Fourth Form of Madness

I have always struggled with attachment to money.  Growing up when I  suffered from a low opinion of myself, I guess I began to equate money with worth, a common mistake.  It seems ugly and almost ludicrous when you write it down in front of you, but I think I actually thought that if you had more money you were worth more, your opinions were worth more, your beliefs, your jokes were funnier – you get the picture.  I’m sure I just didn’t invent this belief system by myself, I am sure, like many of us, I thought this way as a result of the social that I, and all of us, have been emerged in on a day to day basis.  The social where “What do you do for a living?” is more often said and meant than “How are you, are you well?”.

Somewhere along the line, and I have no idea how this works, the practice of  yoga dissolved this belief system within myself, without me even realising it.  There have been many things that yoga has “magically” dissolved from within me.  I use the word magically here because to me it is sheer magic and a mystery how yoga works and whilst I may never understand or know it’s inner mysteries, I can’t deny the experience of it working in mine and many other lives.  Perhaps the best example of yoga’s dissolving powers is with my fear of death.  I had not your average fear of death.  Literally, all jokes aside, I could make myself hyperventilate at the very thought of dying, either dying myself or my loved ones.  For many years my husband used to say to me, “You really need to get over this fear of death, it’s preventing you from living”.  Not so easy when you are breathing into a brown paper bag just over the mere mention of the word.

Then I started practising yoga, regularly and steadily.  With passion and a love so deep.  Just practising, just showing up and breathing.  Eventually any agenda that i may have had, like to do a achieve a hand stand, to stretch further etc etc dissolved away.  Without any effort.  But what I didn’t notice was a lot of the other things that were also dissolving, practising out of me :-).  Until called upon, I never really realised how much yoga had changed my way of viewing the world, people, my place and the big events like dying.

Last year my father passed away from an aggressive cancer that left him bedridden the last five months of his life.  My mother, brother and I had a roster that we followed so that every day he would have someone sit with him, to just be there with him.  To almost everyone else Dad played the “Yep I am going to beat this cancer” card, with me he was honest.  He knew he was dying and was afraid and for some reason, the first time in my life, I wasn’t afraid to talk death or to listen and hear my father working through his thoughts and fears of his fate.  To allow him this space, to be accepting of this part of his life and to live it with dignity and a respect for life rather than in a constant state of denial that the modern medical system sometimes seems to demand of the patient, was some of the most inmate moments of life and I feel blessed I got to share those moments with my father.

Our sessions on “dying” started very simply one day, after he had ripped a feeding tube from his nose and sent the nurses scurrying from the room with his cries of despair.  Not knowing what to do, I simply laid my hands on his face to bring him the comfort of touch. Touch has now become one of my favourite senses, (and yet only about a year ago I didn’t really like to touch people).  I wasn’t sure if my father was going to like my hands on his face, he never been one for actions like this but within minutes he asked me not to stop whatever I was doing and so I continued and gave him an hours worth of this simple hands on session.  Half way through he was sleeping so soundly and peacefully and the feeling in the room had changed from one of despair and angst to peace and serenity.

From then on each visit with my father started with this simple session of hands on therapy at his request.  I brought some music and we would often sit there for long periods.  However, one day during the gentle hands on therapy, my father made a simple request – “Talk to me of yoga”.  I was a little confused at first.  He had always made a little fun of my yoga practice and me for doing it.  He used to call me swarmi which he knew annoyed me to no end , which is why he probably kept calling me that.  Then I got it, he wasn’t talking about asanas, or breathing or any of the practices of yoga, he was talking about union, union of opposites such as life and death.

How does one even begin to talk about these unknowns and does anyone ever get the authority to talk of such things?  So I pre-empted these discussions   with the statement “I can’t tell you what I know, because do we ever really know anything, but I can share with you only the very limited experience I have had”.  And so we began our sessions of life, death and other things.  Out of them my father developed his own mantra, just the simple word “energy”.  He used to whispher it to me at the beginnings of our periods of sitting together and I saw the comfort and serenity he created for himself just with this simple mantra and I would whisper it back and squeeze his hand and together we would sit as life rolled on, through and between us.

