Patanjali

This weekend was tough. In teacher training, we were discussing the yoga Sutras of Patanjali, which were probably written three or four thousand years ago. We used the version with commentary by Swami Satchidananda; commentary is very important, because the sutras are extremely short. The purpose of the sutras is basically to explain what yoga is, and how to use it to attain samadhi (or liberation from the current human state without having to be reborn a zillion times).

So much of the first book made so much sense to me, but was still really troubling. Patanjali says that nothing that we can see, hear, smell, touch, or taste is real, and his rule of thumb is that if it changes, it's an illusion. This seems to be exactly what Descartes was going for in his First Meditation, except Patanjali takes it further. Everything changes except the inner self. And he says there's a self so far in there that it doesn't change- rather, the purpose of life is the building up of this inner self, and the bliss of samadhi is when that self gets to join with all the other inner selves who have achieved samadhi, and that joining is god. Phew. The first book also says that things in life that seem at first pleasurable often are actually painful. Well, yeah. You love someone, you get married, and eventually it will be painful for one partner to lose the other partner, and that's best case scenario. When people are too attached, he says, even when things are going well you're scared that they won't be tomorrow. How do you deal with this pain and at the same time get close to your true self? Non-attachment.

So, non-attachment to stuff I can understand. When my bike got stolen last summer I realized how attached I'd become to it, and it hurt when it was taken away. Stuff just isn't worth being attached to because it's all temporary. But Patanjali says to avoid attaching to people as well, both to avoid pain and to avoid clinging to this life. This, I'm having problems with.

One of the other teacher trainees (who is a beautiful, very enlightened woman) said that she thinks of it like this: if she would experience a crushing amount of grief on the loss of a person in her life, then maybe she is stifling the growth and life of that person. So, holding them too close. Smothering them with her attachment.

Our guru was careful to point out that non-attachment doesn't mean indifference. I'm struggling to find the meaning of it for myself, though. I'm not sure if this is an attitude I want to adopt or even want to think about too much, but I feel like it's something that I need to consider, especially given how scared I've been over the last year that something would happen to the hubby.

Product Reveal

I think the first time I thought about what I was putting ON my body, instead of IN, was when Katie was talking about natural makeup. Even though every woman knows that her skin soaks up the lotion she puts on, it hadn't occurred to me before to question what was in the lotion I was rubbing all over my body's largest organ once or twice a day. Lately, partly because of the yoga and partly because I'm trying to become more conscious of my impact on the world, I've really started to think about what Katie was saying about using natural products.

In teacher training last weekend, we talked about habits and routines, and the literature that we were reading mentioned skin care, that you should rub oil into your skin every night before you go to bed. One of the other trainees said that she uses almond oil on her face, and that you can see the difference the next morning. So on the way home, I bought a jar of organic coconut oil, and started using it as lotion.

Coconut oil is a good oil for cooking; supposedly because it's solid at room temperature, it has a high flash point and is slow to develop cancer-causing free radicals (same as ghee). It's also easier for the body to metabolize than olive oil, according to our teacher. It's not particularly good for my dosha, so I figured I'd try it out as a moisturizer and see what happened. Even though it's solid at room temperature, it's liquid at body temperature, so the easiest way to get in on skin is to scrape a hunk out with the back of your fingernail and just rub it into your palms; it'll turn into a nice-feeling oil, not too thin and definitely not like rubbing shortening into your legs. It's unscented, which surprised me. It's good, though, in that if you dislike coconut or don't want to smell like a tanning salon all the time, you don't have to!

It's been awesome. I don't know whether it's real or psychosomatic, but I feel... less toxic, maybe? I feel good about what I put on my body before I go to bed. And the morning after I first used it, my whole body felt like a baby's butt. In a good way. This is also the best oil we've ever used for back rubs, because it seems to have a saturation point where you don't need to keep reapplying.

So now I have to ask, if this unscented, hypoallergenic, organic, natural moisturizer works so well, why have I been rubbing chemicals into my skin for the last twenty-five years?

Hey Baby, What's Your Dosha?

This weekend we learned about Ayurveda. It's a little frustrating, as it's a system that seems to dictate what you eat, when you sleep, and basically everything else about how you live, and yet every source is different. My body type (pitta, fire) isn't supposed to eat bananas, for instance- and then I see a recipe for pitta breakfast that's full of bananas (but it's okay because there's a spice in it that neutralizes the properties that disagree with pitta).

I know that this system isn't perfect- no system is. But I like this one, and I'll make an attempt to explain why.

