Fourth Form of Madness

A few weeks back a ripper of a storm tore through my suburb. It was so bad it broke our garage door, knocked a few trees over and left us (and many others without power) for two days. I love storms, all that untamed and uncontrolled naturalness and I got to admit I also liked the effect of being without power for two days (once I got over not having a hot shower!).

We have so much technology buzzing around us, there is always this phone to answer, this tv show to watch, this twitter to read and so on into infinity, one distraction rolling into another, so we become constantly distracted. With the electricity out, it cut out a fair bit of this noise. So when my husband, my mother (who is currently living with me) and I found ourselves at home for the second night in a row in the dark, we embraced the situation and made it fun. We ordered pizzas in (yay good excuse for junk food) as we had no cooking facilities and did not trust most of the food in our fridge by this stage (I studied microbiology for a semester at uni – I’m a little touchy about micro growth in food in uncooled conditions, and don’t get me started on wooden chopping boards!). We sat around enjoying our pizza and apple cider (luckily the bottle shop still had power) and discussed what was going on in our lives over numerous vanilla scented candles. It was beautiful and I felt like I had spent some quality time with both my mother and husband instead of my usual style of trying to fit conversation around writing a text or during commercial breaks. After a chat, we all huddled closely around my Mac which had enough power on it to watch a movie I had downloaded a few days earlier (okay so we did fall back on distracting technology just a tad but at least we were huddled together :-)). When it was time for bed we each took a candle, bid each other goodnight and went to our candlelit bedrooms. It was a really special evening.

On reflection this whole evening reminded me of one of my favourite Greek philosophers, Seneca. Seneca was one of the great Greek Stoics. So what’s a Stoic? In a nutshell, stoic philosophy generally follows the principle that life will run as it does and it is not for you to mould life into the shape that you want it to be, but rather for you to let life be, and learn not to let it disturb you so. To keep a constant temperament, regardless of whether conditions are good or bad in your life. Sound familiar? To me the teachings of Buddha are very similar to Seneca, even though Buddha walked a very different part of the earth almost 500 years prior to his Greek contemporary. I guess really good concepts need to keep coming up across the ages, cause we might miss them the first time billion times they come to us.

One of my favourite Seneca quotes goes something like this “Each month, for two days, go without all those things you think you could not live without and you are scared of losing. At the end of this two days, you will see, you can live out these things, life will still roll on with or without them. With this realisation these things will no longer have any power over you and you have increased your freedom.” I love this advice, I’m yet to put it in practice on a regular basis but I still love this advice.

So I guess that those two nights without power was an enforced Seneca retreat of some kind. I enjoyed it, it gave me time to reconnect with my husband and my mother, it gave me a welcome break from the computer and it allowed me to enjoy one of my biggest joys in life, vanilla candles!!!!!! Maybe, just maybe that Seneca was onto something!

Part of the criteria for my yoga teacher training course is assisting. Attending classes to offer assistance to participants. This has prompted a lot of questions asking within myself, not only for the situations that arise within the class but on a more holistic level, the ethics of assistance. Mainly, when do you know someone needs assistance and what ultimately, within yourself, do you use to make a decision whether to offer assistance or not.

Firstly, the yoga class situation, when should one assist and from what place within should you come from? This divided me for some time as I feel with yoga the aesthetic creeps in where it has no place. For me, if you are assisting to make the body look better, to match some perfect picture in some book, you probably shouldn’t offer the assistance. Mostly asanas unfold like, life, they come out of nothing, into something, whatever that something is for that person, and then should go back to nothing. Just like the flow of life. For me, if anything looks like it might take out a knee, a neck a shoulder, that is if it is going to cause harm, if there is a need, I assist.

Shifting to a more holistic view of the world, this is pretty much how I feel about the ethics of assistance on a global scale. If there is a need, assist. But what inside you actually gets you to the door of assisting and actually doing it? Peter Singer has some very interesting theory on this topic my favourite being his example of at what point do you decide not to assist in terms of distance between you and the person requiring assistance. In the example, there is a young girl that can not swim and she has fallen into a deep pond. You walk past but 10 metres away – would you render assistance? I hope I can safely say that you would. Now you walk past and you are 300 metres away and you have to cross some obstacles to get to her and give up catching a train that would take you on holiday. Think about your answer. Now you are in a cafe a few streets away, you hear about the girl in the pond through Facebook, she still needs assistance, but you have just started an important business meeting and you are fairly certain that someone closer will help if you don’t – would you still render assistance?

