I woke up

Yesterday morning, after a strange, struggling dream, I woke up and felt like a mess for half a second. And then, completely unprompted, this phrase popped up: There is so much to live for!

Where did it come from? From deep inside. And it was one of those special, rare moments where it feels like a lot of quite diligent practice has come together—into something golden, strong and loving.

I bring this up today not as a means of spiritually showing off, but rather as a support to anyone who is on the path, having a rough time and showing up anyway. In my years of practicing yoga and meditation, this is one of the biggest, clearest lessons I have learnt: show up.

Sometimes it feels like big, exciting things are happening when we practice; we have an epiphany in meditation, a yoga pose stirs up deep emotions that we feel we can safely release. It can be wonderful when those things happen.

Other times it can just be really hard. It might be hard because you’re working through grief, and you feel hopeless to the point of feeling disconnected from the source, from love. Sometimes it’s hard because you’re tired to the point of falling back to sleep in meditation. Or—and this is a big one for me—sometimes it’s hard because it feels like an issue you’ve been working with for so long is still an issue. You feel like, “I’ve tried meditation, yoga, hypnotherapy, reiki, and still I feel this difficult thing! Nothing is shifting!”

But you’ve been putting in the time on the mat, on the cushion. And time and again, you’ve been showing up for yourself; believing that there’s something beyond the streams of anxious babble going through your mind, or the emotional loops that keep playing themselves super-loudly right next to your heart—like, “This one! Remember this painful thing? Let’s hear it again!”

One of my favorite teachings is from the great yoga guru Sri Pattabhi Jois. He said, “Do your practice. All is coming.” I do not think of this as some kind of pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking. In my experience, I do my practice, and then—often when I least expect it—I realize that something has shifted. Like when I received that message after my dream: There is so much to live for. It wasn’t some glib mental sticky-note; I felt it to be true. And this came after a year of big, real life losses, one after the other—and having felt, at one very low point in the spring, like there really wasn’t much to live for.

And sometimes we don’t have sparkly moments like these. Sometimes we don’t perceive shifts in ourselves until a close friend remarks on how much we’ve grown over the years—how much easier we seem in ourselves.

So, I’m saying: keep going. Keep trying. You are doing great.

The more we look after ourselves, the more we facilitate love and connection with each other. As my friend, the yoga teacher Adriana Rizzolo writes: “You and God take good care of your precious life and heart, and I’ll do the same. That way, when we come together, magic naturally unfolds.”

What a day

Today is the UN’s International Day of Non-Violence, and it’s Gandhi’s birthday. It is also a day on which many Americans are watching and sharing a speech given by President Obama regarding yesterday’s mass shooting in Oregon—the 45th school shooting this year in the United States. He seemed weary, incredulous at points, as he spoke of the country’s gun laws, observing, “Somehow this has become routine.”

Indeed, violence has become routine in our world. I remember walking home one night not so long ago and seeing through a large window on a recently built block of luxury condos: A man was watching TV on a massive flatscreen hung on the wall, and some kind of very loud assault was taking place onscreen, probably on a glitzy police TV series. We, as a society, invite violence into our homes, then wonder why it’s making us unhappy.

We can focus in even more tightly and look at the violence going on in our heads. This year I have been heartened to see a lot of discussion in advertising and on social media around the ways we are casually and relentlessly mean to ourselves, along the lines of, “Would you talk to someone else in the way you talk to yourself?” (Most of us: “Dear God, no!”)

However hard we try to behave nicely and smile, outwardly, through our own distress, doesn’t it follow that when we find ourselves intolerable, we find things in the outside world intolerable, too? This is where a meditation practice can become so valuable—not one which necessitates a fancy silk cushion, scented candles and mood music. Rather, one which involves sitting quietly with yourself, over and over again, and learning to be your own friend, as I discussed in last week’s post on Conscious. It is hard to be our own friend if we don’t know who we actually are, and crank up the outside volume to drown ourselves out.

I was very moved by the Pope’s recent words on the current immigration crisis. In a soft, patient voice, he asked people not to look at the numbers of refugees, but rather at their faces. This is so profound; it is very, very hard, to act without compassion when we’re looking in someone’s eyes. This kind of focus brings us back to earth and to our own humanity.

I have a friend who is a great mum to her lovely four-year old daughter, and when her little girl is getting distracted or overwhelmed, she asks her to look into her eyes while she’s talking. It changes everything.

It seems to me that so much trouble and violence arises from our inability to take a long look at something or someone, however painful and problematic it may seem. Violence can, and has become routine. And while it’s possible to cultivate “good” habits which benefit each other, I think that kindness cannot be routine. It’s a stirring of the heart, in response to truth. In Buddhism, it’s bodhichitta; the tears that instinctively come when you watch one of these news reports on TV, a compassion that comes out of being awake to feeling.

Today is a good day to practice lovingkindness meditation for all (outlined here); and of course, for the great, simple prayer: Lokah samastah sukhino bhavantu; may all beings be happy and free, and may I in some way contribute to that happiness and freedom.

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.