Thursday 26 February 2015

...And that



So hum means I am that.
सो ऽहम्

There's a meditation practice around this mantra described on Yoga Journal, here. You might like it.

Like that


Tuesday 24 February 2015

Seeing things


Sometimes different things become visible in winter. Like the vapor billowing out of chimneys, making shadows on the walls in bright sunshine. It is a good, still time to take note of these things, I think. And just watch.

Getting free


I’m going to go ahead and say that it’s pretty much a fact, at this point, that if you’ve spent any time around someone under six-years old, you probably know most of the words to the theme song from Frozen, have sat through the movie at least once, and enjoyed it more than you thought you would. (“Fixer Upper” has some pertinent insights on relationships in it, and I’m certainly happy to have sound advice delivered to me by jolly trolls.)


But my favorite aspect of the Frozen experience is my niece’s personal take on it. She’s five-years old, and makes up songs constantly—which she either hums to herself or performs, quite flamboyantly. This, she did recently, with a number which revolved around the refrain, “I’m getting myself freeeeee!”. Standing on a chair at lunch, she sang it with such joy and gusto, tossing back her hair a la Elsa, but with a delight that was all her own. It was funny and it was touching. Sometimes we idealize kids’ lives as being free from the responsibilities and rules of adulthood (bills, jobs and so on). But little girls and boys are being told what to do constantly. So it follows that kids like my niece love the idea of wide-open freedom—the kind that feels like rolling around in the snow, or wriggling around in the sea—a vast, expansive way of living.


I like this idea, too. And I notice that it’s a struggle, often, to live free. In the outer world, of course; the alarm clock, the responsibilities, bills, all that. But in the inner world, too. As you may know from previous posts, the past few months have been very challenging for me, and I’ve felt at times this childlike feeling of indignation and objection: “But I didn’t choose this.”


Laying on the ground at a restorative yoga workshop I took recently, the teacher encouraged us to let go of anything we felt wasn’t serving us. I thought, “Please can I be free from this pain, it feels like a prison”. And then out of nowhere I felt an answer of sorts, which was, “You can get up and leave any time you like”. In my mind I saw a bright doorway in a dark cave. “Oh,” I thought. And then I realized how much of me didn’t actually want to go.


When you are in a lot of pain, it rarely feels negotiable in the moment. But for me, part of the point of physical and spiritual practice is that it opens up the inbetween spaces. When we’re really listening, on the mat or in meditation, the body tells us many things and our emotions sing many songs; if we can find some single-pointed focus, we may be able to respond with an intelligent decision. When we practice this often, it starts to open up little spaces in everyday life. It’s like if you see a piece of cloth just laying on the table, it looks opaque. But when you hold it up to the light, right near your eyes, suddenly there are lots of tiny holes in it, where the light is coming through. There are spaces everywhere. There is room for you to try something else, to stick with what you’re doing, or not do anything at all, just breathe.


So, I don’t mean, in my case, that Bingo! I can walk out of the imaginary door and everything is magically okay. The pain of our particular circumstances may be unavoidable. But I do mean that even just recognizing that I have choices within my sadness and how I deal with it—and in my happiness, and how I respond to that, too—then I have a little bit more freedom. And that feels good. One of these days I might even make a song about it, and sing it to my niece.

Wednesday 18 February 2015

Happy new moon


A holiday for your heart

My latest post for Conscious2 is right here. It is about looking after your lovely heart.

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A holiday for your heart

Here is what I vote: I vote we make Valentine’s Day a holiday for your heart. And by that, I mean let’s give your heart the sweetest, tenderest care we can. Let’s see if we can give ourselves the day off from worrying and doing all the things we think we should, or feeling the ways we imagine we should. Instead, how about we have a restful time, full of gentleness and lovely things? Mmhm. I think that sounds nice. If you do, too, I have assembled a care package that you can give your heart—or offer someone you love, for theirs. I have found each of these things to be supremely helpful and healing in their own special ways, and I am happy to share them with you. Here they are. 

