I guess this article is supposed to be inspirational: The “Chief Evangelist” of Brand Marketing at Google suggests that if you feel like you’re too busy to do yoga or meditate, commit to just one minute.
I want to argue, though, that if you feel like you’re too busy for yoga, you ARE TOO BUSY.
Yoga is—in part—about finding balance. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali teach the values of sukha and sthira: strength and action together with ease. The asana practice gives your body the chance to experience what your mind and heart are seeking. Balance.
If your body is telling you you are too busy for yoga, you probably are. Our culture values GOING and EARNING and COMPETING and CONSUMING. Where is the ease? Use that moment to ask yourself, “what matters?” Is one minute with your child or your partner enough?
Widgets can wait. Yoga can bring balance to your life, but only if you commit to balance, not “yoga.”
I’m still looking for the right words to describe how seeing this blog post in my inbox—and then READING—it made me feel, so bear with me. I just want to get this OUT… imperfect as it is.
I’ve been wondering what to do with “my yoga.” I’m teaching and I love that. But I’ve hesitated to promote my vision and “put myself out there.” Partly it’s because I’m uncomfortable with what I see being promoted as yoga, and HOW yoga is being promoted. I haven’t wanted to contribute to that. And, I’ve wondered if I’ve carved out too narrow a niche for myself. Two years ago I thought that teaching yoga to advocates and activists and building community in that way would be one way I contributed to the social justice movement (see the home page!). But the more I tried (or thought about trying) to make a “business” out of it, the more insincere it felt, and the more discouraged I got.
I’m turned off by the VAST majority of yoga marketing I see. Yoga to sell beer. Yoga as part of the happy hour party routine. Woo hoo! Yoga!!!! It all seems so shallow. Within the context of a real need for real action on many fronts—gentrification dislocating poor people and old people from their homes, the Black Lives Matters movement, real discussions of anti-capitalist alternatives, important local and national elections—pushing yoga has actually just seemed like a distraction.
Ok. AND… I must admit I’m still a little gun shy after being chewed up and spit out after my last real professional effort at advocacy and civic engagement. But I’ve been watching important movements from the sidelines and justifying it as a white woman feminist stepping aside, trying to be an ally instead of the star.
Last week, a teacher I respect very much took the leap to bring the Black Lives Matter movement into the yoga community. She is encouraging study, discussion and action within this — let’s face it — even-in-San-Antonio, predominantly white community.
I have been involved in New Age circles since I was eighteen years old. I can not tell you the number of World Peace prayers, mantras, visualizations and ceremonies in which I have participated. I have listened to countless charismatic teachers talk about “ushering in a new paradigm” and being part of an “evolution in consciousness” and so on. Gathered in small and large groups, armed with mala beads and good intentions, I have felt inspired, uplifted and buoyed by the notion that I was part of a larger process of awakening.
Of course, I don’t have to tell most of you that 99.9% of the people in those rituals and gatherings were white. And perhaps I don’t have to tell you that my own relationship to said “new paradigm” and said “consciousness evolution” was somewhat vague and, if I am honest, largely centered on my own current and future well-being. I am not saying that I am a total asshole or that I am completely self-centered. I needed to dive into the sources of my personal suffering and to get a handle on my own inner workings. I needed to invoke a positive future for myself. In fact, my life depended on it. Up to a point, personal work on self is essential. After a point, working only on self may have some serious downsides.
One of those serious downsides for me is that I was living in ignorance of larger social issues and failing to see that my ignorance kept me unconsciously participating in an unjust system of institutionalized racism that feeds on fear, blame and inequity– the very things I was praying would come to an end. By being focused on the ways my personal consciousness was patterned from childhood conditioning, I missed the obvious– the ways the culture in which I was brought up created patterns that kept me blind to racism, hatred and various forms of de-humanizing cultural norms.
In short, there’s a LOT of shit between your small or capital S self and the “universe.” And it all needs changing. In the hard work of yoga, we (can) learn that reality is something we create and agree to. Unfortunately, often we agree to a lot unconsciously. In this case, systems of power that benefit some over others. It’s not personal! But we have a personal responsibility to do something about it. Something real that includes breaking the unconscious agreement NOT to be part of the solution.
