How to be a friend to yourself

"Hey, you! Meet you!" Your meditation practice can help you make friends with yourself. Here are my thoughts on how this can happen, to coincide with Conscious 2's One Month Meditation Challenge.


One thing I hear often, from those who like the idea of having a meditation practice but feel it might not be for them, is, “But I can’t clear my mind!” They have tried sitting down in a quiet place, hoping to find some peace, and instead they’re overwhelmed by a honking barrage of thoughts—or a trail of anxious inner whispers, or whatever particular inner soundtrack tends to pop up for them.

To which I say, it’s okay. You don’t need to clear your mind to have a good, healthy practice. To me, that’s not what it’s about. In my understanding and experience, it’s about becoming a friend to yourself. It’s about being able to stay with the shouts and yelps and laughs and sighs of your own inner experience; and then integrate that patience and kindness into your whole being, so it starts to come naturally in your day to day life.

To get a little technical, in traditional yogic terms what most of us are doing when we’re sitting on the cushion is practicing dharana, which means "concentration" in Sanskrit. We are bringing our mind to a single point, like the breath or a mantra. Only once we’ve merged our consciousness with the object of our concentration are we in actual meditation, dhyana, which takes us to a fully awakened yogic state, samadhi—bliss.

As nice as it sounds, very few of us are going to be able to magically be whisked off to samadhi just like that, and it takes a lot of dedicated practice to even come close to softening into dhyana. The advertising images we see of attractive young women sitting on beaches in lotus pose suggest otherwise, though, which is where I think the mind-clearing myth comes from. The mind absolutely can be clear—is clear, when we let it be. But trying to stop our thoughts from coming is about as effective as trying to push rain back up into a cloud; it’s the way that we relate to these thoughts and feelings that lets the storm pass.

Concentration can sound like a hard, strict word—but it’s totally your ally in your meditation practice. Concentration when we’re sitting is simply about bringing your awareness to a single point, like the breath. The Buddhist meditation teacher Sharon Saltzberg talks about “resting your awareness on the breath.” I love this idea of resting our awareness, because it does away with that flinty, unyielding notion of concentration (“Do it this way, or else!”).

So, you rest your awareness on your breath. And your thoughts will come, and your awareness will wander off your breath and want to follow your thoughts. The key is just to notice when this happens, and bring your attention back to your breath. Then you might start to observe how you’re bringing your attention back. Are you berating yourself? Telling yourself you’re stupid, or that this is a ridiculous idea, or it’ll never work? Are you neutral? Disinterested? Or maybe you’re really gentle about it.

For me, the absolute jewel of my years of meditation practice has been to discover that I can bring my awareness back to the breath with kindness, patience and compassion. “Let’s come on back now.” “There we go.” “Ah.” “How about now? What’s actually happening now?”

Over time, and in increments as tiny as the speed at which hair grows, I have become less impatient and frustrated with myself. I have become softer, and at the same time more courageous and strong, because I haven’t shooed away hard thoughts quite so much. I am more able to sit with who I am, most of the time. And this has moved into my everyday life. I have begun to see that I can be kind to myself anywhere.

I will say that it’s 100% an ongoing process. I still make myself squirm often. I still have a tendency to fan the flames of anxiety, get stuck in sad, doom-y thought patterns, or go off on a skip down daydream lane. But I catch myself more often, and more gently these days.

In the end, whichever tradition you’re approaching a meditation practice from, my feeling is that it really just comes down to love. When we quiet down and stop running our internal monologues, we get to hear and see the world in such a deep way; that’s when I start to feel a current of quiet joy running through me, and the sense dawns that maybe, yes, love really is our true nature.

And love

Says,

“I will, I will take care of you”

To everything that is

Near.

—Hafiz

Honoring BKS Iyengar

A year ago today, the great yoga teacher BKS Iyengar died. He was such a light. Here is what I wrote in his honor in 2014.

Understanding the Prayer

Understanding takes its own sweet time, and it's an ongoing process. I had a profound moment, while wearing a hairnet and singing along to the Beatles. Here is what happened.