After yoga class today, one of the ladies took me aside and confided that she found the rest and relaxation class that I take the hardest of all yoga styles.  I understood where she was coming from, this very gentle, very grounding, minimal movement orientated yoga is indeed hard for many people to embrace.  There aren’t any tricky, taxing movements to be accomplished or to distract the mind away.  The mind is laid out bare, stripped of all pretences and stories or rabbit holes to slip down and away into.  Just the breath and the joining of that rhythm to the rhythm of existence.  It’s not for everyone and yet it is there for everyone.

There were many ways I could have answered her admission of her struggle with breath and movement (with innate peace) – I chose to listen to her story and hear her story as the story of us all.  We hide behind so many aspects of our lives.  There are our social roles of mother, father, daughter, son, wife, doctor, teacher etc.  Our achievements and statuses, our identities we create, that we cling to.  Sometimes, to me, it seems that yoga can just become another one of the things we hide behind, that we use as a buffer between us and reality (what ever the cool kids are calling reality these days).  Mistaking our social creations for the non-social, the innate and enduring.  Do you think a dog knows it is a dog?  A label that we have created in a language, our language not the dogs.  I don’t think so.  Do you think the dog knows it is alive, living and breathing and chasing cats – this I think it experiences these things which becomes a sense of knowing.  I think our existence can only be known in a similar manner, free of labels and beliefs of what we are what we call ourselves, free of everything but the experience of it, the pure experience.

I hear so many different styles of yoga being mentioned now and yet when I am asked what yoga I want to teach or actually teach, I am a little lost to reply.  Not because I am ignorant of the many different styles or beliefs that are out there about yoga but because yoga to me is simply matching the breath with movement (no matter how minimal or maximal as the case may be) so you become so absorbed in this that you simply can not differentiate between what ever so called labelled style of yoga you are doing.  It is the same process, absorption into breath and body movement, focus on just that, free of beliefs and labels.   However, I am quite possibly mistaken as I am about so many, many other things these days.

The other day I wore some rather figure hugging yoga gear.  The whole time with the fabric gripping my body and a generous handful of flesh overhanging the top of my pants, I felt  I was enormous and like the mid morning and mid afternoon chocolates had finally caught up with me.  Then the very next day I wore a pair of work pants that were clearly purchased when I was going through my donuts for breakfast stage.  They swam around my body and my belt had a hard job keeping them up.  I felt very thin and frail and felt like I needed to nourish and nurture myself with food.

Unless I am Alice in Wonderland it is highly unlikely I shrank so dramatically in just one day.   So how could I feel so bodily different from just one day to the next?  After some contemplation I realised it was my clothes, an external factor that had the power over me to make me change my internal experience of myself, my embodiment of me .  I was gauging and orientating my experience of myself around a factor that changed daily rather than the only constant in the picture, me.  Then I started thinking, if this is the effect of my clothes on my experience of being, imagine what other people and their words and actions are having on me!

We are social beings.  We belong to, contribute to and get influenced by the social every step of the way.  And yet we often love to think we isolated islands, uninfluenced and unaffected by all that unfolds around us.  Unique individuals with our own thoughts and opinions of the world.  But are we?  A wise woman once said to me “Your thoughts are not your own, you don’t own your thoughts.  They are a foreigner in your body that you need to befriend but not followed blindly”.  To be honest I didn’t really understand what she meant at the time. In fact, I think I even remember nodding my head in agreement but thinking “My thoughts are me, you don’t get more me than that”.

However, over the years, I have often returned and contemplated what was said to me and have arrived at the conclusion that we not only are submerged in the social externally through our participation in society, but we are also emerged in the social internally.  The social lives within our heads, our thoughts, our opinions.  From the moment we are born, we are being taught  the societal beliefs and opinions, the moral judgement codes that belong to our society that allow us to make an assessment or whether we think something is right, wrong, good, bad etc etc etc.  We internalise the external, repackage it in our thoughts and label it “my ” thoughts, “my” opinions, me.  But is that you?  Are you just a regurgitation of the masses?

