On the Edge of Prudence

I’ve stopped to smell the roses.  To watch the sunset.  To breathe in life all around me.  To self-indulge in the healthiest of ways: sleep well, eat well, be well, be present.  Pause.  Let go of achievement. Let go of efforting toward a goal.  Let go of the need to please.  Just pause.

Stress has become the popularized curse-word of our society.  Stress-this.  Stress-that.  But stress is no joke and it is linked to nearly every unhealthy counterproductive high-risk behaviour out there.  Over-eating.  Under-eating.  Over-cleaning.  Under-cleaning.  Over & under exercising.  Over and under indulging…achieving…being.

We are goal oriented people in a goal oriented society.  We glamourize high risk behaviours such as addiction leading people to achieve via self-destruction.  We encourage obsession, leading to a world full of overly anxious, self-conscious, over-achieving individuals who never feel anything we do is quite enough.  We don’t feel we work hard enough, play hard enough, exercise hard enough, so we end up doing them all WAY TOO HARD, tear our bodies and minds apart in the process and wonder why we still feel crappy despite doing everything “right.”

We forget to just be.  Be in the process.  Accept the journey of life.  Be present.  Accept that as long as we keep running after arbitrary goals and achievements whose reward will be a mere fleeting moment of self-satisfaction before we launch ourselves into the oblivion of yet another achievement-focused path we will never ever get the opportunity to enjoy life as it is, right here and right now.

I am teaching myself to be.

This is much more complex than it may seem.  I’m pausing.  Soaking it in.  Remembering that the moments where I laugh until my belly hurts, hug a friend in need, snuggle with my love and my pooch are the moments that truly count.  These are the moments I will remember and cherish for the rest of my life.  Not one of my achievements now or ever will measure up to the love, the friendship, and the laughter I have filled my life with.  Life is not the sum of our achievements, it is the matrix of moments we are truly present and appreciative of all we are blessed with.

Progress is received, not achieved, through surrendering to process, peace, and patience.

Just be.  You are perfect.

D

There are moments, I tell you.  These moments when the world falls away and we remember who we were before we became who we are.  There’s this impressive forward motion to humanity: we are encouraged to move forward, to progress, and to be present.  We are encouraged to avoid rumination over regrets of our past.  For some, this leads to the forward momentum of avoidance – of regrets, disappointments, embarrassment, heart-break.  You can see it like the quick dash of a rabbit avoiding a predator – zigging and zagging all over the place.

But then there are these beautiful and bittersweet moments where we are so happy where we are in the here and now, that we are able to feel the beautiful nostalgia of where we once were.  Regrets and grudges be gone, we are here because of where we were and true nostalgia allows us to pay respect.  I say, live in the moment, but leave a little room for nostalgia over the past and much hope for the future.

I’ve recently been propelled into my youth via the conduit of music.  Somehow, suddenly and without notice, I encountered music that holds a special place in my heart and reminds me of everything I was and hoped to be as a teenager.  That tumultuous time where we are so consumed with hormones, driven by emotion, and utterly and completely confused (despite the belief we “know it all,” quite literally).  I’ve spent the last 12 years distancing myself from my adolescence.  I’m not sure why.  I think we all feel confused and emotional during our adolescence.  I was so ready to move beyond that time in my life I fear I dashed out friendships and relationships too quickly.  I wanted to travel, to explore, and to break free of all of the cliched stereotypes engulfing me.

In any case, somehow moving beyond my 20′s into my 30′s has marked a significant forward movement for me.  A freeing, of sorts.  I didn’t know what to expect, but somehow, somewhere, I found peace.  I’ve heard this is common.  Here I am, a cliche yet again!  In any case,  I’m here, and I am me.  Somehow I’ve spent the last 20 years trying to get here.  I remember so many journal entries about wanting to be in a place feeling exactly as I am, with people around me who love me for all of me.  And here I am!  ME!  What a weird feeling after 20 years of struggling to be here, and to be me.  But I’ve come to learn that self-love is the only way to end up in a place where we are surrounded by people who are loving, kind, accepting, and love us unconditionally.  Self-love is truly the only way to be the people we want to be.