Hawthorn Tea
Having a cup of tea can be one of life’s simplest and most soothing experiences, in and of itself, and Hawthorn tea is especially good for your heart. Made from hawthorn berries, this tea is a very old healing remedy which is said to improve cardiovascular function and ease hypotension, as well as reduce cholesterol and ease tension in the chest.
You could follow Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh’s suggestion to let your tea-making be a meditative experience, where you’re really contemplating what’s actually going on in your cup; you see that the water used to be a cloud, and that same cloud was once the sea… and maybe through this, you feel your perception of yourself as limited to just your body shift a little, as your consciousness melts into something far larger. That would be quite a cup of tea.

Ganesh mudra
Making mudras is like doing yoga with your fingers; a mudra is a special way of holding the hands to stimulate the flow of prana (life force) through the body’s energetic channels, just as you would in a physical asana practice, only here you’re sitting still and noticing a very subtle rebalancing of the body and mind. My favorite mudra for the heart is the Ganesh mudra, as outlined in Gertrude Hersch’s excellent book, Mudras: Yoga in Your Hands. This is a heart-strengthening mudra, and it’s a great way to start the day if you’re feeling vulnerable or wobbly; it’s good for heartache and times when you’re feeling like your confidence could do with a boost. In Hinduism, Ganesh is the deity associated with removing obstacles along yourpath, and a positive, full-blooded energy. Here’s how you do Ganesh mudra:
Start by holding your left hand in front of your chest at heart-level, palm facing outwards, fingers bent. Grab hold of your left hand with your right, with the back ofyour right hand facing outwards. As you exhale, draw your hands apart without letting go of the grip. This engages the muscles in your chest and upper arms. As you inhale, release the tension. Do this six times, and then gently place both hands on your heart for a moment or two. Then you’ll repeat this six times on the other side, so your right palm is now facing outwards. Take time to sit quietly afterwards.

Stones
I consider stones to be a big part of my healing practice. Sometimes I use them in an active way, placing them on the body during restorative poses, and other times I just like to have them in my pocket as I go about my day. Each type of crystal is thought to have its own energetic vibration, and this can have a harmonizing effect on the body.
The very loveliest stone for the heart is rose quartz. You can tell by the color—rose quartz is a beautiful, opaque pink stone and feels soothing just to look at. And its effect on the heart is equally soft. It is a gentle stone. Place it on your heart as you lay down and breathe deeply, lengthening your exhale (this calms the nervous system). If your mind is bouncing around, place a nice piece of amethyst slightly above and between your eyebrows. To support a grounded, rooted feeling of love and wellbeing in your body, place carnelian about a hand’s width below the belly button. See if you can let go of any gripping you feel in any of your muscles, however tiny, and release anything that’s weighing you down. Pink tourmaline is considered a “super activator” (!) of the heart chakra, encouraging compassion and also gentleness during times of personal growth; try keeping a piece on your nightstand and see how that feels.

Essential oils
Essential oils are extracted from plants according to traditional healing wisdom. To support serenity in your heart, I recommend Geranium, Sandlewood, Neroli, Ylang Ylang and Rose oils. Try dabbing a tiny drop directly on your sternum, or popping a few drops in a diffuser.

Lovingkindness meditation
Lovingkindness meditation is like meditation in a hug form. That’s not to say it’s easy, exactly. But the peacefulness it instills in your heart can be profound. Lovingkindness meditation in its full form is usually practiced with a number of different people in mind; a teacher or loved one, someone who is suffering, someone you don’t know well, someone you have difficulty with, and then all beings. The particular variation I’d like to recommend here can be found in Thich Nhat Hanh’s beautiful book, Love, and he recommends you begin by practicing it just with yourself, for as long as many days or weeks or months as you need, before you go anywhere else with it; coming home to yourself before you go anywhere is always a good call. Sitting in a comfortable meditation posture, you gently say these phrases to yourself, letting their meaning arrive in its own way:

May I learn to look at myself with the eyes of understanding and love.May I be able to recognize and touch the seeds of joy and happiness in myself.May I learn to identify and see the sources of anger, craving and delusion in myself.
I like to add in at the end, May I meet myself where I am.
The key to all the practices I’ve mentioned is to offer them to yourself wherever you are, and however you’re feeling. You don’t need to be a “good yogi” to feel their benefits, or in terrible emotional or physical trouble to really “need” them. They are just there for you. And the more well and full and happy we are feeling in ourselves, the more we can be there for others, to offer our love and support. Happy Heart Day.

