Fourth Form of Madness

I’m not big on technology, it’s not really my area. I find the hardest thing about teaching a hot yoga class is pre-setting the panels to come on at a future date. So Friday night I was thrilled that at the end of the power/restore class I remembered to set it for my teacher’s early Saturday morning class. This was no mean feat, by the end of the restore session of the class I’m always ready for a warm mug of tea and bed. This Friday I was in a particular mellow and subdued mood so as I chatted and locked up with the last few to leave class, I was also mentally chanting to myself, “preset the panels, preset the panels, preset the panels”.

I was so proud of myself for remembering that I promptly walked out without remembering to shut the door of the yoga room to keep in the heat when the panels came on at 6am. That was until 2.30am in the next morning. I woke up with an uneasy feeling. Something was off centre. My dog snored gently beside me…..he was definitely okay. As I often do when I can’t sleep I mentally went through a class in my head (it kind of relaxes me). It was half way through my mental warmup that it popped into my head, a vision of the yoga room door wide open. Bum! That was not going to be good for the hot class at 7.30am or the studio heating bill.

I was about to get up and drive to the studio and close the door (I blame the adrenaline rush that comes with knowing that you have done something not so ideal), when I realised tromping around in the middle of the night in the middle of the countryside (okay not quite countryside but countrysideish) was not such a sound idea. Instead I set my alarm to 5.30am and drifted back to sleep. Upon which I tossed and turned haunted by a dream that I was only afforded glimpses of upon waking. So I was in a bit of a frazzled and slightly worn out state when my alarm went off at 5.30am.

My dog sprang into action at the sound of the alarm and by the time I threw on a pair of jeans and wrestled myself into a jersey, he was practically doing back flips at the thought of an unexpected but welcome early morning walk. Then I grabbed my car keys and he went into a frenzy walking on his hind legs and turning circles in front of me. My dog loves a car ride and there was no way I was going on that one alone. I opened the garage door and ran out like a shot and waited for me to open his side of the car. Since I got my little orange car (which I have fallen in love with – week 9 and still no sign of a new door for the jeep that was broken into) taking puppy dog for a ride is a funny event. If he jumps over into the back seat, his butt is too large to jump back through the same gap on the way back so it takes about 5 hours to get him out of the car.

Not this journey, he proudly sat in the seat beside me and there we were cruising along to yoga together. It felt kind of cool. And then it happened, my dog reminded me about the innate joy in life. I had rolled down the window, despite it being coolish outside, as I could tell he wanted to stick his head out and catch the wind in his mouth. I glanced in his direction to make sure he wasn’t hanging too far out of the window, and there I saw it, pure joy as his fur was stuck back on his face and his eyes wide and his mouth wider due to catching the wind, pure joy, enjoying whatever life brought. It only took one look and I got it, saw it and remembered it in every cell in my body – the joy of being alive, of having this consciousness come what may.

Often on this journey we oscillate back and forward, back and forward, between remembering, forgetting, then remembering again. It was nice to given this chance to remember again with my dog this time as my teacher. So as I shut the door I had left open and hopped back into my car, I felt like I had done my yoga class already that day and as I drove home to start getting ready for my morning practice, I rolled down my window a bit and let life in.

I woke up this Saturday morning looking forward to yoga and feeling in a generally mellow and reflective mood, basically in my own zone and space. Nice, it had been a very hard week and it was nice to be regaining some sort of equilibrium in my being. Off I popped in my cute little orange bubble of a car that we brought in the interim of our other car ever being fixed (6 weeks and counting) and which I have now fallen in love with. There I was cruising along only 20 minutes into my 45 minute journey just about to break into chorus with my mellow dreamy yoga cd when I realised I had a “klingon on the starboard bow” so to speak.