I suppose arriving at ourselves allows us to be grateful for the influences of those who propelled us forward, who shaped us, who challenged us (however painful the challenges may have been), and who hurt us.  All of the turmoil and (oft, self-inflicted) pain of youth and early adulthood teach us how to pick ourselves up and move forward.  By looking back with an open heart we can consider those we may have hurt and hope only they too have found themselves exactly where they want to be, looking back with fondness and nostalgia.

Here’s to looking back with a smile…

-D

“LUCK: When preparation meets opportunity.”

This past month has been pretty stressful for me.  I’m not sure what it is about September, but it’s the time in my life when everything seems to come tumbling down around me and I have the weight of the world on my shoulders.  Everything happens in September.  I’m not kidding.  In 2006, I came home from Halifax because my aunt was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer.  Exactly one year later, she died and I gained custody of her daughter.  In 2008, a friend and colleague was diagnosed with breast cancer and I was diagnosed with a mysterious tumour in my hip bone.   And every year since then something happens.  This year the “stuff” has been in the financial and personal realm.  Thank-you universe for keeping my loved ones healthy.

So this has been a hard month.  Yesterday, while it seemed yet one more thing was weighing on my shoulders, two possible solutions presented themselves.  Amazing!  Since I was young, I have always found that if I keep open to possibility, things just work out.  Some call it “luck” others call it “the secret” and others call it God.  I’ve just realized that when you want something to work out, and you believe in it working out, you believe there is a solution, you believe you have the ability to figure it out, things work out.  The first explicit incidence of this I can recall is when I was shopping for my first car.  I had saved up $1300, I was 17, and I wanted my own car.  My mom and I went car hunting one day.  By lunchtime, I was feeling dejected, disappointed, and frustrated with the lack of products that suited my idea of the “perfect first car.”  Over lunch, we chatted about what I envisioned and what we had already viewed.  My mom said simply, that I should realize I’m unlikely to find the exact car to fit my wish list on day one of shopping.  This was unsatisfactory to me.  I wanted the car, and I didn’t want to spend weeks looking for it.   My mom told me that’s not how the “real world” works.  And maybe she’s right,  however…

Later that day, I happened to have a conversation with the mother of an old friend from elementary school.  I can’t recall the reason we ended up on the telephone, but it had been a long time since I’d talked to this person and we were briefly chatting about what was occurring in our lives as of late.  I mentioned my search for a vehicle.  She immediately replied that her father, my friend’s grandfather, had a habit of buying old cars and fixing them up for his grandkids.  He had done just that with a car that fit my wish list perfectly, but all of his grandkids were already outfitted with cars.  I scheduled a meeting that evening, and by the next day, I was the proud owner of a little sporty hatchback!  It was a beater, and it was purple, but it fit my wish list perfectly!

After that day, my Mom started referring to these incidences as “Darby’s World” events.  She would quip “Only in Darby’s World” when something worked out in my favour.  After that, I started thinking about this phenomenon.  I did some reading, and came across one study (cannot for the life of me remember where or by whom) where they studied “luck.”  They divided people into two groups after putting them through a regimen of psychometric testing supposedly to measure how “lucky” these people were.  Then they randomly assigned the people into the “luck” category and the “unluck” category.  The participants believed this sorting was based on their performance on the testing, and that those in the lucky group actually were more lucky based on the measurements.  Then they followed these people for a period of time, keeping track of “lucky” events in their lives.  In the end, they found that the “lucky” group had more incidences of lucky events, such as winning the lottery and so on.  The explanation given for the phenomenon was not that there was something categorically more lucky about the lucky group, per se.  The explanation was that the people who believed themselves to be lucky were more likely to open themselves to opportunities.  If they felt lucky, they’d buy a lottery ticket.  On the other hand, the “unlucky” group were less likely to do things like buy lottery tickets because they thought “well I’m unlucky, I’ll never win, why would I waste my money?”  To me, this explains the “Darby’s World” phenomenon perfectly, and I think it can be anyone’s world.  You can’t win if you don’t play the game, right?