What if we stopped identifying ourselves as our thoughts?  Is it possible or even reasonable to think we could be something other than our thoughts?  If we leap into this void, then what replaces the constant chatter of us, the constant reaffirmation of our existence?  This reminds me of one of my favourite Japanese koans – if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it still make a sound.

Arh that’s what I love about life, so many questions, often unanswerable but nether-the-less , good questions to ask and explore.

Once there was monk crossing a courtyard in the centre of a town.  The town’s policeman spied the monk crossing the courtyard and as a social courtesy asked him where he was going.  The monk replied “I don’t know”.  This angered the policeman as he felt the monk did not think him worthy of telling him where he was going.  So the policeman asked the monk again “Where are you going?”.  The monk replied again “I don’t know”.  By now the policeman was furious and demanded to know where the monk was going.  For a third time the monk replied “I don’t know”.  With that the policeman arrested the monk and took him to the police station.  At the police station the policeman said to the monk, “Tell me now where you were going”, to which the monk replied “I did. I didn’t know where I was going.  I thought I was going to the market but I ended up here.  So you see, I really didn’t know where I was going”.

I love this story.  I read it many years ago but it still holds true today.  You can plan and schedule and diarise all you want, but no-one ultimately knows what is going to happen in life and no-one has any control over the journey.  Best to be like the monk and acknowledge this gracefully as you go about your business of living.

I had a beautiful reminder of this only just last night.  My husband and I set out for dinner with friends and it ended up with me spending 4.5 hrs in the emergency department of a local public hospital.  Everything had gone just as expected.  We all enjoyed a curry and a few drinks, a few laughs.  We were post dinner and gathered in the kitchen solving all the problems of the world when the brother of our host came in feeling terribly unwell.  He clearly didn’t look healthy, he was clammy to touch, pale and his heart was racing.  He asked if he could stay with us as he didn’t want to be alone in his house.

Soon it became clear that he really should be checked out medically.  So off we trundled, the ever caring wife of the host couple, me and brother in tow.  The emergency department reception was surprising vacant and silent and soon pale and shaky brother is taken behind the automatic opening and closing doors into the sterile chaos that is the emergency department.  Meanwhile we caught up on our gossip magazines from 2011 and eyed off the only copy of Better Homes and Garden that another lady in the waiting room had.

Shortly after we were hustled into a curtained cubicle to wait with the brother who then went through blood tests, an ECG and X-ray and other various medical checks.  Being in this curtained off space was like being in a box.  We could hear and sense people all around us but we couldn’t see them.  As we sat there, hour after hour, the noise and commotion outside the curtain became louder and louder.  Doctors came in, doctors went out.  Nurses came in, nurses went out.

The patients in the next cubicles changed over several times during our visit.  One, I am guessing, was a teenage girl that had just suffered a major fit.  Apparently she had only just got over another major fit two weeks ago and had only just returned to school 2 days ago.  She was drugged out and had minimal responses.  As I sat there wondering if it was a crime to use my i-phone in emergency, I heard her mumble something to her mother.  Her mother replied “No it’s okay no one saw love, you were in your room”.  As I looked down at my i-phone a tear fell to its screen.  I put my phone in my pocket and started concentrating on my grateful list.

About a month ago I went to lunch with a friend.  Over a curry (um that’s a reoccurring theme) and a wine, I confided to my friend that I was living in so much fear about various things and negativity.  Her eloquent and useful response was “You need to practice more gratefulness and trust – those two things will smash through fear”.  Well she certainly was onto something.  Since that lunch I have been starting my day, usually as I drive to the train station, going through the things that I am grateful for.  The first time I did the list I was surprised at how many things there were on my list.  This had should a transformative effort on me.  To focus on the positive rather than the negative, that I have kept it up every day since.  It’s just like my asana practice now, if I don’t do it daily something feels a little missing from the day.  This simple act of just running over mentally all the things I am grateful for has made me feel more positive in general, which has made me feel more friendly towards others, which in turn has made them more friendly and co-operative towards me.  Why don’t they teach this stuff in school? 🙂

Anyway after many tests later, shaky and clammy brother is thankfully advised he is not having a stroke or heart attack.  I’m sure that is going to make his grateful list for sometime to come.  We finally get out of there just as things are reaching their crescent of babies screaming and various people yelling about various things.  Later as I fall into bed well after midnight and in the knowledge that I have to be up at 6.30am, I reflect on the evenings events and conclude, I never thought the evening was going to end up being spent mainly in the emergency department.  Yet strangely it feels like it worked out just the way it was meant to and just the way it always was going to ………regardless of my input.  And I am grateful for that.