Actually it was a rather aggressive looking, awfully busy looking 20 something woman who had decided that she needed to drive a millimetre away from my bumper. Now I am no slow driver. Unfortunately I have always had a lead foot and it takes all my concentration not to speed (good awareness training now my radar detector has been stolen). As it turned out, due to my impending backing vocals I was about to deliver I had neglected to stay under the speed limit and was doing 10 km over. And still there she was aggressively pushing me along and swerving out to see if there was anything in front of me. I took a breath in time to realise I was buying into her aggressiveness and then tilted my rear view mirror so I could no longer see her and belted out my chorus with such conviction I think I saw the windows shudder.

On to a relaxing session of yoga which restored my “chill out” factor some what. Then I was back on the road heading home delivering a beautiful (slightly bias here) rendition of Om Namo Narayani when someone tried to run me off the road. Now I know merging is challenging, but here is a tip to keep in mind, when you are a full car length behind someone, don’t speed up and try to run someone off the road no matter how great the urge! There I was one minute blending harmoniously with the universe (hee hee) and the next I was up on the kerb and heading for someone’s wheelie bin. Let me tell you, no-body puts baby on the kerb (baby being my cute little orange car). Something within me dug in and decided to stand my ground, I flicked on my indicator (always polite) and reclaimed my spot in front of the car that had tried to harm my person. Then I proceeded to drive at 40km in a 70km zone until he eventually turned off (okay I have my vindictive side that also enjoys the occasional day in the sun).

Breathing a large sigh of relief and feeling that I was in the clear for a calm and non-eventful drive home I looked into my rear vision mirror only to spy another klingon, this time male, getting ready for a rear bumper push on. First thought was “What is with the world today?”, second “what am I doing to attract these drivers into my life?”. Neither question was answered a I was far to engaged now with the driver behind me, exhausted I allowed myself to be sucked into his world, his creation. I was now officially vexed and I became the crazy lady who, even though every cell knew I should just let him pass me and let him drive out of my life, for some reason decided to embrace the second option, which was to allow him to pass and then drive as fast and close to his back bumper as I could.

I still love that part of me that stands up occasionally, that crazy, dark, self justified part of me, that always fights for the under dog (this time it was me :-)). My mother once came home from parent’s teacher night and told me pretty much each one of my teachers advised her I should be a defence lawyer and if they were in trouble they would come to me for their defence. I have always been able to find that strong, argumentative side of me when needed but most days now I chose to give it a rest. So there it was out in all it’s glory and making a day of it, it didn’t take long for the guy to turn off probably to escape the angry orange vision behind him.

I decided at this point that it might be a good idea to bring in the heavy guns and put on some crystal bowl chiming and started to concentrate on my breathing. So there I was chiming along and concentrating on my three part breathing, hoping to get home in one piece with no more angry drivers (including myself by this stage). As I cruised along, I couldn’t help a little smirk for that side of me that stepped up and out with force. I never deny these sides of myself, I find this just leads to a long trip, down a narrow, dark rabbit hole. Best to embrace all parts, but perhaps allow yourself enough of a pause to decide if you wish to bring them forward to handle an event at that time. Just as I was about all chimed out, I made it home, all in one piece, embracing all my totality.

This week my car got broken into. I had just come from a relaxing session of yoga out into the cool night breeze. As I come straight from work for this class, I have gotten into the habit of walking from the class to my car without shoes on. Heels don’t go so well with yoga attire. I usually walk on the cold crisp grass and the bitumen and I love feeling the different textures under my feet. This particular night, as a special treat from nature, there were some wild bunnies hopping crazily around the grass (I seem to have a bit of a bunny theme going on in my life at present, an interesting totem).

So as I am chatting to the bunnies and tip toeing over the freezing yet invigorating ground, I open my passenger door of my car to see papers strewn everywhere. Now the next few seconds I love, it’s the time where the mind still working with the image of the car as I left it, can’t quite figure out what the hell is going on – how did these papers get here. Those precious seconds were the mind is ungrounded and struggling to catch up with life, I now kind of love exploring these moments. Then someone presses the reset button on my mind and I realise “oh I must have been broken into”. Then I walked around to my driver side and there was no doubt left that someone had broken in, not only had they broken the window but they had also managed to twist the whole door frame. As I stood amongst the glass, I decided it was time to dress up my yoga outfit with a pair of heels.