It’s not that I’m more lucky or lead some kind of blessed life.  Bad stuff happens.  I lose sometimes.  Things don’t always work out the way I planned.  But, because I have an understanding that opportunities can turn to luck simply by opening myself to them, when there is something in my life I desire, I open myself to solutions.  Some might see this as a simply optimism vs. pessimism viewpoint, but I think it’s more.  The world opens itself to us, and it’s up to us to step through those openings and make opportunity realities.  When you believe that things can work out in your favour, you are more likely to see past the barriers to the solutions.  Yesterday, I was stressed and worried about the weight of the burdens on my shoulders.  These things have been weighing on me for weeks.  I verbalized them to Scott and said “what are we going to do?”  Within hours two solutions presented themselves to us without our really doing anything.  The world opened itself to us.  We stepped through and we’ll see where these opportunities lead.  But what if we didn’t step through?  These opportunities may not yet be official solutions, but now they have the power to be.  If we hadn’t accepted what was being offered in opportunity, we’d still be back at square one.

The point of all this?  Be open to possibility, to opportunity, and to solutions.  Be one of the lucky ones.

-D

I’ve started and stopped a post every day for the last couple of weeks.  There’s been a lot on my mind and I’ve been struggling to express it all.  I feel I’ve been overwhelmingly overflowing with thoughts and ideas, but have taken a step back to observe.  The words observe, process, and progress have stuck at the forefront of my brain for the last couple of weeks.  Then, I was listening to a talk by Gabrielle Bernstein and she was challenging the idea that personal self-growth is a time-limited event…some goal we reach for and attain at some point.  To those people saying “well I’ve done XYZ to grow spiritually and as a person, I’m done, I’ve grown, yay me!” Gabrielle says “What Did You Do Today?”  Bam.  That hit home and brought all these thoughts together.

On Process
In yoga, we are focused on the process NOT the goal.  The goal is the process.  To me, this is yet another perfect analogy of yoga to life.  Perfection in yoga is being present, focused, aware and respectful of exactly where we are at in this moment.  The old adage “it’s about the journey, not the destination” is true no matter how cliché it may be.  We get to our destinations by participating in the journey, there is just no way around it.  The lessons learned don’t come on the day we walk in our caps and gowns across a stage, “graduation” in all its various forms is simply a symbol of the process.

One of my yoga instructors last week said “forget the plan you showed up with today.  Where are you now, in this moment?”  This opened an opportunity for a personal breakthrough for me, because I had shown up with a plan.  I do show up with plans.  And when plans go astray, my biggest challenge is to let go and roll with it.  I always set my intentions for the class at its commencement.  Planning is a good thing, but the plans can take us over.  We can lose touch with our needs in each moment when we perseverate too deeply on the all powerful plan.  We obsess about things happening according to plan, and miss out on the lessons of the process.  In this moment, I realized I had misinterpreted the purpose behind “setting intentions” in yoga.  In setting my intentions, my ego was getting the better of me.  I would say to myself: “My intention for this class is to do every pose without falling out of any posture” or “My intention for class is to work as hard as I possibly can for the full 90 minutes.”  But when I became fatigued later in the class and my body was telling me to pull back slightly, my ego would berate me for losing touch with my intention.  But that’s counterproductive.  Being mean to myself about “failing” in the last posture certainly isn’t helping me focus in the moment on the next one.  Instead, a more helpful intention for me is to say “My intention for class is to be in each moment fully and listen to my body and allow it to do the work it needs to do.  Respect where I am in each moment.  Focus on my breath.  Be here now.”  Once my intention was set to be present here now in each and every moment, on and off the yoga mat, the process revealed itself to me and breakthroughs started to occur.