I fell in love with yoga from pretty much the first class I ever took, years ago. I had no intellectual knowledge of the philosophy of yoga, but it felt right. So right. I remember walking down the street after my second ever class, trying not to laugh out loud because I felt so delighted and free!

Sure enough, I became more aware of the disciplines and values of this ancient spiritual system, and some of these made good sense in my head; intellectually, I got it and thought it was a good idea, though I didn’t wholly feel it in my body.

If you’ve taken a few yoga classes, you’ve more than likely heard or chanted the prayer Lokah samastah sukhino bhavantu. This is a prayer that’s often recited in Hindu practices, and it can be translated as, “May all beings be happy and free, and may I in some way be able to contribute to that happiness and freedom.” Of course we wish that for each other, right?

In reality, it has taken me years of practice to begin to really experience that prayer and understand it in myself.

At the weekend, I went to help out at a monthly soup kitchen at a church here in NYC, for the first time. It’s called Mother’s Kitchen, and it was founded my teacher, Mata Amritanandamayi as a place where homeless people can get a good meal in a welcoming environment.

When I walked in, I was happy to see quite a few people I recognized from satsangs (community gatherings) around town; I put on an apron and hairnet, started chopping up fruit, and felt very lucky to be able to help in this way while having a friendly time with all these nice people. There was even a guy plonking away on a piano in the corner while we worked. My friend Sanjoy said, “Wait til people start arriving—that’s when the magic happens.” I didn’t know quite what he meant, but took his word for it.

As I stood at the serving tables collecting seating tokens and chatting to folks who had come for the day, I looked around me—at all these people who had come together, all the good will that was going on, all the food that had been prepared with love, human beings being decent to each other. I was moved to my very core and had to stop myself from welling up. There was nowhere else I’d rather be than right there, and I had the thought-feeling: “This is what it means. This is being inside Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu.”

Maybe it has not taken you six years of yoga practice, trainings, study and so on to arrive at understanding prayers like this in your heart. Maybe you don’t practice yoga at all and you got it from the get-go? Maybe you’re somewhere in-between.

I wanted to share it with you, though, because quite often on our respective journeys there are ideas which seem to make good sense to our brains, but don’t really chime with us on a deep level. It is so, so, so very okay if and when we feel that way! Understanding, on any level, happens in its own time; whether it’s related to an immediate personal relationship or something you’ve read in a poem, whatever it might be. And understanding is fluid, not static; it moves with us. There is no end-point to understanding, it just gets deeper, wider.

These practices that we have—like yoga, or giving up our seat on the train, or trying not to interrupt people, or being patient, or formal prayer—are all part of the same thing, all part of our reaching an understanding that doesn’t need to be explained. The kind of understanding that very simply brings peace to our hearts.

Lokah samasta sukhino bhavantu.

लोकाः समस्ताः सुखिनो भवन्तु

Summer and the happy habit

Beautiful, beautiful August! Such a good time to get into the habit of exercising our gratitude muscles. Here is my piece for Conscious this week.

My spiritual teacher, the humanitarian Mata Amritanandamayi (Amma), visited New York recently, and as ever, it was a time of great joy and learning for me. Amma is popularly known as “the hugging saint” because she gives her blessing in the form of a very tender embrace. This hug is known as darshan, which you can translate as “a glimpse of God”, and indeed, in the moments when you’re nestled in the arms of this awakened person, it can feel like time disappears and you’re part of something infinitely vast.

One learns about love on a visceral level, both in Amma’s embrace, and in watching her hugging people—one after another after another—for 12, maybe 13 or 14 hours non-stop. She has said before that where love flows, everything is effortless, and watching the affection coming from Amma and in the faces of those people she’s embracing can be like seeing love made visible. Everyone is lit up.