About 2 months ago my husband and I planted a veggie garden.  We have been talking about it for a while but one Sunday we got up and went and did it and it has been a source of amusement and amazement ever since.  Everyday I like to go out there with my dog and inspect the leaves for bugs and welcome new shoots. Sometimes if I have time I hand water.  This simple act of tending to the earth brings me so much joy.  The fact that you can watch this creation evolve day after day, that out of nothing comes something so bountiful and delicious that then nurtures you seems to me like a little bit of wonder!

Actually to me it seems purely magically.  Take for example the asparagus we have growing.  We planted this 4 years ago from seed and as far as we were concerned it was just a weed growing in the corner.  However, when we recently made over our veggie garden and replanted, we cut it all back.  Low and behold there are asparagus shoots sprouting up all over the place now.  One day there is nothing,  the next day there will be 4 new spears ready for picking.  My mind loves this.  Nothing then something, all you have to do is feed the soil a little, spend a little time watering and give it some daily attention.

So I couldn’t help connecting that often this is the way we grow and be bountiful as well.  If you want to manifest something in yourself or in your life, then surely it must be a little the same. First get yourself in an enabling, supportive environment.  If I planted the seeds to my veggie garden in gravel, I don’t think anything would have grown.  We are similar.  For example, If you want to promote a positive attitude in yourself, it is going to be harder to achieve that if you hang out with people that do little else but point out your short comings.  Seek out those environments which are most conducive to what you want to achieve and then let yourself be effected by the environment, let it slowly influence you until it becomes second nature to you.

Next you will need nourishment, water and sunlight or as I like to think of these things, passion, courage and faith.  Passion is whatever you love doing.  It could be cross stitching, reading french literature, cooking, whatever, just let yourself spend some time doing these activities regularly.  There is nothing like spending time doing activities that you are passionate about or that inspire you. I feel it every time I pick up a philosophy book, a certain fire just ignites in me no matter how tired or how busy I am.  Courage is a wonderful precursor of growth.  For all of us who have been stuck due to one fear or another at some stage in our life, there is no greater feeling that finding the courage to move past the fear.  My regular fear is failure.  Each time I am courageous enough to move past that fear I feel fantastic.  When I don’t, and I stay stuck in fear I now feel a little disappointed in my self, like I have let myself down. Then there is faith.  This faith is faith in yourself.  When you know yourself, your ethics, your shadow, your weaknesses, your strengths – faith in yourself can gain a foothold and grow from there.

Who would have thought there is so much knowledge on  how to live and thrive growing all around us just waiting for us to pause long enough to have a conversation with it.  I guess I finally did pause and in doing so have found a new passion – gardening.

I am currently studying a sociology unit that studies how the concept of health and illness in society is constructed.  There was much ummming and arhing on my part whether I should go back to study this semester as I have a fair bit on in my life this year and I am still working with the death of my father last year.  As soon as I picked up my book to start the course, I knew I had made the right decision to return.  As I began my first article to review and analyse I felt that oh so joyous rush of passion fill my being and I knew  for me, at this moment, my return to sociology/philosophy was the best decision in terms of my wellbeing I could have made. To others it may have looked like adding another thing to my long list of things to do but to me it was returning home to a love that nurtures and inspires me and in a way rejuvenates all in life around me.