On Progress
The process becomes progress when we let go and observe.  Interestingly, in yoga as in life, the biggest bursts of my own progress seem to come immediately after a time when things didn’t go according to my plan.  The challenges and barriers arise in the process, and suddenly, we learn something.  In yoga, it always seems breakthroughs in postures (going deeper, for longer, reaching closer to the ideal form of the posture) come after a difficult class.  My body faces the challenges and opens itself to them.  Progress happens in challenge and process.  In life, it’s when I don’t perform well at something that I progress, because I am blessed with opportunities to learn (as long as I can see it for the opportunity it is and don’t fall into a pit of egotistic despair at how atrocious I am as a human being).

Competency is the opposite of progress.  In life, I’d rather receive the “most improved” ribbon than the “#1″ ribbon.  Most improved means I’m progressing.  Fighting against the process, avoiding things that are difficult because we don’t want to look stupid, only doing things we are competent at, and being cruel to ourselves when we don’t “do the best” only serves to stall the progress of the process.  The challenge isn’t about improving, that part will happen naturally simply when we keep working at something.  The challenge comes from allowing  ourselves to be in the process.  It’s often the case that yoga students like to avoid postures that are particularly difficult because they “can’t do it right” and they look forward to the postures that come naturally or with ease.  But it’s the difficult postures that bring about the most progress in our health, well being, and yoga practice.  The same goes for life.  When I was in grade 3 we used “Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing” to learn how to type.  This is way back when the internet didn’t exist in day-to-day life and we had computer labs that we visited once per week, not lap tops on each desk.   I stayed on the “home row” (asdfghjkl) for as long as I possibly could because I was good at it.  My speed was amazing.  I managed to get away with this for a number of weeks, looking as though I was really an amazing typist.  I felt great, but also a little like a cheat…because that’s what I was.  When I finally ventured beyond the “home row,” I didn’t look as awesome as I once did, but it wasn’t until I challenged myself to participate in the process and expand onto the harder keys that I improved my skills.

As another example, let’s take academia.  Students (myself included, at one point) will berate themselves when their thesis proposals or manuscripts come back with revisions.  I remember the first time I received a paper back chalk full of “track changes” and my undergrad supervisor’s comments and deletion/insertions all over the paper.  I was devastated.  Now I recognize the immense value of the red corrections all over my page.  It was part of the process.  I wasn’t a failure as a student, I was simply participating in the process.  No one becomes a tenured professor without participating in the process themselves.  We go to school to learn, but too often students confuse this with perform.  We are not in school to prove our perfection, we are in school to learn, which is a process that allows us to progress.  Yesterday, I received my thesis proposal draft back from my supervisor with quite a few comments and queries from him on areas for me to improve my writing.  8 years ago, this might have devastated me.  Today, it makes me thrilled at the opportunity to progress.

On Observation
Observation has been a theme for me these past few weeks.  On the mat, I’ve been focusing on calm observation of each moment as opposed to the emotional and psychophysiological turmoil that can sometimes occur when we are working hard or struggling with something.  Ego likes to mess us up and have our “monkey mind” work against us while we try to progress.  But instead of progress, we simply end up with struggle.  Once I was able to let go and detach, I’ve found myself progressing in areas of previous struggle in leaps and bounds.  In a particularly difficult posture in yoga, where I may have once become frustrated and upset with myself and my body, I now push myself to the limit and stay there, breathe, and stay calm.  I do not go beyond my limit no matter what my ego tells me to do.  It doesn’t matter that the person beside me is far deeper in the posture.  It doesn’t matter that I wish I was deeper in the posture.  None of that matters.  I simply stay where I am, and allow myself to be in this moment.  When we go beyond our limit, we often end up injuring ourselves or losing the benefit of the process because our bodies let us down (since we’ve let our body down by pushing it too hard.)  I think this works in life as well.  We must know what our limit is and go there, but stay there.  Do not go beyond it.  Simply observe our reactions, our feelings, our inner and outer struggles and stay here.  Work through the process toward progress.  It’s the observation and awareness of ourselves that allow us to do this.  Do not struggle and blame.  In yoga: the heat, the wrong towel or outfit, not having drank enough water, the instructor talking too fast, the annoying person beside us.  In life: the barista making our coffee wrong, the traffic, our spouses, our friends, our bosses, our workloads, etc.  The list of blame goes on and on and on.  Chaos happens, it’s a fact of life.  It’s also a fact that while planning and being organized can be a helpful coping mechanism to improve productivity, it does not control the chaos.  The difference between coping with chaos and allowing the chaos to take us over is the ability to observe each moment calmly and give in to the process.  Forget about the goals, and focus on the process.  One foot in front of the other, one tree stand per day.

