Backyard Suffering

I have a 10 year old neighbor, I’ll call her Amy, who has drug addicted parents. She and Bhaerava play together a lot. The other day he gave her a peach off our tree, she said, “This is good, I never ate a peach before.” I have nothing even remotely resembling a poker face, but I managed to ask her nonchalantly enough if I had heard her correctly. “Well, I’ve only had them in cans.” We picked her a few more to take home.

Last night she came over as we were getting ready for bed – this is about the 3rd time now, for a medicine pill vile of rubbing alcohol. My mom needs some alcohol, she cut herself again on a sharp corner of her bed, she said, without looking me in the eyes. She’s speaking more softly than usually, her skin is oozing with shame. My husband and I look at each other, do people really drink this stuff? I give her a few drops, hoping it’s not my substance that will finally do her mother in. I hate that corner of the bed, she offers. I don’t know how to say no to her without blowing the cover on the drama she’s presented.

I want to hug her and tell her she can tell me anything and I will be there for her. Instead I offer her a tofu dog. She almost never says no to food, but tonight she just shakes her head and completely avoids all eye contact.
Do you want to come over tomorrow and ride bikes with us, I ask.
Okay. See ya, she sighs.

She told me her mother told her to sleep on the top bunk, that way she won’t be scared of anyone getting her. I’m not sure how literal that advice was…

The next day I give her some tomatoes from the garden and she talks to me about Jesus. That’s when I see her eyes start to sparkle. So I teach her how to meditate on Jesus. Well, actually Bhaerava does. He tells her that Jesus is just like Baba (our guru). He says, so I’ll think about Baba and you can think about Jesus, and that’s how we can meditate together, okay? Then we all meditate together for approximately 2 minutes and 17 seconds.

Please try this at home

I teach this workshop called “Day in the Life of a Yoga” which is about things like using a neti pot, yogic moon fasting, how to make kichidi (rice, veggies and dal, mmmm!), how to chant, etc. One student who came last year said, “It was interesting, but I really was hoping it was going to be about things like, how to do a forward fold while you’re doing the laundry.” 

It’s in our heads

Here’s something from Dr. Laura Berman, who specializes in helping women repair their sex lives and find relief from menopausal
symptoms.

“A recent Japanese study found that the way we feel about our physical appearance may be a case of mind over matter. Researchers have found that women are more sensitive to appearance-related words than men. When words like “obese” or “heavy” were flashed in front of female study participants, a part of the brain’s threat-signaling center — the amygdala — reacted. Men who were shown the same words processed them in an entirely different area of the brain — the prefrontal cortex, which is linked to more cognitive-emotional functioning. The study’s authors theorize that women take the words to heart emotionally, while men evaluate them more rationally.

This evidence may explain a lot of the behavioral differences between the sexes! So what can you do about it? It would seem this offers yet another reason to minimize possibly harmful “triggers,” whether they’re unrealistic standards of beauty in magazines, or friends and family who try to make you feel physically inadequate. Cutting down on celebrity worship will help, too. Feeling attractive is as much a mental game as a fight to stay physically fit, and believing you’re beautiful is most of the battle.”

Under the Knife

Asheville is a kind of, well, “au naturel” sort of place you could say – especially the yoga circles in which I travel. Its not uncommon to find a furry-legged teacher with a make-up-less face leading the class.

At a recent barbecue I attended, the host polled barefooted guests with the dog or burger question – mind you, it was understood that he meant veggie dog or burger. Guests sipped ginger beer and discussed which mala beads they liked to use best and why – one person spent 10 minutes explaining to me how his guru had recently, psychically implanted a mantra in his heart chakra and how his mind had been ringing with it since. Now, that’s what I call FUN! Okay, I’m a geek, I know, but I love this place. No one asked me how my portfolio was doing.

When I visit Florida or California, I often feel like I’ve landed on a different planet. Last weekend I didn’t leave Asheville actually, I just went to the Grove Park Inn for dinner with visiting relatives. It was definitely a different planet – one, it would appear, that is inhabited primarily by silicon-enhanced beings.

