Fourth Form of Madness

My favourite kind of learning (aka unlearning) is the type that happens when you not even thinking of it or focusing on it, not asking for it so to speak. When I first started hot yoga I wasn’t a great big fan. I don’t really like the heat, which is not good when you live in one of the hottest parts of the world, but I endured it. To be honest that is what I felt I did for a long time with hot yoga, I endured it but it was quite the mental exercise. As I sat and watched all these negative thoughts parade around my existence, I suddenly kind of got it! I began to see that this is what I have been doing with life in some way, enduring it, bearing it whilst all the while carrying around all these negative beliefs. When people are asked how they want to live their life you don’t hear them usually respond “I want to endure it’. So why was I?

This was the tricky part, why was I doing this? Hot yoga helped me out again with a bit of a visual aid, my legs in shorts of all things. For as long as I can remember I have struggled with weight issues. When I was growing up, I was always the kid that got called “fatso” or “blubber ball”. I thought I was beautiful but then I was a kid what would I know :-). I was put on diets and encouraged to be like everyone else. Fast forward a few years to sweet sixteen and it turns out to be not so sweet with one of my nannas dying of cancer, my aunty dying of breast cancer and my other nanna suffering a major bout of mental illness. I spiralled into an out of control eating disorder, which ironically at the time, I think I started to actually feel like I could gain some control over my life. There are many rabbit holes we can all fall into as we navigate mind, this is a particularly deep and unpleasant hole. I spent many years of living the mental agony that is anorexia, and it was during this period I taught myself, and unfortunately I’m a good learner, that life was to be endured.

Then today in hot yoga, I found myself in down dog looking at my bare legs as I was wearing shorts. Hot yoga has brought me to shorts due to the heat. Now I try never to wear shorts in public, even in my uber skinny mysore days, I rarely wore shorts as I have loads of dimples and lumps and bumps for going from a larger size down to a littler size all to quickly. My thinking was along the lines “I can’t wear shorts, I’m not skinny enough, I have lumps and bumps”. But here I was staring at the two most gorgeous dimply, lumpy, bumpy legs in creation and I felt so in love with myself that I was starting to wonder if I had hung upside down for far too long. However, back in an upright position, settling in for a nice, still meditation helped along by staring out of the window at nature, one of my favourite friends, I suddenly get as my mantra “Let yourself be magnificent”. Well this is new. I never have used a mantra like this before. So I give it a go and it suits me really well. I feel so at ease there in my shorts and my dimples and I start to feel that at any point in the past I could have felt this way, it is just that I have chosen now.

Afterwards, as I am reflecting on the class and this new found love for my legs (and the rest of me and life) I realised that for a long time I had held the belief that life must be perfect, that nothing bad or more aptly put, life-like, must be happening to you in order to be able to love your life, to love yourself and to quite literally shine. Clearly this belief was wrong and as I relish in my new magnificence, I send a pray of gratitude for this wonderful lesson of unlearning and to my teacher, that through her wisdom, brought us the hot yoga experience.

I worked late this week and decided to treat myself to a taxi instead of the bus on the last 15 mins of the journey. I love taxi rides. When I was working in the stockbroking industry I got to take a lot of them and got to meet some really cool people with wonderful life stories to tell. I can honestly say some of the best advice I have received has been from taxi drivers. I have been told “to hold my truth in life even when it is no-one else’s” by one powerful yet gentle woman driver and that the one thing you can guarantee in life “is the vast space” from one very mystic driver that seemed to know a good deal about yoga and could stop your heart with his intense stare not to mention his laugh.

However, my personal favourite will always be a very well dressed Indian mini cab driver who literally appeared out of no-where when I was 21 and down and out in London. There I was lamenting in my head about all the woes in my life in the back seat of a brand new Mercedes (yes I know I had never been in a mini cab that was so plush, usually they were all ready for the pits). He proceeded to chat about the beauty of life and his many daughters and in between all this told me “to know your own power that is all that is asked of any of us”. Somewhere in the rapture of his words, I remembered I needed to go to the cash teller (this was the days before Visa and eftpos in taxis). Upon hearing I didn’t have enough money to get me to my house he answered “Don’t worry, I will always get you home when you come with me, you don’t need money”. His words seemed to hang in the air and have always stayed with me. When he dropped me at my flat I remember standing in the middle of the road for about 5 minutes just watching the taxi drive out of view and feeling like something really important had just happened although I wasn’t really sure what it was.

So here I was 2 days ago flopping into a taxi after a long day at work. A storm was brewing and there was that amazing energy you feel in the air before the lightening starts cracking. I turn to my taxi driver and am struck with what a kind and joyous face he has, clearly this man loves life. Then he starts talking in his eastern european accent and randomly smiling at me from the corner of his mouth, I am already in love with his spirit. Life has been tough for him over the last few years as he struggled to keep his taxi business afloat. The only reason he has done it is to ensure that his son would have a job but now all the taxi driver’s money was gone and he couldn’t keep going this way. This man I guessed was about 60, as I listened I felt my stomach register fear, fear for him and fear of that situation. I needed hadn’t bothered. In the next breath he is talking me through how one day he thought “I can’t continue this path for much longer, I need to create an alternative for myself”. So he did, he had for the last few years being studying various safety courses. He walked me through his 5 year plan and how he anticipated, that after getting a job in the safety industry, would study part time at uni to get a degree qualification. I didn’t doubt a word of it. I couldn’t help admiring how throughout his whole story this man was smiling and joyous and excited about life. I just beamed at him with awe and sent a silent thank you out to the universe that I should be so lucky to spent some time with such a beautiful and powerful being. And he was powerful, as I listened I heard a person that did not rely on the outside to tell him what he could and couldn’t do but trusted his own self and instinct to create his life and his experience of it. Talk about knowing your power, this gentle man reminded me how powerful creativity is and how it opens up a person and their life. I can’t wait until my next taxi journey!

