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.

The meditation of the birds

There’s so much to be said for a good morning: my granny used to say, “Morning hours are golden hours”, in terms of the sheer possibility and illumination that can be found in these precious early times. And in the summer, there can be a particular sweetness to the mornings, don’t you find?

In that spirit, I'd like to offer you one of my favorite personal practices. This wasn't taught to me by anyone in particular, and you may already do something like it on your own. Still, I'd like to share it with you because it brings me such joy—in a light as air way—and a certain kind of peace.

I call it the meditation of the birds and I came upon it years ago when I first started practicing yoga. I knew pretty early on that yoga was something I wanted to do for myself at home, as well as in class, so I started doing a bit of asana in my bedroom in the morning before work.

It felt great, but I would sometimes find it hard to let go in savasana, final resting pose. I still do, actually, and that's why I love it when the meditation of the birds comes to me.

I remember lying on my bedroom floor in savasana one summer morning and becoming aware of the birdsong outside my window. I wasn’t living in some bucolic retreat at the time, far from it—I lived in a shared apartment in Williamsburg, a "cool" and accordingly noisy part of Brooklyn.

But I heard the birds and I let myself just listen. Just listen. And as I let myself become absorbed in the sound—in, essentially, a world so, so, so much larger than my whirling mind-thoughts and the notion that I am my body—I felt myself physically let go. My body felt relieved. My muscles relaxed, there was this quality of melting. As if my mind said, “Well, what am I, anyway, other than just here?”

There are many explanations for why just turning one's awareness to the birds is so peaceful. Partly I think the random-seemingness of their chirping holds our attention in a way that a steadier, more predictable sound would not. Partly it's the sheer joy of existing in weather that's warm enough for birdsong. And truly, I think there's something so profound in the simple acknowledgement of nature, of the craziness of these wild creatures which fly around the sky and call out from the trees.

I've always loved the author John Steinbeck, and have read and reread his books for years. Among my favorites is a large tome which simply collects together the letters he wrote in his life; they are (unsurprisingly) beautiful. The book is called Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, and I bought my copy a decade or so ago from Steinbeck House, the author’s former home in Salinas. It is very well thumbed at this point!

Around this time of discovering yoga, I was rereading the book. A little bit, I think, because it is funny to have moved to a whole ’nother country and be away from one’s home, and Steinbeck’s books bring me a particular kind of comfort.

I was reading the letters Steinbeck wrote when he and his wife moved to Glastonbury, England, for a year in 1959, towards the last part of his life, to work on a modern day retelling of the legend of King Arthur. They lived in a very old cottage, in a very simple way, and he was happy there. Happy in a profound, peaceful way. This is what he wrote to his friend, the publisher Elizabeth Otis:

“Meanwhile I can’t describe the joy. In the mornings I get up early to have a time to listen to the birds. It’s a busy time for them. Sometimes for over an hour I do nothing but look and listen and out of this comes a luxury of rest and peace and something I can only describe as in-ness. And then when the birds have finished and the countryside goes about its business, I come up to my little room to work. And the interval between sitting and writing grows shorter every day.”

I'm pretty sure I shed a tear to read this. At the realization of the universality and simplicity of such things as inner peace, and the specialness of a morning—what Steinbeck describes later as “the processional of the sun”. The discovery of profound inner rest.

The meditation of the birds. I think we can call it what we like. Either way, I hope you are having some fine summer mornings.

Show your rough work

This felt like an important piece for me to write—on art and shyness. You can read it here, and below. I've had some very positive feedback from women friends who have encountered the same issues in their creative lives which made me wonder how much of a women's issue this is? I am very interested to hear from men who have experienced this too!

Do you remember being asked to do that in school? “Show your rough work” makes me think of taking maths exams (which is already enough to make me feel a bit nervous) as that instruction would come without fail: Show how you arrived at your answer, demonstrate your process.

In terms of maths or science, I suppose that the examiners wanted to make sure we weren’t making random guesses or cheating, and I certainly have made a few wild stabs in the dark in an exam hall. I’m okay with that, as indeed I am with showing the sums that helped me solve an equation.

But where the idea of showing my rough work became really difficult at school, in college and in my creative life now, is in art and music. As a child, I drew endlessly; on paper, on walls (sorry, mum and dad), furniture (sorry, bedside table), in home-made books, as a means of illustration, as a way of telling a story, as a way of expressing myself.

I got a lot of positive feedback about my drawings and was aware that people thought I was artistically gifted—which is a special thing to feel. But somehow by the time I was a teenager at school, this encouragement had muddled its way into the misunderstanding that I was expected to come up with something perfect and finished; that art was a kind of “ta-dah!” gesture.

At a school parents’ evening, when I was 15, I remember my brilliant art teacher saying to me and my parents that I needed to worry less about the end result—the final painting—and get more involved in the prep work, the sketches, the rough studies. I felt horrified. I thought: I’m sorry, but I just can’t do that.

Similarly, I fell deeply in love with piano music age 5, hearing my dad play Bach’s Moonlight Sonata. I took classical piano lessons which I loved, but which emphasized very specific directions, when what I really wanted to do was go heavy on the sustain pedal and lose myself in the music. I was not in love with someone else’s idea of “getting it right”, but it didn’t seem to me that there any recognized value in playing with sound.

My shyness about exposing my creative process moved from being an external thing to an internal thing, too. I didn’t want to expose my own vulnerabilities and experiments even to myself! Often, the times I feel most free to experiment as an adult is when I’m on holiday, somewhere warm and beautiful and free from expectation; my own or anyone else’s. When I’m in the city and in my work zone of achieving and competing and hurrying, I have found it very hard.