I find it ironic that my first unit back is one that so heavily focuses on the dominance of the biomedical (modern medicine) perspective and questions it authority.  I feel like I have spent most of last year fighting with modern medical establishments so it’s nice to read about it for a change 🙂  When going through traumatic and highly emotional situations, it is always rather interesting to be clear about what roles people naturally fall back into to play.  I don’t mean this disrespectfully but we all have patterns that we easily fall into when faced with adversity.  The role is easy for us, allows us to almost go on auto-pilot as other parts of ourselves that we perhaps don’t want to examine, retreat into the safety and the focus that the role demands.  When I look throughout the duration of my father’s illness, which pretty much required him to stay in hospital for the whole time, my role I slipped immediately into was that of “justice fighter”.  I’ve done it since as long as I can remember, my first external reaction is never sadness, fear or bewilderment.  My first reaction is always anger at some perceived injustice before me and action as to how I am going to put this right because it is the right thing to do.  But then anger is so much easier to handle than grief.

So there I am in the mist of medical madnesses.  I am in good company, my mother’s role in situations like this is to switch into “polly anna” externally positive as  everything is going to be all right in the end and my brother’s is the “martyrdom”.  I love them both very deeply (them and their roles they switch into) and they all serve their purpose in that crazy situation we were in.  For example, I would never have been able to deal with getting my father back to hospital after it became clear after only two weeks after coming out of hospital that the tumour they had removed from his spine, had grown back.  The pain no longer made it an option to be at home and it was my mother and brother that struggled to get my father, a then screaming and trembling man, into the car to start the 1.5 hr journey.  And then sit with him in the car for the next 4 hours as the hospital tried to get him out of the car but couldn’t due to the extreme pain.  It would have been my style however to then scream at the hospital for not thinking it a good idea to send an ambulance to go get a person that was essentially from that point on a paraplegic and never got out of bed for the remainder of his life.

My father was transferred to a different hospital under the guise of “better rehabilitation facilities” that both my brother and I were not pleased with.  When it became clear our fears were justified, when after 4 weeks no one had bothered to advise my mother was going on with my father’s condition even though she was in his room for 8 hours or more every day – my “justice fighter” role stepped up again.   This time I was joined by my brother, who through his work with children living with cancer, had also had contact with the hospital they were sending my father to and he didn’t feel the hospital was the best communicator either.  I had worked there many years ago and still shutter at the mentioning of it’s name.  It is the most sterile, disempowering and unwelcoming environment for people that are not well that one could possibly find.  I don’t want anyone going there let alone my father.

So off I went.  First I was ignored and had to keep phoning.  Then when they did call they treated with me a mocking, condescending tone.  Then when I started talking legal action for asking my father to make medical decisions on his behalf when he was no longer sound of mind (he was on such high levels of morphine based drugs that he was no longer always lucid and he was also off his bi-polar medication) and not bothering to consult his legal guardians, they started to fight me.  The fact that they said he was sound of mind concerned me the most, as for the last week before this my brother, mother and I had all been playing along with his illusion of being on a cruise ship in the Bahamas with him (an illusion of his we were more than happy to perpetuate).  This clearly told us how much time they were spending talking with my father.

Instead of speaking to my mother about what was going on with my father, the doctor went straight in and told my father that I had objected to his treatment which upset my father greatly.  Hello my name is “rage”.  I still can not comprehend this display of insensitivity and total lack of compassion for my father.  The whole discussion was about trying to open communication, to my mother mainly as she was becoming stressed and sick about not knowing what was going on.  The medic powers to be flatly refused to do it. Even better they chose to display their “power” by upsetting an already sick and traumatised man.  I won’t say we won as this whole situation is not early about winning and losing but about dignity and caring but he did get shifted back to his hospital of choice before he died and we were all very grateful for that.

So back to the present,  I embark on this journey into this new unit with much interest and passion and reflection.  I embrace the life experiences that I have just moved through and hold them to the “knowledge’ that I am now learning in a formal setting and compare if art truly does reflect life or whether truly there is no imitation of life to be had.

In this society we tend to love success.  Why not it feels great to succeed at the job interview, the footy game or lotto!  We embrace success, share our success stories and celebrate the success of others.  Failure is not celebrated in our society.  It is not spoken about (usually) or embraced or celebrated.  We all remember who came first in the race but rarely the person that came over the line last.

