night roses

Get your nose in the roses. They smell so good at night, in the dark and the just-rained rain.

Rain

Walking in the rain when you're not trying to get out of the rain is so nice.

Working together, working alone

This latest piece for Conscious is about partner work and finding your own muscles—on and off the mat. You can read it here and below.

How do you feel about partner work in a yoga class? Maybe you love it and find it a fun way to get to know other students in your class. Maybe you find it really awkward—the business of introducing yourself, worrying if you’re getting the pose right, feeling like you’ve been jolted out of your “zone”. Maybe it’s a combo of both.

The first few times partner work came up for me years ago, I did find it awkward, but I’ve grown to really welcome it—and I had a bit of an epiphany in class today concerning working together. We were practicing going up into a handstand in the middle of the room from a wide-legged straddle. This is definitely something I cannot do unassisted yet! And the same applied to most of the people in the class; we gazed in admiration as a sweet classmate called Trevor demonstrated this maneuver on his own with grace and seeming ease.

As I say, I’m not ready (at all!) to do this myself without support, but with the right assistance from a classmate, it felt simple. In this case, it was a tweak at the hips and then support at my ankles, taken away briefly for one delicious moment where I found my balancing point. This experience of getting the right kind of support is something I’ve had a few times in the past years: Ooh! Your feet magically float up! There it is!

In this way, your body recognises and understands what it is you’re working towards doing on your own. So, you practice and you work and you get stronger and more in tune with your body. And then one day—Ooh! There you go! All by yourself!

The thought I had today in relation to all this was that this is how life is, off the mat. I’ve needed a lot of support over the past few months following some difficult personal events, and I’ve been fortunate enough to get it from loving friends, family and teachers.  What I’ve noticed, as I move through it, is that I’ve started to understand that while the support is great—invaluable, actually—I also need to do it for myself. I need to find my own muscles, and crucially, apply that balance of effort and ease in my life, on my own. When I was a little girl, I would sometimes object to other people intervening in whatever I was up to, saying, “I want to do it my own self!” Thus, “Her own self” became a family nickname, and one that I am seeing the positives to as an adult!

You can adjust someone in a yoga pose in nine zillion ways to get them aligned and in the pose—kind of. But if the moment you pull the support and props away, they lose the posture, it’s only helping them so much. We have to participate to fully be in the pose, and to fully live our own lives.

Other people’s thoughts and takes on one’s situation can be incredibly helpful; it can feel like, “Ah! So that’s a potential way of viewing this. That’s an option. Good to know.” Just like in our yoga class, other people being there can provide crucial support, right when we need it; it makes us feel like, yes, we can do it, after all! Which is wonderful.

Ultimately though, I would really like to be able to get into that handstand in the middle of the room myself, just as I want to find my own balance in life. So I’m flexing my muscles and doing my practice and taking my time. Hopefully one of these days I’ll be able to get back to you and report that yes—Ooh! My feet went up, like magic. Or that I learned something really precious along the way, which turned out to be the real gold.

Feeling the feelings

This one is about the rasas, the purest states of emotion; the philosopher Abhinavagupta describes rasa as “the self tasting the self.” You can read the full piece here, and below.

==

Today is my friend Nick’s birthday. He died in December, but I can't imagine that today ever won't be his birthday. It’s been an absolutely beautiful day in New York; birds tweeting, the sun shining, and the new leaves on the trees casting all kinds of beautiful seaweed shadows on the sidewalk.

I am so very sad he has gone. And so very glad to be alive. I have been thinking lately about a teaching I received on the rasas, in a yoga class by the founder of Abhaya Yoga, Tara Glazier. She talked about the rasas as the very purest states of emotion that we feel, and are our birth right. It is a profound part of our human experience to feel these things fully: love, joy, wonder, courage, peace, sadness, anger, fear and disgust.

Rasa can be translated as juice, essence, or transformational state. In Shiva Rea’s excellent article, Coming to Your Senses, she writes that the idea of rasa originated in Indian performance art, and that the philosopher Abhinavagupta describes it as “the self tasting the self.” Isn’t that amazing? I had to sit with that idea a little to begin to comprehend it.