Singer was referring to geographical distance and factors in your code of ethics that determine for you in what situation you would assist. I think another interesting distance to be explored, if we are to examine this area, is the distance between what you consider “you” and the “other”. If we think of people as not us, or even not like us, then the distance between “yourself” and other people’s needs, naturally widens and allows you comfortably to disregard the suffering of others as not your problem. If we can harbour feelings of sameness, the fact that we all face this world with so many unanswered questions, we are all going to share in the same heart aches and joys, birth, sickness, death, this kind of binds us and manifests a ground level compassion and empathy for all. We can walk across this bridge that compassion provides and towards a place where everyone is an extension of each other. When one sees someone else as merely an extension of their own arm, their own heart, their own thoughts, then there will be no need for the talk of the ethics of assisting. Until then talk and theory is all we have, oh yes and the actual doing 🙂

I love storms. I love being reminded that no one, no person, no corporation, no religion, no class, no ideology, controls nature. It’s refreshing because in the everyday “you have to pay your mortgage world” it is easy to forgot this when every message hitting your five senses is screaming at you otherwise. Learning to turn the senses down and re-learning how to tune into nature is a path worth learning. There are many different paths to learning this, best to listen to yourself on what works best for you – be it meditation, yoga, gardening, fishing, surfing etc etc. But why isn’t such a valuable skill taught in every education system? Surely education should extend itself to more than just “book learning” but rather also to learning life skills and being able to use them in everyday life.

Has our educational system become to focussed on what gets you a job rather than what gives a person a complete set of skills to live their life through? Why so much emphasis on getting a job anyway? When did the educational system become more about churning out the next generation of workers than well rounded citizens of the world? I’m hearing the “c” word being said – yep capitalism. The big C stepped up and the focus became producing and more producing with less interest in who the worker was and more of a focus on that there be a worker there. Any worker, faceless, nameless, but able to do the job. Alienation yes but not from the product being produced, alienation from self, total isolation from the value of your self just as you are, standing apart from the function you perform at work. You are not a job title, no matter how societal structures (and lets face it, other people) try to make you believe you are.

Many people share the same job title, but no one shares your existence as you. You are the only one with a window seat ticket to that one! The problem is, if you believe you are your job title (whether you consciously realise you are doing this or not) you start to believe that you are the same and interchangeable with everyone else that shares your job title. Suddenly it becomes competitive, where in your “make believe” sameness suddenly you realise you must do something to distinguish yourself out from the rest, make yourself important, unique. The irony is, in your natural state, you are already unique and vitally important. So there you are, chasing the dragon so to speak on the outside when the bounty your after lies waiting for you within the whole time.

Oh its a topsy turvy old world. The only way that sense can be made of it, is to turn to nature. Good old, reliable, unbiased, unfettered, free of suffocating ideology, nature. Accessible to all without prejudice or preference.

For a while now our back fence has been broken due to an over zealous puppy dog hurling himself at cats that gave chase in his yard. When it first happened I went out to say goodbye to my dog before leaving for work (he’s like my child what can I say). I called and called but he wasn’t to be found. Then just as I was about to launch a full scale search and rescue, I heard a faint voice come from over the fence…. “He’s over here, he came for a visit and now my son wants to keep him.” I was bewildered, how on earth had he managed to get over the fence, did puppy have some levitating powers I did not know about? Then I saw it, a big smashed panel in the far right hand corner of our yard. When puppy wants something he gets it, for a small dog he sure has some latent energy he can unleash should the situation calls for it.

Now I’m guessing but I would say that was over two years ago! There were many moments that hubby and I discussed getting it fixed, it went on the official must fix list, but nothing ever eventuated. Then this morning, as I was getting ready for yoga, I looked out across to that section of the fence. At first I thought I was seeing an illusion, you know the sort where you focus on something so much, you actually think it has come about (maybe that is just me :-)). No the fence had definitely been fixed but hubby didn’t say anything. Upon inquiring about the fence hubby replied “Yeah I fixed it over a week ago, I was waiting for you to notice.” After making a note that I must practice mindful awareness more, hubby interrupted to say “I better tell you this one or there is a change you will never notice, but I have taken the vent out of the back toilet window as well”. He was right, that one might have gone an eternity before I noticed, even though I have lived in this house for over 7 years.

Then I wondered how many things in life go past us like this? Where we look but we are not really seeing. Many of us have had the experience where we arrive at a destination only to realise that we can’t remember really being engaged with driving there. Scary stuff. If life exists in your experiences, then the trick is to really experience them. This does not mean to slow down to snails pace so you can give yourself time to absorb every detail. It means slowing down your mind so that you are only where your physical body is. Yep you got it, the physical body can only be in the moment, positioned in space and time, the mind well that’s a bit of a nomadic wanderer that will follow any road that it sees. Maybe a way of reducing it’s Jack Kerouac nature is to really embody it. Perhaps real embodiment comes from noticing and experiencing all that is around you in all your physicality, just as it is, no add ons from the mind. Or perhaps not. Either way I have to go, I meant to be studying and so far, I have had a sleep, walked the dog, cooked some soup!