What does it mean?

We so rarely know the true nature of any one event when it happens. Two big things happened in the same day that reminded me of this. You can read the full article for Conscious right here, and below.

Here is what I have learned, over and over again, this past year. We generally don’t know what a thing means, right when it happens. Often we think we do: “The person I love broke up with me. That is bad.” “I lost my job, that is terrible.” “My apartment’s lease is not being renewed, I’ll never find somewhere as nice.” These kinds of thoughts. But we don’t know. Not really.

One of my favourite teachings along these lines comes from the Zen Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh. He tells a story about a poor couple living in a little village whose one pride and joy is their son. One day, the son is involved in a horrible accident which leaves him badly injured, and his mother and father are devastated. “This is the worst thing that could possibly have happened!” they think. Then war is declared in the country, and the military sends forces to all the towns and villages round up men to fight. The couple’s precious son is rejected on the grounds that he’s not fully fit to fight, and is thus spared being sent to the battlefields. What they thought was “bad” turned out to be a blessing.

Lately in my own life, I’ve been loving cycling around on my bike. I bought the bike a few years ago and invested a bit of money at the time—I wanted a nice bike that didn’t make me huff and puff like crazy on hills! And my bike really came into her own this summer. The weather here in New York has been truly beautiful—warm, sticky and sweet—and I’ve been taking long bike rides around Prospect Park in the evenings, soaking in the feelings and the freedom.

This morning I went outside and discovered my bike had been stolen. I don’t know how, because the lock was gigantic, the rack was impenetrable and the wheels and seat were locked to the frame; the policeman who came to take down details said that some professional thieves can replicate the keys to special locks, and that’s probably what happened.

Naturally, I was vexed and sad. But I figured that while it was definitely not something I would have chosen to happen, I did have choices about how I registered it inside. I could deal with the outer things (reporting it stolen, thinking about how to replace it and so on), and I could just let it be, inside. I talked to my friend about it, and we looked at a nearby bike store’s website and I felt okay.

Shortly afterwards, he wrote me a beautiful letter about going through transitions in life (there have been many in mine lately), and told me that he had bought me a voucher at the bike shop and to go get myself a new two-wheeled chariot. I was speechless and smiley and touched to the center of my heart. Wow!

Can you believe how lovely people can be? I was, and am, floored by my friend’s kindness and generosity, and reminded in such an immediate way that, as I said, we so rarely know the true nature of any one event when it happens. Today I was reminded that as human beings, we can behave in stunningly decent ways; I felt valued, and eager to do the best I can for others. That wasn’t how I expected the day to go when I saw my bike had gone.

May the blessings in your life unfold in their own sweet time, and may we all be able to hold the uncertainty that is life with patience and grace and a sense of humour.

A mat that teaches you?

I laughed out loud when I heard the voice-over on a promotional video for a new yoga product: a yoga mat with positional markings on it which purports to “[help] you find calm and inner peace”. Surely this had to be some kind of spoof?

The publicity email invited me to support a Kickstarter campaign for a “revolutionary” new yoga mat. The sticky mat in question has various markings printed on it, so that the practitioner knows the “right” positions for their hands and feet. It comes in three sizes, small, medium and large, “all according to height”—as if all our bodies had the same dimensions!  It struck me as unfortunate that such a product could have been developed with seemingly little understanding of what yoga means, and what a physical asana practice is actually for.

On a very basic level, all our bodies are differently proportioned, regardless of height: The length of our limbs and torsos is not standardized. (And for that matter, even if our hands are in the “right” place, that doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re distributing the weight as we need to be, or pushing into a part of the hand or foot that will help us.)

Our expression of any given pose will vary dramatically according to where we are in our practice. Do you remember the first time you tried Virabadrasana II, Warrior 2 pose? Very likely your stance was quite short and your front thigh was far from parallel with the ground; you probably breathed pretty hard, sweated quite a lot, and found it hard to stay there for long. Then maybe over some time, you were able to move with greater ease and fluidity. You found your body saying “Yes” to deepening the pose a little, moving your feet a touch wider apart, bending your front knee a little deeper while being careful the knee didn’t track beyond your front ankle. You eased into it, over some years. Even within one class, a pose can become more available.

In my understanding, paying attention to what’s really going on in your body—your completely unique body—is asana practice. We learn to listen to what the body and mind tell us, and make good decisions based on that information, not according to habitual behavior or one-size-fits-all instruction.

A good teacher will pay very careful attention to you as you practice. She or he will look at how your body is aligned and what’s going on with your muscles: are they tense, juddering, slack? Your teacher will notice how you’re breathing and what’s happening to your face. One fab instructor of mine once noticed, as the class attempted a particularly tricky pose, that we all looked like we were going to the guillotine; we laughed, of course, loosened up, and made our way into the posture with a lot more ease than we would’ve found otherwise.

Similarly, the art of self-practice (ie doing yoga on your own) is a profound exercise in engaging with your whole being. Without a teacher watching and making adjustments, you become your own guide. You alone are making the decisions about the poses you practice based on deep listening. In this way, you take responsibility for yourself.

I giggled, earlier, about the idea that one could find calm and inner peace via a yoga mat with some markings printed on it (or in any prop, for that matter). But I fully acknowledge the seriousness of our need to find inner peace—particularly in the West, where our value system can seem so skewed.

It is good that people are looking towards the system of yoga in the hope of welcoming these things into their lives. And it is so important to practice carefully and safely. But I have serious reservations about gimmicky products like these. Asana is just one part of the journey towards yoga (meaning, union), and honing our ability to observe and listen and make adjustments is a crucial part of that inner journey.

How to be a race car driver

From a conversation I had with my dad at Heathrow airport, on how driving a Formula 1 car around the race track at Silverstone can be like our yoga practice and spiritual life. Yes! You can read the article here and below.