What Did You Do Today?
Gabrielle Bernstein helped me pull together these thoughts on process, progress, and observation by reminding me that any kind of growth is not a goal, it’s a journey.  Sure, having goals and ideals and plans can be a helpful thing to keep us on track, but it’s today that matters.  Reminding ourselves to work each day to be our best selves is the best thing we can do.  Throw the plans out the window.  Or keep them, but remind yourself that it’s a guideline, not a rule book.  Be where you are in each moment and observe yourself, observe your environment, and do what you need to do in each moment to be your best self and care for yourself.  It’s not about what you did last year.  It’s not about what you are going to do next year.  What did you do today?  What are you doing right now?  It’s the process.  It’s progress.

My good friend, bronlegu, provided me with inspiration from her words:

“We are only as good as the people we surround ourselves with…and those people are a true testament to who I am.”

I’ve been thinking about that lately, and feeling overwhelming surges of gratitude at the diversity and wealth of the people surrounding me in my life.  I can be hard on people, which comes with the territory of being the kind of person who is very hard on herself.  Sometimes I forget and put my own perfectionism on others.  This isn’t fair, I know.  It’s one more thing added to the list of “D’s stuff to work on.”

So this week has gone as expected: partially as planned, and partially chaotic and unplanned.  That’s a good thing I think.  I’m working toward goals and structure in some areas of my life, but I’m also working toward being consciously freed from the confines of my own expectations.  As I’ve mentioned, September is historically a tough month for me.  It always seems to be a transitionary time for me: one with lots of possibility and opportunity for change, and also one with lots of challenge and life lessons.  This week has been filled with both.  In my less graceful moments, Scott is the one who bears the brunt of it.  He sees me at my worst, when I’m catastrophizing about the world falling apart in all my neuorticism.

He’s come up with all kinds of coping mechanisms, many of which I’ve learned a great deal from.  He has the uncanny ability to make me laugh when I’m one hot mess.  Haha.  This week, he’s developed a new strategy: baking!  He made me cookies on Tuesday when I was having a little mental breakdown (me?  mental breakdown?  never…).  Then I came home from dance class last night to the smell of warm brownies fresh out of the oven.  I’m notorious in our household for “health-nut baking” whereby I try to create delicious things like brownies using non-delicious ingredients so I can have guilt-free indulgence.  My experiments rarely result in the product I’m hoping for.  Scott got fed up with my brownie experiments and baked the real-deal.  All-purpose flour and sugar to boot.  Let me tell you, those were yummy.

The moral of the story?  Well, there’s few:

1) Sometimes a little all-purpose flour and sugar is exactly what you need.  Indulge now and again!

2) Surround yourself with people who will see you at your worst and love you all the same.

3) APPRECIATE those in your life who will make you laugh when the world is falling apart.  TELL them, SHOW them, HUG them.

4) People who make you brownies to sweeten your life are exactly the “best” kind of people I’m talking about.

5) Take a moment to stop and appreciate the small tokens and gestures and love that likely surround you daily, and you take for granted.  Say it out loud.  ”I appreciate you.”

If you have someone in your life that makes you brownies, INDULGE!

Pre-script: Since I’m training as a yoga instructor this year, I must warn you posts like this one might become more and more frequent.  I’ll do my best not to relate everything to yoga, okay?

