Short Step

Today is Day Two of the spring celebration of the festival Navaratri, nine nights of the goddess.  It’s mostly a celebration of the goddess Durga, whose name comes from the Sanskrit for ‘hard’ or ‘difficult’.  (Look at that hair in the picture of her in the 1 o'clock position!)  She’s the promise that resides in all of us that we can be more, but it’s going to be rough going.  On this very Day Two in my back yard, we’ve had just enough sunshine and just enough rain to get my tulip blooms out. 

They’ve been waiting since their last bloom, since I last folded their leaves down, through the heat of a mosquitoed summer, through the fall Navaratri, through the bare winter, creating and storing in their bulbs the potency and potential of their short-lived blooms that will show in the next few days.  At the height of their beauty, they’ll be visited by the bees, and then it will be a short step from the bloomed tulip to a bare stem and exposed stamens and stigmas.  She will have put on her best outfit, only for it all to come off again, to be undone by her own beauty.  For the sake of getting to do it again, of reinvention, of fertilization, to make something more than was there before. 

Every time the weather changes, I vow (vrata) to step up my fashion and beauty game.  Yes, it is a sacred vow and worthy of the Sanskrit word.  So many women must feel the same way, as the fashion weeks and 5-pound issues of Vogue arrive in late February and August.  These are the times of the year when it’s easy for life to feel hard (dukha).  You’re either really cold and miserable and over it or you’re really hot and sweaty and need some relief.  So, that first sunshiney day of about 75 degrees is cause for celebration.  We even have an Argentinian friend who looks forward to El Dia de Pezon, the spring day when ladies throw off their scarves and jackets and run around with just a couple of flimsy layers on their top parts.  They are dressed perfectly in their nakedness. 

Navaratri’s goddess celebration, for me, commemorates a period of time when life shifts from feeling tough to feeling like a girl has options, that she might choose to adorn herself and present herself in her best light.  Maybe she’s a little more colorful, maybe a little more studious, but she looks and feels more refined.  No sooner do I get my nails and hair done and my lips painted on that there will be packages to open and wind blowing and the eating of lipstick (insert commercial for lip stuff made from ingredients that you wouldn’t mind actually eating).  This isn’t about trying to stay perfect all the time, but rather about recognizing that lying barely underneath what looks like the most beautiful and refined version of something is that very thing’s hardship, its effort, its edginess and vices. 

You see, it’s a short step from a yoga teacher who looks strong and like she has it all together to a girl with an eating disorder who was doing nothing more enlightened than looking for more time at the gym.  It’s a short step from a sensitive, giving friend to the scared person who wants to control those around her so that they don’t leave.  A short step from loyalty and protection to being a holding tank for resentment.  From our most outwardly presentable selves to our most primal natures, those techniques that have preserved our survival on the most raw level. 

These nights of the goddess invite me to compassion – for myself, for my friends, and for my family.  They invite me to plant the very seeds that were saved from the most fertile experiences in the last growing period, filling me with hope for something that has not yet been and dread of all the work it will take to get there.  Most of all, thought, they excite me to revel in the gorgeousness, knowing that it is already being eaten by time. 

Fearlessness

 

I’ve been spending some time at my grandmother’s house, along with my four-year-old and my uncle, who also lives there on the farm. During our stay, my son turned four, which is a really fun age for all the family. He’s playing superheroes all the time, especially Spiderman, and he and his great-uncle put up shields to protect themselves when they are fighting off bad guys. He's learning about being strong, about being brave, and even about being feared.  My son asks about these things, and I think about how to answer him in a way that he can understand and still carries the weight of what more there is to know about fear and courage.

While in Western Kentucky, I was excited and honored to teach a workshop in my home county at the yoga studio on the town square.  It's owned and run by a mother and daughter team, and it has been super-fun to get to go to classes there with some of my high school friends, their sisters and mothers.  The ladies at the yoga studio were interested in learning more about inversions and arm balances, so I decided to teach alignment and strength in the upper body and pair the actions with the theme of courage.   

Now, let me paint you a little picture.  The son of the family runs a pawn shop next door. This seeming juxtaposition of the yoga studio next to the place with displays full of guns had not gone unnoticed in the preceding weeks of my visit.  I kept thinking, ‘Only in Todd County.’  (Let's just say I'm a little more accustomed to coffee shops and juice bars next to my yoga studios.)  As we ladies were sitting in the front receiving area, allowing the room to cool off from the heated class before, we were greeted by a burly gentlemen in overalls toting some sort of rifle. Of course, he was headed to the pawn shop, but that didn’t keep him from letting out a friendly,“I’m not headed for you!” to relieve a little of the tension that was naturally there.  Everyone made light of the event, and we moved on with our morning. 

