And so did he…
Blue Trees by Leigh-Ann
Yes, I am late with this. Yes, I am sorry. Life got in the way of blogging, as it is wont to do sometimes!
- Pretty pictures. Look at the lovely one above…
- Picnicking in the park on warm Saturday evenings, with live music in the background, great food, and lovely company
- Lingering in bed till eleven. Ahh, to have more mornings like that
- Feeling purposeful and hopeful
- Anticipation for Mark’s workshop next weekend, woot!
- The amazing, positive response from the attendees of my Breath and Bandha workshop on Sunday. Thanks, you guys!
- Noodles and tea with a favourite friend on Sunday evening
- Celebrating my mother’s birthday. I know this isn’t true of everyone, and it makes me even more grateful: I really like, love, and enjoy my family and wouldn’t change them. I am really lucky
- Speaking to my gran on the phone, and she was able to hear me. It’s a little touch and go with her hearing sometimes
- Sleep. One day I will get enough of it
- Being by the beach on sunny days. Gotta love the lingering summer
- Pretty frocks. A girl can never have too many
- Houseguests. Coming next week, yay!
- Cleavage. I have only just learnt to wear mine with aplomb, and now, I work it baby
- Plotting home decor revamps
- The emails people have sent me to say how much they love these lists, heee heee
- And, did I mention sleep? I might have a little nap now, actually
Mmmm. Now here’s a topic on which I am Not An Expert. But I was so moved by Kate’s note on my Rhiannon post:
Around my house, it’s time to get serious about trying to get pregnant. I’m terrified, and I realized last night it’s because I will have to give up so much control over my life. How do you do that? How do you go from “I make my own destiny” to “Let’s see what happens…” over night? I don’t know if I can do it.
After this, my friend Melanie and I had an email exchange about surrender too, so I thought, what the hell, let me tell you all my views! Oh, the infinite narcissism of the blogger. The last year has helped me understand the concept of surrender a little better, but it’s still something I struggle with.
I guess it’s a contextual thing: sometimes it’s appropriate to surrender, and sometimes it isn’t. My understanding of the concept of surrender can be summed up in Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer:
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.
It’s discerning what we can and can’t control that makes the whole thing so complicated. Because it seems rather silly to surrender in an unacceptable situation when it can, in fact, be changed, with enough perseverance. Witness the efforts of Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. They did not surrender. They could have, the outlook didn’t look marvellous for either of their cause. But. It was an unacceptable situation. Which could, and eventually did, change. But pregnancy? Some of that is in the hands of the Divine. Same with relationships, I believe.
When my marriage ended, I had been trying very hard, for quite some time, to make it work. Eventually, I let go, I listened to the (very, very loud) messages my body and soul were sending me, and I surrendered my idea of a Perfect Life. I remember walking through the park one day, soon after we split up, and feeling this tremendous sense of lightness. The worst that could happen had happened, and, here was the exciting bit, at that moment, I didn’t care at all what people thought about me. I was free. Just me. Because I had let go, opened my hands and surrendered.
Unfortunately, I soon started to care what people thought again. Deep pattern, hard to break. I just don’t care as much as I once did. This is such a relief, and now I consciously practice letting go of my attachment to other people’s approval. What they think of me has, in fact, very little to do with me. I do the best I can. It’s enough. I know that. Even if I have to repeat it to myself rather often.
This is what I believe about surrendering, letting go: if we know that we are enough, just as we are, if we believe this in the core of our beings, then we can let go of many of the things in this life that cause us suffering. The need to always be right. The need for more money than we actually need (not that a little bit of a buffer is a bad thing). Worry about our physical attractiveness. Worry about our competence to have and raise children, hold down jobs, pay the mortgage. Worry about what the future holds. Worry that we didn’t do the best we could in the past. Worry about being loved. Or not. Both seem to cause suffering. I know: when I am loved I tend to spend a lot of time worrying about the situation changing, and when I am not, well, I worry that I am unlovable. Clearly I haven’t quite got a grip on this one yet, but I am trying!
For me, the essence of surrender is encapsulated in this sutra:
1.12 abhyasa vairagyabhyam tannirodhah
The mind can reach the state of Yoga through practice and detachment
(This is from TKV Desikachar’s translation of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali)
I love this sutra, and, like the Anthroyogini, I feel that perhaps if I get ‘vairagyam‘ tattooed on my person, it will serve as a reminder to Let. Go. I know that surrender can mean other things than letting go, but for me, surrender as a practice of power is a practice of releasing rather than subsuming or submitting. It is a practice of forgiving, because when we hold onto anger, it makes us sick. Sick in our emotions, certainly, and sick in our bodies, often.