According to American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ASAPS) statistics, nearly 329,000 breast augmentation procedures were performed last year.  (These figures may include reconstruction surgeries as well.) That’s up 221% since 1997…

And in 2008, 8.7 million appearance changing plastic surgery procedures were performed, according to American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) statistics, up 32 percent from 6.6. million in 2002. That increase, by the way corresponds with the onset of reality tv shows like Extreme Makeover. Breast augmentation was the number one procedure.

So if you think that you’ve been seeing more plastic surgery lately than ever before – you’re not crazy, you have.

Europeans (and most aliens) think we are insane. Personally I think little breasts are cute and comfortable, thank you very much (and they make shoulderstand a whole lot easier).

But on a compassionate note, I wonder how much psychic pain a person must be in to submit to the knife. How do we collectively ensure that people find value in their being-ness rather in their appearance?

When I was visiting my meditation teacher in Mongolia in 1995, she took me to see the dead bodies. Didi is a yogic nun who runs the Lotus Children’s Centre in the capital, Ulaan Bataar , but Mongolians are mostly Tibetan Buddhists so they throw the bodies of their dead out into the vast, wild fields to be returned to nature. I guess Didi wanted me to see all the tourists the sights before I left ;-> So we went to the fields. Didi put her scarf over her mouth as she approached a few bodies – most of them had had a tummy tuck, well actually, they had had their abdominal contents removed, most likely by wolf, wild dog or vulture surgeons.

I had a hard time remaining on my feet. The closest body I got to was a skeleton with nothing but the remains of one heel intact. That was slightly tolerable. Didi came over next to me to look at my find, then looked at me quizzically and said, “We all end up like this…It’s amazing how much time people spend on their appearance isn’t it?”

Thin is In, Even in the Yoga World

I looked at the cover of last month’s Yoga Journal without much thought. She looked like most of their covers – thin, lithe, strong, young, etc. She is doing a nice forearm balance and has a smile on her face.

Anyway, when I opened it to the editor’s letter page, there was a picture of the model with a bunch of other people – first, I felt shock. So I looked a little closer, it’s a small photo. More shock, a bit of nausea and something like a sense of optical illusion, like I’d been duped…

The woman in the lime green leotard no longer looked strong and healthy – she looked like…Well, let’s just say, very, very thin. The words “scary thin” come to mind.

Now, I certainly do not want to make any inaccurate statements about her personally, or that her body or mind is unhealthy – but surrounded by a bunch of normal-bodied women in normal clothes, she looked painfully thin and I was shocked and a bit nauseated because I realized that, to my eye, a bone-thin woman alone on the cover is normal – It is what my eye expects in a magazine cover, it is deeply etched in my psyche.

I wondered, “Are any of their other readers seeing this the way I am?”

So I was kind of curious to see the “Letters” section of this month’s magazine. But there was nothing about the cover model, only a letter gushing with gratitude for someone who had written a story which spoke about how it can be intimidating for those who don’t feel like they are good enough, thin enough, or stylish enough to go to yoga class. Hmmm. Now I have this phrase rolling around my head: “Mixed messages.”

Then I turned to the “Editor’s Letter” page. It was essentially an apology for the thin, perfect-bodied models used in the magazine – “It’s true that we feature some amazingly capable yogis – people who’ve worked hard to develop the strength and flexibility to hold advanced poses for longer than you’d dream possible and, after a moment’s pause, do it again.”

But she didn’t apologize for or address the scary thinness. However, interestingly, there are a few normal-ish women modeling this month – even the cover model has a few extra pounds (she’s probably a size 4, rather than a 0). It makes me feel optimistic and hopeful that the yoga community seems to be putting a bit of pressure on them to stop promoting dysfunctional messages in their eagerness to sell magazines.
 
Over the years I have witnessed the regular, consistent promotion of mixed messages in this magazine - yoga is about self-awareness, self-growth, even Self-liberation – but also, ya gotta be thin, hip and cool to be part of our club. When I see what they’ve done this month I think, Hmmm, maybe the uncool, but nice kid’s club is starting to grow.

It’s a Weighty Issue

There’s this sort of mechanistic, black and white equation about body weight that goes something like this:
   
                weight = what you put in - what you put out.