However, both success and failure are journeys that should be embraced and celebrated as they are so entwined and feed off each other symbiotically.  If you always succeed, always ride the wave of success, you never have the chance to learn to fail and fail in style. Seriously, you need the experience of a failure, to feel how it feels, to review the experience, to see it for just what it is – life and nothing more.  And then to just pick yourself up and try again.  If you never experience failure, in what ever shape and form, you never get the chance to know the beast for what it is, to realise it ain’t  such a beast at all and that life, and all it’s ups and down will roll on regardless.

This is a lesson that is very close to my heart.  As a typical card carrying A type personality, I have always strived to achieve in everything I do and be good at it.  Over the years I had manage to build up a fear of failure so great that I could make myself pass out over the thought of it.  🙂 And then I started yoga and a funny thing happened.  With each class, each session of being guided by skilful and beautiful teachers, I started to naturally experience a shift in perspective, mindset.  I no longer looked at the mat as a place to achieve but instead a peaceful place of meditation to tune in my body and my movements and my breath and to drop out of the constant chatter, often negative, about myself.  A refuge.

Along with this I was encouraged to try things that I once never would have tried because I would have pre-empted I would fail.  Oh failure, can’t be doing that.  Not with yoga, with a non-attachment to achievement, a letting go of results, came a thirsty sense of self-enquiry to approaching an asana.  With this new attitude, anything is approachable and dare I say it, an adventure.  There is so much to be had in trying, attempting, in adapting the asana so it suits your body at that moment on that day.  The jewel is in the attempting with integrity no matter what the end point, not in only attempting asanas that you know you can achieve and do perfectly.  When is life ever really like that, only bringing what you like and can cope with?

So today in a class that I was teaching when we came to side crow, I paused and surveyed the room.  There were people attempting the asana but there were many more that were  looking at me like I was the craziest lady in the universe.  I sensed some apprehension and fear and resistance to trying.  So respecting and embracing their fear I tried to talk them to their edge or at least take a step closer to their edge.  I advised them to first and foremost have some fun with this, play with this asana gently and not to be afraid of falling (in their mind failure) as falling is often the part of the process and seldom do we hurt ourselves when we fall.  And most of all, we are going to fall in life, so we really should learn to do it in style 🙂 and to learn to abandon ourselves to the falling process.  And then as if on cue, a lady fell in grand style.  I walked over to her, asked her if she was okay, and she assured me she was and then she got back up and gave it another go.  I could not have asked for a better demonstration if I asked.

If I have learnt anything in this life, it is that we all need to learn to fall, to fail.  We all need to learn to embrace, celebrate and even rejoice these falls as until we do this, until we are able to experience and see clearly failing for what it is, and that it is just life rolling along as it does, a necessary and natural part of life, we will never appreciate and rejoice our successes.  Knowing one without the other is like only seeing the light side of the moon, and that is not the complete picture.  When we bring success and failure together within ourselves we find we are just left with life.  And that’s the way life rolls….

One of my biggest concerns, amongst many, when my dad passed away last year was my mother.  My mum and dad had been together for 48 years and still loved each other very deeply and considered each other their best friends.  Forty eight years of experiences, laughs, loving and then loss.  My brother and I held our breaths the months following dad’s funeral, waiting and expecting her to fall apart.  Instead of crumble, Mum has thrived and turned into this woman I hardly recognise (quite literally because she has had a fancy new hair do done).

Mum loved Dad and their identity was very much defined together, I never really considered them individually, as separate to each other, they were “mum and dad”.  Mum played a more traditional wife role, she was the homemaker, the child minder and the one that made everything that was wrong in the world, somehow right again (or at least tried to).  For a large part of her life she also worked as a general manager of a hardware company, so she was always busy, busy doing something for someone else.  I do remember her quite often saying when I was growing up  “when is it my time?” – a question that I believe for her life, at that time, was a very valid one.  A question that she probably made me ask for my life as I was starting to shape it as a teenage girl and I am grateful for this question for it is a very important one and that it also, without me realising it, made me question the traditional role of a woman in life (but that’s a whole other blog).

So when my father died and mum was on her own lonely and drained from the preceding 5 months of utter hell, a choice was hers to make.  Lay down, curl up in a ball of despair and grief and crumble as most of us were expecting (why do we always think we know what people are going to do?) or  thrive.  Mum took the experience, saw it for what it was, an ending yes but also a beginning and ran with it.  These days I am lucky if I can schedule her in for a dinner date!  She is always going off to this club and that meeting, or dining out with friends.  She already has 2 holidays booked with different groups of friends.  My social life looks absolutely dismal next to hers.