This is how I choose to understand the above sutra: When we do the very best we can, judged by whether we are fully present in the moment, and then let go of the fruits of our efforts, the appropriate result is guaranteed.
I say ‘appropriate result’ because things don’t always go the way we think they should, but if we did the best we could, that’s enough, and we can surrender.
When I was 21, one of my closest friends killed himself. He left a note for me. It was more than a year old, left over from the first time he had tried. I was devastated. I had known he was depressed, and he was certainly behaving more strangely than usual, but then, we were young and strange. Both of us. I had a boyfriend who needed my time, I had my final year of university to get through, and although I pressed my friend to talk, he didn’t want to. I backed down, thinking he would talk when he was ready. It took me a year to get over the guilt of not being able to see his suicide coming. When I finally realised that I had had no control over the choices of another adult, even one I loved, I was free of the guilt. It was when I surrendered my desire to have things be otherwise that I began to heal. I did do the best I could for my friend. I was fully present when I spoke to him. His death was not for me to control. So the appropriate result here was not that he lived, that was not his karma, but rather, that I remember him now with great love, and I remember the girl I was in that grief with great compassion.
That was my first lesson in letting go. There have been many since, just as I am sure there have been in your life!
If we can survive the really hard stuff: the grief, the bereavement, the pain of divorce, then maybe we can forgive those we love for the small things they do that irritate us, we can let go of the idea of conventional adulthood (married, mortgage, 2.5 kids) as the only valid way to be, we can surrender, even just a little bit, our holds on the steering wheel of life. Provided the situation is not violating us on some level, of course.
What do you think?
Three years ago, when I was struggling with how to lay boundaries with a difficult student, another, much beloved, student, gave me a book. It was Teaching Yoga, by Donna Farhi. It prompted this post. I still agree with what I said there, although my understanding of how this might happen has deepened.
I used to hold my students at arm’s length, believing that was what was required to be ‘professional’. What this did, though, was limit the degree of intimacy in the teaching relationship. I am not suggesting that yoga teachers should over-disclose to their students, or even, necessarily, socialise with them. But certainly be real, be yourself. If life is hard, sometimes it helps your students to know that you are just a person, like them, going through some Stuff. You are not some levitating super-being.
At least, this is what people tell me. It’s the same when I tell them I struggle with certain poses: how nice to know that the bendy chick up the front battles with some asanas too, and that doing those asanas is not the point of doing yoga. The body-breath link is.
Mark Whitwell (you know, the guy I quote in practically every post I ever write) says there are only three requirements for a teacher:
- Have your own practice
- Have a good teacher yourself
- Care
Amen, brother. He also often says that learning happens when the teacher is
No more than a friend, no less than a friend
No power disparities, no weird game-playing, no rules about socialising or not socialising after class, just people coming together in caring.
That said, it’s sometimes a little hazy. When does the intimacy of the yoga room end and the intimacy of friendship begin? I host Free Form yoga events on the last Friday of every month, and also other events like yoga parties, and those have fostered a growing community of people who know each other from yoga, but are also becoming friendly and connected to one another outside the yoga room. Many of them tell me that this has added to their lives as much as the asana has. I, too, have developed friendships as a result of these events. I see no ethical problem here – these are people who know me as a person, not just a yoga teacher. I don’t hold myself as somehow above them, and they don’t see me in this way. I hope. And we share an integral interest, a common spirituality. Also, frankly, I work. All. The. Time. I am not going to meet people outside of yoga. It’s silly to expect yoga teachers to hold their social lives totally separate from their working ones. Especially since to those of us who teach, it’s such an important and integral part of our lives. Working-living-relating. All one. Jason Brown wrote an essay a few years ago talking about the difficulty of being a (then single) male yoga teacher. Read it. I agree with everything the man says, always have. What do you think?
Now, a qualifier. All this intimacy stuff is great, but there is no possibility that any teacher would end up being close friends with all his or her students. It’s a time thing, it’s a personality thing, and yes, it’s and appropriateness thing. I have certainly avoided deepening relationships with students when I could see that they didn’t understand the boundaries of what was being offered. Regular contact with your yoga teacher can lead to feeling that you know them when in fact you hardly do. Especially if that teacher, like me, is a blogger and shares some of their internal life in the public space. You will notice I said some. Not all. Not by a long stretch. Assuming that you know me from reading my blog is a bit like assuming you know Jaimal Yogis or Elizabeth Gilbert because you have read their books, in which they reveal aspects of their internal lives. I do actually know Jaimal a little, and I can tell you there is much more to him than the contents of his book.