But there’s also a more instructional kind of learning on offer in the form of the talks that she gives before darshan. On this New York visit, she spoke about gratitude, specifically on how it’s so easy to focus on what we don’t have. It’s like if there’s something wrong in your mouth—say you’ve lost a tooth—your tongue can’t help but endlessly explore that area, and the gap feels enormous. We’re compelled to explore that lack, even as we forget the other perfectly good teeth in our mouths, or the general miraculousness of our bodies. When we get obsessive about what we don’t have, we lose sight of what we do have.

I notice that gratitude comes more easily to me in the summer. Yesterday I lay in the park just watching the flowers nod gently in the breeze, and I felt utterly bowled over by the gorgeousness and generosity of summer. It is a time of ripeness, abundance, fecundity, playfulness, smiles at the beach, ice-cream truck music… Even the quality of being physically alone in summer can feel different to in other seasons; there’s a certain kind of freedom and a quiet joy to it.

This being so, it is a very good time to practice being thankful. Not to simply strike things off a list, ”I am grateful for this, that and the other”, but to really feel it in our bodies: The way the evening breeze feels on your skin; your feet in the sand; a mouthful of ice-cream; the feeling of leaning your head on your friend’s shoulder, and their shoulder being warm from the sun. It’s like everything is humming with the same sweet energy. To me, it is darshan in everyday form.

Developing such awareness to your body is something anyone can support through yoga practice, if that’s an option that appeals. Simply focussing your attention on your breath and what it feels like to be inside your body in the outside world can have a transformative effect on your relationship with your own body, mind and soul, not to mention other people’s, whatever the time of year.

But right now it is summer. Why not let the sun melt your heart and your anxieties? And see if you can let yourself just hang out in those moments of sweetness and thankfulness. Nothing to do, nowhere to be. Just here.

Happiness can, I think, be like doing headstands: It takes some practice. What a beautiful time it is to get into the habit of being grateful.

A special day for teachers

Today is a special day in the Hindu, Jain and Buddhist calendar: it’s Guru Purnima, a holiday where people can celebrate their teachers. For this reason, I think it’s a beautiful holiday for everyone, regardless of faith—though certainly faith comes into our relationship with any teacher in our lives, whether it’s listening to an insight or gesture when it’s given, or finding the space to understand it afterwards.

Perhaps you have someone whom you regard as a spiritual teacher? A guru, monk or humanitarian figure whose words and way of life you follow? Or maybe it’s someone in a classroom or a driving lesson whose words go beyond simply making sense and somehow become inspiring?

There is a beautiful lineage in yoga that the yoga teacher Ruth Lauer-Manenti talks about in her book, An Offering of Leaves. She talks about how sometimes in a class, our teacher will physically touch us in a way that feels helpful, saying, that teacher, too, was touched by their teacher in just such a way, and their teacher before them. “When the teacher is talking about kindness and you feel nourished by their words, something inside of you is stirred and something that was sleeping awakens. This is because that teacher also had a teacher who spoke about kindness and woke them up.”

It makes me think of the image of buckets of water being passed down a line, and it strikes me that good teaching can work in our lives like this. Many pairs of hands have brought me to this point in my life; many good people have given me tools to dig myself out of holes or build safer ladders to the stars; many people have held me physically and emotionally. On a day like Guru Purnima, it’s nice to take a moment to think of all the people in your life whose teachings have lifted you and supported you.

For me, I’m thinking of my spiritual teacher Mata Amritanandamayi Devi (Amma), and of my wonderful granny dressed in her white cardigan and sitting in her favorite chair; I liked sitting at her feet like that even when I was a grown up. I think of my incredibly patient driving instructor, Mo, who only lost it once, the day before my test when I was driving abysmally: “Love! What’s happening! You’re cracking up!” Family, friends, so many hands...

The word guru has its roots in the syllables “gu” meaning darkness and “ru” meaning light, conveying a sense of the darkness of ignorance being dispelled by light. Some friends and I had a discussion about the nature of a guru. One said, “the guru is in your heart,” then another said, “the guru is your heart.”

The guru is your heart. Happy Guru Purnima.

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.