There's a sense In which to allow ourselves to fully explore any one of these states opens up our capacity for all of them. And similarly, to damp down or deny any one of these pure states is to risk muting them all: when we fully feel pain, we give ourselves complete access to joy, and vice versa.

The deeper I move into my practice and noticing what's going on in my body and my mind, the more I understand that it’s possible to know two seemingly opposite experiences at once. To have tears in your eyes from the heart-pain of having lost a loved one, at the same moment as you see the sun and shadows moving on the wall, and feel something in that same heart dancing.

I realized today that in one pocket of my wallet I still have the train ticket from the day I went to Nick’s memorial service back in England; in another, there’s a folded up scrap of paper that has the address of my friends’ wedding party in Mumbai written on it, from such a happy time last May. Both are precious.

On the yoga mat, we practice holding these dualities. Reaching up as we root down. Focussing the mind on the breath and letting the thoughts go. Finding a balance of effort and ease in the same pose. I find it hard to do these things, but I try anyway, and I learn.

My own experience of grief has been that it feels like it’s opened up another dimension of feeling and understanding, as painful as that has felt. And it has felt very painful; I don’t wish to fluff around the edges of something that’s been so sharp. Yet in this expansion, I’ve felt more love; curiously, more capacity to love. A sense of the human heart opening so, so wide. The question, it seems to me, is whether we allow the heart to hold us in its open embrace, as we feel those pure feelings?

Happy birthday, Nick. Happy loving and living, all of us.

Spring, and how we see

Spring is such a visual feast, and can also be a time of vulnerability for your eyes, according to Traditional Chinese Medicine. Here are some practices you may find helpful, plus choice words from Cezanne and Thich Nhat Hanh.

The Magic Tree

Spring! Season of rising sap, life-force moving up and out. I talk about my favorite methods of getting aligned with the season here. Includes twisting, stretching the inner leg-line and hugging trees.

As a little kid, one of my favorite ever gifts was a Magic Sakura Tree. It was a small cardboard tree that you stood in water when you went to bed, and when you woke up, blossom had sprouted all over it. I have no idea what chemicals were in it to make this happen, but I was amazed.

As I get older, it's spring—the real deal—that really does it for me. These first weeks of spring have a special magic to them, with new life announcing itself everywhere; buds in various stages of emergence even on the same tree, some beginning to unfurl, others like love letters opening themselves up to reveal their shiny green messages. It is exciting!

In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), the spring is a yang season, meaning its energy is all about up and out. It even sounds that way: YANG! And it’s the opposite of winter's inward-looking, slow, reflective yin energy. As such, the transition between the two states can be a little bumpy.

You can see with your eyes and feel in your bones that the sap, the life force, in trees is rising; moving up the trunk and exploding in the form of acid green leaves and soft bundles of blossom.

At the Brooklyn Botanic gardens this weekend I put my arms around a tree by the lake to see if I could feel that surging current of energy and let my own body align with it. This may be perceived as an eccentric gesture but to my mind it's just an expression of what we humans need to do in the spring (and indeed in any season), which is to work with nature's energy. It’s a dance like this, every season.

So let's go into a little bit more detail about what this entails for us in day to day life. In his excellent book, Healing With Whole Foods, Paul Pitchford recommends taking brisk walks early in the morning in spring, and I have friends who swear by this. Personally, I find that if you live in a big city this can be a lot of information to take in, first thing; so I prefer to practice yoga on my patio. Either way, getting outside is key. Making your physical practice more vigorous also helps you join this season of waking up.

Physically, TCM tells us we’re working with the liver in spring. In terms of the body’s meridians—its energetic highways, if you like—the liver meridian runs along the inner legline, up around the shoulders and neck and travels to the eyes. It’s a major detoxifying organ, and the emotion we associate with the liver when it’s out of balance is anger. So, as the liver starts processing the accumulated sludge of winter and working through undigested emotions, it’s more than likely you’ll feel some sparks of irritation and frustration. If your liver is overloaded with toxins, you may notice rashes on the skin or acidic digestion.