Me, teaching. Photo by Alison Baker
What do you guys think? What are your feelings experiences been around being taught, and teaching?
To get you thinking, here is some further reading:
Sarah Courts’ blog post – pop over and read it.
Svasti’s thoughts on becoming a yoga teacher, parts one and two.
This week has been one of workworkwork, and also rather a bit of frivolity.
1. love poem, 2. This is Magic, 3. Love Silhouetted, 4. “love comes from the most unexpected places…”
- The smell of toast. It smells like Sunday mornings, childhood, and comfort
- Retail therapy. I got an amazing necklace from Cat Hammil. Beautiful!
- Sunny Sunday afternoons in the city
- Dumplings in Chinatown
- Massage anticipation. I am back at work, full speed, and I had somehow forgotten that walking 10km a day and teaching anywhere up to four classes, in addition to my own practice, is Quite A Lot of Exercise. I ache…
- Coming home to someone to talk to
- Coming home to quiet. Both are good, just depends on the mood!
- Summer
- Taking friends to a favourite restaurant and having them like it. Which one? Wood Spoon on Smith Street
- Sleeeeep. Still not getting enough of it
- Gelati, the best on Lygon St, at Crema. Go. Try their Banana and Walnut flavour. I think I will be having fantasies about it for a long long time
- Planning my trip to South Africa. Spa day with BFF, anyone?
- Catlove. My cat, who has lately been rather off me, has spent the last few nights cuddled up to me and purring. And lying still. Because you know how offensive those beasties can be when they want to
- An unexpected holiday: Australia Day on Tuesday. Australia, I heart you. Thank you for being my home
- Fun short trips on the horizon: Great Ocean Road in March, Tassie in May
- Tattoos, and the planning of a new one. Oh, yes, another. Soon
- The countdown to Mark Whitwell’s workshop in February. How cool that it falls over the Valentine’s weekend too! Yoga of Heart during the weekend of luuuurve. Perfect
What made you happy this week, lovelies?
Crescence over at Heart of Birth has written an elaboration on, and reply, to, my post about Strength Receiving. I like what she says: I stopped at surrender (about which I plan to witter on later in the week) but she takes it further, to receptivity. Pop over and have a read!
No, that title isn’t a typo! It’s just that I have never heard of a New Year’s Resolution quite like this before. I think it’s a great idea though!
New Year’s Resolution: Have More Sex
I kinda like Sadie Nardini’s style anyway. She was the one who started all the ruckus about being vegetarian. Or, um, not. Clearly, this woman is a fan of advaita vedanta. I will clarify what I mean sometime soon: the Wikipedia link is a little waffly and academic.
A friend told me the other day that I have ‘a Goddess thing going on’.
My initial reaction was this: ‘?’
But she has a point. I do choose to anthropomorphise my belief in Source, and more often than not, it takes the form of a female deity of some sort. This is partly because I am a woman and feel a natural affinity with powerful feminine symbols, and partly because it seems to help me redress the imbalances between masculine and feminine that are rife in my psyche and also in society at large.
This week (because I think I might pop a Goddess on the blog every week) I would like to talk about Rhiannon a little. I first encountered her in Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. He does like his mythologies, Neil. It’s probably why I, and others, have such an enduring fascination with everything he writes. She just appeared as a Lady in Grey, on a white horse. The inference was that she had something to do with taking souls over to the other side, but I never researched her further. Until, today, she popped out of my card deck.
Rhiannon, The Lady on the White Horse
She is a celtic horse goddess and is considered to be both a goddess of abundance and manifestation, and of death, or rather, of taking souls to the other side. Sometimes they come back, if they are shamans. Mostly, they don’t. But, and this is what I love about the ancient understanding of the cycles of life, when Rhiannon carries your soul, it is a nurturing experience, one that you long for.
Wouldn’t it be lovely to truly believe this? I do, until the belief is tested by the death of a friend, as happened last week. Then, not so much.
My special interest in Rhiannon this week is in her role as manifestor of dreams. There are things I would dearly like to see happen. Things I have only just found the courage to admit to wanting. But. I have spent most of my life with my knuckles white on the steering wheel, trying to wrench the world into the shape I think it should be. I don’t want to do that anymore. I want to be in flow, and manifest appropriately, at the appropriate time.
