Sunday 27 December 2015

I woke up




Yesterday morning, after a strange, struggling dream, I woke up and felt like a mess for half a second. And then, completely unprompted, this phrase popped up: There is so much to live for!

Where did it come from? From deep inside. And it was one of those special, rare moments where it feels like a lot of quite diligent practice has come together—into something golden, strong and loving.

I bring this up today not as a means of spiritually showing off, but rather as a support to anyone who is on the path, having a rough time and showing up anyway. In my years of practicing yoga and meditation, this is one of the biggest, clearest lessons I have learnt: show up.

Sometimes it feels like big, exciting things are happening when we practice; we have an epiphany in meditation, a yoga pose stirs up deep emotions that we feel we can safely release. It can be wonderful when those things happen.

Other times it can just be really hard. It might be hard because you’re working through grief, and you feel hopeless to the point of feeling disconnected from the source, from love. Sometimes it’s hard because you’re tired to the point of falling back to sleep in meditation. Or—and this is a big one for me—sometimes it’s hard because it feels like an issue you’ve been working with for so long is still an issue. You feel like, “I’ve tried meditation, yoga, hypnotherapy, reiki, and still I feel this difficult thing! Nothing is shifting!”

But you’ve been putting in the time on the mat, on the cushion. And time and again, you’ve been showing up for yourself; believing that there’s something beyond the streams of anxious babble going through your mind, or the emotional loops that keep playing themselves super-loudly right next to your heart—like, “This one! Remember this painful thing? Let’s hear it again!”

One of my favorite teachings is from the great yoga guru Sri Pattabhi Jois. He said, “Do your practice. All is coming.” I do not think of this as some kind of pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking. In my experience, I do my practice, and then—often when I least expect it—I realize that something has shifted. Like when I received that message after my dream: There is so much to live for. It wasn’t some glib mental sticky-note; I felt it to be true. And this came after a year of big, real life losses, one after the other—and having felt, at one very low point in the spring, like there really wasn’t much to live for.

And sometimes we don’t have sparkly moments like these. Sometimes we don’t perceive shifts in ourselves until a close friend remarks on how much we’ve grown over the years—how much easier we seem in ourselves.

So, I’m saying: keep going. Keep trying. You are doing great.

The more we look after ourselves, the more we facilitate love and connection with each other. As my friend, the yoga teacher Adriana Rizzolo writes: “You and God take good care of your precious life and heart, and I’ll do the same. That way, when we come together, magic naturally unfolds.”

Friday 2 October 2015

What a day


Today is the UN’s International Day of Non-Violence, and it’s Gandhi’s birthday. It is also a day on which many Americans are watching and sharing a speech given by President Obama regarding yesterday’s mass shooting in Oregon—the 45th school shooting this year in the United States. He seemed weary, incredulous at points, as he spoke of the country’s gun laws, observing, “Somehow this has become routine.”

Indeed, violence has become routine in our world. I remember walking home one night not so long ago and seeing through a large window on a recently built block of luxury condos: A man was watching TV on a massive flatscreen hung on the wall, and some kind of very loud assault was taking place onscreen, probably on a glitzy police TV series. We, as a society, invite violence into our homes, then wonder why it’s making us unhappy.

We can focus in even more tightly and look at the violence going on in our heads. This year I have been heartened to see a lot of discussion in advertising and on social media around the ways we are casually and relentlessly mean to ourselves, along the lines of, “Would you talk to someone else in the way you talk to yourself?” (Most of us: “Dear God, no!”)

However hard we try to behave nicely and smile, outwardly, through our own distress, doesn’t it follow that when we find ourselves intolerable, we find things in the outside world intolerable, too? This is where a meditation practice can become so valuable—not one which necessitates a fancy silk cushion, scented candles and mood music. Rather, one which involves sitting quietly with yourself, over and over again, and learning to be your own friend, as I discussed in last week’s post on Conscious. It is hard to be our own friend if we don’t know who we actually are, and crank up the outside volume to drown ourselves out.

I was very moved by the Pope’s recent words on the current immigration crisis. In a soft, patient voice, he asked people not to look at the numbers of refugees, but rather at their faces. This is so profound; it is very, very hard, to act without compassion when we’re looking in someone’s eyes. This kind of focus brings us back to earth and to our own humanity.

I have a friend who is a great mum to her lovely four-year old daughter, and when her little girl is getting distracted or overwhelmed, she asks her to look into her eyes while she’s talking. It changes everything.