Monday 16 February 2015

Stars


Good things


Sometimes good things happen while you weren’t waiting for them.

I saw the full moon as I walked home from work, so clear and crisp in the dark winter sky. I had a funny thought: it’s the same moon I’ve always seen, all my life. Some part of me, I think, feels like every time the moon is full, it’s a new iteration. When in fact, there she is—shining like new, but still the same old eternal moon that I’ve always gazed at. She surprises, and she endures.

I got home very, very tired. I put some squash in the oven to roast, and I ran a bath. I listened to a very beautiful sad album while I was in the bath because that’s what I needed to do and it felt good and also sad and also right. There are ways of welcoming grief, when it signals its arrival. I lay down with crystals in the dark with candles after that and cried and did some breathwork and said some full moon prayers. I noticed through releasing that everything started to feel very simple and quiet again.

I came into the kitchen and took my squash out of the oven. It was perfectly done and completely delicious. It was such a sweet surprise. I knew I’d put it in the oven, but somehow wasn’t expecting it to be so good and perfect and just what I wanted and needed.

This made excellent good sense to me. This, to me, is like practice. The practice of yoga, the practice of meditation, the practice of looking after yourself in any way you know how, through teachings and curiosity and accident and coincidence and anything else that lands on your path.

A lot of the time, practice can feel like practice. Like… like sitting down on the meditation cushion because it’s that time of day and that’s just what you do. Like one of the Warrior postures on the mat because you know this strong, standing pose is what you need, even if you don’t feel all that vibrant at the time. Practice. Practice.

But your efforts are going somewhere.

I remember being on a retreat, this time last year. I met a friend there who had been through heartbreak and was still in quite a lot of pain, but was putting in the effort to practice and to try to help himself as best he could. I remember saying, as we stood by the river in the cold, “None of it goes to waste. All of it will help you. We just don’t know exactly how, right now.”

The late yoga guru Sri Pattabhi Jois said, “Do your practice and all is coming.”

And this is what I am thinking about, as I eat my roast squash.

Put the food in the oven. Be kind to yourself. Practice the things you have a feeling are good for you, even if you’re not feeling much at all. Rest. Let things happen. All is coming.

You can't keep it



When I was a little kid—about nine or ten—I remember a teacher giving a talk in school assembly which struck me very profoundly. The teachers often told little stories in morning assemblies and I invariably tuned out or tried to listen and found them boring and God-y in a way I couldn’t relate to. But this one was… strange. And I think about it to this day.


The teacher sat on the edge of the stage and told a story about someone making a beautiful drawing in charcoal, while a little boy watched and gasped at how lovely it was. The artist said, Would you like to keep it? And the boy said, Yes please. So he told the boy to look at the picture, really look at it and take it all in—and then he started to pour water over the drawing, so the lines were washed away and the paper disintegrated before the boy’s eyes.


I was quite disturbed by this. I felt my heart throb. I thought it was so sad to have something so lovely and then to seemingly destroy it; sad to not keep it and save it, and wasn’t it a little mean of the artist? But some part of me understood. I got it. The picture would forever be in the little boy’s mind, even as he grew up and grew old.


Today I took a walk in the park with an old friend. It snowed heavily last night, and by the afternoon, New York had already done that thing to snow that New York does, which is to somehow make it dirty and drippy and kind of gross in a way that any city dweller will be familiar with. The sky was overcast and it was very slightly drizzling; the entire park was pretty much monochrome, with tiny scraps of muddy color showing through. It was a good walk and we laughed in the cold, and off went my friend to get her train home.


