Color of winter

A little bit of soap

There is a store a few blocks away from where I work in Manhattan which took me years to discover. I walked past it many times, partly because there’s no sign outside, just a random-seeming hat stand on the sidewalk—and partly because Manhattan exists, generally-speaking, in a driven state of getting somewhere. One day I looked in the window of the shop—just briefly, but it was enough time for me to see a beautiful bronze Buddhist statue. The next time I passed by I looked again; lots of statues, cloth, bits and bobs, trinkets… I went inside, and found shelves of raw and cut crystals for healing, traditional Hindu and Buddhist ritual objects, and hanging tanka Buddhist tapestries; statues worth thousands of dollars, bundles of incense for a couple of bucks... Best of all, I discovered that its owner is a warm and wonderful man from Nepal called Biswah, who will cheerfully blow a conch shell horn loudly in the shop if you ask him what it’s used for. I realized after some time that I’d been visiting the store with the cover of buying incense, but really I was dropping by to have a nice chat with Biswah and seek his advice on any and everything.


At the beginning of December last year, I found out that a friend I loved had died, completely unexpectedly. I was at work when I got the news, and I don’t think I realized I was in shock until a colleague asked if I needed to go home. I wandered outside and walked to Biswah’s shop. I told him what happened and cried. He thought for a moment, and then went over to a corner of the store and pulled out a small, beautifully decorated metal box. He opened it, and inside was a piece of handmade lavender soap that smelt heavenly. Biswah explained that this was special soap, to be used with careful attention when I washed my hands at the end of the day, as soon as I got home. He told me that the very simple act of washing one’s hands moves our awareness down, physically, out of our million-mile-an-hour minds, through the heart and into the hands. It moves us into touch, and aliveness and the beautiful smell of that soap; into cleaning, and renewing and taking a pause. Then you can sit down, he said. Just sit. For a few moments or minutes, and let the quiet find you.


If you’ve gone through heartbreak of any kind, you’ll know how all over the place it can make you feel. Moving your attention into the body, specifically into the belly, can be incredibly helpful at these intense times. A teacher once told me to imagine a tree in a storm; she said, would you go sit in the leaves and branches getting blown about by the wind? Or would you take refuge at the trunk, at the earth? You can think of the mind as the storm and your belly as the tree trunk. When there’s a storm stirring, you can gently move your awareness down, and rest somewhere safer and quieter. Breathe deeply into the belly and your roots. Notice how that feels; that’s all you need to do.


If you are experiencing agitation, it can be very hard to practice yoga asana—you want to lay down and rest, but it feels like everything’s whirring. I recommend moving through a gentle round of chandra namaskar, moon salutations, to get the body and the breath flowing. Stand in goddess pose, arms out cactus-style; as you inhale, straighten the arms and legs; exhale, move into trikonasana (triangle pose) on the right side; inhale and find parsvokonasana (extended side angle); exhale, find a medium squat with your hands in prayer, elbows on your knees (this one is also known as campers’ pose, for obvious reasons). Then inhale and move into parsvokonasana on your left side; exhale, trikonasana; inhale to standing, arms extended; exhale, goddess pose (you can stick your tongue out and open your eyes wide, Kali-style, if you like). This is half a moon-salutation. To complete it, repeat the cycle from left to right. Do this two or three times as you feel the body loosen and the mind soften.


Then you can get low and snuggly with some restorative poses. Try taking supta badakonasana followed by a restorative twist over the bolster, then child’s pose. Notice, as much as you can, every little inch of your body, and the places that you may be gripping; tension can hide out in really tiny muscles, like the ones around your mouth, or in your fingers. Check in with your hips and your shoulders. What are your shoulders doing right now this very second? Can you drop them just a little? Doesn’t that feel better?


I love yoga for its gentle, kind, loving aspects; and I also love it for its practicality and quiet discipline. Both these things shed light on the ways we can work constructively with the mind and the body. I still have a little of the soap remaining, and I try to wash my hands carefully at the end of the day; doing it slowly like this makes me feel much more peaceful than rushing through it, like a task to be crossed off a to-do list. So it goes with so many simple actions, and every yoga pose you move in and out of.


This kind of conscious care is equally important and useful when times are good. Happiness can be so deliciously exciting, giddying, even. I think that when we’re lucky enough to be blessed with good fortune and love, it can be beautiful to honor that joy by bringing it into the present: Yes! Wow, this is really happening—just as the water is running over my hands and the soap is smelling good.


You can refer to this seemingly simple act of bringing attention to the present as mindfulness. And you can refer to it as love; your precious self deserves nothing less.

Snow day

Winter and stillness

I have started writing for the health and spirituality site Conscious 2. You can read my first piece below. It is about what happened when the river froze over.