So don’t you know that really it’s very simple – it’s all about how many calories you put in and how many calories you burn off, right? 
I’ve long been suspicious of that equation. Because, anecdotally, it was never that evident, but also, in a deep, intuitive, yogic, very spiritual kind of way, I understand deeply, that…

I am not a car…
or any machine for that matter. And my body size depends on many factors other than the amount of fuel I inject and the amount I burn off (although those things are a factor of course!)

(dieting car…poor thing)

So I’m not sure I have an equation that would trump the above one. But I have a feeling it would not be a linear one. Into the mix with diet we have to add emotions, hormones, toxicity, lifestyle and life demands, life experience and years, enjoyment, spiritual satisfaction, etc.

I wasn’t surprised to find these aritcles. The first is about how sleep deprivation is very much linked to weight gain (I think many sleep-deprived new mothers would agree.) The second, is about the link between stress and weight gain. (Ask, well, just about anyone about this. The idea of researching it is almost redundant!)

Fortunately yoga is great for both! Sleep deprivations – get yourself upside down. Legs up the wall is an excellent pose, but there are many others as well.  And stress, well, just about all of it is useful – but especially restorative poses and yoga nidra – we’ll be exploring all this in the upcoming 6 week series at One Center. Research in India demonstrated that restorative poses, more than intense yoga, helped people lose weight. That’s exciting! 

Losing Your Cultural Baggage
Try this: don’t comment on anyone’s weight loss. Let them know you love them regardless of the size of their body. Let them know they look healthy when you see it in their face, not their waist. It’s liberating for everyone.

May 28 – What To Remember

I was thinking about Memorial Day. I’ve gone to picnics and pool parties for it since I was a kid. But what is the meaning of this holiday anyway? To remember the people who have died in war, of course. Okay, well yes, a lot of people have given their lives, necessarily or unnecessarily, to maintain some sense of freedom for people in this country. But are we celebrating that by having a cook-out? Seems to be severely lacking in gravity to me. It seems that in general, Memorial Day is not often used as a platform to engage in any sort of meaningful ritual or ceremony to commemorate the dead.

Politics being what it is, it’s hard not to be cynical about the senseless loss of more lives in the Iraq war than were lost in 9/11 – not to mention the complete devastation of that country. On CNN yesterday I heard a report about how 90% of the children in Iraq have learning disabilities from living in a constant state of fear.

I found a website that explained the history of Memorial Day.  The author lamented that the holiday has fallen into disuetude: “Traditional observance of Memorial day has diminished over the years. Many Americans nowadays have forgotten the meaning and traditions of Memorial Day. At many cemeteries, the graves of the fallen are increasingly ignored, neglected. Most people no longer remember the proper flag etiquette for the day. While there are towns and cities that still hold Memorial Day parades, many have not held a parade in decades. Some people think the day is for honoring any and all dead, and not just those fallen in service to our country.” For more click here.

In a way, remembering the dead honors that person – but the honoring is more useful to the living than it is to the dead -  If it is about upholding the spirit with which that person walked through life. The honoring is really only for those of us still trying to live – it reminds us of what is possible and it inspires us. And then there’s the question of what do we want others to remember about us when we’re gone?

                    I have loved this world.
                    I have looked at the earth with wonder-struck eyes.
                    In days of flowering, I have composed songs.

                    Those songs are touched by my deep inner love.
                    Let those songs carry my sweet memory,
                    and let all else of me perish.

                                          -Translation of a Bengali song by Shrii Shrii Anandmurti

So who do you remember that inspires you? What do you remember about that person? What is the value of that remembrance for you?
There’s a state of remembering that the yogis talk about called Dhruva Smriti. It means being able to constantly remember who you are. In other words, the memory is not of past events or regrets. It’s just remembering that the reality of who I am is much deeper than the passing events that I get caught up in. Now that would be something to celebrate.

May 22, 2008 – Herding Cats

Has it really been a month since I blogged? Om Namah Shivaya!
How did that happen? Life somehow obliterates any semblance of linearity in the space/time continuum.

One of my students was talking to me about how she can’t meditate because of her “monkey mind.” I think it was Ramakrishna (a 20th century Bengali mystic) who coined the phrase, “The mind is like a drunken monkey stung by a scorpion.”