I started walking back through the park and the white and the black and the grey. And as I got to the entrance, where you can see out over Brooklyn and beyond, I saw a peachy beginning-of-color in the sky, in the distance: The sun was setting. I hadn’t even been aware there was any sun today. Within moments, the world went from grey to beautiful glowing pink—the whole sky lit up suddenly with this incredible glow. What could I do? I stood there and watched. A man waiting at the traffic lights next to me also stood and watched and neither of us cared whether the lights had changed.


I was about to reach for my phone to take a picture, then remembered it had run out of batteries. Damn, I thought. What a photo that would’ve made! I would have liked to keep it.


And of course, I remembered the story of the charcoal picture. I thought, You’ll just have to look at it and love it and let it go.


I wonder sometimes if our culture of selfies and photographing everything and showing photographs of everything is partly an attempt to “keep” things? To pretend that life isn’t transient and every moment isn’t melting into the next one? (Note: I’m speaking as as a dedicated Instagrammer and occasional selfie-taker.)


One of the things I am most deeply grateful for, from my yoga practice, is the ability—okay, the beginnings of an ability—to be present. I remember times in my life which I knew to be important to me where I was not present; acting in a school play and switching off until it was over and then thinking, I wish I could do it again, so I could be there. You know that one?


Yoga constantly emphasizes being present, and I think for quite some time I didn’t fully understand what this meant or entailed or would feel like. It took a lot of practice (physical and mental) to be able to get past my mind’s chatter, even for a few moments; to arrive at that peaceful, relief-feeling of, “Oh. Here I am”. I meditate for twenty or so minutes every day, and maybe find this feeling for a couple of those minutes. It is worth it, for me—to be able to watch the sun set, and let it go.


I’ve talked about loss and heartache lately. In terms of living one’s life fully and being aware of its inevitable losses, I feel strongly that being as present as I can be in times of joy is the only way to fly. Yes, it is more painful, in one way, to be fully present when things are wonderful, because if you are living and loving to your heart’s capacity, or at least as far as you can stretch, you might feel that you have lost more when those times are gone; that you let the gold of the moment move through your heart and your veins and into your finger tippy tips, and now in this new present, you are not there any more. Ow. It is painful. I find it incredibly hard to not try to reach for what is lost; to somehow dive after what has passed. But can you imagine what a loss it would be to have avoided being there with yourself and the world in beautiful, happy times? To have skipped giving presence your best shot? You would miss the sunset in the snow.


There are ways of working within yoga practices like asana and meditation that can develop our sense of now-ness, for sure. The two verses from Master Patanjali’s ancient yoga sutras that are the most key to this, for me, are these:


Atha yoga nusasanam (1:1), which can be translated as “Unity happens in the present”. And, Aparigraha sthairye janmakathamta sambodhah (2:39), “When one does not cling, true understanding of life comes.”


But I have also found that letting yourself go a bit by giving yourself a break can do the same thing. Laying on the couch and eating some really good chocolate (or some really bad chocolate) and not stressing out about whether it’s “in line with your practice” or not can help; as can allowing yourself to drop the worrying for a second while you walk around the park. It’s really about whatever letting things go looks or feels like for you. I find that these are often the times that life sweeps in, with breathtaking delicacy, and reveals its humble, magnificent beauty.



—Peace, peace, peace.

Color of winter


A little bit of soap



There is a store a few blocks away from where I work in Manhattan which took me years to discover. I walked past it many times, partly because there’s no sign outside, just a random-seeming hat stand on the sidewalk—and partly because Manhattan exists, generally-speaking, in a driven state of getting somewhere. One day I looked in the window of the shop—just briefly, but it was enough time for me to see a beautiful bronze Buddhist statue. The next time I passed by I looked again; lots of statues, cloth, bits and bobs, trinkets… I went inside, and found shelves of raw and cut crystals for healing, traditional Hindu and Buddhist ritual objects, and hanging tanka Buddhist tapestries; statues worth thousands of dollars, bundles of incense for a couple of bucks... Best of all, I discovered that its owner is a warm and wonderful man from Nepal called Biswah, who will cheerfully blow a conch shell horn loudly in the shop if you ask him what it’s used for. I realized after some time that I’d been visiting the store with the cover of buying incense, but really I was dropping by to have a nice chat with Biswah and seek his advice on any and everything.