On one of the rare nights I was able to arrange a dinner with her, we were chatting after eating in big easy comforty lounge chairs shooting the breeze about this and that.  She was giving me advice about a few situations I have going on in my life at present where I feel like curling up in a ball of grief and worry and despair in a ball on the floor.  Fearful of change and wanting to hold everything the same 🙂  I looked at her, this peaceful, shining, strong example of a woman and I did feel like everything was going to be okay.  How could it not?  I come from good stock, I come from mother’s body and spirit and I am sure her wisdom, strength and courage is in me as well.  All I need to do is listen….

Today when I was taking my dog for an early morning walk, enjoying the song of the birds and the gentle lazy, hazy feeling of the morning waking up, I was confronted with sudden conflict.   It probably wasn’t so bad but when you are cruising along in a state of peace and someone suddenly comes at you with a wall of conflict of anger – it feels like a tidal wave.  Anyway there I was enjoying the feel of the morning the really mellow vibe 🙂 pausing the walk for my dog to take a little wee on some rocks in someone garden edge that was on the path.  At that moment, the people that lived there came home in their car and were pulling into their driveway.  They paused too, to roll down there window and give me the biggest glare of pure hate.  I was a bit taken back and did the classic movie thing of looking behind me to see if anyone else was there as why would they be doing that to me.  Then it dawned, of course, my dog is weeing on they rocks that are on a public path, how silly of me, I should be hung and quartered too along with my dog for this crime.

The moment passed and I walked past them, the three of them, now out of their car and in the safety of their garage, pausing to continue the glare at me.  I smiled and walked on…. what else can you offer?  But it did remind me of another walk I took perhaps 2 or 3 years ago in the same neighbourhood where I once again found myself in the midst of conflict due a simple dog weeing.  This particular time in my life was an extremely difficult time and I had ironically gone on the walk to chill out and get close to nature.  On my walk I was comforted by the sky, the sea and the cool sand beneath my feet and the sight of dog and cat (yes she walks on the beach as well) enjoying themselves.

It was on the walk home, as I meandered along contemplating life and my place in it, when suddenly a screaming hurricane crossed my path.  My dog had taken a tiny little wee on a brick wall that lined a path.  Apparently this was her outside brick wall and she wasn’t happy.  Now a strange thing happens to me when I am confronted with conflict, I get calmer. Always have, way before yoga, I seem to have this inbuilt ability to go real quiet when someone else starts to arch up.  As you can imagine it is really infuriating to the other person but I don’t do it to anger them, it is just the way I am built.  However, a calm perspective does afford you a different perspective to someone that is full of rage and so you can sometimes see very clearly the humour (yes humour) and the inconsistencies in their logic.  I’ve learnt that one should never point these out to someone in the midst of rage, not if you value living 🙂

Anyway as this screaming vision went into full flight, calling me a F*** B**** and saying I should go live in a suburb that she obviously considered herself superior to, I did ask her why she thought so poorly of the people that lived in the suburb she was bad mouthing.  She replied because they act like animals, like me, and are crass and uncultured.  This coming from someone that was screaming obscenities at me in front of her neighbour’s 6 year old children she was standing with in front of her house with pray flags waving proudly from the immaculately landscaped garden.   The irony of the situation did not escape me, and unfortunately I did point out that if she thought it was okay behaviour to teach young people to treat other people like she was, then perhaps it was time to look up what the prayer flags were all about instead of just liking what they may her garden look like.

Hello 4th of July – she went off like a firer cracker.   It was at this point, that my cat decided to run into view, and into her garden and do a long wee in her flowerbed.  I took this as a cue to turn and leave, as she shouted threats of killing my cat if she ever saw her again.  Man that cat is brave and smart, there was no way kitty would venture that close to the tornado again.  And to be honest I followed her lead.