I’m going to participate in this webinar today, and join the discussion. I hope you will, too.
Ok, y’all. It’s no secret. I get into studying. I can be a little academic. I mean, the name my business has a colon in it! So, you might guess that one of my many pleasures in getting into yoga was having a whole new system of thought to study — there’s history, psychology, philosophy, ethics, cosmology, and mythology, in addition to anatomy and sanskrit and 108 or more postures to learn the names of and try to do.
I don’t claim to be an expert on any of it yet, but I can tell you that it’s been an amazing exercise to try on a more Eastern perspective, to try to think about my life, my capital S Self, my work and my relationships through a completely different lens.
I realize that many of the concepts affiliated with the “spiritual” teachings of yoga seem esoteric and turn people off. I try very hard not to become this guy:
But I can assure you, the teachings are good. Importantly, they have practical value. And you can experience them and know them even if all you do is the physical yoga practice (which are called asanas).
Two yogic mind/body concepts that have provided particularly valuable insights for me are koshas and chakras.
Chakras are energy centers that are associated with different aspects of our psychological development and personalities. Anatomically, they are aligned along the spine where there just happen to be clusters of nerves. The chakras provide seven categories for thinking about your current state of being: roughly, physical body/survival needs (root chakra, base of the spine), sensual/pleasure (lower abdomen, genitals), will (solar plexus), emotional/social connections (heart), communication/expression (throat), vision/conceptual (eyes/third eye) and holistic wisdom/feeling of oneness (crown of the head).
Koshas are a little harder to grasp. They are energetic layers that describe five different aspects of your mind/body self. Here the categories get a little less familiar, but the overall concept is similar to chakras: We have many ways of perceiving our surroundings, interpreting the world and experiencing ourselves. Each has value. None should be denied.
Chakras and koshas are all about energy and talking about them can sound a little “woo woo.” So, here’s another way to think about it that you might be able to relate to a little easier.
In 1983, Howard Gardner outlined his theory of multiple intelligences in his now well-known book, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. In a nutshell, Gardner tossed out the idea that intelligence was not limited to the math and verbal abilities supposedly measured in standardized tests like the SAT. He said people are also intelligent somatically, like athletes, musically, visually, interpersonally, etc.
The idea is that we all have these very different ways of learning, of apprehending our world, making sense of it and contributing to it. We each have the ability to filter our experiences through any of the modalities. Some of us are naturally stronger in some than others. I think of them as pathways into our intellectual potential. Perhaps music opens your pathways. Now there are innovative programs in some schools that use art to teach science and math. It’s a way for visually or artistically or right brain holistically inclined learners to wrap their heads around linear, logical concepts like science and math.
You can experience and exercise a number of these intelligences in any asana yoga class. We move our bodies, listen to music, visualize our own limbs as we position them and use them in different ways. We breathe and think about breathing. We imagine. We share the experience of trying out crazy moves. We laugh at ourselves and exult when we do something new we never knew we could. We feel.
These are all important ways of knowing ourselves, solving problems and engaging in the world. In any yoga class, you will mindfully move your body, becoming aware of how your body feels, what it knows and the many ways it has of knowing. Practicing asanas is like using art to experience and “GET” math or science. Asanas give physical expression to the various psychological filters described by chakras and koshas. You don’t have to study the esoterica to experience the full wisdom of your body. Getting to know your body gets you to your mind, and can open new pathways to solving problems and doing your work.
Is it so far fetched to believe that moving your body in a mindful way for an hour can connect you with those many other ways you have of knowing and perceiving the world? After all, we know and perceive the world with our bodies! I hope you’ll give the experience a try.
I want to say a quick thank you to the many people who “liked” and commented on my new yoga portraits on Facebook. I’ve never been one to take “yoga pictures” of myself — even on my many yoga retreats in faraway and beautiful, exotic places. My practice has always been for me.
Now I want to share it by teaching.
Because all of you actually know me in person, I hope that the pictures show you something more than cool things I can do! I hope they give you a glimpse into the power, strength, courage, determination, concentration, and grace that I am constantly seeking through my yoga practice. Yoga reminds me that I can be quiet and fierce, strong and flexible at the same time. I can push myself and then relax fully. Renewed, I can face the challenges of my life.
