Fourth Form of Madness

Another week, another injury. This time the sacrum/lumbar region, though on examination by my rather spectacular muscle therapist/myofacial therapist (I can’t quite explain what she does but truly she is amazing) there is a lot of thoracic involvement and trigger points that are setting the whole show off. This time though I am like “Oh well another injury, I’m going to take time off from yoga”. In fact, I’m looking forward to the break, I think the “honeymoon” phase with yoga is over and now its all about negotiating how we are going to live in the most harmony, whilst conceding there are going to be plenty of rough, “hold onto your flimsy identity and all you think you are” power struggles.

This injury has occurred at a time where I am questioning my true intentions with regards to doing yoga. It has brought me to a place that I can no longer ignore that I have tenancies to always want to be a “special little snowflake” in everything. I need to feel special. I have been examining this need and I think it is driven from the in bedded belief that I am not special and that if you are not special you don’t deserve love. Um painful stuff, just ask my body! I’m sitting with this a while as it only a recent admission to myself, although I have been dodging around this painful self secret for years.

In fact, I only explored this realisation in the early hours of this morning, as I lay in bed following a rather grueling muscle therapy session and observing how my body was responding to the work and the subsequent thoughts that were arising. One question that kept coming up, “Why do you keep making decisions that go against your wellbeing? Why do you keep struggling against wellness?”. It was interesting and I am going to use this statement to examine my life for the next 2 weeks or so, and see if I can consciously identify when I am doing this process. This brings us back to yoga, I know that sometimes, okay a lot of time, when I attend yoga classes I go with the wrong intention. I go so that people can see how far I can stretch, how long I can balance etc etc – all feeding into my need to be special. Seldom do I go with the intention of solely attending the class for my wellbeing and self discovery. In fact, the only time I do this is in my very gentle and prop based home practice that I adore and try never to miss. In my home practice it is all about stillness and discovery.

Anyway, this time is good to me to examine my intentions, not only towards yoga but my life in general. I am going to embrace and enjoy this time and try to let go so that I can be guided by my new insight and questions revealed to me in contemplation to heal myself and my old thinking patterns. I don’t just want to rote learn all the right things I am meant to say and be in regards to life anymore. I want to at all times be honest with what is and what I am feeling/experiencing and then proceed with life from that point. Interesting, exciting times!

When I started practicing yoga I naively thought that you stepped onto the mat a raving, ranting stressed out wreck and at the end of the hour you glided off transformed into a vision of serenity and wisdom. Ummm no. Well not for me anyway but then maybe I’m doing it wrong. To be fair I have a lot of sessions where I do feel calm, soft and centred but I also equally have sessions where I bump into some awkward emotions/feelings that has just been waiting for me to slow down enough so they can catch up with me, like a loathsome stalker.

There have been many sessions where I am feeling focused and centred and glide on into relaxation to be confronted with a wash of tears that generate from my core, a pit of mixed being of great happiness but tremendous sadness at the same time. No amount of trying to focus the mind on the out breath seems to reduce it, so I have learnt to go with it and try and not to place my mat to near to anyone!!!! It seems to happen in my Saturday morning class the most and I am grateful to my ever graceful and gentle teacher who gently massages oil into my neck and temple and slowly places a eye pillow over my eyes and then carries on to do the next person.

I’m not ignoring these tears and emotions/feelings but I am letting them “go”, so to speak, whilst I am on the mat. There is plenty of time for self-contemplation off the mat. When I do contemplate these feelings in particular I feel that it is showing me that beauty is made up of good/bad, happiness/sadness etc. They are truly the same thing and they all are vitally necessary and must exist to have a full and balanced life and to learn.

I struggle with letting things just be the way they are, yes I am a control freak! I have this new method to try and change this. First I am practicing being more mindful. I have started with taking 5 full and conscious breaths as many times as possible a day, particularly when I catch myself slipping into uncontrolled rapid thought patterns. I try to eat in silence and with concentration on the weekend as much as possible. I have also changed my meditation to a Tibetan styled meditation where I just sit with the out breath. I also find I have been doing this in everyday life as well now and have found it very helpful for staying with the moment and not getting carried away with emotions or feelings or memories or planning. This allows me to catch myself when I start trying to change the way things are. Secondly, when I catch myself trundling along the well worn path towards my habitual non-conscious way and I am about to act, I ask myself “What way should I act to respect this moment and all that is involved in it?” Yeah it’s a heavy order and to be real, I still totally suck at it and need a lot more practice which I am certain life will provide.

