6 posts tagged “yoga”

Oh man.  I'm moving again.  I'm standing in my half-packed, half-unpacked, half-still-packed-from-the-last-move apartment realizing that the countdown has moved into the "weeks" range and I'm doing what I swore to myself I wouldn't do again at least for two years.  Moving.  I hate it.  But the frequency with which I do it suggests there's something I love about it.  Perhaps it's time to unpack that...both the apartment and the "stuff" surrounding it.

Last year at this time Meghan (hi Meghan) graciously agreed to search for new apartments with me.  What a trooper.  But she joked that I have a commitment problem and it's stuck with me; I think she hit on something of a universal , running truth for my life.  It's clear to me that I have a problem "settling."  I've never thought about it literally before but it's true.  The possibility that there's something better out there haunts my dreams.  It motivates my every move (including apartments).  It suspends me in something of a web of anxiety.  Searching, searching, searching.

So, here's the beauty of this move: It's a chance for me to do something I've not done ever, really.  It's an opportunity for me to allow this new place to become home and not just my "Tent on the Beach." (Wow...the implications of this are far-reaching...I might have to do a blog overhaul.)  I think, possibly out of sheer exhaustion, I need to stop searching and just learn to settle here...as the first settling in a series of settlings that, I think, I've been putting off for a long time.

Yesterday I read an article about contentment...I always read these things like I would an instruction manual: "How do I get this Contentment?"  The point was really good.  It basically said it's a matter of choosing it.  Contentment is always there for the taking.  It's being appreciative for what you have and letting the reins loosen on what you want.  It's a living in the present, I guess. It's letting go of searching so fervently.  Already I feel better.

What a nice thought: to fully believe that, in 3 weeks, I'm going home.

[Sigh of relief.]

There is certainly something to be said for quiet.

I went home to Cleveland this weekend, a place not known for its quiet.  My brothers were home with their respective dogs in tow, so our house is not a place known for its quiet.  But, I ended up sleeping on the living room floor and I'll tell ya, when everyone had gone to bed and I was lying there, trying to fall asleep, there was quiet and somewhere in its folds was a little peace.

We somehow tend to assume that silence and quiet are the same.  They are not.  Since I've started writing again, I find that silence fills a lot of my days.  I spend long stretches of time in spaces designed to block out noise, other's conversations, and the sounds of life.  It's those places in which the buzzing of fluorescent lights starts to wear on me.  There is no peace in that kind of silence.  My attention-deficit mind yammers along barely stopping long enough to catch its breath before launching into four separate conversations simultaneously. The tap of the keyboard always pushes through. That silence can drown a person.  It gives me anxiety and makes me run from it.

Quiet, though.  Quiet is not the absence of noise, like silence is, but the absence of want.  Quiet is rest. Several moments of quiet strung together can be peace.  And several stretches of peace strung together can become contentment.  Quiet is calm.  Even when there's noise, there can be quiet.

I have to remember that.  I've been mistaking silence for quiet for too long and it's taken it's toll; I find myself getting angry and scared when those stretches of silence leave me agitated and edgy.  I have to remember that one is not the other.  And start to look more readily for the state made possible by resting.

I'm in search of some quietude.

This is a first.  In some ways, it's very exciting. In others, I feel a little defeated.  But I think not for long.

Usually when I write about finding Zen I do so in a reflective state; I've had hours to think about something and Zen helps clear me.  But I am having a moment in which I need Zen right now.  I'm not sure why but I just hit this moment that made me enter the early stages of panic.  Honestly, I'm beginning to think this is a Sunday night thing.  I get all caught up in that and the scope of the week which leads me to the scope of the year which leads me to the scope of my life and the scope of the universe.  I was just thinking that I wonder how far down in my lineage (should I end up having kids) that my (not existing right now) prodigies will encounter the end of the world.  I'm not kidding.  This was my thought.

So I did 20 minutes of yoga and I feel better...at least I'm headed back onto the right track.  But what's so amazing about this moment is how fast my brain gets away from me.  It's also being evil in an inter-personal way.  I've been nothing but surrounded by people for the past 5 days including today.  Today I even was surrounded by people all doing things we absolutely love.  It was a great day.  All of a sudden, my brain starts suggesting that I might feel lonely.  That my friends don't really like me.  That people are making excuses to not spend time with me.  WHAT?!? Where is that even COMING from?!? That couldn't be even farther from what has transpired over the past couple days. Shut up, brain.

I think that has been my new insight into Yoga that I've never had before but that has really taken hold this time around.  This is not a linear activity.  You don't reach a certain stage and then "graduate" to the next level.  It's catching yourself at every moment that this starts happening and going back to "letting go."  If I can manage to take things one step at a time and concern myself with only one step at a time then my whole world becomes much more manageable. Expectations, good or bad, cease to exist. That becomes a much more relaxed and able way of being.  That I can handle.