It seems to me that so much trouble and violence arises from our inability to take a long look at something or someone, however painful and problematic it may seem. Violence can, and has become routine. And while it’s possible to cultivate “good” habits which benefit each other, I think that kindness cannot be routine. It’s a stirring of the heart, in response to truth. In Buddhism, it’s bodhichitta; the tears that instinctively come when you watch one of these news reports on TV, a compassion that comes out of being awake to feeling.

Today is a good day to practice lovingkindness meditation for all (outlined here); and of course, for the great, simple prayer: Lokah samastah sukhino bhavantu; may all beings be happy and free, and may I in some way contribute to that happiness and freedom.

Monday 28 September 2015

How to be a friend to yourself


"Hey, you! Meet you!" Your meditation practice can help you make friends with yourself. Here are my thoughts on how this can happen, to coincide with Conscious 2's One Month Meditation Challenge.


One thing I hear often, from those who like the idea of having a meditation practice but feel it might not be for them, is, “But I can’t clear my mind!” They have tried sitting down in a quiet place, hoping to find some peace, and instead they’re overwhelmed by a honking barrage of thoughts—or a trail of anxious inner whispers, or whatever particular inner soundtrack tends to pop up for them.

To which I say, it’s okay. You don’t need to clear your mind to have a good, healthy practice. To me, that’s not what it’s about. In my understanding and experience, it’s about becoming a friend to yourself. It’s about being able to stay with the shouts and yelps and laughs and sighs of your own inner experience; and then integrate that patience and kindness into your whole being, so it starts to come naturally in your day to day life.

To get a little technical, in traditional yogic terms what most of us are doing when we’re sitting on the cushion is practicing dharana, which means "concentration" in Sanskrit. We are bringing our mind to a single point, like the breath or a mantra. Only once we’ve merged our consciousness with the object of our concentration are we in actual meditation, dhyana, which takes us to a fully awakened yogic state, samadhi—bliss.

As nice as it sounds, very few of us are going to be able to magically be whisked off to samadhi just like that, and it takes a lot of dedicated practice to even come close to softening into dhyana. The advertising images we see of attractive young women sitting on beaches in lotus pose suggest otherwise, though, which is where I think the mind-clearing myth comes from. The mind absolutely can be clear—is clear, when we let it be. But trying to stop our thoughts from coming is about as effective as trying to push rain back up into a cloud; it’s the way that we relate to these thoughts and feelings that lets the storm pass.

Concentration can sound like a hard, strict word—but it’s totally your ally in your meditation practice. Concentration when we’re sitting is simply about bringing your awareness to a single point, like the breath. The Buddhist meditation teacher Sharon Saltzberg talks about “resting your awareness on the breath.” I love this idea of resting our awareness, because it does away with that flinty, unyielding notion of concentration (“Do it this way, or else!”).

So, you rest your awareness on your breath. And your thoughts will come, and your awareness will wander off your breath and want to follow your thoughts. The key is just to notice when this happens, and bring your attention back to your breath. Then you might start to observe how you’re bringing your attention back. Are you berating yourself? Telling yourself you’re stupid, or that this is a ridiculous idea, or it’ll never work? Are you neutral? Disinterested? Or maybe you’re really gentle about it.

For me, the absolute jewel of my years of meditation practice has been to discover that I can bring my awareness back to the breath with kindness, patience and compassion. “Let’s come on back now.” “There we go.” “Ah.” “How about now? What’s actually happening now?”

Over time, and in increments as tiny as the speed at which hair grows, I have become less impatient and frustrated with myself. I have become softer, and at the same time more courageous and strong, because I haven’t shooed away hard thoughts quite so much. I am more able to sit with who I am, most of the time. And this has moved into my everyday life. I have begun to see that I can be kind to myself anywhere.

I will say that it’s 100% an ongoing process. I still make myself squirm often. I still have a tendency to fan the flames of anxiety, get stuck in sad, doom-y thought patterns, or go off on a skip down daydream lane. But I catch myself more often, and more gently these days.

In the end, whichever tradition you’re approaching a meditation practice from, my feeling is that it really just comes down to love. When we quiet down and stop running our internal monologues, we get to hear and see the world in such a deep way; that’s when I start to feel a current of quiet joy running through me, and the sense dawns that maybe, yes, love really is our true nature.



And love

Says,


“I will, I will take care of you”


To everything that is

Near.


—Hafiz

Thursday 20 August 2015

Honoring BKS Iyengar



A year ago today, the great yoga teacher BKS Iyengar died. He was such a light. Here is what I wrote in his honor in 2014.

Understanding the Prayer



Understanding takes its own sweet time, and it's an ongoing process. I had a profound moment, while wearing a hairnet and singing along to the Beatles. Here is what happened.