Sometimes the feelings/emotions come from outside. For instance this week at a lunchtime yoga class I attend I felt like I was going to launch into confrontation with the teacher. Firstly, the class is held in a gym which is noisy and not the most appropriate setting for yoga (or at least the way I like to do yoga). Secondly it was approaching a new moon and feelings were a little haywire in the room. Thirdly, for a number of weeks the teacher has a favorite student and spends most of her time talking with him (including during relaxation time) and this situation has really annoyed me as I don’t believe this is appropriate of a yoga teacher as all students should be treated equally and relaxation time is sacred and it is extremely disrespectful to all the other students to talk during this time (but that’s just my opinion).

Anyway, the class starts with the teacher arriving in a noticeably bad mood. I get told in a rather gruff way to straighten up my mat as it was going to “do her head in” (I might be mistaken but I thought I was there for my neurotic tendencies not hers). Next she starts again rather gruffly to tell me that one of my asanas was wrong and then keeps yelling at me regarding this as I had no idea what she wanted. By this stage, when she finally approached me I am sure she could feel the anger that was in me and I was very conscious of. Now I believe that yoga gives you a wonderful chance to make friends with your ego and therefore subdue it but that day I almost screamed at her that “She didn’t have to be so hard on me, I do that quite nicely all by myself” along with “I’m so sick of this focus on the physical, when are any of you going to teach me the spiritual/mind/soul material that I have plenty of questions on also!!!” – this I admit is my own stuff I am working through. All of me wanted to roll up my mat and storm out of there……then I let go of that by breathing into it and just watching it and I was able to work through the rest of the class….. to enjoy it even. Until I got to the relaxation part and once again they talked through it. On leaving the class the favourite student remarked what a great class it was to me. I remained silent because I didn’t trust myself to say something altogether sincere or nice but I may have come off quite frosty.

Later when I reflected on this, I realised that hard teachers aren’t for me, I’m hard enough on myself, I don’t need this from others, although I do appreciate the occasionally ego check with them. Secondly, I need to practice not at a gym. Thirdly, the student that was the focus of attention, reminds me of me when I first started, all interested in mastering every position even if it hurts them and not one bit interested in the spiritual side of yoga. I realised that I was really projecting my feelings that I had about myself at that stage onto him and that I should open my heart more to this student as I understand where he is at. Mostly I realised that I should have listened to my intuition because right at the beginning of that class when I was in wisdom pose before the teacher arrived I had the greatest urge to leave yoga for that day. I really should listen more to my Self.

I wouldn’t know our neighbours. Seriously, if I passed them in the street I wouldn’t know they live next door to me. I’ve never seen them. I’ve never even seen their cars. And this is the neighbours on both sides I am talking about. The only reason I see the neighbours that live in the house across the street is because they have a big glass panel the whole length of their stairway that links both levels of their house. Unfortunately, they belong to that strange group of people that didn’t learn that glass is see through and usually run up the stairs with nothing other than a flimsy towel guarding what’s left of their dignity. I’d prefer not to see these neighbours.

Do we really know the people we spend most our lives with…..let’s be honest, for most of us, that’s now the people we work with. In such a highly affected and unfair socially constructed atmosphere, if I was a betting person, I would put it all on the number that said “not a chance”. Most work environments are the playgroups of hell. For 8 hours of every day, you are taught how to lie about your feelings and your opinions, how to play a role so as to appease all that keep your arse in a seat and to swallow the status quo of inequality until your all full up yet strangely unsatisfied. The most appalling part is, the more you do this, the harder it is to determine where you begin and where your 9 to 5 cover finishes.

Do we know our partners? Truly? As much as I would love to say yes, this would be my ego talking. We know what they show us. By the fact that we spend so much time with them, allows us to correlate information about their preferred actions in certain situations, or reactions to certain life events. But is the “thinking” that you know how someone will react to something, based on statistics, really the same as knowing someone, their essence?