So, whatever you see in the pictures, I hope you will see those things in yourself, and find a practice to nourish them. I think yoga is a good one.
Full disclosure: after my last post about the importance of a regular practice, I did exactly NO home practices of any kind last week. No morning yoga, no meditation, and after a frenzy of writing on Monday, no writing for a whole week!
Interesting.
So, I’m back to it this week. Really!
And while it’s tempting to ruminate on the whys and what ifs and fall into the familiar habit of self-flagellation, I am going to just try to accept that I made decisions last week NOT to introspect in a formal way. Let’s be clear, whether or not I sat down and deliberately weighed the pros and cons of meditating or writing, I was making decisions NOT to do them.
Introspective practices are tools for discovering the unconscious. They help uncover and shine light upon feelings and mental processes that are influencing you beneath your awareness.
I’m not going to say that I might not have benefited from sitting a few times last week, but I will say that reconnecting with my father opened floodgates from my unconscious mind. I don’t think I needed a lot of extra help acknowledging the feelings and memories and assumptions and grudges and regrets that came crashing through. They now litter my mental landscape like bits of trash and broken glass washed up on the shore — evidence of once useful items, now either obsolete after the beatings of waves over time or dangerous to the touch. I’m on active clean up duty now. And it’s so interesting.
One of the first things I did on my epic road trip last month was write my dad a letter. I have not heard from or attempted to contact my father in about 25 years. I had reasons — very well thought out reasons, coolly held reasons attached to the version of the story I’d been telling myself all those years.
But earlier this year I had a sort of revelation. It was a combination of the ancient, raw desire of a little girl for her daddy, and the very grown-up acknowledgement that, like all stories, mine had gaps. It was made. It had been constructed on the foundation of my own pain and incomprehension at my parents’ divorce underneath years of inference from deliberate and well meaning, as well as off hand tellings from my mom. My story was made from pain and subtext. And anyway, wasn’t it just time to drop it?
So I wrote him a letter and carried it around with me for three weeks! Finally I mailed it. And yesterday I heard back from him.
His letter was heartfelt. He said that he blamed no one for our estrangement, that I owed him no apology, and that getting my letter was the happiest day he could remember.
He also said that he had always loved me and always would.
And that’s when the crazy started.
I suddenly felt happy and hopeful and angry and hurt all at the same time. Only, it took me all night to tease those feelings out! For a while, I just felt crazy, out of my mind. My “dad stuff” got triggered and off I went.
Times like this test my yoga practice. The frenzy of my whirling mind is seductive, and again, familiar. Comfortable. It will take discipline to stick to the practice. What do I want to be attached to: old reactions running on repeat or new practices that nourish, strengthen and calm me? Doing yoga isn’t going to make the old feelings go away. But it does give me the opportunity — as often as I want to take it — to make the conscious decision to get off that particular hamster wheel. I initiated contact not to re-experience the trauma abandonment or self righteousness, inviting him in and then pushing him away, but to experience something new.
Times like this are why you need a yoga practice when times aren’t like this!
The mind is going to race. The unconscious wants to run the show. That’s what it does. A regular yoga practice in “regular” times prepares you for stressful times when your every instinct is to revert to old self-soothing ways. You need your practice to be routine. You need it to be something you just do, and not something you have to think about, make a decision about, and talk your self into doing. It helps make it feel less onerous, less like one more thing you have to cope with.
I’ll be using my asana practice — the part of yoga that is physical, doing poses — to shift all this swirling mind energy ground-ward where there is wisdom in my body. Where the knot in my stomach and the tightness in my heart ache for healing. It’s the best tool I’ve got to help me stay with my initial intention in reaching out to Dad in the first place, to help me keep looking forward and resist the urge to move backward.
Visitors built many offerings on the way to the energy vortex at Boynton Canyon in Sedona.
As I’ve worked to get grounded after the tumult and stress of the last couple of years, I’ve caught myself several times applying the same kind of frantic doing mentality that burned me out in the first place to the introspective practices I’m trying to integrate into my life as an antidote. It’s really a hard habit to break! Once you’ve identified that you’ve burned out, I think you want to do ANYTHING you can to get healed. Unfortunately, I think sometimes that translates into doing EVERYTHING you can to get healed.