Luckily that night it was freezing cold and I lived 45 minutes from my home. So as I drove the crisp and invigorating drive home, with one side of me being warmed by the heaters I had blasting on me and the other getting treated to cold, crisp wind therapy, I contemplated my car getting broken into and someone taking my radar detector and all the items in the centre console, which to be fair, I think was yoga music and not much else. The interesting thing for me was that for a while now I have been working on giving. Not the giving where it is of your own volition, where you want to give, but the kind of giving where you don’t really want to give but do it anyway. So often when life brings me to this decision point, I shut down, close up and dig in with my resistance against doing something I don’t want to do. I chose to stay stuck. Why would we ever chose to stay stuck – lots of reasons, but maybe they all revolve a little around identifying yourself to strongly as separate, as an individual. Maybe a little fear comes into it, something along the lines of “where will I define the borders of me if I give everything, what will be left that I can say, this is me?”.

Who knows, all I know is it’s an area that I have been really working on this year, I guess life felt like it need to give me a little push on this one 🙂 As it turns out, other than the inconvenience of not having a car for 8 weeks due to the door having to be fixed, the break in didn’t bother me at all. I had something that someone else needed, so they got it. Pretty simple when you don’t put a lot of rules and regulations around it. I have a very fortunate life, others have a less fortunate one. Things just balance out.

When I got home, frozen on one side of me and slightly less frozen on the other, I felt like I had to defrost my hands off the steering wheel. Later, thawing out in the lounge room with the heater switched to high, Hubby said “Well you must be pleased, someone finally took some of your music”. I used to live in South Perth many years ago, and my car got broken into about 6 times whilst I lived there and not once did they take my music! I was pleased this time it was yoga music, nice relaxing, mood softening yoga music. I really hope they listen to it and it brings them joy and peace.

Last week my cat caught a bunny. If that isn’t bad enough, she dragged it home and devoured it out on our alfresco – not the kind of outside dining I imagined when we built that area. Normally my cat is quite placid and loving unless you open a packet of crisps in her earshot and then she will maul you to death in order to get herself a crisp. But puss is a bit of a split personality, loving lap cat by day and ruthless assassin by night (or mid afternoon as in this case).

I didn’t think anything of it until the night after, when I was rushing off to yoga with just minutes to spare. Puss was snuggled up in tight little ball and as I bent to give her a kiss I noticed she had black lumps on her ears. As I bent closer I realised they were no black lumps, those were fleas and she was covered in them. After I recovered from the shock and spontaneous scream I let out, I did what any loving mother would do, I grabbed puss in one hand, grabbed a tube of Programme with the other and hastily dabbed at her neck as I hurled her outside. I couldn’t help savouring the sweetness of karma as I stared out at puss through the glass door, those fleas were definitely a parting gift from the bunny who, whilst unable to defend itself against the food chain hierarchy of nature, was able to return to puss some of the suffering she was dishing out, instantly.

Actually nature has a way of ensuring things kind of balance out of their own accord without any interference. The problem is, we all often can’t help interfering with the natural order of things. We often feel we have to control things, make things right, prevent things from happening when actually, all we really need to do is breathe and allow life to unfold of it’s own accord. Life will always strive to maintain equilibrium, just like out bodies. Whether we like the direction that equilibrium takes us is a mute point. Our task is to train our minds so that we can relax into life, come what may and love it with all our heart and all our soul as we ride the tides of equilibrium that are our lives.

This week I started back at the gym. Where I work I am lucky enough to have access to a free gym which is awesome. This year I have gotten into the habit of working through lunch which is so unhealthy for your mind, body and soul. Once I got up after working for an extended period and could hardly straighten my knees. My body is quite supple, if it can be reduced to that stiffness in a few hours, how bad must sitting all day be for you!