There are three body types: vata (or wind), pitta, and kapha.

I'm a pitta. Pittas are a fire dosha (type), so if they eat too much spicy food they get heartburn (that's me). They often have red hair and spots on the skin. They have a temper that can flare up with almost no warning (yup). They have to be careful of the sun (I often feel like I look like Michael Jackson when I go outside). They are medium build and tend to maintain weight pretty easily. My secondary dosha is kapha (water/earth), and kaphas can be sweet if they're in balance, but if they're out of balance, they have a tendency to get sedentary. Obviously thousands-of-years-old documents didn't specify laying on the couch watching Tough Love and eating a carton of ice cream as a kapha behavior, but I feel that they would have if it'd been an option.

So in this system, all the negative things that I feel live I've dealt with since we got married (the temper) and my whole life (my tendency to not want to get off the couch) can be dealt with through diet, aromas, and colors. If I feel lazy, I eat a slice of lemon. If I'm about to blow my stack, I stick to yogurt. The thing that I like about it is that you just accept these things... and then deal with them. Rather than being embarrassed and not talking about my championship couch-sitting, I say in front of all the other teacher trainees "my kapha is out of balance. I don't want to do anything lately." And then I work on it, but I feel like the work comes as much from the inside as the outside food I'm eating.

There's also been this cool change, which is basically miraculous if you know how I've been about my body image my whole life: the other day I was walking back home from grocery shopping, and I saw this really skinny girl walking opposite me. My first reaction is to start beating myself up almost instantly... "why aren't YOU that skinny? Why can't YOU stop eating? Why don't YOU go to the gym twice a day?" ... which usually only results in me feeling terrible and going home and eating more ice cream (helloooo kapha). This time, I thought "I'm a pitta kapha, and that's how I'm supposed to be." And it was like this huge internal smile. I'll never be stick-skinny like a vata type, and that's okay. I can watch my weight without obsessing, I can be healthy without beating myself up for not weighing 115. It's like all of this suddenly makes sense to me, when it never has before. And it's also like I have this huge secret when I'm walking around, that I know that I'm a pitta, and that means that I'm a little more accepting of myself than I was before.

Eat Your Spinach.

It doesn't make sense to me, really, that it's so hard to get out of bed in the morning, but after being on my mat for half an hour, I feel so good. When I wake up, I'm sleepy and cranky and cold, and even the ten or so sets of surya namaskar that I did just made me feel awake and alive... and ready to face my last day of work.

So why is it so hard to do the things I need to do? This isn't the first time I've asked myself this question... it popped up once or twice (or every day) in college and grad school with the flute. Why is it so hard to get in the practice room when it feels so good to be there?

I wonder if this quote has something to do with it, at least for me:

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us most."

-Marianne Williamson

I actually think that sometimes I'm afraid of doing things that are good for me because I might succeed... and it's silly. I feel like Popeye, afraid to eat spinach because then I'll be strong. I think this feeling is something that I'll have to confront head-on, especially because I'm trying to find students on my own, rather than another job.

Yoga Is All Around

I've had this obsession since I was little with being individual. It's a weird thing. I always wanted to read the books that nobody else in my age group was reading (like Les Miserables in middle school... that was before I attempted [and failed at] the French version). I want to have a unique subset of talents, because I feel like it gives me a sense of identity. When I was at MSU, I felt like I had no identity as a flute player until I started to develop into "that flute player who teaches music history and can probably help me edit my paper." I don't know why it is that I've always needed to stand out so much, although I'm sure it has to do with a subset of insecurities that probably stem from decades ago.

In any case, I'm sure I'm not the only ethnoflautoyogini ever on the face of the earth. In fact, I'm pretty sure Krishna was all of those things, in a way. I feel strangely compelled to defend my title, though, and to add more little things to make sure that I'm the most oddly-accredited person in the world, just in case anybody needs an ethnographer who also knows how to play flute and teach Hatha. I think what I'm trying to express is that ultimately, I've always been fine with nobody else doing the things I do. More individuality for me.

Then I had this thought the other day while watching this: yoga could solve a lot of problems for a lot of people. It should be so obvious, but I hadn't actually considered that getting more people to do yoga is a good thing, not only for me personally but for the rest of the world. A peaceful and meditative mindset could stop a lot of bad things from happening, and could stop a lot of hurt and fear. I'm not saying that yoga makes people perfect, but I do think that it causes us to confront ourselves in a way that is totally uncomfortable, but ultimately good. I have a suspicion that it may be difficult to bomb people if we're aware of ourselves.