Yin and the Art of Enthusiasm Maintenance

Painting by William Bouguerau

The first time I ever went to see an Ayurvedic doctor, he told me two important things. One, he looked at me when I first walked in and said, "You know what you are, don't you? I don't even need to take your pulse."

I did know. In the Ayurvedic constitutional matrix, I am made of two things. Fire and Air. Pitta and Vata. Either burning up or drifting off into the cosmos. Surprised?

He took one look at me, and he knew.

The other thing he told me was that I should be avoiding caffeine (what?!) and that--and here's the part that, at the time, I just couldn't swallow, even more than the no caffeine--that I should mellow out my yoga practice. "You should not be doing a bunch of handstands and backbends," he said (my two favorite things).  "You should be meditating. You should be getting close to the ground. You should be spending a long time in savasana."

At the time I smiled and nodded, yes of course, with absolutely NO intention of following this advice.  Was this guy joking? He wants me to lay on the ground and call that a yoga practice? Maybe after I bunny-hop like a mad-woman up and down into handstand a dozen times and do something ridiculous on one leg and heat up my breath to within an inch of my life...maybe then I'll lay on the ground.

I suppose I knew, empirically, that he was right. Of course, it wouldn't hurt for me to spend a little more time rooting and a little less time...expanding.  But I really felt, at the time, that there was no way something that felt so good, could ever be bad for me.

Have you ever heard it said that people tend to go in the direction of their imbalances? In the same way that someone with a sweet-tooth craves sugar, I have discovered that a yogi who is revved up will want more rev, and a yogi who is slowed down, even if nearly to stuck-ness...will yearn for more slow.

Such is the way with me.

Until recently.  It has been years since that Ayurvedic prescription was handed to me and summarily torn up and thrown in the trash (by me), but recently, I have found myself digging it out and pasting it back together.  Maybe my body has hit some kind of tipping point.  Maybe I've just been practicing yoga long enough now that I can finally feel the signals coming from a subtler layer of the ol' body/machine.

For a long time, a yoga practice is just about the poses. And the breath. And the philosophy. It's just about the style you love and the teacher you love and the time of day you love to practice. It's about struggling with something new and mastering it (or not).  And it can be just that, for a long time. Which is plenty. And plenty deep.

But, then...then something starts to happen.

Because maybe you want to start reaping the larger benefits of yoga. Maybe you want to learn how to find the state of yoga in other areas of your life. Maybe you start to realize that you are different than every other body that has ever practiced or ever will practice, and therefore you have to bend the yoga to fit YOU. Maybe you realize that even though handstands seem more productive, that for you to really begin to touch the center of YOU...that you need to just lay on the ground.

The impulse I used to label as "laziness," this little call from my body to just hang out and open, I have finally begun to let express itself.  And, yeesh, okay doctor...maybe you were right.  Because, I have to say, for my body, which begins to rev up and pump and think and desire and long and all sorts of other various and wild and electrical things, from the moment I wake up in the morning, for this often over-taxed body of mine, in order for this body to get to the real yoga, that blissed-out oneness-with-the-world state...it needs to slow down. And ground. And relax.

Your prescription may be entirely different. Your prescription might be more fluidity. Or more fire. Or maybe more lightness and air.  For you to find the yoga in your life it might mean more time to yourself, or less. It might mean more investigation, or less. Whatever it is, though, most likely the answer is already right in front of you. And if that's the case, then all I have to say to you this morning is...

"You know what you are, don't you?"

Oh, Rumi...

For more on Rumi, Mr. Amazing Himself, go here. Or here. 

Words for the Weekend...

How I Spent My Week...

Sorry for my absence, Shanti-Towners...last week I made an impromptu trip home to Seattle to see my loving family (with a bonus dinner out in Portland with the in-laws!).  Here is a picture of my dad's chickens to make up for it...

Yay, chickens!

Back next week with more yoga-goodness.  And hopefully a podcast!!

Swim, Fishy...Swim!

What is the difference between effort and surrender?

This week I heard it described like this:

Imagine a fish swimming in a river. When the fish is in the current, she is surrendered.  She is letting the flow of water carry her.  And if and when she ever loses that current, then (and only then) she uses her effort, to find her way back.

Her effort, her will, is what she calls upon when she's fallen out of the stream.  When life starts to get hard, get rocky, when it feels like nothing is moving and certainly nothing is moving her...that is when effort is required.

And then, lucky fish, once she's reunited with the river's current, then she is carried.

And on and on it goes.

I love this description so much (lifted from an interview with Mark Nepo) because we hear so much about surrender.  Surrender is the thing we're all told we're looking for--or at least that's what our yoga teachers tell us and our books tell us and our wise friends tell us (they tell us other things, too)--and often they're right.  Often letting go is what's needed.  Often it's needed because we live in a world where nearly every other influence in our lives is urging us toward the opposite.  Towards more, towards faster, towards harder, towards sweat, towards effort.  Towards multi-tasking our effort.  And so, the encouragement towards, sheesh, softening some of that, is good.