In India, the gesture of fearlessness is the right hand held at chest height with the palm open and facing outward. (See the photo above.)  It has a sort of softness and roundness to it, unlike our hardened palm-face-out ‘talk to the hand’ gesture that means the conversation is over. It’s a showing that there’s nothing being held that could hurt you, and so you are beckoned closer, to the possibly even more frightening process of intimacy. Yoga is not just that which is peaceable, calming, or harmless. It invites us to raise the stakes as much as lower them.It brings us into the churning and heat of facing our interior selves and our exterior lives.

What I taught on Saturday to the ladies who were relatively new to bearing their bodies’ weight on their hands was that fearlessness is not about hot having any fear, but rather being afraid enough of the right things. Something gives us a moment of pause, and we take the time to give the right amount of respect to something that could hurt us. When we do that, we get to keep going, trying, and living. What would otherwise stop us completely becomes the invitation to more. 

The value-added project, a phrase my teacher loves to use, becomes not just staying in your own conversation, not just keeping your same point of view, but rather really bringing your hard-won experiences and opinions to bear in moments when there could really be some growth and learning.

Bravery is not the opposite of staying safe, nor is it willfully putting yourself in harm’s way. It is being willing to take the kinds of risks that you can take, of stepping up to your capacity and capabilities.  I hope that I can give these teachings to my son, over time and through example.  I hope that he will be able to listen, learn, and act in ways that are truly heroic. 

Let it Mix with You

"Christmas light" Nataraja and Sivakamasundari just outside the temple at Cidambaram.  

 

About six weeks ago, I was still in India.  If you read the post before this, you’ll know that it was quasi-miraculous that I was even there in the first place.  It was an adventure and a lesson in stamina of all sorts.  Over something like seventeen temple experiences in the two weeks, it became more natural to me to be wrapped in the six yards of fabric that a sari requires.  I got used to my bare feet on the temple floors, picking up whatever was on the ground there.  And it felt right for my forehead to always be smeared with a dot of kumkum, a red powder, and a line (or three) of vibhuti, the white sacred ash. 

We were asked to do all of these outward shows, because Douglas likes to remind us that, “Nobody cares what you believe.  They care what you do.”  So, we came correct.  In addition to the saris, braided hair was required for the temple (and should always be ‘neat’ in any case), we wore fancy bindis, lined our eyes, and made sure we always had on our earrings, necklaces, and bangles.  Let’s just say it was a time commitment made of love.  And we were rewarded for our efforts: people took our pictures, they thanked us, and they even gave us little sparkly OK signs with their hands and said “Super!” 

That’s not to say it didn’t get old.  Sometimes I wanted to just leave my hair down and put on no jewelry and throw on a nightie.  Ever-vigilant for our modesty, though, the Muslim men who sold me these long, printed cotton gowns were sure to shout “NIGHTIE!” every time I looked at one, just to make sure I knew that it was not daywear.  

 

Photo of village girl in a nightie by Laura Patterson. 

By the end of each long, sweaty day I would inevitably forget about my extra make-up and wipe my brow, smearing together a kind of paste made of my sweat and skin, of kumkum and vibhuti.  Then I would get out one of my hundreds of baby wipes and clean it all off of my face. 

The vibhuti that we got most likely was not made from the ritual fires in the temples where we were.  Apparently, Tiruchendur is one of the major suppliers of vibhuti for Tamil Nadu, the region where we were pilgrims.  It is probably cow dung, with maybe some other ingredients thrown in.  In any case, the ritual fires are offered valuable fuel.  I kept thinking of how much our offerings would cost if I had to buy them from the Whole Foods at Columbus Circle but I knew that what we were doing in ‘wasting’ all those groceries would turn into meals for poorer pilgrims and generally mean a lot to the temple itself.     

Vibhuti is what remains when everything else is burned up.  It is white, the color of the sexual fluid, and so represents both where we all end up and where we all came from.  Siva’s left hand holds the fire of dissolution, one of the five acts attributed to him.  We take the ash from that fire and wear it, applying it to ourselves.  Follow the ring of fire over to his right hand, and you’ll see the two-headed drum of creation that beats and pulses life into existence. 