Growing up a dancer, I’ve become quite fond of imagery to assist in completing tasks successfully.  Imagine you are jumping on delicate flowers that you cannot squish.  NO ELEPHANT FEET! Pretend you are pushing your foot through thick peanut butter as you tendu.  And so on…

So my point is, imagery, metaphors, and analogies work for me.  But, as I was chatting with my academic friend the other day she commented “I enjoy yoga, but please don’t become one of those teachers who tells me my problems are going to poor out of my finger tips!”  Her point was, she sees the purpose of yoga, but she’s a logical and rational being who doesn’t fall for those lies!  No, her problems really wouldn’t literally pour out of her fingers.  At the end of yoga class, the world is still waiting for us with all its problems, whether those are revisions to a thesis proposal or a personal crisis.  Perhaps, I pointed out, it’s more reasonable to tell yoga students to imagine their problems pouring out of their finger tips.  Perhaps, instead, the purpose of yoga is not to solve all things but to better equip us to cope with what the world throws at our heads (yes, sometimes I like to imagine when things are going poorly that the world is a group of bullies throwing stinky gym shoes at my head.)  But semantics about the most appropriate way to address the yoga analogy aside, I am continually amazed at how appropriately yoga analogizes life.  It’s sort of ridiculous, actually.

Monday evening was my first day back in the Bikram studio for about a year and a half.  Prior to that I practiced Bikram studiously for about a year and a half, which ended abruptly when I wasn’t properly nourished to handle the major stressors in my life at the time and my 30-day yoga challenge.  30 days of 90 minutes in a sweltering hot room sweating my…well…you know….sweating A LOT.  By day 26, I had sweated out every last ounce of energy, I was emotionally and physically exhausted, and my back was in a rebound spasm.  I had nothin’ left.  I remember laying on the couch all akimbo with tears pouring out of my face (but I wasn’t crying, ever have one of those cries…you aren’t crying but the tears keep coming?  It’s easy to jump from those moments into pure existential crisis mode, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here).

Scott was all “Dude, you’re mangled.”  I was all “I gotta get up and go to yoga!”  Scott was all “Dude, you’re mangled”  I was all “WAAAAHHH!  Don’t make fun of me!!!!”  Scott was all “Dude, you’re….” oh never mind…we eventually pulled ourselves outta the circular discussion to this:

Scott: “Seriously, 30 day challenge ends on day 27.  You’re done.”
ME: “WAAAAHHHH!  I’m a failure!!!  I gotta go to YOOOOGGGGA!”
Scott: You can barely move.  You can go to yoga if you can lift even one part of your body 45 degrees off the couch.  Try your arm, you might be able to move your arm.”
ME: (face turning blue with effort, desperation in eyes with the effort to prove my super human body moving abilities)….aaauuuugggghhhh. AUGGHGHHGHGH.  I can, I promise.  Augh.  I can’t.  (Flopped back on couch facing existential crisis: if I can’t lift my arm off the couch, do I really exist?!?!)
Scott: You’re done.
ME: *sigh.  *tear.  *sniffle.  *defeat.  ”Yeah, I know.”
Scott: It’s cool, you just need to rest up, get some food in ya, and mend your back.  27 days is AWESOME!  Be proud!  You can go back when you feel better.
(These kinds of conversations between Scott and I happen a little more frequently than I’d like to admit.  The guy deserves a medal.)

…Then life happens…and here we are a year and a half later…

So I was STOKED to get back to the studio.  I was ready, willing, and prepared.  The night before I had packed up my bag with all of my Bikram essentials:

• skimpy Bikram costume that I wear with pride and try not to look too closely in the mirror while I’m in it (essentially a bikini if you’ve never been to a Bikram class): CHECK.
• THREE towels (two for the studio to pour my problems…er…buckets of sweat onto, one for the glorious shower afterward): CHECK
• Emergen-C packets in case my body goes into full reject mode and needs a few electrolytes: CHECK
• two water bottles because yeah, you need ‘em: CHECK

After work, I made a nice healthy meal, because I was not going to make the same mistake I made before and forget to fuel my body properly.  I ate with a couple of hours leeway so I could be sure I had properly digested (no one wants to be that person in the Bikram studio).  Off I went, with a little “Woohoo!  First day back at yoga!” statement to Scott as I hopped in my car.  I left him shaking his head and following Walter around the backyard with a poo bag waiting to scoop up saying “Go two Wally!  Go two.  It’s okay!  Go two!”  Yes, our dog likes imagery and coaching, as much as me.