But, what about the times when surrender is not the answer?  Are we really just meant to go from splashing wildly, or worse, swimming in panicked circles, certain the current is there somewhere...to just being lazy fishies, letting the water take us where it will?

That doesn't seem right.

That would imply that the human system is flawed.  If surrender were the only solution, if the only thing which existed other than surrender was a kind of aggravated repetitive belly flop...that would imply that there is nothing to be done.  We either give up, or we suffer.  And I just think that the human mind and heart are too complex and too gorgeous (sorry), to write them off simply as the agents of our own destruction.

But if you think of a wise fish...of a little guy who finds himself suddenly out of the flow of water...what is he going to do?  I don't think he's going to freak out.  I don't think he's going to start slamming his fish body against the rocks along the bottom of the river because he's just so upset that this has happened to him, yet again, and all his other little fishy friends seem to be doing just fine thank you very much and why the heck can't he ever catch a break?!  No, he's going to quiet his little fishy mind (remember, he's a wise fish), he's going to stick his little fish nose and little fish ears (do fish have ears?) into the water, and he's going to use his will to start his little tail and fins a flippin', and he's going to swim himself back to that current.

And when he's there, he'll know he's there, whether or not his eyes are open (whether or not he even HAS eyes), because things will suddenly get...easier.

Ahhh.  Exhale. 

He'll know he's in the current, because he'll be able to fold his little fins against his fat little rainbow-scale sides, and coast.  He'll know he's there because he'll be moving with the river.  He'll know he's there because he'll suddenly be able just to enjoy the ride.

And if ever the time comes when he falls, one more time, out of the grace of the river, he'll know he has his effort, his will, and his good sense...to guide him back.

A Problem of Thinking...

Have you ever considered, that perhaps this is not a thinking problem?

Have you ever considered, that perhaps problems get solved in your life in spite of, and not because of, your thinking?

Have you ever considered (I rarely do) that perhaps all the moments of all the days don’t need to be filled with thinking?  That maybe one doesn’t need to think from the bedroom to the bathroom, from the bathroom to the kitchen, in the kitchen while the tea is bubbling, in the car while the wheels are turning, on the walk while the door is looming, over the sink while the dishes are doing, above the stove where the food is cooking, in the place where the work is happening, at the end when the lights are turning, back in the car as the eve is dawning, back up the steps to where the door is waiting, and on and on and on?

Have you ever considered that the mind is not meant for such stuff?

Have you ever considered that the mind is meant for mind-matter:  for chair building and computer programming and book-reading and play-writing and lightbulb choosing and car driving and philosophy grasping and fire starting and gadget inventing and all the other hundreds and thousands of things that the mind is perfectly suited to?

Have you considered that love, is not the domain of the mind? That feeling, is not the domain of the mind?  That instinct, is not the domain of the mind, art-making is not the domain of the mind, sex and fucking and love-making...all not the domain of the mind?

Perhaps you have.  Perhaps you have considered all of this, because these are so obviously products of the heart, and the senses, and the pumping of the blood.

But what about decision making?  Have you ever considered that decision making is not the domain of the mind?

What?  You may be saying.  Of course decision-making is for my mind.  That's what my mind done does.  That's what it always done did and always will would.

But what if it's not?

What if...if when faced with a decision...you were to get soft and quiet, instead of tight and loud? Not letting the many voices of reason that occupy all your many spaces pipe in immediately with their suggestions.  What then?  What if you were to close your eyes and drink in the smells around you and just rub your face against the wind that is rubbing against it?  What if you were to unclench your jaw and unclench your eyes and unclench that poor little mind, that just wants to help, that always wants to help, but maybe, possibly...can not serve you here?  What would come rushing in?  What would establish itself in clarity?

Albert Einstein would have all his greatest ideas in the shower.  So he said. Or while shaving.

Isaac Newton talks about problem solving like one would talk about watching a flower open, "I keep the subject of my inquiry constantly before me, and wait till the first dawning opens gradually, by little and little, into a full and clear light".

"It is curious," said Mark Twain, "-- the space-annihilating power of thought."


All great men.  All great doers.  All, somehow, in agreement about this--spaciousness.  Be it spaciousness of shower, or spaciousness of dawning realization.

And for myself...every real stroke of insight or clarity or brilliance I have ever had, has bubbled out of silence, and not out of the morass of thought. Never ever ever has it bubbled out of the morass of thought.  Sometimes I have driven myself near to insanity with thought and then finally, because I just could not take it anymore, or because I had cried tears and the tears had broken some kind of dam...finally I relented.  And in the relenting came a ready solution.  And so, sometimes I have equated these two things:  the exhaustive death-match with thought and the miraculous solution at the end.