I call on the Lady on The White Horse.
Does she resonate with you? I love to know which Goddesses people are attracted to. Yes, Mary counts.
*Just a side note on the topic of manifestation: I stumbled on some goals I had written for 2009 and then promptly forgotten in the back of one of my many notebooks. I achieved all of them (many of which seemed insane at the time I wrote them) except for two. Those two, if I am honest, were not in line with my core values and so they were never going to happen. Interesting, no?
As if there hasn’t been enough joy round here the last few days, here is my inaugural BlissList, woot!
This post is by special request. A friend has been re-reading Mark Whitwell’s book, Yoga of Heart, and she asked me to clarify what Strength Receiving means.It’s going to be fun, because I teach this stuff in class all the time but have never really tried to articulate it in writing before.
Here goes, and forgive any droning on, because this will be well-known to some of you. I just need to begin at the beginning in order to collect my thoughts.
The word Yoga comes from the Sanskrit root yuj which means to yoke or to bind. Basically, when we harness all our attention in a particular direction for long enough, we no longer perceive a difference between us and it. There is just the unbroken flow of attention and a full understanding of what we are perceiving. This is the experience of Yoga.
Yoga can also be defined as a union of polarities. All of life is polarised, because you can’t properly name and categorise something unless it can be defined by its opposite. For example, if we only had one side, we wouldn’t have left and right. There would just be ’side’.
The simplest union occurs in our breath – exhale creates inhale, which gives way to exhale. Ha, the Sanskrit word for masculine, sun, exhale, and Tha, the word for feminine, moon, inhale, unite in the pauses between breaths. Try for yourself: sound ‘Ha’ on exhale and notice what a forceful sound it is, notice perhaps that your abdominals are contracting. Now sound ‘Tha’ on inhale and notice how it slips in between your teeth, how your chest lifts and your throat opens as you sound it. Do you notice the different sensations the two sounds and actions create? Do you notice how the two parts of your breath are different?
Now, breathe using ujjayi breath, in and out in a steady stream. Begin to observe the pauses between inhale and exhale, exhale and inhale. Just observe those pauses, observe what you feel in the action of your exhale and then what you feel with inhale.
Exhale is an action, and it requires strength to push the air out. Simply put, you need some degree of tone in your diaphragm, intercostals and abdominals to make it happen. Inhale, on the other hand, happens passively as a result of the vacuum created by a descending diaphragm. We will not forget to breathe in, because our bodies are programmed to make sure we get enough oxygen, but most of us can attest to what happens when we are stressed or concentrating and we forget to breathe out. Headache, anyone? Perhaps with a side helping of anxiety? It takes muscular effort to release your breath from your body. It takes strength to surrender.
And when we are strong enough to fully surrender to our exhale, we make space to fully receive our inhale. This is Strength Receiving. This is HaTha. This is Yoga.
Let’s expand this to asana. Have a peek at the picture below. It has labels and everything. Also, totally off topic, it’s my favourite pic; it makes me feel like I wandered onto a Yoga Journal shoot.
Ok,so you see how my legs are working strongly, and my upper body is soft and arched? This is also strength receiving. Anatomically, we are designed to stand upright, and bear the weight of our bodies through our legs, pelvis and spine. This leave the front of the body open to receiving and releasing our breath. It also leaves the shoulders soft and open. Strength, receiving.
The point of practicing yoga postures, apart from helping us feel the strength receiving in our breath, is to strengthen those parts of us that need to be strong, and stretch those parts of us that need to let go, so that we can be in balance. Balance between strength and sukham, which translates as ease. It also translates, literally, as ’space around the heart’. And that, dear yogi(ni)s, is the essence of receiving, non? An open heart will allow people in. A closed one will not.
Once we have mastered HaTha, strength receiving, in our breath and bodies, then, as Krishnamacharya said, yoga begins. Because all yoga practice is really about our interactions in this world, with other people. So we learn to be strong enough to let go of being right, strong enough to lay ourselves at the feet of those we love, but also strong enough to set appropriate boundaries. We learn to be soft enough to allow others to do things for us, soft enough to let them see our tender underbellies, our foibles and our faults. Soft enough to receive the love that is always flowing our way, even when we don’t believe that it is.
I hope I have explained that lucidly! If not, please let me know.
Happy week to you all.