On our penultimate night in India, I watched as Siva’s wife, Sivakamasundari (‘the beautiful desire of Siva’), was ritually bathed.  Mythically, her first child Ganesha was ‘conceived’ in her bath.  I don’t know how many times I had heard the story of her longing for a child while sloughing off her skin, mixing it with water (symbolizing tears), milk (the universe), sandalwood (beauty), etc.  As I waited that night for the curtain to re-open after she had been dressed in her new sari, I understood better.  All that stuff that I was smearing on my forehead was not just for an outward show, it was meant to mix with me.  The temple mixes with me as I do some sloughing.  The temple lives on through my stories and experience.  And, falling in love with my life, I become her, empowered to turn what I want into what I have. 

Photo of me leaving the temple on December 30, 2012, by the light of the almost-full moon. 

You Get What You Want

In yoga, you always get what you want.  This is not to say you get it exactly the way you want it or that you can just throw out ‘wishes’ and magically receive free babysitting and lots of new clothes (my wishes are fairly modest these days).  But I’m currently having this experience with things that I have really wanted, often for some time.   

I like to tell this to students who are new to me that this will happen to them, too.  I tell them that if they want a good stretch, they’ll get just that.  If they want to know the secrets of the universe, they can.  If they want to do crow pose, I don’t see any reason that cannot happen in good time and practice.  Sometimes they get more than they bargained for along the way. 

Seven years ago, I worked for The Bank and would go on lunch breaks (sometimes a couple a day) to this park in TriBeCa near our offices.  I would sit on the benches in my barely-corporate clothing, read a fashion magazine, try not to eat, and daydream about being one of those moms playing in that park with their little kids.  I imagined myself being a yoga teacher and mom to a boy named Van, living a life of happiness and luxury.  This fall, as I sat in that very same park, I realized that is exactly what I’m doing. 

Don’t be mistaken, though.  One of every five women in New York City is a yoga teacher these days.  Many of us are very good, but we still only get a three-minute audition at our local gym along with everyone else.  My bank account is currently a sad state of affairs, and our family arrangement is such that my husband works so much that we often don’t see him for days at a stretch.  It has taken me over a year to find another mom in my neighborhood with whom to have weekday-morning pancake breakfasts.  I’m not being ungrateful here.  I’m being real.  (I really believe we do ourselves and others like us a disservice when we only show the life-is-perfect Facebook-update versions of ourselves.) 

And yet, this realization has given me permission to really want the life I have, to love it, and to radically affirm it.  I’m getting more than I bargained for.   

Next week, I leave for India with Douglas Brooks, on a trip that I have wanted to be on for years, the trip that I announced at the beginning of 2012 that I would be on.  Changes in work, finances, and our yoga community during the year made this trip seem more than impossible.  What has made it possible is the optimism of a dear friend, beneficence from a long-suffering partner, and willingness to step up from grandmas in two states.  In one word, love. 

Once, in a discussion about major and minor deities, Douglas said that if you’re looking for something specific, it’s not necessary to go to the little local deity for that specific thing.  If you want a pregnancy, then probably really what you’re wanting is love and intimacy.  So, go to the major deity and invite that energy more into your life (by whatever means, mantra, mudra, etc.), and you’ll get what you want. 

We’ve probably all had the converse experience of getting some desired outcome only to feel that we didn’t really get what we wanted.  See: child who plays with the vacuum cleaner at someone else’s house only to completely ignore the identical one you just bought.  What the child wanted was the playmate, or the stimulation of being in a different place, or you to pay attention to him. 

Probably what most of us really need is to have an experience of unconditional love.  We experience that love through the conditions of our lives.  In yoga, we call the energy that brings us that experience Kali.  She is time, she is terrible, and she is the great mother.  Through time and life all things are accomplished.  May we love it along the way. 

Just so much...

In my late days of dieting and early days of teaching yoga, I had a neighbor who was studying nutrition and who was also a very early yoga student of mine.  I was still doing the Emily-from-Devil-Wears-Prada thing, “Well, I don't eat anything and when I feel like I'm about to faint I eat a cube of cheese.” She must have sensed something was a little unhealthy and loaned me a book, called One Bowl: A Guide to Eating for Body and Spirit, by DonGerrard.  It tells the story of a businessman who, over the course of many business lunches and dinners and trips, had gained a bunch of weight.  Somehow (I forget), he decided that he would only eat from one particular bowl.  There were other rules, too, but let’s just call those ‘being mindful’.  He could put whatever he wanted in the bowl and fill it up as many times as he wanted. 