But I don’t want to live like this—not least because it doesn’t really feel like living, to have to monitor my own creativity. So, lately, I’ve been stepping into the shyness. Feeling the awkwardness and moving through it, knowing that there is something on the other side of that fog that’s worth getting to.

My yoga teacher, Tara Glazier, told a beautiful story about Krishna and Radha recently. Lord Krishna, the supreme Hindu deity, was lost in a terrible storm. Radha, his love—often described as Krishna’s heart—came looking for him. She took his hand and led him back to his village. His heart led him home in the storm.

There was a great storm here in New York yesterday. I took out my harmonium and sat with the door wide open onto the patio as the rain came down. I started singing devotional chants and let myself move into the music and the rain and the sense of something bigger. Then a song came. It seemed to unfold itself, and I went with it—even though I’d decided to record the rain and the chants and the red record button was on, and if my made-up song wasn’t “good” it would be there on my iphone as “proof”.

I loved what came out. It sounded true. I love that when music is honest it can be like holding a seashell to your ear and hearing the sea; only instead you’re hearing someone’s soul. There is of course work to be done with a song sketch or a study drawing or any kind of doodle; there is sculpting, and more experimenting and honing and refining and pursuing. A sense of, where will this go? Catching the melody and riding it.

But I think the need to present something as perfect is not helpful, and not actually true. We don’t try to polish our own souls; it’s more, I think, about taking a journey towards touching our own truth or light, and maybe expressing that, if it feels natural to do so.

I love yoga asana because it is a practice.There is no finished “ta-dah!” result, no goal beyond residing in a truth that’s already inside you. We are always moving towards. We are stretching, extending and relaxing in awareness; moving, finding and discovering. Yoga is “showing your rough work” in all its own perfection. And in this sense, it is practice for doing so in our lives off the mat. It helps me sing. It helps me draw. It helps me live honestly.

May you find creative joy in your vulnerability this week.

Saying yes to the heat

My latest post is about saying yes to the heat, even if it involves a burly Russian masseuse thwacking you with oak branches. You can read it here, and below.

For the first time in my life, I went to the Russian baths. Have you been to the Russian baths? It’s really quite something. I knew a little about what it would be like beforehand: that there would be lots of hot and cold, and (the part I was most intrigued by) that one is likely to be thrashed with a big bundle of leaves in the name of good health.

I’d already spent a lovely afternoon at Coney Island with my pal from London: we’d braved the whipping winds and sand on the the beach and ridden the Wild Water log flume ride at Luna Park, so my inhibitions were down. Really, once you’re on a rollercoaster and it’s inching its way to the top of its climb, pre-descent, there is nothing you can do but surrender to the experience and the joy and the screaming and the delicious terror. Which is what we did.

So we got to the spa nearby, where we were taken in hand by a commanding, jolly Russian man called Yuri. He told us that we would take a medium hot sauna then two very cold showers, then a very hot sauna followed by immersion in the icy cold plunge pool, and we’d receive platza—the treatment with a broom of oak leaves. He told us that one of the many benefits of the hot and the cold cycles is that at first your body goes into “fight or flight” mode, but once you keep taking the counterintuitive course of action, your body kind of throws in the towel and de-programs itself—“Fine, do what you like”—and starts to relax more deeply.

Yuri was emphatic about the benefits of heat on the body; on the circulatory system, the skin and on the organs. To receive platza, you lay on the highest (and hottest) bench in the sauna, and the swishing of the leaves creates yet more heat. He said we might find it uncomfortable, but if we fought it, it would only feel more uncomfortable, more panicky. He said, with a shrug, that you have to say yes to it.

So there I lay, with Yuri gently thrashing me with a bunch of twigs, sweating and feeling very, very hot. But I did let go of the panic; even when he pressed the twigs right down on my belly where my liver is. (Okay, the second time he did it, I pushed the leaves away after a while, but still!) Similarly, I dared to go in the freezing plunge pool afterwards, which I’ve never done before in any kind of spa; I’ve always been too scared. It felt wonderful! Absolutely stimulatingly relaxingly amazing.

And here’s what it got me thinking. It put me in mind of Tara Brach’s excellent book, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha. Brach’s approach is about gently but directly looking at what’s really going on in your mind and body, and accepting it. This is a radical approach because it goes against our instinct and conditioning to move away from pain, fear and discomfort as quickly as possible.

It’s important to note that in saying “Yes” to what’s going on, you’re not necessarily condoning it or agreeing with it, you’re just not struggling with it. Equally, in any kind of abusive situation, getting out as fast as possible is imperative. But what Brach is talking about here are the basic everyday struggles and tussles we all get into with our minds and bodies.

She offers one particular meditation which was a real eye-opener for me, called “The Power of Yes”. In it, you sit in a comfortable seated posture, calm down and find your breath, and then call to mind a situation that you find hard or painful or uncomfortable. You summon those feelings fully, and then you say “No” to them. You watch what happens in your body when you do this; you see how the resistance manifests itself physically. You imagine yourself continuing to say “No” in a month’s time, a year’s time. When I first tried it some months ago, my body felt like a flower curling up, in physical distress. Then you return to your breath.

Next, you bring to mind the difficult thing again, and this time you say “Yes” to it. As I said, you’re not saying, “Yes I agree with this, it’s brilliant.” You’re simply accepting it for what it is. And you notice what happens in your body and your mind. Again, you imagine saying “Yes” in the future, and you observe. My body stayed open; my mind stayed open. The feelings that arose, in this case of sadness, discomfort and anxiety, were able to exist simply as they were. It was a profound and liberating exercise.

So that’s what I thought of, as Yuri swept me with the oak broom in the soaring heat. I mean, I thought that, and periodically, “Get off!”, and also “Ooh, that’s nice”. I surrendered to the heat, and the heat did its transformative work in my body and my mind.

May your own Yesses this week bring you health and clarity.

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.