My husband is a bit of a fitness freak! Love him dearly but sometimes even I shake my head and wonder what planet he came from. Like the times when he decides to cycle 20kms to bjj training, do not one but two sessions, and then cycle 20kms home, all on days that would be best spent in the pool with with a cocktail in hand. However, this week I have been very grateful for his fitness expertise as I have commenced, under his very mindful and slightly amused eye, a morning kettle bell routine.

Now it doesn’t look hard and only involves a smallish looking 8 kg kettle bell but oh my what a workout! A day before the official start hubby and I assembled in the makeshift gym in our house otherwise known as the lounge room. He proceeds to give me a demonstration of the 4 exercises I will be doing in my 4 minute (yes you read right 4 minutes but trust me people it feels like 30 mins). I proceed to break out into girly laughter as I realise how hot my husband is when he is in his earnest instructor mood whilst at the same time making a mental note to check out how many girls attend his fitness classes he sometimes gives at bjj. After establishing that I am “such a child”, hubby advises me it is my turn. I pick up the kettle bell, apparently totally incorrectly, and after ripping half my lower back, proceed to rip the remaining half as I kettle swing away.

Surviving that experience, it was on to exercise number two – one handed kettle swings. From the onset I didn’t feel confident about this one but not wanting to disappoint, I bent properly this time and picked the little bugger up (my affectionate name for the kettle bell) with my left hand. I gave it the best swing I could give but things did not feel well in my elbow and I was a little bit afraid I might let go of the thing mid swing and end up with a nice new window into our garage. We decided that this exercise clearly was not in my reach at this moment. As it turned out neither was the third. What hubby had made look so easier actually turned out to be incredibly hard.

This left me with deep squats, yay cause I really can’t get enough of those things particularly when I am holding an 8kg kettle bell and having to put my elbows inside my knees. Who thinks up these exercises, I would like to meet them and give them a big dose of Prozac because clearly they are suffering from severe depression to want the body to go through so much pain. Anyway dramatics aside, I am proud to say that 3 times this week (hubby thought it was best to start at 3 sessions a week until I am conditioned, but secretly I think it is until he is conditioned to my moaning and protesting) I have ploughed through my routine. Come the 3rd one I felt like Rocky Balboa and was looking for stairs to run up and down whilst humming the Rocky theme, until I caught sight of myself in my shortie pjs and dishevelled hair and thought it best for the world if I just hit the showers.

So onwards and upwards with week two looming…….who knows I might even built a few muscles and actually be able to do the other two exercises….anything is possible I guess with such a hot instructor to impress!

You could really bend yourself out of shape with trying to work out what is beauty. Seriously give it a go. Are we talking about physical beauty, or spiritual beauty? Is beauty universal or do we trust the saying that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder?”. Is it all about aesthetic beauty or is there something deeper. I like to work with these starting thoughts sometime. I can not say I know for sure what beauty is by definition but I certainly know when I am in its presence.

It may be different for everybody but to me the most beautiful thing in the world is kindness. My definition of kindness may be a little different from others or it may be the same. I find the kindness that reduces me to a humble piece of jelly is usually always linked with courage. The two seem to hang out together often and I think as kindness is a choice, and choices so often require courage, they thrive in each others company. I have a friend that cries if she sees anything sad about dogs, in fact, I have, in the past, read books before her so I could tell her that nothing bad happened to the dog and it is safe to read. I know how she feels. If I am in the presence of true kindness I am always reduced to a quivering crying mess not worthy of a beauty so great.

I find the real kindness that levels me is the sort that is done without anything to be gained by the person doing the act. I remember one such act when I was 17 and had just finished my year 12 exams. One of my father’s good friends had just passed away suddenly due to a massive heart attack. His wife, who was a teacher, and who had been devastated by the loss, had happened to see my name in the newspaper regarding the exam results a week later. Even with all that she was enduring, she brought me a card and a congratulation gift and dropped it off at my home. When I got home later that day with my high school sweetheart in tow, I was blown away to find the gift and card waiting for me. As I read the card and her kind and supportive words of encouragement, my thoughts were with her loss and her pain. How had she managed to rise above all that to think of someone else, to offer such beautiful words about life? I couldn’t stop crying tears that seemed to come straight from my heart much to the astonishment of boyfriend and mother who kept saying “I thought you would be happy”.

Why indeed are some people so selflessly kind? Is it a strong sense of who they are? A strong sense of what is intrinsically the way to live? Is it a lack of ego? This question has intrigued me for a while and I have studied several public people as case studies, perhaps one of my favourites being Gandhi. By far the Gandhi story that touches me the most occurred well before he was the “Gandhi” we all know today. He was a lawyer living in South Africa and he had boarded a train to go to work and had taken a seat. This was the time of apartheid and only “white” skins were allowed to take seats. The train conductors advised him that he must move, Gandhi was astonished and remained seated. They repeated their commands to move. Something in Gandhi that day stayed grounded and refused to obey their authority. He realised that even though the whole train was staring at him and he was about to get beaten, he would not move, could not move as it was a matter of principle, of equality and not just his but for all South Africans, for all people that weren’t being treated equally. He did get beaten and humiliated and he did suffer injury to his body, but I am guessing that his soul was just fine and was just starting to find its true strength. That day Gandhi chose more than not moving for his own well being, he chose not to give up his seat as an act of kindness towards all those that were being denied one. Such acts of kindness don’t get more beautiful than that!