Now I’m cool with the whole intellectual “nobody really knows anybody else” deal. This happens to be the topic of my favourite lecture I give my mother when she insists on knowing something about someone – the difference between knowing yourself subjectively and perceiving someone objectively. You are the only one you can know subjectively – the only one that has a ring side seat to you – and this still leaves most of us in the awkward position of continuously not knowing who we are. I’m sticking my hand up for this one. I’m not sure who I am, what I believe and what I’ll be willing to fight for or even if I want to fight for anything, from one moment to the next.

Now I am a firm believer in that is why we are here, to learn. To learn all about ourselves from all the life events that can be thrown at us. I signed up for this and just recently I made peace with this. However, I kind of think it’s going to be a long journey to self enlightenment (okay let’s face it, for me it’s likely to be many many many many……..many lifetimes). I guess I was kind of hoping it wasn’t going to be such an isolated and in a way, lonely one.

Wow time flys when you are not blogging! I would love to claim writers block but the truth is I have been plagued by disinterest and laziness when it comes to blogging. Anyway a two year break has allowed me time to mature and develop as a writer and experience life in its many different shades.

One of the biggest things to happen for me is I fell in love with yoga! I have become a “yoga bore” according to many around me (okay my husband). Like any new passionate relationship I threw myself head first with total abandon into the raptures of its being. I practiced yoga, I read yoga, I theorized yoga, I contemplated yoga, I talked and talked and talked yoga, and I dreamed yoga. I meditated, I practiced pranayama, I attended workshops and then I would practice some more for good measure. And then……..I was exhausted and broken and I could no longer ignore the physical and mental pain I was in.

I was in constant pain as I had a shoulder injury that I had practiced on for several months (okay 7 months) without acknowledging the pain and mentally this aggravated several other aspects of my being that needed some honest assessment and attention. Unbeknown to me at the time, I had reached a point of “being” rather than “doing” – I was forced into this point by my body, when my mind and spirit had failed to stop me, my final frontier, my saviour in this case, my body, came to the rescue and said a very loud and very clear “STOP”. I stopped and the healing was able to begin. Just like when you have eaten something bad and your body has to expel all the toxins before it can be well, I began to expel some of the toxins surrounding my soul. It was an excruciatingly painful and dark time for me, in this time I believe I began to understand “loneliness” and hopefully started to make friends with it (or at least exchanged email addresses).

Throughout this witheringly painful period I did hold to a faith that had been in me all along, a real love that yoga led me to and “plugged” me into, a love of God. I know these days we aren’t meant to mention God anymore as we are all meant to be so secularized but if a human doesn’t acknowledge their source then they are like a river that refuses to acknowledge that their existence is from the sea. I don’t chose to define God to anyone – that is your own job, to find your own definition of God, to acknowledge God to yourself and to live the path that this definition provides you. Your own personal God path is exactly that – your own, it should never be enforced upon others as it is a great injustice to rob anyone of their own right of passage to God and this is truly your birth right. Let everyone find their own path. Your path is within you, you just need to stop.

I still love and practice yoga. I have changed the style of yoga I do and I have started home practicing more to adapt to my shoulder injury which is still present. I have come to see my shoulder injury as my teacher/guide, it tells me when my ego might be taking over in an asana and when I should remember to recenter myself. I have discovered a softer side to my practice which I am really enjoying and trying to translate over into how I live my whole life. I am grateful for the “life/personal development projects” that time on the yoga mat is providing me with. I am hoping to commence a yoga teacher training course next year and welcome the knowledge and experience this will bring.

Love and peace be with you all.

Well its been a long time between blogs. I figure why rush these things. I prefer to wait until a topic finds me – which is what has happened. Identity – what makes us….. well us?

Big topic. Are we defined by what we remember? This question was really brought home to me recently when I was staring into an ATM machine realising that I had forgotten my pin number. After using the same number for 3 years, one morning I simply woke up and had forgotten what the number was! I felt a part of me slip away. More sobering was that I realised that this could happen to any piece of information I had stored in my brain (please note I use the word brain really as an “x” in this sentence as I, like many, are still baffled by the mind/brain question).

I could wake up tomorrow and not remember that I have read The Sacred Canopy and all the contemplating I did around that text (this might be a good thing because the whole “Is there really a God question” can cause a lot of hardship to all involved :-)). I might forget that I love gin & tonics or even forget how to make them. I may not remember my addiction to “Lost” and therefore may cease to care who Kate ends up with. More tragically I might even forget the little girl that won a dance recite when she was 6 by being covered from head to toe in sequins and stomping around a stage to “The Flight of the Bumblebee”. These are poignant pieces of me, integral in the understanding of what makes me instead of say Jenny who lives two doors down from me.

