Currently viewing the tag: "awakening"
My yoga teacher is fond of the phrase “It’s yoga practice, not yoga perfect.” The point of our yoga practice is not to be stunningly beautiful on the mat, have the perfect yoga outfit, or do the yoga poses flawlessly. The point is to keep learning, evolving, and flowing with our experience. Some days, we’ll be in flow; we won’t fall over in Tree Pose, we won’t struggle to do yet another sun salutation. Some days, we’ll feel grumpy and stiff and our bodies won’t do what they could do perfectly well the day before. Yoga is a practice, a way to keep present, and to connect with our bodies and minds. There is no ‘goal’ in yoga, no place where you can end up and can then go no further. When we get too good at a particular sequence, when we don’t even have to think about it, it’s time to change things up, to add poses that challenge us to keep growing.
Life is like this.
I’m terrified of making interpersonal mistakes. If I get too emotional and someone sees it, I can feel ashamed for weeks. Sometimes I have to literally bite my tongue to keep from asking, yet again, for reassurance from them that they don’t now despise me for having had an emotional reaction. My practice, then, is working on being comfortable being emotionally open, even when the emotions are uncomfortable. If I didn’t have this particular struggle with having people see this part of me, I wouldn’t need to practice letting go of the shame for having an emotional side of me.
Our struggles are like this. They are our practice. If we didn’t have them, we’d be perfect, and there would be nowhere for us to go. There’d be no reason for us to be here.
It’s hard to remember this when we’re in our difficult places. Just like when we’re in a strenuous yoga pose and all we can think about it how uncomfortable it is and how annoying the yoga teacher is for talking when all we want to do is get out of the pose, when we’re wrapped in our stories and our struggles, we forget to breathe, forget that THIS, this discomfort, is our practice. All we want is for the discomfort to stop, to get to a pose we like.
For me, yoga has always been more than just a fitness regimen. It’s been about training myself psychologically to be in uncomfortable spaces and to stay there, feeling the sensations but not collapsing under them. I’ve seen myself evolve off of the yoga mat, too, though I’m still nowhere near perfect (as if that were the goal). I’m better at sitting with uncomfortable emotions, better at focusing my attention and re-centering myself. When I fall over, I still struggle with accepting this and being kind about it, but I’m getting better.
Life is a practice, not a pursuit of perfection. When we meet our goals in life, hopefully there will always be more to strive towards. The goal, then, is not really the point. It’s the process that’s the real goal, the practice of learning how to get back to stability and balance in challenging new poses.
How do you use your life as an evolving practice?
The other day I was telling a deep-thinking friend about how I just needed to be more comfortable being myself. This is the advice we always hear, isn’t it? In dating, in job interviews, anywhere where we feel someone will judge us. We hear ‘just be yourself and everything will turn out okay.’
After I spoke, my friend, in his deep-thinking way, was silent for a moment, then said “I don’t actually agree with that.”
“What?” Isn’t that what we’re always told we’re supposed to be? Ourselves?
“There are ways that we can be ourselves that don’t serve us,” my friend explained. “Your insecurity doesn’t actually serve you, but that’s part of your self.”
Well, he had a point. After some thought, I realized that the way to be, rather than just ‘ourselves’ is to be our best selves. On dates, we don’t want to be our insecure selves, our angry selves, or our petty selves, though those are all parts of most of us. We want to be our best selves: balanced, open, discerning. In job interviews, we don’t want to be our desperate, insecure, or greedy selves, though those are all parts of most of us, too. We want to be our best selves: intelligent, poised, competent. When people suggest ‘just be yourself’, they aren’t suggesting that we give rein to those parts of our selves that operate as the child in each of us, grasping, acting out, stubborn, and reactive. Though those parts are ourselves just as much as our open, honest, kind, and light-filled selves.
In short, we need to be discerning in the selves that we choose to be. And we need to work with the parts of ourselves that don’t serve us, to find out what they’re trying to tell us so that those parts can dissipate and lose the power they have to derail us, to send us into yet another tailspin.