Other signs of liver imbalance can include neck and shoulder tightness, eye problems (hello, twitchy eyes!), restlessness and tight tendons. You can ease tension in the body by practicing yoga poses which open up the liver meridian, such as Trikonasana (triangle pose), Uppavistakonasa (wide leg forward bend) and Badakonasana (bound angle pose). Twists will also help to flush out the organs via what B.K.S. Iyengar called the “squeeze and soak” principle—meaning you compress the organs during the twist, pushing out stagnant blood and toxins, and then fresh blood rushes in as you release the twist.

I also love balancing poses like Vrksasana (tree pose) and Ardha chandrasana (half moon pose), which open up that legline. It’s so important to find balance in the spring; on the one hand, we want to meet its rising energy, and on the other, we need to give ourselves quiet time to process what we’re seeing and feeling, otherwise it’s all too much.

Taking time to meditate in the morning and before bed can help. One of my teachers, Leigh Evans, recommends making a daily “to do” list and then taking two things off it, as well as “padding” daily activities with an extra 15 minutes. Simplifying your day is great, and a social media detox can work wonders if you’re feeling agitated; often when we feel overwhelmed, we feel a compulsion to manically “check” everything.

It’s lovely to enjoy the excitement of spring and maintain a gentleness at the same time; letting things unfurl rather than yanking or forcing. We need a bit of oomph to get our momentum going after winter, but it’s equally important to make room for what needs to emerge and clear quiet space for what needs to be heard.

Like this, it’s easier to really open our eyes and see that we’re surrounded by real life magic trees, and—whisper it—that we are magic trees ourselves. Happy spring.

Kahlil at the deli

This is really a note for us city dwellers, regarding how we procure things in the physical world—how we get hold of our groceries, our books and records.

I work in Manhattan, and commute in from Brooklyn every day. It takes about 45 minutes, and in order for me to meditate and practice and eat before leaving the house, I get up around 7am, and usually get home around 8pm. It doesn't leave a lot of time for embarking on any kind of project beyond unwinding in the evening.

I know a lot of us function like this, and I fully see the sense in all the new online culinary services that have been popping up lately that allow you to get ingredients delivered to your door which you then throw in a pan—thus, you get to cook your evening meal yourself. A good thing, to be sure.

But a few nights ago I went to my local deli to pick up some vegetables and thyme to make dinner and I got talking to the owner, a man called Kahlil. He said, it's good that you cook. I said yes, I like it. He told me his mother used to make the family's butter and cheese back home in Israel. He rang up my thyme on the register and said that as a little boy, he remembers going up into the mountains to get thyme, and the smell of it in the air. Can you imagine?

And I said that I think the getting of things— the gathering of your ingredients—is important. Squeezing the fruit, getting a sense of where it came from, seeing inside the store, sniffing the smells—being part of the journey. The actual making of the meal is just a tiny part of its ingredients’ journey, and of your journey to the food on your plate.

I think the same is true of books and records. Some of my most profound literary discoveries have been in bookstores when I'm just absorbing what’s going on, coasting along with my intuition and letting the experience unfold and the pages turn.

I have no doubt that this is part of the reason that “Record Store Day” (April 18) exists. To get us out there, in the real world, seeing, hearing, sensing and being part of it.

Now, none of this means that I magically have more time to go shopping or that I live near a sweet smelling mountain. But it does make me appreciate the opportunities I do have—to smell the air, touch the fruit, feel the feelings, be part of a process that's bigger than getting my dinner.

We don't have to behave as machines shovelling food into our bodies or words into our brains. We are alive. The great poet Kahlil Gibran was born and raised in Lebanon and emigrated to America aged 11. His profound relationship with nature is described beautifully here [http://www.alhewar.com/Gibran_Eco.htm]  in Dr. Suheil Bushrui’s essay, Poet of the Ecology of Life. For now, I’d like to give you this lovely quote from Gibran’s best known work, The Prophet (1923). It’s perhaps something to tuck into a pocket in your heart and re-trace next time you’re in the deli, patting a nice grapefruit.