I fell in love with yoga from pretty much the first class I ever took, years ago. I had no intellectual knowledge of the philosophy of yoga, but it felt right. So right. I remember walking down the street after my second ever class, trying not to laugh out loud because I felt so delighted and free!


Sure enough, I became more aware of the disciplines and values of this ancient spiritual system, and some of these made good sense in my head; intellectually, I got it and thought it was a good idea, though I didn’t wholly feel it in my body.


If you’ve taken a few yoga classes, you’ve more than likely heard or chanted the prayer Lokah samastah sukhino bhavantu. This is a prayer that’s often recited in Hindu practices, and it can be translated as, “May all beings be happy and free, and may I in some way be able to contribute to that happiness and freedom.” Of course we wish that for each other, right?


In reality, it has taken me years of practice to begin to really experience that prayer and understand it in myself.


At the weekend, I went to help out at a monthly soup kitchen at a church here in NYC, for the first time. It’s called Mother’s Kitchen, and it was founded my teacher, Mata Amritanandamayi as a place where homeless people can get a good meal in a welcoming environment.


When I walked in, I was happy to see quite a few people I recognized from satsangs (community gatherings) around town; I put on an apron and hairnet, started chopping up fruit, and felt very lucky to be able to help in this way while having a friendly time with all these nice people. There was even a guy plonking away on a piano in the corner while we worked. My friend Sanjoy said, “Wait til people start arriving—that’s when the magic happens.” I didn’t know quite what he meant, but took his word for it.


As I stood at the serving tables collecting seating tokens and chatting to folks who had come for the day, I looked around me—at all these people who had come together, all the good will that was going on, all the food that had been prepared with love, human beings being decent to each other. I was moved to my very core and had to stop myself from welling up. There was nowhere else I’d rather be than right there, and I had the thought-feeling: “This is what it means. This is being inside Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu.”


Maybe it has not taken you six years of yoga practice, trainings, study and so on to arrive at understanding prayers like this in your heart. Maybe you don’t practice yoga at all and you got it from the get-go? Maybe you’re somewhere in-between.


I wanted to share it with you, though, because quite often on our respective journeys there are ideas which seem to make good sense to our brains, but don’t really chime with us on a deep level. It is so, so, so very okay if and when we feel that way! Understanding, on any level, happens in its own time; whether it’s related to an immediate personal relationship or something you’ve read in a poem, whatever it might be. And understanding is fluid, not static; it moves with us. There is no end-point to understanding, it just gets deeper, wider.


These practices that we have—like yoga, or giving up our seat on the train, or trying not to interrupt people, or being patient, or formal prayer—are all part of the same thing, all part of our reaching an understanding that doesn’t need to be explained. The kind of understanding that very simply brings peace to our hearts.


Lokah samasta sukhino bhavantu.


लोकाः समस्ताः सुखिनो भवन्तु

Summer and the happy habit



Beautiful, beautiful August! Such a good time to get into the habit of exercising our gratitude muscles. Here is my piece for Conscious this week.

My spiritual teacher, the humanitarian Mata Amritanandamayi (Amma), visited New York recently, and as ever, it was a time of great joy and learning for me. Amma is popularly known as “the hugging saint” because she gives her blessing in the form of a very tender embrace. This hug is known as darshan, which you can translate as “a glimpse of God”, and indeed, in the moments when you’re nestled in the arms of this awakened person, it can feel like time disappears and you’re part of something infinitely vast.


One learns about love on a visceral level, both in Amma’s embrace, and in watching her hugging people—one after another after another—for 12, maybe 13 or 14 hours non-stop. She has said before that where love flows, everything is effortless, and watching the affection coming from Amma and in the faces of those people she’s embracing can be like seeing love made visible. Everyone is lit up.


But there’s also a more instructional kind of learning on offer in the form of the talks that she gives before darshan. On this New York visit, she spoke about gratitude, specifically on how it’s so easy to focus on what we don’t have. It’s like if there’s something wrong in your mouth—say you’ve lost a tooth—your tongue can’t help but endlessly explore that area, and the gap feels enormous. We’re compelled to explore that lack, even as we forget the other perfectly good teeth in our mouths, or the general miraculousness of our bodies. When we get obsessive about what we don’t have, we lose sight of what we do have.


I notice that gratitude comes more easily to me in the summer. Yesterday I lay in the park just watching the flowers nod gently in the breeze, and I felt utterly bowled over by the gorgeousness and generosity of summer. It is a time of ripeness, abundance, fecundity, playfulness, smiles at the beach, ice-cream truck music… Even the quality of being physically alone in summer can feel different to in other seasons; there’s a certain kind of freedom and a quiet joy to it.