In the beginning, there were lots of bowls of chocolate cake and ice cream, and yet he still saw some positive results. At least, I don’t think he was gaining any more weight like that.  And then, the deeper hunger started to become more important, that of being satisfied in body, soul, and psyche.  Different foods began to ‘sing’ to him.  The practice was the vehicle for the lesson to listen and respond to what the body wants and needs, to wanting and getting enough. 

Yatha tatha.  “Just so much, so much so.”  In some teacher training mentoring group that same year, a wise man named Harrison offered this phrase.  For me, this was really the beginning of learning about having enough.  I am sure he was referring to the fine art of how much to talk during class or something that had to do with applying technique to our practice, but it’s one of those moments that stuck on me.  I had been buying too much and eating too little.  Working, ahem, not at all (but getting paid more than I ever had or have since).  And working out with no great efficiency.  Energy didn’t match desires.  Quantities were off.  I had a deep mistrust that I could monitor and manage the right amount of anything.   

Thankfully, I can say that over the years of practice and the practice of teaching and the practice of living as a teacher, I have learned to trust that I can do enough, that I will have enough, be enough, and not too much, and not too little.  That antsy feeling I get when I haven’t done much work or been very creative lately?  It just means I’m hungry, and that I will soon go through the process of nourishment and satisfaction.  In fact, to reference One Bowl again, the author writes of hunger being just the first note of a whole “symphony of inner sensations associated with my natural digestive processes.”  Whatever that note is, I can say that past experience gives me the faith to trust in following the song through to its final resonance. 

This plays out wonderfully with the little ones who, if you leave them alone, will often pick (over the course of a week) a fairly healthy diet in a fairly healthy quantity.  Taking bites from the stick of butter becomes a reasonable thing to do if that’s pretty much your butter intake for a few days.  But they also need some guidance, as when my son (3) was fighting with a 5-year-old over a little trampoline.  Both wanted it exclusively, but then they agreed that three-year-olds could jump for three minutes and five-year-olds could jump for five minutes.  After about 30 seconds, the five-year-old was ready to share.  He had been given the time to say when so much was enough. 

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Ever thought about what would happen if we took those instructions literally?  We’d be in a captive, torturous, vicious cycle that we could not quit.  Of course we know better than to get ourselves stuck in the shower, unable to get to work or get on with our lives.  The yoga tradition is full of warnings against samskaras, those ‘scars’ that we make through living by habit, unconsciously.  They happen little bit by little bit, until the pattern is undeniable. 

A few months ago, my mom ended up in the E. R.  It was no freak accident that caused this trip, though.  It was her contact lens.  Years and years of wearing hard contacts had literally worn a groove in her eyeball, to the extent that one night she just couldn’t get that sucker back out.  This is a woman who abided by all of the rules of contact lens wearing…the ones that I really, really should.  And yet, here she was, in the middle of the night, with a doctor flushing that little lens of empowered vision out of her eye. 

[This kind of injury is exactly what your yoga teacher is telling you about lifting your finger pads up or dropping the head of your arm bone forward in caturanga dandasana.  You won’t get hurt today, but when it happens it will feel like it happens in a moment.]

Not all repetitive cycles are the negative type.  How many times do you stir the pot, make the bed, pick up the child?  You do it until it’s done.  And yes, it wears a groove.  There’s a certain efficiency in that.  A way that you don’t have to ask yourself, “Should I pick him up again?”  You just do.  It’s only when we slavishly follow the laundry-must-be-done-on-Saturday-and-not-a-day-before-or-after routine that we are victims. 

Mythic consciousness offers us the images of the buffalo and the cobra.  The buffalo is a dense animal, with no extra space to know anything else besides its own nature.  It ruminates, telling itself the same story over and over, unable to hear any other version of the story than the one that keeps regurgitating itself.  The saying goes, “Even if Lord Krishna plays his flute, the buffalo will still chew its cud.”  The buffalo is not aroused, but the cobra is.  Cobras are poisonous snakes, and that poison both protects them and is the means by which they can assimilate food.  The cobra eats, grows bigger, and sheds its old skin, leaving it behind, but with a new skin that will serve well.  Until growth requires a new shedding, during which we’re a little vulnerable to predators. 