Well, I don’t know about you, but I’d rather not think about anything stinging my mind, and I’m not crazy about it being drunk either. And monkeys move too fast for me and they can be mean. Once when I was in India I was staying in a sort of motel place by the Ganges in Varanasi – I say sort of motel, because there were these free standing rooms on a hill up over the river, with some mosquito netting over the beds and a flimsy little door that didn’t close properly. You had to walk outside to get to the bathroom, which was essentially a porcelain-lined hole in the ground surrounded by four things mascarading as walls. For hygeine, there was a spigot outside the outhouse – bring your own soap!

Anyway one day there was a lot of monkey activity happening,  a lot of “monkeying around” you could say.  I had just gotten back from the market and I was making some rice and vegetables for lunch. I took some carrots to the spigot to wash them and left a small bag of peas on the bench in the room. I saw that the monkeys were eyeing me and my food. As I walked back into my room, I heard a lot of commotion, so I went over to the other side of the room to look out the window toward the river. At eye level, I could see that a gang of monkeys was in a tree trying to get the eggs out of a big bird’s nest. The bird was dive-bombing the monkeys – and all of this was accompanied by voluminous squawking, shrieking and a general sense of mayhem.

When I turned around to get back to my cooking, I saw a monkey scampering away with my bag of peas! “Hey!” I yelled, as if that might be productive. I ran after him out the door and saw him and three of his cronies sitting there on a wall across the courtyard - I swear they were taunting me and laughing, passing my bag of peas back and forth. I was set up by a bunch of monkeys!

So anyway, I think I’d rather think about my mind’s thoughts as being sweet, lovable wandering cats. Although I’ll admit that sometimes wandering cats are a bit nasty, or dismissive, or arrogant. At any rate, I’d rather think about cats in my head than thieving monkeys.

So maybe meditating is a bit like trying to herd cats. You can watch the cats wander around all day, they’ll probably pick up some friends on the way, maybe catch a nap in the sun, then wander some more .They’re not interested in paying attention to a herder – they’re not sheep after all (although sometimes when I’m meditating, they seem to have the same effect as sheep – I wake up to find I’ve got a kink in my neck from having my head slumped over for a while.)

But if you give the cats a bowl of milk, they’ll pay attention. And the mantra is the bowl of milk. It’s sweet and soothing. It makes them purr. Monkey’s, on the other hand, would prefer peas.

Famous last words: I will blog again soon!

April 23, 2008 – Eating Your Vegetables

My 4 year-old son Bhaerava knows he won’t get dessert unless he eats his vegetables. So after that fact is reiterated, he looks at his plate for a second or two, and then he gets up and wanders into the other room to see his father who, at this time of day, is usually in shoulderstand. Then he asks something like,
“Which planet is bigger, Jupiter or Neptune?”
His upside down father says “Jupiter, and by the way, aren’t you supposed to be eating your vegetables?”
“Yes, but Daddy, I want to know which planet is farther, Jupiter or Neptune?”
“Bhaerava,” my inverted husband remarkably manages a sigh and then says, “Go sit down and eat your vegetables, or you won’t get any dessert.”
“Oh,” he says thoughtfully, as if that never occurred to his 4 year-old mind, “okay.”
Then Bhaerava comes back and sits down and looks at his broccoli for a minute. He knows it’s the right thing to do, he wants the reward, but often, he somehow just can’t bring himself to do that very thing that will give him the bliss of dessert. So I remind him how much he likes dessert. Generally he remembers, takes a long breath, and then eats his broccoli in a hurry, amidst lavish parental confirmation.