But perhaps you could have the latter without the former?

The great guess of spiritual practice, the grand hypothesis of yoga and all the others, is that the world, at it's essence, is born from space and from silence.  And, in that silence is the power of creation.  And our small piece of eternity, our sippy-cup of heaven, as humans, is that if we can get ourselves as quiet as that space...then we can taste a bit of what it has to offer.  We can actually step into the power that makes worlds.  That is the experiment.  It's the experiment of meditation and the experiment of yoga and the experiment of writing and the experiment of song and the experiment of love and the experiment of play...what can we do to step in?  How many things can we find that can quiet us well enough and for long enough that we might just get a little eternity juice on our hands and our face?

I am still in the trial phases, myself.  I will report findings when they are available.

In the meantime...if you are struggling with something, if you are turning it over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over in your mind.  Just consider, that perhaps your mind is not meant for such things.  Perhaps it is the silence, right down there in the center of you, that is best suited to hurl that particular boulder, to that particular moon.

Structure and the Creative Urge…

Several weeks ago in a class, one of my favorite teachers, Maria Cristina Jimenez, had us rig up a little strap-sling for our upper arms, and in several poses she had us press out into the strap with our biceps as we folded forward.  Our charge was to find (and revel in), from that pressing out, the magical extra opening of the heart that quickly followed.

And for weeks I have been using and adjusting and playing with this same trick (thanks, MC!) and variations on it in my own practice, and in classes.

Right away, while testing this out in classes, I realized that there are two types of people.  There is the type of person who is all loosey-goosey flexi-pants, who really needs to draw in instead of pressing out.  This person has got enough out.  This person needs some holding to their center, and so for them the strap is actually about restraining, about holding them to the middle.  And then there is the other type of person (I fall into this category), who errs toward the muscular, rather than the loose, and who needs a little less holding it all together, and a little more expanding to their limits.  For them, the strap is really about something to expand against, to relieve all that constant contraction.

We all need structure.  Boundaries.  We all need something to push up against—whether that is a literal pushing out, or an invisible drawing in (a pushing up against one’s own center)—whoever, however…there has to be some kind of structure in place or else…chaos.

We know this about children.  You hear it all the time, that if kids don’t have boundaries, they are going to go crazy in the looking for them.  If you have ever made theatre or made a painting or made just about anything, you’ve probably heard a variation on this theme—that the rules have to be in place before anything really creatively free can take place.  You need to know who is doing what, where things are happening, what the beginning and what the end is or else…the whole creative work would just devolve into nonsense.

When I first started writing in a more serious way, several years ago, I used to ask P. to give me a list of random elements to make a script from.  He would come up with five or six things, sometimes practical like, “only use one location”, sometimes plot-based, “there has to be an explosion”, sometimes more moody, “it should feel dark all the time,” and off I’d go.  Immediately, list in hand, I felt free.  Because, though I didn’t know much of anything else, I at least knew that there would be an explosion, there would be darkness, and we would stay put. 

And the body, perfect metaphor that it is, is no different.  As soon as the boundary lines are established, as soon as the feet and the head and the ribs and the arms all know what they’re doing and where they’re heading—that is when a real opening can begin to happen.  You take a shape, and then you spend some time in that shape, and you explore its dimensions.  You push out, you draw in, you soften, you engage…the pose is a playground within which you experiment.  You play.

But the challenge is, that for most of us as adults, we are left to our own devices when it comes to creating structure.  I remember when I first moved to New York after college, at 22 years old, it was such a shock to my system to have no rhythm to my days.  I didn’t understand how people made it work, this whole life thing—where exactly was I supposed to go?  How was I supposed to spend my time?  Who was handing out the grades, here, anyhow?  It took years for me to realize (and I think I’m still figuring this out, day by day) that I had to be the arbiter of my own structure.  If there was something I wanted to do or make or be…I had to be it.  And without anyone nodding their approval I had to set aside the time and the means to make things happen.

I am a person who craves structure.  But, I am also a person who craves freedom and craves a creative life…often these two things do not go hand in hand.  There are days when all I want is for someone to tell me where to be, what time to be there, and what I should do once I’ve arrived, but what I often forget is that, that person…is me.  I am the one who gets to (has to) tell me where to be and when and what to do when there.  I am structure-maker and I am play-er within. 

Some days it’s harder than others.

But, on the days when the structure feels futile, when all I want to do is navel gaze and ruminate, I have learned to enlist my block-builder self, and set to work.  That is why the structure is there.  It’s there to hold the shape on the days when passion alone can’t suffice. 

These days, I just imagine a strap hugging against me, hugging my arms together, and I close my eyes and press out.  And then I wait for the opening that is sure to come…