When I’m my best self, I can still sense the parts of me that are insecure, afraid, controlling, or angry, but those parts aren’t in ascendance. They have very little control over my actions, though they may continue to whisper in my ear. Like a parent with a child who is in need, I can hear their messages and choose not to escalate their emotions, while providing, to the best of my ability, what they need to feel safer.
One of my goals in life is to surround myself with the situations and people that support my best self rather than the ones that inflame the parts of me that don’t serve me. I don’t just want to be myself. I want be a particular sort of self: my BEST self.
What about you? What is your best self, and what are the situations and people that bring it forth? And can you have more of those in your life?
By Melissa Kirk
So last Thursday night I was on the bus coming home from work. Normally I take BART – the subway - for this leg of the trip, but there was some delay on BART, so I took the 72 bus instead. It’s a LOOONNNGGG bus ride. For some reason, I was just sitting there without a lot of jibber-jabber in my head. That’s not normally the case for me, but this night, I was just sitting, my mind relatively quiet, observing, open to the people around me.
The first thing I noticed was the noise. This was one noisy crosstown bus. I think if I had been more my normal self – more in my head and more judgmental – I would have been really pained by the noise. There was a group of high-school-age kids in the back talking back to each other as kids will, a woman talking rather loudly into her cell phone, and two other women having a loud conversation. As it was, I let the noise just wash over me, and it did feel like some sort of sonic wave.
The next thing I noticed was peoples’ energy, bouncing around inside that steel box. The lady on the phone was getting mad because another passenger was looking at her as she talked. Two young girls were eating sweets (one had a huge, rainbow-colored lollipop, the kind I didn’t think they made anymore) and talking quietly. The two conversating women were swapping stories of their painful childhoods – and they did sound painful. One said the last time she had seen her father was when he had come running to her house, t-shirt covered in blood, looking for shelter. The punk-looking guy next to me was staring out the window but his fingers never stopped moving.
Eventually, as I watched the restlessness on that bus, I realized what I was seeing. It was like I opened up to what was really going on. And what was really going on were that everyone’s egos were desperately seeking comfort, bouncing around inside that bus like ball bearings in a pinball machine.
The lady on the phone was seeking acknowledgment from her friend on the phone and also making a big show of getting up and moving so the guy watching her couldn’t see her. The comfort of self-righteousness is one of the nicest feelings there is. The girls eating sweets were enthralled with the comfort of the food. The two women sharing horror stories were wanting their pain to be seen – really seen – by the other, and also wanting it to be OK that they didn’t feel responsibility to treat other people respectfully because, as one of them said “Nobody ever said sorry to me.” The loud kids in the back of the bus were seeking comfort in numbers, seeking physical and psychic safety by taking up space. The guy next to me was, like me, en route to something else that would give him some kind of comfort. A lover, maybe, or a concert or a drug deal. I was going home to be safe in my cave, where I was in control and nobody could touch me unless I wanted them to. We were all just bare-naked egos in that bus that night, crying like little babies wanting to be fed and held.
I know that this is true of most people most of the time. I joke sometimes that you can take the person out of the schoolyard, but you can’t take the schoolyard out of the person. All of us at some time or another, and most of us most of the time, are in the schoolyard, at least in our psyches. We hit and kick when we think the bully is coming after us, or we ingratiate ourselves in exchange for being left alone; we seek solace in something outside ourselves – food, love, sex, booze, TV, self-righteousness, religion – because we aren’t getting our needs met elsewhere and don’t know how to ask; we seek cameraderie with others so that we can feel safe and not alone, the way zebras do on the plain, and we’ll do whatever we can to be accepted by our crowd, to not get kicked out and left for the playyground bullies.
And there’s nothing wrong with all that – it’s the way humans are. But that day on the bus I saw it clearly than I usually do. I’m usually as blind and ego-driven as everyone else, and I was on that night, too, but for some reason, I saw something differently, some break in the curtain between what we tell ourselves is real, and what is actually real. It was like when the light falls in a certain way, illuminating a familiar object differently than normal, and you see that object in a new way, for just a second. I felt a strong compassion for everyone on that bus, for the little kids inside us all, who just want to be loved, acknowledged, appreciated, and touched.
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Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chicanerii/478003790/
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