Here’s me:  But I haven’t even paid for my membership, or gotten changed, or been toured around the new studio, or ANYTHING.  They’re going to be all “Whoa, FAUX PAS little lady.  Turn yourself right back around and get the HELL OUTTA OUR YOGA STUDIO because anyone who shows up so LATE is obviously lacking in anything resembling respect or appreciation for the fine art of Bikram Yoga.  Oh yeah, and you suck as a person all around.”  No, I told myself, I can’t go, they’re going to yell at me and hate me forever.   I’m going to be THAT girl, who shows up at the yoga studio all disjointed and discombobulated and they’re going to kick me out.  You suck.  Go home.

Then I think (you know, the other me): (cue magical epiphany lighting) What am I thinking?!?!  You came all this way to go to yoga, you’ve been so excited.  Of COURSE you are going to march into that studio and yoga it up!  What’s the worst that can happen?  They say “Sorry, you’re too late for today’s class.”  Seriously?  This isn’t the world endin’ honey, this is you being a chicken.  Get your butt in there.

So I open the car door and start walking across the parking lot toward the studio.  I stop dead.  I forgot my yoga mat…at home.

Here’s me: Oh my god, you are SUCH a loser.  Get back in your car and go home.  You have no right to be here.  You forgot your YOGA mat?  SO DUMB.  Dumbdumbdumbdumb.

I walk back to my car and get in.  I sit there.  I realize that what’s dumb is me backing down from my goal over such minor barriers.  I can just rent a mat!  YAY!  TRIUMPH!  I get out of the car and start walking with determination toward the studio, “dumbdumb” chimes in: Where’s your wallet, dumb dumb?

Head hung low, I start walking back to my car.  I had left it at home on purpose because I wouldn’t need it while doing yoga.  I don’t have the $3.00 needed to rent a yoga mat from the studio.  I am defeated.

Smart-me takes over the attempts to steer me in the right direction: You can just tell them the truth.  Maybe they’ll let you pay the $3.00 tomorrow.  What’s the harm in asking?  You are wasting time with all this indecision and uncertainty.  Just go through the doors, ask the questions, see what happens.  You’re going to feel way worse if you give up before you even started.  Don’t be ridiculous.  

I continue to walk back and forth in slight circles in the parking like I I’m running some weird drills or having a seizure, smart-me and dumb-dumb arguing about how to handle these clearly catastrophic circumstances.

Somehow, I stop, turn on my heel and walk through the doors of the studio.  It was kind of like when you have to mentally trick yourself to jump off the high diving board as a kid.  You stop yourself from thinking and just go…pushing your body over the edge before your rationale mind kicks in to try to stop you from killing yourself.  Then in mid-air you start to protest to yourself, but it’s too darn late.

I am greeted by a pleasant, friendly, and bustling atmosphere if yogis and yoginis.  Everyone is friendly, easy going, and happy.  No one seems to care what time it was or that I don’t have a mat.  When I explain about my mat, the girl at the desk doesn’t even flinch.  She simply hands me a mat, smiles, and says “just bring the $3.00 next time, if you remember.”  TRIUMPH!  I overcame a series of ridiculous and innocuous pseudo-setbacks to achieve my goal. I am at Bikram.  Yogic life, here I come.

