Sunday 30 November 2014

Winter and grace


I went to see my teacher, Mātā Amṛtānandamayī Devī in Detroit over Thanksgiving. It was a most illuminating trip in so many ways; I felt that through its challenges, as well as its many sweetnesses, light was shed in some dark and wintery spaces for me. The journey to Michigan was tough; like many other folks on Wednesday, I experienced all manner of shenanigans just getting on the plane. We boarded, our wings were de-iced (with green slime!), we waited, we "de-planed". We re-boarded. We were de-iced again. We waited. We de-planed again. There were frantic negotiations with airline folks at the airport, rescheduled flights, wonky routes—I'm sure you know how this goes. I eventually got to Detroit around midnight. Amma was still giving darshan (her blessing as a hug), and I found my way to her arms around 1.30am. I had to take my glasses off (I usually wear contacts but had been flying), and there was something really profound for me about receiving her embrace in such a blurry, vulnerable way—looking up afterwards to see her smiling at me as if I was a little baby: Look at you! You made it! Well done!

It was an intense trip for many reasons. Seeing my teacher is always a big experience for me. And there were aspects of the retreat that I hadn't really thought through beforehand. When I've seen Amma in New York, I am with my very favorite people, my whole yoga community is there and it feels like a shared experience. At the retreat, I didn't know anyone. I had thought that I could give or take Thanksgiving, being as it's not a festival I grew up with in England—but realized that since I've been in the States, I've always celebrated it with loved ones, and it felt strange to be away from that. And I signed up for a two-day meditation course that required a lot of time and I ended up feeling anxious and exhausted by it, surely not the intended result!

At the point where I realized I hadn't left the huge hotel and seen daylight for 24 hours since my arrival and was feeling very overwhelmed, I decided I needed to take a break and take a breath. Like a GPS: Recalibrating...


So I walked by the river in the cold and stopped and looked, and felt the feelings... I took a taxi—with a very jolly taxi driver—to the Motown Museum. It was so fantastic. The history—and the aliveness of the history—is so beautiful and so striking. Our tour guide was just a kid, really, but super-confident and leading the tour like a TV show host in a really touching way. We all sang "My Girl" in the main studio, surrounded by the original headsets and mics hanging from the ceiling (the Funk Brothers referred to it as "the snake pit" because of these). I went to a cafe afterwards and found myself singing along to Aretha songs and drinking hot cider. I felt back in myself. It felt like a relief.

I returned to the hotel feeling more able to receive, and it was time for Devi Bhava. This is the all-night celebration wherein Amma performs a puja (fire ceremony) for peace and channels the life- and love-force of the Divine Mother. I've talked about her instructional talks at Devi Bhava before—how very clear and funny and helpful they can be. And as ever, her words felt spot-on for me.

She said, It is easy to get God's grace; it is not so easy to get the blessing of our own mind. Wow, I thought, and wrote this down. This was so much a part of the anxiety and loneliness I had been feeling, before I had given myself a break. I had been feeling like I had been getting everything wrong, somehow—that feeling bad and worried was somehow my fault. I had lost touch with the part of me that's really able to look after myself in a deep way, until I took myself outside—literally and metaphorically—and took a breath. I had to give myself my own blessing.

I wanted to share this with you—whether you have a spiritual practice or not—because it was a necessary and moving reminder to me. Giving ourselves a blessing is simply giving ourselves love. When I can't do this, I feel a real lost-ness. I find it hard to feel my connection to love in its great sense (as the divine or the universe) and its immediate sense of feeling peaceful love and connection to others, rather than anxiety.

Amma talked about ways of giving thanks, in relation to Thanksgiving. She talked about how people often look to the divine in times of trouble, but do this less in times of happiness and thanks. I find that the reverse can also be true: that when one is thankful, one feels in flow with the ways and workings of the universe, and gratitude comes quickly. When times are tough it can be harder to feel connected to a wider sense of grace. It can be easy to feel forgotten and very small.

I find spiritual practice important here: sitting down, chanting—noticing how quiet and little my voice may feel, or that I may be sitting with my head low, curled up almost. And I also find reconnecting to very, very simple pleasures incredibly helpful as a way of re-finding myself. To do this, I have to give myself my blessing to just do what I want to do, not what I think I should do, or what I imagine other people think I ought to do (Martha Beck's book, Finding Your Own North Star, has some great insights into what "everyone" thinks of us). Just go to the Motown Museum. Just sing along to that song. Have a chat to the barista. Do the things. And then give myself my own blessing to enjoy it—to let the waves of spontaneous joy permeate my cells even if it's just for a second. To let that feel more important than listening to the loop of anxious chit-chat in my brain.

Things can look pretty bleak in the winter. Detroit at 30 degrees on a deserted "black Friday" can look pretty bleak. I find myself longing for the sensual pleasures and easy joys of summer—wasn't it summer just a minute ago?

My studies of yoga, Ayurveda and Chinese Medicine tell me that winter is necessary. That in Autumn, we harvest the things that are sustaining to us, the things we need for nourishment, and we let the things that are not good for us fall away; this can be hard, and involve grieving, not least because we know we're not about to follow it up by laying on the beach in the sun.

Then winter arrives and everything is very, very quiet. Nature goes under, to renew itself. We need to do the same. I think the struggle that can take place (at least in my own experience) is that "going under" can feel like being trapped or suffocated; it can even feel like paralysis (where to go? what to do?). But I think it's actually just about having a very, very soft internal time. Treading sooo softly in the inner realms. Taking stock of what's there, maybe doing some gentle re-organization.

Those sensual pleasures that come so simply in summer—grass underfoot, the sun on your face—can feel harder to find in winter. It can take a bit of subtle awareness to tune in, because they are usually quieter treasures. Tinier noises, softer light, heartbeats felt through layers of wool. Which is why we need to go slower and to give ourselves our own blessing to do so. Let ourselves do less. Today I let myself have just one thing-to-do on my list. I did it and enjoyed it because that's all I'd asked myself to do. Today I am following the cat's lead (she is sleeping on my knitting right now).  Maybe I will do some restorative yoga, maybe I won't. Maybe I will keep on feeling good and peaceful, as I do now, maybe I'll have a stumble. I will try to give myself my blessing whatever happens. I hope you are able to do the same and that it feels just right for you.


Restorative yoga playlist here

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