When I discovered my malaise was actually burnout, I wanted to fix it, and fast!
I dived into recovery like I’ve always dived into everything: head first — that is, with my head. I read dozens of books. If I could learn one thing from one book by Pema Chodron, couldn’t I learn many things by reading many of her books? Or, better yet, the books of HER teachers? I was working through Debbie Ford’s 21-day Consciousness Cleanse (for the second time), and The Artist’s Way, and Creating on Purpose all at the same time. It was a lot to take in all at once. And that made it familiar. But what I needed was change.
The past few weeks I’ve been trying to do yoga and zazen followed by writing practice every single morning. These practices are meant to quiet the mind. But the way I’ve been doing them just provides more fertile ground for the thinking and worrying and list-making and what-iffing that can consume my already too active brain.
This morning I skipped yoga and zazen and just wrote. I considered the various meditative practices I’d been doing:
how did each one make me feel?
which ones do I resist sometimes, and why?
how do I feel after each kind of practice?
what is it I am trying to get out of all this stuff, anyway?
That’s when I remembered that just one thing can be enough, and in truth, can even be better. Maybe doing just one thing is the change I need.
It’s not something that’s encouraged in our work cultures or home lives, or even in the “slow-down-and-connect-with-yourself” wellness industry. The book, Just One Thing: Developing a Buddha Brain One Simple Practice at a Time, which I highly recommend, includes 52 different practices! The idea is that you try one everyday for a week, and then maybe move on to the next. But if you’re like me, you’ll read the whole book straight through and then feel excited and motivated and a little overwhelmed by all the options.
I want serenity and I want it now! Won’t trying MORE things get me there faster?
Probably not. Stillness comes with effort. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not easy. But the effort is singular and focused.
So, as you’re preparing for 140 days of frantic doing, and the idea of meditating or doing yoga feels like just one more thing you have to schedule, one more thing you don’t have time for, remember that it’s just ONE thing. One thing that one day. Let that one thing be enough. That’s what I’ll be working on, too.
This month, I’m taking myself on an “epic” road trip through the Southwest, spending time in all kinds of beautiful and exotic places: White Sands National Monument, the Painted Desert, the Grand Canyon and the red rocks of Sedona.
Everywhere I’ve gone, I’ve felt union with the spirit of the place. I’ve opened up my senses to the sights and sounds around me. I’ve been awe-struck at the new dramatic landscapes that appear as I crest a hill or emerge from a winding road into open fields surrounded by enormous red rock formations. I’ve opened my imagination to be inspired by the pace and rhythm of being on the road with my little dog. I’ve walked my legs off and slept hard. I’ve dreamed. I’ve been up at dawn and paid attention to the way the light changes throughout the day. I’ve raced the sunset to catch a glimpse of the Very Large Array in the twilight.
In short, I’ve “done” yoga.
What I haven’t done is a bunch of pretzely yoga poses against the back drop of these fantastic places. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! The asanas are beautiful forms for the body to assume and there is nothing wrong with appreciating the body’s ability to express those forms. I’ve seen some really wonderful yoga photography in which the yoga model/practitioner is placed in unusual contexts, resulting in images that artistically evoke the singular, focused power of yoga. Photos of yoga poses are also really good for marketing! I’ve thought a lot about how such images might be good for publicizing my yoga business when I get home, how the exotic locales might help accentuate the themes and feelings I want to help people experience through their own practice of yoga.
But, I’ve opted against the exotic yoga locale as a marketing technique. No, on this trip I’ve done my asana practice in the mornings, by myself, in whatever crappy hotel room I’m waking up in that day (and the occasional nice hotel room), for free and wearing my PJs! And I’ve experienced my yoga… everywhere.
You see, one of the things I’ve remembered on this trip is that the feeling of union, the feeling of oneness within myself and with my surroundings that I’ve experienced in these unfamiliar places is achievable at home, too, in my everyday life. The sun rises and sets in Austin, Texas, every day! I just haven’t taken the opportunity to notice. I haven’t made noticing part of my practice. And I’m the one missing out!