I love talking to my dad and it’s not something we get to do at length all that often. Earlier this week, he took me to Heathrow airport, for my flight back home to New York. We had breakfast at the cafe and started chatting about his recent birthday trip to Silverstone race track, where he got to drive sports cars very fast (my Alpha Romeo-driving father’s idea of heaven). “How fast did you go?” I asked. “Well, you see, they took the speedometers out of the cars,” he said. I looked puzzled and he explained that this is so that the driver can really feel what the car is doing. This way, you're engaging with the experience rather than just racking up mph to show off to others about, or drive yourself competition-crazy.

Suffice to say, I loved hearing this because it seems to chime in so well with how we might approach spiritual practice. It’s so easy, tempting, even, to be struck by the surface stuff in a yoga class: The people wearing the coolest yoga pants or doing the fancy arm-balances while you drip sweat onto your yoga mat and worry about your knickers being all bunched up. But (and you know this, I’m sure), comparing ourselves to others does not really help us with our own practice on the deeper levels.

Yoga is about the inner journey. It is a life-long practice of refining, of moving from the gross, ie outer levels, to an inner truth. You can look at the physical asana practice as something helps you get your body to a place where it’s healthy and comfortable enough to sit for long periods of time, simultaneously honing your ability to listen to your mental and physical intelligence. Similarly, you can see sitting in concentration (dharana) as a preparation for meditation (dhyana), and meditation as a means to finding samadhi, ultimate freedom.  In this way of looking at things, the yogic path is the most personal journey you can take. And it is not about competing. Meditation is not a performance, any more than a fully lived life is. There is no speedometer for happiness, only the way that you yourself experience it.

After years of practice, I still find it hard to resist comparing my progress through life with others’ (the people with the seemingly picture-perfect relationships or jobs and so on). But as a dear friend of mine observed, “Life is not something that you’re either good or bad at, like bowling or singing.” Rather, it’s about your experiences, your processing, the lessons you learn and the choices you make as you move through it. We listen to our engines, take corners as best we can and base our decisions on the best information we have. Attaching a speedometer to your journey is like trying to grade the sea on how wet it is.

I boarded the plane at Heathrow feeling profoundly reassured by this conversation with my dad—which is why I am sharing it with you now. I wish you happy trails, whichever road it is you’re on.

The meditation of the birds

There’s so much to be said for a good morning: my granny used to say, “Morning hours are golden hours”, in terms of the sheer possibility and illumination that can be found in these precious early times. And in the summer, there can be a particular sweetness to the mornings, don’t you find?

In that spirit, I'd like to offer you one of my favorite personal practices. This wasn't taught to me by anyone in particular, and you may already do something like it on your own. Still, I'd like to share it with you because it brings me such joy—in a light as air way—and a certain kind of peace.

I call it the meditation of the birds and I came upon it years ago when I first started practicing yoga. I knew pretty early on that yoga was something I wanted to do for myself at home, as well as in class, so I started doing a bit of asana in my bedroom in the morning before work.

It felt great, but I would sometimes find it hard to let go in savasana, final resting pose. I still do, actually, and that's why I love it when the meditation of the birds comes to me.

I remember lying on my bedroom floor in savasana one summer morning and becoming aware of the birdsong outside my window. I wasn’t living in some bucolic retreat at the time, far from it—I lived in a shared apartment in Williamsburg, a "cool" and accordingly noisy part of Brooklyn.

But I heard the birds and I let myself just listen. Just listen. And as I let myself become absorbed in the sound—in, essentially, a world so, so, so much larger than my whirling mind-thoughts and the notion that I am my body—I felt myself physically let go. My body felt relieved. My muscles relaxed, there was this quality of melting. As if my mind said, “Well, what am I, anyway, other than just here?”

There are many explanations for why just turning one's awareness to the birds is so peaceful. Partly I think the random-seemingness of their chirping holds our attention in a way that a steadier, more predictable sound would not. Partly it's the sheer joy of existing in weather that's warm enough for birdsong. And truly, I think there's something so profound in the simple acknowledgement of nature, of the craziness of these wild creatures which fly around the sky and call out from the trees.

I've always loved the author John Steinbeck, and have read and reread his books for years. Among my favorites is a large tome which simply collects together the letters he wrote in his life; they are (unsurprisingly) beautiful. The book is called Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, and I bought my copy a decade or so ago from Steinbeck House, the author’s former home in Salinas. It is very well thumbed at this point!

Around this time of discovering yoga, I was rereading the book. A little bit, I think, because it is funny to have moved to a whole ’nother country and be away from one’s home, and Steinbeck’s books bring me a particular kind of comfort.

I was reading the letters Steinbeck wrote when he and his wife moved to Glastonbury, England, for a year in 1959, towards the last part of his life, to work on a modern day retelling of the legend of King Arthur. They lived in a very old cottage, in a very simple way, and he was happy there. Happy in a profound, peaceful way. This is what he wrote to his friend, the publisher Elizabeth Otis:

“Meanwhile I can’t describe the joy. In the mornings I get up early to have a time to listen to the birds. It’s a busy time for them. Sometimes for over an hour I do nothing but look and listen and out of this comes a luxury of rest and peace and something I can only describe as in-ness. And then when the birds have finished and the countryside goes about its business, I come up to my little room to work. And the interval between sitting and writing grows shorter every day.”

I'm pretty sure I shed a tear to read this. At the realization of the universality and simplicity of such things as inner peace, and the specialness of a morning—what Steinbeck describes later as “the processional of the sun”. The discovery of profound inner rest.

The meditation of the birds. I think we can call it what we like. Either way, I hope you are having some fine summer mornings.