“And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.”

―Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

Wriggling out

We all have Houdini tendencies when we're faced with discomfort. Here's how I work with my inner escape artist. Full article here, and below.

I meditate every morning, vipasana-style, for twenty minutes. How do I know it’s twenty minutes? Because I use a meditation app on my iPhone which opens and closes the session with the sound of a singing bowl. Having a set period of time for my sitting practice is useful because it means I leave the house for work on time (usually, anyway…) and because I find I can get more deeply into the practice if I’m not “deciding” on when to come out of it; we don’t “decide” on the timings of most of what happens in our day-to-day lives, so we may as well get some practice in on the cushion.

But here’s the thing. About two-thirds of the way through sitting, I often think: “But what if my iPhone has run out of batteries and switched itself off without my knowing and I will be left sitting here FOREVER?” Then there is usually the thought, “It’s probably fine. Just hang in there a while and relax.” “But seriously, what if?” And this goes on for some time. Sometimes, in the past, I’d decide I was as good as “done” (as if I were a soufflé rising) so I’d close my practice, and then check my phone—only to find there were about 53 seconds left on the timer.

The iPhone story my mind tries to tell me is basically an amazingwriggling-out device; it means I can wriggle out of discomfort at my own volition. Right foot going to sleep? Weird pain in my hip? Incessant repeating of a particular line of thought in my mind? Impatient? No problem! Let’s just wriggle on out via a handy escape route.

The point of this practice though, at least for me, is to get comfortable with my own discomfort. To see it, feel it and know it—and stay with it. Because there is, ultimately, no escape from discomfort. We go from one thing to the next, generally speaking. And there’s a positive side to this, too, as articulated perfectly in a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke; in Go to the Limits of Your Longing, he writes, “No feeling is final.” This, to me, gets to the very core of meditation practice. You’ve surely heard the analogy that our thoughts are like clouds, moving across the sky; occasionally obscuring the sun, but always passing on by.

To me, this line, “no feeling is final” has all life in it. The relief and balm of knowing that it’s okay if you’re in pain, it will pass. And the heartbreaking tenderness of knowing that feelings of joy pass, too.

In vipasana meditation, we bring a light attention to the breath while we sit, and when the thoughts come—as they do—we recognize them, maybe acknowledge them as “thinking”, and return to the breath. Here they come, here they go.

Most of us have wriggling out tendencies in our physical yoga practice, too. It might be obvious, like taking a bathroom break if a pose you don’t like comes up in class. Or maybe it’s a bit more subtle. A particular favorite of mine is in Warrior 2 pose where I’ll straighten my front leg because I’m feeling discomfort in holding the pose. Because I have an established practice it can be quite a subtle kind of wriggling: “I know my body, I’m just working with it.” But when I do this, it means that I don’t get to watch my mind struggling, and realize that my body is actually fine.

I’m wondering if you, too, are a fellow wriggler-out-er? And if so, where and when you catch yourself doing this?

Moving away from what we dislike, and towards what we like are such fundamental aspects of most of our daily lives. Aversion and attraction keep us permanently running from pillar to post, seeking the thing which will make us happy, or stop us from being unhappy. We dash about, and life keeps happening; hard things keep happening and beautiful things keep happening and maddening things keep happening and gladdening things keep happening. The question is, do we want to be on the run all the time?

When I first started practicing yoga, I remember hearing a teacher use the word “equanimity” as something we could work towards. And part of me thought, “That sounds boring. Why would I just want to feel ‘meh’ about everything?”

But my understanding of equanimity now has changed. To me, it’s more about finding a steady place from which to fully experience our aliveness. To stop trying to run away, and instead feel my joy and sorrow and touch my emotions and thoughts; to live, really.