My grandfather suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. My grandfather was in the later stages of the disease when he passed away. Although he did not have any recent memories of who he was and of who we were, he mentally was stuck in the days he spent in the army, at a war that he had fought in. All of us, my family, the nursing staff, his friends, were his army buddies and would find ourselves playing out various regular scenes with him when visiting. This was interesting as prior to Alzeheimer’s he never spoke of this time. I felt we were afforded an insight into this man, a window that lead to a deeper understanding of what he had been through and what had help to shape his values and beliefs. During this time I felt that I was seeing my grandfather for the first time through his most private unshared memories.

Had I not had this time with my grandfather I would have been baffled by his funeral. Unknown to all of us, he had organised his funerals many years before (actually he had organised 3 funerals, and I am not even trying to be funny here, when the disease took over he just kept forgetting that he had organised it and went on organising it with other companies until he went into a home. At his funeral he had requested The Last Post to be played – quite shocking to anyone that didn’t even know that he was even in a war. Standing there, with an Australian flag draped over his coffin and The Last Post being played with all its accompanying sorrow and solitude, I was overcome with emotion for my grandfather – a man that I only got to know after a disease had claimed all but these most harrowing memories.

Yet I can’t help to wonder why he retained these memories and no others? Was it because these were the most important memories, the most important piece of the puzzle of what made him….him? Alternatively, was it just the most horrible time that nothing, not even deterioriation of neurons and synatpic spaces can dull the memory? Was it just coincidence?

What I do know is that memories, if they are defining element of self, are tricky things. Memories don’t have to be shared. Therefore it is seldom obvious to the people around you who you are and what you are made up of. However, memories do have a way of becoming entwined with what you believe and value and therefore shape the “you” that you show to the people around you. Unfortunatley, what does happen is a lot gets lost in the translation between your memory and beliefs/values and how you act. People see you act a certain way and have beliefs about certain things but they don’t see the memories of events that shaped why you acted the way you do and why you believe what you do. Mostly we have each other “out of context” and yet continue to try and understand each other. So I guess your memories are poignant to who you are, to your self identity but a memory not shared does little to help other people identify who you are in the sense of understanding your values and beliefs. Therefore, we all, in a sense, see each other as “who we are not”.

Anyway that’s enough of my rantings for now. Hope you are all well. Take care.

To blog or not to blog – that is the question!

My husband set this site up for me over 3 weeks ago after I boldly stated, in a chardonnay induced haze, that I wanted to start blogging. Within the hour he had set it up. Within 3 weeks I had still not started. I was frozen with fear. Fear that what I wrote would not be good enough or even good (this raises the question for who? – but that is a whole different counselling session – hee hee). Did I have anything worthwhile to post? Why would I, such a private person by nature, wish to expose my thoughts on such a public forum? All these thoughts kept me residing in the land of inactivity – a nice place to visit but not to live.

With some introspection, I realised I was looking outside myself to validate myself. I was looking for outside indicators of my existence, my reason to be and to be the way I wanted to be. George Berkeley (1685-1753), an irish philosopher who worked, amongst other things, on resolving epistemological uncertainties about the external world, gave us subjective idealism – the view that nothing exists except ideas and minds (also known as Berkely’s immaterialism). If all we have to work with to connect us to the external world are our senses and that sensory information has to be perceived to formulate ideas about the world, then it is this perception, these ideas in the minds of perceivers that are real -appearances actually are the reality in this case. Therefore “Esse is Percipi” or “to be is to be perceived”.

However, you have no control over how you are perceived. This depends on the other person and their life experiences and mental processes and how they “mentally construct you” in their perceptions. Therefore, its not you they perceive, but an idea of you – their idea of you. I guess I now kind of seek solace in the fact that no one can know you like you! Therefore, you and only you, must find the answers to all the questions about yourself and existence in general. It is nice to listen to advice and not so nice to take criticism from others, but in the end these others are talking about different “ideas of you” – and you must navigate the path through to your essence.

Okay well that is my first log done and I feel released from the pressure of starting!