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.

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.

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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.