Courtesy of my moment of Zen. 

I've been turning to Zen recently to keep myself sane.  Zen is the "cool" name I have for Yoga.  I know I've talked about it a lot here...all of that letting go business comes straight out of the yogic teachings.  Yoga, despite our Western tendencies to equate it with pretzel-like poses and "sticky mats" and weird unisex unitards (that make me insanely uncomfortable...ahem...to look at) and Rodney Yee, most of Yoga is really about turning your mind inward and learning how to draw everything about yourself back to the present moment.  It's not reflective in the sense that it's looking backward; it is reflective in that it requests that you maintain your presence--that is stay right here, right now.  Doesn't sound that hard, but try to maintain it for more than a minute and, especially if you're out of practice, forget it.  It starts to make ya nuts.  I'm basically a sloth and I find myself getting fidgety and anxious after about 3 minutes.  However, once you do let go of all of those worries about being in the present and just be there, you realize all the stuff that you can miss thinking about anything other than the present.  It's unbelievable.

Anyway, to make a long story longer, in an effort to learn more but no go to a class somewhere, I subscribe to a couple different online journals that routinely send stuff my email way. So, yesterday as I was reacquainting myself with resignation, I happened to be shuffling through the equalivalent of junk (but not spam) email and found the latest installment.  I knew it was coming; I feared it.  And there it was.  The sentence I've been dreading: Learn to embrace impermanence. "Oh crap," I thought. "Just when I was starting to make some headway..."

I knew this was coming because it's the next step in the resignation progression.  If you can let go of your worries and anxieties, the next step has to be learning to let go of your hold on what can happen.  When we have control of what can happen, we call that security.  The problem with this idea is that, usually, it moves us away from the present.  Since nature isn't permanent, any measure of permanence is unnatural and may move you farther away from living in the present. Sometimes I really hate Yoga.  Because it's hard.

What this did make me realize, though, is that permanence is an illusion that can be really deceptive.  After I got over being scared of hugging change (because who loves change?), I thought about all the ways I think I have permanence.  Clue to how this ends: I don't "have" everything I think I do in such a permanent way.  And, actually, I think this is not so much about learning to love change as it is about allowing evolution: of relationships, of living situations, of life circumstances, of self.  It's about letting growth happen as it will and not fearing that the end cannot be foreseen.  Honestly, we shouldn't be looking that far ahead anyway.

I often get caught in these horrible thought patterns that involve linear visions for everything.  Like a timeline, I can parse my life out on paper to the last detail...and then start to have panic attacks that I'm not "where I should be."  If I can latch on to this idea of impermanence, maybe contentment isn't too far to follow.  I think I'm at a point that making friends with change cannot hurt. I wouldn't mind resting the timeline approach for a little while.

I've been doing yoga for a long time...like, the stretching part.  And I am in no way stretchy...not even relatively more stretchy than I was when I started.  That might just always be fruitless.  But what I've come to learn about yoga especially over the past couple years is that the connection between the stretchiness and the meditation is essential.  You don't just do the stretching and poses to become nimble like a minx.  That physicality is supposed to prepare your body for rigorous, deep, intense meditation.  The physical becomes a path to spiritual enlightenment.

Who cares?  Okay, okay.  Testy.  I mention this because, supposedly, when you've been able to really let go the "universe" responds almost immediately.  There's a lot of spiritual jabbering around this point.  It's not like medicine that has to be digested.  So it goes that the effects of "letting go" happen in the moment.  I never believed it.  Until yesterday.  When windows just kept getting thrown open.  Here's how my little Manifesto of Resignation played itself out...manifested itself if you will:

1. I got almost an entire class of exams graded on the day they took the exams. That's a first in my teaching career (that now, I can say, is almost ten years long). 

2. I've had two solid, deep, wonderfully peaceful nights of sleep.  Short.  But still.  Even for five hours (or four...yikes), I feel pretty good.  And I had a happy dream last night...although in my dream, I did forget to bring a pair of socks to play in a softball game and proceeded to play barefoot.  But the rest was happy.

3. Choir practice was not stressful.  That's a first for this year. 

4. After choir practice was not stressful and actually was wonderful.  I hung out with two friends that I pass by every Wednesday night and Sunday morning and don't ever really get a chance to talk to.  For the first time in a long time, I didn't want to or have to be anywhere else.

5. I got an awesome e-mail from a friend who I haven't talked to for too long.

6. This morning, I found out my fellowship at United Way got renewed for next year.  This has been a major source of stress for me for the past 2 months.  It was solved tuh-day.

I'm still getting used to the State of Resignation.  It's not automatically comfortable to me.  But, it seems that everywhere I turn, a window opens up and lets in a little air.  I'm starting to take full breaths again.  I think maybe I could live here for awhile.