Then one day , as life often works, the same lady turned up in one the yoga classes I was also participating in. When we bent forward into a forward pose, I could see her behind me pushing and struggling and forcing her body to go into a poses that obviously her body, in it’s wisdom, wasn’t quite ready to go as far as she pushed.  I felt so much empathy and compassion for this lady at this point as I felt her struggle and saw her competitive, hard set mindset.  And I wished her every best on her journey and wished some softness and nurturing her way.  Perhaps that is the best we can offer.

I was on a plane recently and I am not much of a sleeper on planes, so I flicked through the movie selection on the entertainment centre.  I love movies always have, to lose yourself in someone else’s vision, creation is quite a nice treat once and a while, particularly when they tell a story that is everyones.  Anyway there was a modern day take on Snow white and the seven dwarfs, Mirror Mirror.  Oh goodie a fairy tale my favourite as there is usually something there for everyone and they operate on so many levels and speak to so many parts of us.  This was no exception.

I love the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, not just because it has a strong chick lead, which thankfully this movie played up even more 🙂 but because it so nicely tells the story of the growth of consciousness hidden within a common experience or life as some of us like to call it.  Snow white, the feminine, and central character gets flung out of the castle by her wicked, self-centred step-mom who is as conceited as she beautiful.  Step-mommy could be seen to represent our attachment to the external the aesthetic, representing aesthetic beauty, fleeting with all it’s beguiling ways,  but not the beautiful which is eternal.  This is a little tricky as it seems it is Snow White who is getting flung out into the external, but actually she is getting flung into the internal as she has began the journey of the hero and this is always internal.  The white, the pure, the seemingly nothingness of the colour gives the clue that this is the inner world and yet she is always depicted as a dark haired women, darkness covering the top of her head, perhaps hinting at the darkness that invariabley must travel with pureness until they negate each other or as some like to say, become one.

Then come seven supposed dwarfs, details on names are not important as you will find that these guys have been renamed many times over the ages, but the concepts behind them are eternal, unchanging.  Some say they represent the seven deadly “sins” that we all must befriend when on our journey.  Me, I never did care for the world “sin” it conjures up a whole lot of guilt complexes over events that were always going to happen ie. the knowledge of your bodies mortality.  Me I have no problem with Eve biting the apple, and thus I prefer the word chakras.  The dwarfs could be seen to represent charkas (let’s not get into the debate of how many there are in the body – arguments over metaphysical structures always become a little boring after a while).  These little, or not so little guys, are the path of Snow Whites journey.  Her feminine influence and her pureness (love in it’s eternal form not romantic), courage and strength of character (surrendered “will”), tames them all one by one and they all work in harmony together. Snow White (or individual consciousness) and the seven elements that belong to an eternal consciousness, the collective.

Now to the pesky prince that she is attracted to :-).  In no way, and let me stress this again, is he her saviour or her reason for breathing.  Yes breathing is important, very important, but there is something that comes before breath, something that hangs around long after breath has ceased.  This relation between the two is an important one, to add balance, for one to be able to see the presence of the other and therefore to bring it into it’s very existence.  These two, no matter what their individual abilities and nature, are equal.  Any bias to the contrary is just plain ego and dare I say cultural influence.  When we speak of feminine and masculine here we aren’t really talking to the external representation of the sexes but forces, energies that although very different, are very much the same, that will always attract to each other if reduced to their purity, or returned to the unfettered.

Now once these two kids come together, Snow white and the prince, or if you like, ida and pingala, they form an unstoppable duo, yes better than batman and robin. As they move through their  journey entwined or at least indistinguishable from each other, they can overcome any obstacle.  It is through this union which occurs within Snow White, but is played out nicely on the outside through her relationship with the prince (because let’s face it is hard to represent the internal in the external), that Snow White is able to conquer her self created fears (yay) and over turn her somewhat beautiful but hideously ugly step-mom (the aesethic and the dogmatic ethical) with the eternal (or the abyss where dogma is not welcome or even rates an invite) .

As I said I love a good fairy tale, but this depiction, Mirror Mirror, was even better as it ended with a Bollywood style song and dance. I think Snow White’s journey should so fittingly end with lots of song, dance and joy.  Don’t you?