Later, laying in my Savasana (dead corpse pose) awaiting the start of class my mind wanders to the events leading up to the present.  I am struck by the obviousness of the analogy.  In yoga, we talk about “taming the monkey mind’, which is basically what I nearly let take me over en route to yoga.  The monkey mind is that impulsive instinctual part of our minds that flits from one thing to the next, without any rationale thought or control.  In yoga, the monkey mind usually takes over when we become fearful of a challenging pose and talk ourselves out of trying it.  The ongoing work in yoga is to find yourself exactly where you are in the moment, that is, to reach your limits and not go beyond them.  You want to touch your limit, challenge yourself, and then persevere.  Going beyond our limits in yoga usually leads to injury.  Not touching our limits, usually means no progress.  We work to get ego out of the picture, and focus on breath and posture and just be where we are in that pose at that moment.  Some of the best yogis lack depth in some postures, but have perfect alignment and breath, exactly where they are at.  

I can’t help but smile at myself.  Once again, the yoga analogy is clear in my life.  We so often back down from aspirations, big and small, because very minor obstacles get in our way.  Our monkey mind reacts frantically and we lose perspective.  I very nearly skipped out on a yoga class because of very silly barriers.  Missing a yoga class isn’t the end of the world, but I know that I want and need to be in the studio.  Had I given into my monkey mind, I would have blamed traffic, google maps, Scott sending me a picture at the same time I was trying to read the map on my phone, my stupid yoga mat for being all the way downstairs that I forgot it, and the list would go on.  Had I not made it to class, I would know deep down that it was because I gave up.

In yoga, it’s the postures we like the least, and are the worst at executing, that we need the most.  Our bodies reject them because our egos and monkey minds think “well I can’t do this perfectly, so I shouldn’t do it.”  It’s the opposite!  We should be doing these difficult postures over and over and over.  It’s the same outside the studio.  The cliché  “Anything worth doing is difficult” is so true.  We need to put ourselves in uncomfortable and challenging positions even though we’re scared of looking stupid and out of shape.

Class is amazing.  My body remembers and says “thank you for bringing me here today.”  I do not feel stupid or awkward and no one yells at me (obviously).  I am rewarded by huge amounts of endorphins coursing through my body by the end of class.  I come home happy, rejuvenated, and full of life.  I feel at ease, confident, and impressed with my ability to overcome the potential implosion of all things.  I realize how often we are defeated by the small stuff that gets in our way, sometimes more easily than the big stuff that tries to stop us.  When we face big stuff, I think we know that we have to overcome.  But our monkey mind creates drama with the small stuff and we use it to avoid facing ourselves.  After my 30-day challenge a year and a half ago, I gave up, because I was scared of failing again.  I love the analogy of yoga because in yoga, there’s no success or pinnacle or achievement.  Yoga’s success is in the process.  In the showing up, being in the studio, and doing what you can.  In listening to your true self, and ignoring the monkey mind.  Scott was right after day 27…I needed a break.  But I hadn’t failed, it was simply part of the process.

My instructor yesterday was talking about seeing people in the street who feel compelled to provide reasons why they’ve not been at yoga in a while.  He reminded us that being at yoga is about us, and not him.  He also talked about us choosing how difficult or easy our class is and that none of it has to do with successes or failures.  He talked about one class where he stayed in Savasana (corpse pose) the entire class.  He didn’t do one posture.  But he felt great after class nonetheless.  He hadn’t failed.  He had gone to yoga and done what he could at that time.  Simply being in the studio and deciding where we are at in this moment, meeting but not exceeding our limits, acknowledging that each day and each posture those limits may change – some days some postures will be easier or harder than others.  Achievement and success in yoga has no place.  None of that matters.  Being where we are , who we are, what we are right now is all that matters.

How can we ignore this obvious analogy to life?

I am here.

-D

“Who is imprisoning us in suffering? Your mother? Your father? Your boss? The person who cut you off on the highway? Are they the ones who are imprisoning you in suffering? No! We are our own jail-keeper. We construct the prison, we put ourselves inside the cell, we lock it up and throw away the key. And then we blame the world for it.” – Venerable Thubten Chodron