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.