Still I had to drag myself there, bad habits are hard to break. The best way I have found to change them is to do the opposite of what your comfort zone says to do. So off I trundled to the gym. I only use the gym to have a space to do yoga. The guys there are really cool, we struck a deal, I wear my gym shoes out onto their floor, and then I am allowed to remove them and do my yoga in my little corner. That way we are all happy and their health and safety rules retain their virtue.

A few years ago when I started to practice in gyms at lunch I didn’t think it was a good environment because of all the noise and “achievement orientated” mindset going on all around me. But I persisted week after week because I love yoga and that was the only place at lunch to practice. I started out, alone in my little space amongst the other gym goers, making my funny little shapes. As I persisted I noticed I was often joined by more and more fellow yogis who came out of their closets and claimed their space amongst the weight lifters and spin class regulars. It was nice to practice with people in a unstructured environment, all doing are own thing, quietly and in our own solitude amongst the gym chaos.

Then one day I realised, that when I practiced in the gym space, I no longer heard the loud blaring music, the loud crashing down of the weights, the continual shouting of encouragement from the personal trainers, all I heard was my breath and all I felt was the rise and fall of my stomach, ribs and chest. Quite out of the blue, in an atmosphere I would have least expected it, I discovered focus and the power of concentration. You got to love that about life. Sometimes we think we need quiet to cultivate quiet, but sometimes you need the opposite of what you think you need, just like when you are trying to break a bad habit. Don’t get me wrong, I am a fan of quiet, but I am also a fan of chaos. Both have their virtues.

So this week, as I completed my first sun salvation in my new little piece of gym space, I gave thanks for this quiet and solitude available to me in the mist of a big crowded, noisy city. Then I sunk back into the quietness that is my little piece of gym space and exhaled.

This week due to life circumstances, I pretty much ground to a halt. All the things I have been filling my life with, yoga, teacher training, uni, teaching were suspended for the week and I found myself without something to rush to for once and it was probably just what I needed. I even worked from home and surprised myself how much one can achieve in the quietness of ones own abode without constant interruptions.

I am a big one for home practice, but somehow this week I just felt that the mat was a no-go zone. Yoga is a gift and it’s ability to de-stress and increase one’s ability to handle life just as it comes is phenomenal but something within me wanted to test that I wasn’t also using it as a prop to hold myself up with and to hide behind. Oh how I missed it as I wandered around the house looking longingly at my practice space.

And then it happened. I popped some music on and started to hum a few bars. Soon I was trawling through all my old cps, putting on Dylan, The Waifs, Everything but the Girl and John Lennon and warbling along so loud that the neighbours probably wished they brought a house in Bunbury. It felt good, I felt connected and I felt a love that………………..suddenly I realised, I feel like this when I practice yoga.

Long before yoga, I used to sing. In the shower, at home, actually pretty much all the time. It was the time I felt most like me, contained in myself and free, if that makes sense. To sing is to vibrate as the sound you produces goes outwards but also very much turns inwards, so there becomes no difference between the outside and inside. I had forgotten this gift, this simple yet very effective gift that is equally there for us all. I gave thanks, as with everything that is going on in my life lately I felt I had stepped away from my centre a fair bit. I felt like I had taken “one giant step” back towards centre by rediscovering a part of myself that I had silenced through neglect.

As I continued to flick through my cd stash I acknowledged that all that throat chakra work must finally be kicking in 🙂 I also chuckled to myself as up to now I had seen yoga and singing as separate activities even though I have participated in kirtan many times and have hundreds of cds of various artists, it never occurred to me how joined they are, both with similar purposes and outcomes. Once very earlier on in my yoga journey, a teacher told me that “music has no place in yoga”, without even thinking and finding the courage from somewhere I automatically said back “There is always room for music in yoga, it is part of life’s soul’. I said those words like an involuntary reaction, without really understanding their meaning. Now I really understand those words and hell, I’m going sing about it……….. 🙂

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!