At the beginning of December last year, I found out that a friend I loved had died, completely unexpectedly. I was at work when I got the news, and I don’t think I realized I was in shock until a colleague asked if I needed to go home. I wandered outside and walked to Biswah’s shop. I told him what happened and cried. He thought for a moment, and then went over to a corner of the store and pulled out a small, beautifully decorated metal box. He opened it, and inside was a piece of handmade lavender soap that smelt heavenly. Biswah explained that this was special soap, to be used with careful attention when I washed my hands at the end of the day, as soon as I got home. He told me that the very simple act of washing one’s hands moves our awareness down, physically, out of our million-mile-an-hour minds, through the heart and into the hands. It moves us into touch, and aliveness and the beautiful smell of that soap; into cleaning, and renewing and taking a pause. Then you can sit down, he said. Just sit. For a few moments or minutes, and let the quiet find you.


If you’ve gone through heartbreak of any kind, you’ll know how all over the place it can make you feel. Moving your attention into the body, specifically into the belly, can be incredibly helpful at these intense times. A teacher once told me to imagine a tree in a storm; she said, would you go sit in the leaves and branches getting blown about by the wind? Or would you take refuge at the trunk, at the earth? You can think of the mind as the storm and your belly as the tree trunk. When there’s a storm stirring, you can gently move your awareness down, and rest somewhere safer and quieter. Breathe deeply into the belly and your roots. Notice how that feels; that’s all you need to do.


If you are experiencing agitation, it can be very hard to practice yoga asana—you want to lay down and rest, but it feels like everything’s whirring. I recommend moving through a gentle round of chandra namaskar, moon salutations, to get the body and the breath flowing. Stand in goddess pose, arms out cactus-style; as you inhale, straighten the arms and legs; exhale, move into trikonasana (triangle pose) on the right side; inhale and find parsvokonasana (extended side angle); exhale, find a medium squat with your hands in prayer, elbows on your knees (this one is also known as campers’ pose, for obvious reasons). Then inhale and move into parsvokonasana on your left side; exhale, trikonasana; inhale to standing, arms extended; exhale, goddess pose (you can stick your tongue out and open your eyes wide, Kali-style, if you like). This is half a moon-salutation. To complete it, repeat the cycle from left to right. Do this two or three times as you feel the body loosen and the mind soften.


Then you can get low and snuggly with some restorative poses. Try taking supta badakonasana followed by a restorative twist over the bolster, then child’s pose. Notice, as much as you can, every little inch of your body, and the places that you may be gripping; tension can hide out in really tiny muscles, like the ones around your mouth, or in your fingers. Check in with your hips and your shoulders. What are your shoulders doing right now this very second? Can you drop them just a little? Doesn’t that feel better?


I love yoga for its gentle, kind, loving aspects; and I also love it for its practicality and quiet discipline. Both these things shed light on the ways we can work constructively with the mind and the body. I still have a little of the soap remaining, and I try to wash my hands carefully at the end of the day; doing it slowly like this makes me feel much more peaceful than rushing through it, like a task to be crossed off a to-do list. So it goes with so many simple actions, and every yoga pose you move in and out of.


This kind of conscious care is equally important and useful when times are good. Happiness can be so deliciously exciting, giddying, even. I think that when we’re lucky enough to be blessed with good fortune and love, it can be beautiful to honor that joy by bringing it into the present: Yes! Wow, this is really happening—just as the water is running over my hands and the soap is smelling good.


You can refer to this seemingly simple act of bringing attention to the present as mindfulness. And you can refer to it as love; your precious self deserves nothing less.

Snow day