This being so, it is a very good time to practice being thankful. Not to simply strike things off a list, ”I am grateful for this, that and the other”, but to really feel it in our bodies: The way the evening breeze feels on your skin; your feet in the sand; a mouthful of ice-cream; the feeling of leaning your head on your friend’s shoulder, and their shoulder being warm from the sun. It’s like everything is humming with the same sweet energy. To me, it is darshan in everyday form.


Developing such awareness to your body is something anyone can support through yoga practice, if that’s an option that appeals. Simply focussing your attention on your breath and what it feels like to be inside your body in the outside world can have a transformative effect on your relationship with your own body, mind and soul, not to mention other people’s, whatever the time of year.


But right now it is summer. Why not let the sun melt your heart and your anxieties? And see if you can let yourself just hang out in those moments of sweetness and thankfulness. Nothing to do, nowhere to be. Just here.


Happiness can, I think, be like doing headstands: It takes some practice. What a beautiful time it is to get into the habit of being grateful.


Tuesday 4 August 2015

A special day for teachers


Today is a special day in the Hindu, Jain and Buddhist calendar: it’s Guru Purnima, a holiday where people can celebrate their teachers. For this reason, I think it’s a beautiful holiday for everyone, regardless of faith—though certainly faith comes into our relationship with any teacher in our lives, whether it’s listening to an insight or gesture when it’s given, or finding the space to understand it afterwards.

Perhaps you have someone whom you regard as a spiritual teacher? A guru, monk or humanitarian figure whose words and way of life you follow? Or maybe it’s someone in a classroom or a driving lesson whose words go beyond simply making sense and somehow become inspiring?

There is a beautiful lineage in yoga that the yoga teacher Ruth Lauer-Manenti talks about in her book, An Offering of Leaves. She talks about how sometimes in a class, our teacher will physically touch us in a way that feels helpful, saying, that teacher, too, was touched by their teacher in just such a way, and their teacher before them. “When the teacher is talking about kindness and you feel nourished by their words, something inside of you is stirred and something that was sleeping awakens. This is because that teacher also had a teacher who spoke about kindness and woke them up.”

It makes me think of the image of buckets of water being passed down a line, and it strikes me that good teaching can work in our lives like this. Many pairs of hands have brought me to this point in my life; many good people have given me tools to dig myself out of holes or build safer ladders to the stars; many people have held me physically and emotionally. On a day like Guru Purnima, it’s nice to take a moment to think of all the people in your life whose teachings have lifted you and supported you.

For me, I’m thinking of my spiritual teacher Mata Amritanandamayi Devi (Amma), and of my wonderful granny dressed in her white cardigan and sitting in her favorite chair; I liked sitting at her feet like that even when I was a grown up. I think of my incredibly patient driving instructor, Mo, who only lost it once, the day before my test when I was driving abysmally: “Love! What’s happening! You’re cracking up!” Family, friends, so many hands...

The word guru has its roots in the syllables “gu” meaning darkness and “ru” meaning light, conveying a sense of the darkness of ignorance being dispelled by light. Some friends and I had a discussion about the nature of a guru. One said, “the guru is in your heart,” then another said, “the guru is your heart.”

The guru is your heart. Happy Guru Purnima.

Saturday 25 July 2015

What does it mean?


We so rarely know the true nature of any one event when it happens. Two big things happened in the same day that reminded me of this. You can read the full article for Conscious right here, and below.

Here is what I have learned, over and over again, this past year. We generally don’t know what a thing means, right when it happens. Often we think we do: “The person I love broke up with me. That is bad.” “I lost my job, that is terrible.” “My apartment’s lease is not being renewed, I’ll never find somewhere as nice.” These kinds of thoughts. But we don’t know. Not really.


One of my favourite teachings along these lines comes from the Zen Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh. He tells a story about a poor couple living in a little village whose one pride and joy is their son. One day, the son is involved in a horrible accident which leaves him badly injured, and his mother and father are devastated. “This is the worst thing that could possibly have happened!” they think. Then war is declared in the country, and the military sends forces to all the towns and villages round up men to fight. The couple’s precious son is rejected on the grounds that he’s not fully fit to fight, and is thus spared being sent to the battlefields. What they thought was “bad” turned out to be a blessing.