Like I said earlier, I am a pretty adept escape artist. I think we all have our Houdini tendencies that we’ve honed over the years. But the same fluidity that finds ways of moving out of and around things also helps me step back sometimes and see what I’m doing (and often have a quiet laugh to myself about it).

Real, deep discovery about ourselves and what we’re capable of is so often found in the most uncomfortable places—as I have absolutely learned in the many shades of discomfort I’ve felt in yoga and meditation. I don’t have to like it, but I don’t have to dislike it either. No feeling is final. Okay. That’s something I can work with. After all, when I do manage to stop trying to escape, that’s usually when I really arrive.

Three gems

Sometimes it can be really easy to forget what you already know. I was reminded of this over the weekend, spending an evening with three dear friends: Seth, Graciela and Marissa. All three are yoga teachers, and I was struck by how easy life feels in the company of people who you feel are on the same path as you. It feels safe. I remember my granny telling me, years ago, that she’d gone to a party where all the guests were psychotherapists, and saying, “I’ve never been to such an easy party in my life!”. Meaning, people had shed enough layers that there wasn’t so much anxiety around trying to prove anything.

So we were sharing the various things going on in our lives—the adventures, the feelings, the trials and tribs, the usual. And I spoke about a particular tangle I’d got myself into—my mind was trying to deal with a thorny-seeming problem that kept going round and round in my head. We talked it through, and by the end of the night, each friend had revealed a beautiful, shining gem of wisdom. As we were winding things up, my friend Marissa said, “I know you already know these things. We all go through times in our lives where we get so overwhelmed in a particular situation that it’s like we forget what we’ve learned.”

So, if you have found yourself in a pickle lately, I want to offer you their three excellent pieces of advice—like spiritual post-its—which maybe you, too, already know and have temporarily forgotten.

1. Do away with the third layer

My friend Seth did a simple analysis of the semi-torturous layers of thinking that we often have in response to an emotion. We broke this down into three main components. The first is the actual emotion—the nitty gritty, if you like. The second is the thinking response to that emotion: “Oh no, I am sad” (or, “Hooray, I’m happy!”). And the third is the opinion we have about that thought: “I am ashamed that I am sad” or “I am relieved that I’m happy”—which can spiral off into a further nine zillion layers if we let it: “I am a bad yogi. I have failed somehow…” “Thank God I’m happy, now I can start fantasizing about the rest of my life….” And so it goes. If we’re working with what’s going on inside us, we need to get past the chatter, or at least notice the layers.

2. Get right into the very moment in the simplest possible way

My friend Graciela pointed out that what we fear is going to happen—or what we wish hadn’t happened, or what we wish would happen—is not happening to you right now. Right now, you are reading at your computer. Later you will be making a cup of tea, or walking down the street, and you will be alive in the world as you do these things. Any time you feel overwhelmed, just come back—to the simplest part of what’s going on. The walking, the breathing, the hearing. While walking home recently, my whirring thoughts were interrupted, like a newsflash, by a flash of actual reasonable insight which said: “When you are thinking these thoughts, you are not in the real world of your life. Any moment you spend on these thoughts is a moment you are not spending actually living”. I say this without judgement—daydreaming can be a wonderful thing. But I think it can be important to recognize what it is you’re actually doing, and to do it as a decision.

3. Healing treatments are not magic solutions

When we’re feeling distressed, we might wish that someone would just wave a magic wand and make everything okay (I have definitely found myself wishing this were possible from time to time). But no one can do your inner work for you. Marissa said that treatments like Reiki and bodywork do their amazing work of relaxing you and returning you to a quiet space, where you are then able to feel what you need to feel or be open to whatever insights may arise, and where you have the tools to support this work.
We all get in a tangle from time to time and forget some of the precious things we thought we’d learned. That’s why it’s so important that we hold the wisdom and kindness for each other, to be shared right when we need it. This is a part of Sangha, the Buddhist idea of true community—which is itself one of the three jewels that practitioners take refuge in. Precious indeed.

Sunrise

Precious.