Cobra consciousness invites us to the recursive process of growth.  A recursive process is one that reviews what happened in previous iterations and then adds on.  It’s the reason that you can drop in to a yoga class without already knowing everything about yoga.  The teacher starts with the basic instructions about breathing and what to do with your hands and feet.  Every time.  Even in the advanced class.  After a few poses, she tells you how to use some muscles.  In between instructions, she links things together, “Keeping that, add this.”  The review is built in, and each next step requires the steps before.   

And, beautifully, recursion refines, allowing the version that wasn’t the most optimal or most current to pass away, just like your tenth-grade biology book.  Just like old skin.  We just know more now.  We’re bigger now.  We contain more. 

 P.S. – When I was contemplating this post, I had a moment of déjà vu.  Had I written this before?  I can’t find any evidence that I had, but I must have written this a few times in my head before it finally emerged.  I guess it took a few layers of growth.  And I know that I learned while I wrote it.   

Advanced

A few months ago, one of my friends posted some photos from Anusara's Inner Harmony days.  It was before I was practicing at all, before most of the teachers there were popular, and before Sianna's pants had ruffles on them. Those images helped me get through the first wave of resignations from Anusara, including my own in March.  It just helped to see these folks practicing together.  I'm sure people weren't all best friends then, and I'm certainly not interested in going back to some perfect time that never existed, but the collective memory should include more than just 'why I'm leaving' stories.  Here's one of mine.

Shortly after my copy of The Poster was hung in my studio (thanks, Lois), another studio in Louisville announced that the very practitioner in those photos would be teaching a workshop at their studio.  I promptly got my ass in gear and contacted both the studio and Darren Rhodes to offer to assist his workshop. Next, I got my ass in gear to make sure I could demo whatever might be asked of me.  I really wanted to show EVERYONE that a viable option for Anusara Yoga existed in Louisville. And that option was me.  This is all just a little embarrassing to write, but there's a point.

So, the very week of the workshop, I'm attempting niralamba sirsasana (look Ma, no hands! headstand). And, of course, I fall.  I'm sure it was right before I taught a class, too, but in those days my classes consisted of my husband, a teacher who liked me, and Mary.  Admittedly, I was kind of hurt.  I did therapeutics on myself, and went to get body work, and hoped for the best. 

The weekend arrived.  Darren, endearingly, showed up to the studio with no yoga clothes, and taught in his Prana corduroy pants the first day.  As expected, I got to demo.  Students from my studio came to the workshop and knew the invocation. I assisted my little heart out in those classes.  He wrote a thank-you to me in my notebook while the students were in savasana. I got to practice with Darren during the lunch break and was invited to the post-workshop dinner.  Admittedly, I felt like a big shit.  He even said to me, "You're not Certified?  You seem so Certified."

I could not have been more proud.  And I was sure that my little studio would soon be overwhelmed with students who wanted me to teach them my mad skills.

As the end of the weekend approached, and I felt more comfortable around this very accomplished teacher, I asked him about his experience in making The Poster, about specific, elusive poses, etc.  I'm sure they're questions that he's been asked a bazillion times by now.  But here's what I took away from his answers, and it's what I've kept in mind every time my best friend challenged me on why I would ever care to attempt the Level 3 Syllabus (Radical Expansion).  It's not about your performance of the poses.  It's about what it does to you as a practitioner to do that kind of a practice. 

Extrapolate that to any puja. It's not what you do to the outside thing that matters.  It's how you shift internally when you do that chant, mudra, hold that baby, etc. 

For me, it was about devoting myself to something difficult (which I was, in the form of trying to run a studio).  It was about not just doing the big, easy thing. It was about setting a goal and sticking to it.  About not giving up, giving in, or accepting what everyone else thinks is comfortable just because it is.  Maybe one of these days I'll write a blog post about comfort and ease, but don't hold your breath.

By the way, not one person who was in that workshop came to my class in the weeks and months afterward.  Maybe someone came years later, but it was not directly related to that experience.  These were years of deep humbling for me, and really the beginning of my yoga practice.  Darren's kindness and encouragement helps me to remember what's valuable about practicing doing what you cannot yet do. 

Join Allison on Saturday, June 2, at Abhaya for three hours of advanced asana, 2-5 PM.