Lately in my own life, I’ve been loving cycling around on my bike. I bought the bike a few years ago and invested a bit of money at the time—I wanted a nice bike that didn’t make me huff and puff like crazy on hills! And my bike really came into her own this summer. The weather here in New York has been truly beautiful—warm, sticky and sweet—and I’ve been taking long bike rides around Prospect Park in the evenings, soaking in the feelings and the freedom.


This morning I went outside and discovered my bike had been stolen. I don’t know how, because the lock was gigantic, the rack was impenetrable and the wheels and seat were locked to the frame; the policeman who came to take down details said that some professional thieves can replicate the keys to special locks, and that’s probably what happened.


Naturally, I was vexed and sad. But I figured that while it was definitely not something I would have chosen to happen, I did have choices about how I registered it inside. I could deal with the outer things (reporting it stolen, thinking about how to replace it and so on), and I could just let it be, inside. I talked to my friend about it, and we looked at a nearby bike store’s website and I felt okay.


Shortly afterwards, he wrote me a beautiful letter about going through transitions in life (there have been many in mine lately), and told me that he had bought me a voucher at the bike shop and to go get myself a new two-wheeled chariot. I was speechless and smiley and touched to the center of my heart. Wow!


Can you believe how lovely people can be? I was, and am, floored by my friend’s kindness and generosity, and reminded in such an immediate way that, as I said, we so rarely know the true nature of any one event when it happens. Today I was reminded that as human beings, we can behave in stunningly decent ways; I felt valued, and eager to do the best I can for others. That wasn’t how I expected the day to go when I saw my bike had gone.


May the blessings in your life unfold in their own sweet time, and may we all be able to hold the uncertainty that is life with patience and grace and a sense of humour.

A mat that teaches you?


I laughed out loud when I heard the voice-over on a promotional video for a new yoga product: a yoga mat with positional markings on it which purports to “[help] you find calm and inner peace”. Surely this had to be some kind of spoof?


The publicity email invited me to support a Kickstarter campaign for a “revolutionary” new yoga mat. The sticky mat in question has various markings printed on it, so that the practitioner knows the “right” positions for their hands and feet. It comes in three sizes, small, medium and large, “all according to height”—as if all our bodies had the same dimensions!  It struck me as unfortunate that such a product could have been developed with seemingly little understanding of what yoga means, and what a physical asana practice is actually for.


On a very basic level, all our bodies are differently proportioned, regardless of height: The length of our limbs and torsos is not standardized. (And for that matter, even if our hands are in the “right” place, that doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re distributing the weight as we need to be, or pushing into a part of the hand or foot that will help us.)


Our expression of any given pose will vary dramatically according to where we are in our practice. Do you remember the first time you tried Virabadrasana II, Warrior 2 pose? Very likely your stance was quite short and your front thigh was far from parallel with the ground; you probably breathed pretty hard, sweated quite a lot, and found it hard to stay there for long. Then maybe over some time, you were able to move with greater ease and fluidity. You found your body saying “Yes” to deepening the pose a little, moving your feet a touch wider apart, bending your front knee a little deeper while being careful the knee didn’t track beyond your front ankle. You eased into it, over some years. Even within one class, a pose can become more available.


In my understanding, paying attention to what’s really going on in your body—your completely unique body—is asana practice. We learn to listen to what the body and mind tell us, and make good decisions based on that information, not according to habitual behavior or one-size-fits-all instruction.


A good teacher will pay very careful attention to you as you practice. She or he will look at how your body is aligned and what’s going on with your muscles: are they tense, juddering, slack? Your teacher will notice how you’re breathing and what’s happening to your face. One fab instructor of mine once noticed, as the class attempted a particularly tricky pose, that we all looked like we were going to the guillotine; we laughed, of course, loosened up, and made our way into the posture with a lot more ease than we would’ve found otherwise.


Similarly, the art of self-practice (ie doing yoga on your own) is a profound exercise in engaging with your whole being. Without a teacher watching and making adjustments, you become your own guide. You alone are making the decisions about the poses you practice based on deep listening. In this way, you take responsibility for yourself.


I giggled, earlier, about the idea that one could find calm and inner peace via a yoga mat with some markings printed on it (or in any prop, for that matter). But I fully acknowledge the seriousness of our need to find inner peace—particularly in the West, where our value system can seem so skewed.


It is good that people are looking towards the system of yoga in the hope of welcoming these things into their lives. And it is so important to practice carefully and safely. But I have serious reservations about gimmicky products like these. Asana is just one part of the journey towards yoga (meaning, union), and honing our ability to observe and listen and make adjustments is a crucial part of that inner journey.



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.

Saturday 13 June 2015

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.

Wednesday 3 June 2015

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.