Please excuse my family’s tendency to eat dinner in shifts (asanas after work are essential for my husband’s mental and physical well-being!). The point is, our son’s hesitancy to do what is good for him is a pretty common human predicament. I hear my students describe their relationship with meditation or even asana practice in much the same way.
“I like the idea of meditating, but I can’t actually get myself to do it.” or the wry, “I have an ambivalent relationship with meditation.”
Why is getting ourselves to meditate as difficult as getting my son to eat vegetables? We know it’s good for us, we know it will pay off in the long run, we might even get a bliss better than whipped cream out of it, but somehow, it’s so easy to get distracted. There’s always something else to do, maybe it’s not a lot of fun, we don’t enjoy it that much.
That “enjoy it” part is interesting to me. I somehow had time and space in my life 15 years ago to get the ball rolling. My meditation teacher told me to meditate twice a day – she didn’t even say for how long, but I just did it. If I hadn’t built that foundation, I don’t think I would enjoy meditating. And because I established the habit, even when i have no desire or interest, I still drag myself to my seat. You have to remember that meditation builds on itself. You have to do the groundwork and the maintenance – but it does pay off. You start to enjoy it.
But even if all you are able to do in meditation is sit there and space out for 15 minutes – and you don’t even do it every day – isn’t that a welcome respite from 12-16 plus hours of running around! Hmmm. And what if you really started to practice.
What if you started by watching your breath for a while. What if you just enjoyed the relaxing feeling of doing nothing but breathing for 15 minutes – wouldn’t that be worth it?
What does it take to sustain a practice? That’s a question to sit with.
For me meditation is about relationship. I want to live a life worth living. I want to experience love and beauty, I want to have a relationship with the divine. But relationships require work – anyone who’s been in counseling knows that. So for me meditation is a time I can be with the deepest part of myself in relationship. Relationships take time and energy. You have to nurture them, you have to be in them, you have to have them. What relationship is more important? What is more important than spiritual serenity?

April 15, 2008: The 6th and 7th Chakras – The Journey’s End

In October of 1932 in Zurich, Carl Jung gave four lectures on yoga and kundalini. When he got to the fifth chakra he said, “we are already out of breath – literally so – we are beyond the air we breathe; we are reaching, say, into the remote future of mankind, or of ourselves.” He was certain that most of our work is in the third and fourth chakras. And it would seem that the ancient yogis were in agreement. We still have a lot to do in the lower chakras. When Jung got around to talking about the crown chakra he was even less interested in the value of interpreting it: “To speak about the lotus of the thousand petals above,” he said, “is quite superfluous because that is merely a philosophical concept with no substance to us whatever; it is beyond any possible experience…It is without practical value for us.”
But the yogis would disagree with this assertion. On a purely psychological level, the upper chakras are not terribly interesting. There aren’t any great personality issues to overcome, but these chakras are the reason that meditation works. It is through them that we move into our greatest potential as human beings – to merge with the Divine and understand it as ourselves.
The Sanskrit word for the Sixth Chakra is Ajna (pronounced ah-gya) which means “The Command Center.” Like the sahasrara above it, it is beyond the five elements and therefore beyond the confines of shape, color or sound vibration which occur only in the manifest universe – not in the spiritual universe. In the sixth chakra our ego and our psyche disappear and we are absorbed into the universal mind. The ajna has only two petals – as if it were going to fly away – and it does, into the ocean of effulgent light that is the Divine.
Now the brain has two lobes, there is some indication that the wings of the sixth chakra relate to the potential of these two lobes. We have often heard that all knowledge is within us – that the brain only uses a fraction of it’s potential. Here the yogis have touched this reality in the symbolism of the sixth chakra – one petals represents all knowledge of the physical universe and the other all knowledge of the spiritual universe.
The hands come together and lift the thumbs up to touch this chakra in the ancient Indian greeting, “Namaskar” before bringing the thumbs down to the heart. While it’s easy to understand why you would want to greet someone from the heart, to touch the third eye sanctifies the gestures by connecting to the infinite wisdom of the Divine within.
Accordingly, this chakra is the place of concentration, deep understanding and intuition. Meditation practices will strengthen and develop awareness in this chakra.
The seventh chakra, the sahasrara, is beyond even the effulgence of the sixth chakra. It vibrates off the body, just above the crown of the head and is called the 1000 petaled lotus. If we take the lower six chakras with their 50 petals and multiply that number by both an internal expression and an external expression, we have 100. If we multiply 100 by the 10 motor and sensory organs, we get 1000. In other words, there are 20 ways our body-minds can express each of the 50 vrittis in each chakra. This is the meaning of the 1000 petals. The sahasrara is our deepest connection to the spiritual plane, when we have awakened this center, we have gone beyond any ego, and even beyond any connection to the Divine ocean of the sixth chakra. It is beyond words, beyond description and beyond experience. The seven chakra is the pinnacle of the journey. It is here that we come home to ourselves and our human potential.