Winter and stillness

My favorite of the ancient yoga sutras is this one: Atha yoga nusasanam. You can translate it from the Sanskrit as, “Now, yoga happens”. It’s among the opening verses in Master Patanjali’s collected insights on yoga, and you could take it to mean, “Okay, sit down, we’re going to talk about yoga now.” And you could hear it on a deeper level, too. Yoga means union, and it’s used to describe the state in which we realise life’s deepest truth: that we are all connected, and everything is divine. And where does this truth reside? In the now, in the miracle of this present moment. When we practice asana, the physical aspect of yoga, or meditation, we are practicing bringing our minds back to the breath, back to movement, back to one single point – again and again, and with kindness.

But what if you'd rather do anything than be present? Than accept reality? This is something I've been working with for the past month or so. A very beloved friend of mine died suddenly, and around the same time a cherished relationship came apart. The present has felt incredibly painful at times, and the very idea of accepting reality can be frightening.

I went to stay with a friend who runs a beautiful retreat center in the countryside at the weekend, to try to find some peace. I have been visiting this same place for some years now, and have seen it in every season, just as it has seen me in all my heart seasons. But I had never before seen the river frozen. Utterly still, and glistening in the sunlight. I couldn’t quite believe it. Every time I’d see the river out of the corner of my eye, its stillness made it seem like the world had been paused. And there was a strange relief in that.

Usually, it’s when the river flows that I feel a relaxing – via the knowledge that all things are constantly moving and changing and nature is carrying things along just as it needs to. But this time, the river just said, “Stop. Be still. There is nothing you can do. Nothing to be done. How about breathing into the pause? How about relaxing and not trying to figure anything out, or solve anything, or be somewhere else? How about now? What does now really feel like?”

I recently came across a beautiful piece of writing by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, on stillness. He wrote,

“If it were possible for us to see further than our knowledge extends and out a little over the outworks of our surmising, perhaps we should then bear our sorrows with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new, something unknown, has entered into us; our feelings grow dumb with shy confusion, everything in us retires, a stillness supervenes, and the new thing that no-one knows stands silent there in the middle.”

This strikes me as an expansive and generous way of looking at uncertainty; of bearing the experience of not knowing and feeling like nothing makes sense. It reads as a reminder that you don’t have to try to pick apart the source of your sorrow, or push to make sense of it to the point of exhaustion and despair. I don't think you can neaten up the uncertain and the unknowable, and tie a bow around it all.

From a holistic point of view, winter can be supportive to this state of not knowing, whether you’re grieving or in a happy place, or somewhere in-between. We all begin the year not knowing, just as we begin every day not knowing. Winter shows us how to be still, with its frozen rivers and sleeping creatures and hidden seeds, dreaming germination in the dark.

We know, in winter, that movement will happen in due course, that the river will flow again, sap will rise and green shoots will appear; the seasons are the most beautiful, poetic and sure reminder of life’s capacity for rebirth, to those of us feeling desperate, lonely and bereft.

This is a quiet time, a space to let feelings move as they may, and listen. I cannot recommend highly enough that you support yourself as lovingly as possible while you do this. Yoga is a listening system, as is its sister science, Ayurveda. To practice either in a way that is nourishing and effective, you need to listen to your body, heart and mind: Which bones are creaking? Which muscles are sighing “Yes”? What does this food say when it meets my belly?

Restorative yoga will help you attune to the season’s innate encouragements to find some gentle time. Taking suptabadakonasana (reclined bound angle pose) will relax your body in a profound way. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, winter is associated with the kidneys, which are in turn associated with fear and anxiety when there’s an imbalance in the body. This pose opens up the kidney meridians, which run along the inner legline to get chi (energy) flowing smoothly. Support yourself using a bolster and blocks, lay a blanket over the hips and stay reclined for 10-20 minutes. If you have a piece of rose quartz, so much the better – place it over your heart for soft healing and regeneration.

Warm, wet foods will soothe anxiety and stoke your agni, your inner digestive fire, and abhyanga, the practice of massaging yourself with oil, will boost circulation and bring you back to the body if the head is running around in circles. Sesame oil mixed with brahmi oil is especially effective and warming in the winter.

In my experience, letting others look after you, and accepting that love quietly is a profound practice and a meditation in and of itself.

Wherever you are at in your life at this still and poignant time, I wish you warmth, patience and peace.

Resting and growing

Winter—quiet, slow, long-night winter—is a season of stillness. If you go for a walk in nature at this time of year, things are so quieted down you may find your ears leaning in to readjust. But the sounds are still there, all the same. I went walking in the English countryside this week, and felt that there was something so special about being able to hear the small sounds; a little rustling, wings flapping, the gurgle of a stream whirling around stones.

Peace

The word santosha in Sanskrit can be translated as contentment; I have enough. I have enough friends, food, clothing, or what have you. I am enough.

It is one of the niyamas, or ways of living, as described by Master Patanjali in the ancient Yoga sutras. In my understanding, there is a sense of fullness to santosha—a knowing that we are full and clean and knowing, like a moon at night. Purna, wholeness.

It can be difficult to tune in with feelings of enough-ness and fullness in the holidays—specifically at a time when there's a tendency to compare our experience with everyone and anyone else's.

I found a doodle

...that I made at the summer solstice. You can hear the birds singing. It made me feel nice.