Imagine feeling this inspired, this raw, this hopeful every day.
One of the challenges of a yoga practice — and the asana practice is a perfect place to, well, practice this — is to be open to the unique quality and character of your experience that day, that moment, in that class. Maybe you’re feeling awkward in your poses. Go with it. Enjoy the clumsiness. That’s your practice that day. Maybe you’re feeling especially strong or flexible. Go with that. That is your practice that day. All you have to do is pay attention. Notice how you are feeling. There’s so much to learn from that.
I know it’s not that easy. There’s something about everyday life that numbs us to the potential of “right here, right now.” There’s something about routine that gets in the way of practice. It’s a paradox. The practice must be repeated, and yet, it must stay new.
So, I get up in the morning and I do my asana practice in whatever space my little hotel room allows, and then I go out into the amazing world and I notice things. My vision is fresh because what I’m seeing is new. Can we find this kind of newness in our every day lives?
I don’t know; but I want to! I shall continue to practice using the asana practice as my living, embodied metaphorical experience to prime me for the real and actual newness of every day life, for the wonder I could feel if I were open to it, for the inspiration to create something that adds newness to the world.
And, at some point, I will take pictures of myself doing yoga poses. But what I will teach, I hope, is a way of living that the yoga practice can remind us daily is possible.
A few years before my mom passed away, she told me for the first time that she could see people’s auras. It wasn’t something she was ever taught how to do. It wasn’t even something she had to try to do. She said for as long as she could remember she just saw colors around people… all people.
Curious to me, she had never talked to anyone about it. She never researched what the different colors were thought to mean. She just saw them and accepted for herself that everyone has them.
When I was in Sedona this week, I went to one of the many aura photography places to see what would show up in my aura picture. The computer was set up with a camera and some kind of biometric sensor that took some kind of readings from your left hand. When my technician turned on the camera and I looked at the screen, I saw exactly the colors my mom thad described to me. She said they were mostly orange but mixed with sea foam green around the edges.
I had been skeptical about aura photography, but this felt like confirmation of its validity! Or, maybe it was a confirmation that my mom really did see colors. Looking at the picture, I missed my mom and her special gifts. I imagined what it must have been like for her to see people surrounded by colors like that all the time. Her world must have looked very different from the world I think I see.
Perception constructs our reality. And now I wanted to “know” all the things she must have intuitively known about me.
I dived into the 23-page aura report like it would contain the answers — finally! — to all my questions about my psyche and my way of being in the world, like it would tell me why I am the way I am and how to fix it.
But the report was confusing. My chakras are all pretty much in balance, some are stronger than others, but not by a whole lot. My aura isn’t very big, but shines about my whole body evenly. My yin and yang, right and left sides are in balance.
In short: Nothing is wrong with me!
That’s when I realized that … nothing is wrong with me. I have spent most of my adult life trying to figure out what is wrong with me, why, and how to fix it. I’ve done talk therapy and yoga therapy. I’ve studied many different psychological and spiritual systems, looking for the narrative that seems to fit best. Within western psychology I’ve studied existential psychology, Rogers, Perlman, Freud, Lacan, Gilligan, Horney. I’ve read tons of Buddhist theory and yoga psychology. I’ve read the I Ching and the Gita and Rumi. I’ve read about chakras and somatic psychology and doshas. And I’ve approached all this reading from the perspective of solving the PROBLEM that is however it is I think I am.
I’m too needy. I think too much. I’m too judgmental. I’m afraid of commitment. I don’t know what I want.
What this aura photography helped me to see — whether it’s really a photograph of my actual aura or not — is that I can quit looking for what’s wrong with me, and instead turn my attention to acknowledging and accepting my unique combination of attributes and motivations and drives. Stop trying to figure out WHY they are there, and instead work on accepting how my own personal set ingredients combine to create my own unique perspective of the world, and my own unique experience of life.
This is probably going to have to include acknowledging and accepting my inner critic! But perhaps I can learn from this part of myself. Like the other attributes, the inner critic filters the reality I perceive and influences the reality I create. I shall do my best just to witness how it works and know that even if it is “me,” it is not all of me, and it is ok.
Now I want to share it by teaching.
Yoga with Lesley 