Yoga

Yesterday we graduated. We all wore white (it's a Kundalini thing) and had a small puja (fire ceremony) along with a pretty spectacular gong meditation. While our teacher was giving us our bindis, she said "you are now teachers of yoga... you are now in union with the universe."

Yoga means "to yoke." So it means to tie two things together, to bind one thing to another thing. Ideally, this would be a person in union with the universe, or the eternal, or the reality, or god, or God, or whatever the person desires to be in union with (yoga's not picky, in my admittedly limited experience). Our human minds, connected to the infinite god. So nice (and optimistic) of our teacher to say, but so not true.

Yesterday while we did 108 sun salutations at 6:30 in the morning, I was trying to think "okay sun. You've done a really great job of coming up every day for my whole life. This is the least I can do for you." What I was really thinking, though, was "oooo boy, my triceps are going to KILL tomorrow."

It's not that I haven't been there before. I have been in that place of communion, and I'm fortunate enough to say that I've experienced some pretty great moments lately... not samadhi, but not bad either. But I obviously have a long way to go. I have a very, very erratic mind to calm, and I have big decisions to make about my life, and I have a life to live. That means that I will always struggle to maintain the balance, and that there will always be something that I haven't done that I need to do. It's not me to live a monastic life, so I'll be balancing these things until I give up my body, and that means continual work on my windy (vata) mind, on my sluggish (kapha) body, and my (pitta doesn't translate well) temper. I'll always be working on yoga.

It made me think about other ceremonial "markers" in my life... college and grad school graduations, for instance. They always seemed like a smoke screen to me. Like a silly trick to play for your family... "X is now educated! X can be sent into the world now to do things that are hopefully good." Marriage too, seems to me to be a misleading ceremony. Like your relationship hasn't really started yet, or like it will substantially change for the better. As if the learning and growth is over. As if the work has stopped. As if yoga has been achieved.

Maybe we need that, as people... maybe we need to stop in time and appreciate how far we've come just for an hour or so. But it seems so dangerous and misleading. I know my education hasn't stopped, and I definitely haven't "finished" yoga.

In any case, I can teach in a studio now, and am looking forward to continuing to teach the little brood I have already. Here's to a lifetime of yoga.

So.

So I'm awake in the middle of the night and I need to do something to calm my mind down, and there's something about meditation and pranayama that are just not cutting it right now (like... I'm not good enough at them yet!). So here I am. And I think "I should post something that's not heavy," but it's the middle of the night. It's all heavy right now.

The reason I'm awake is that I'm tachycardic. This happened once a couple of weeks ago, also on a Sunday night when I'd had a particularly miserable week the week before with the kiddos that I watch. I'm nervous about going back to work tomorrow (and I have them for the whole day), so the nerves bypass my conscious brain and go straight to my heart rate. Meditation is just making me worry more (note to self: practice meditation), so I'm doing an outside thing to calm my mind and maybe work out some of the heebie-jeebies about tomorrow.

This week in teacher training, we read the Bhagavad Gita, which is the most fabulous little book. It's a dialogue between Krishna, a chariot driver, and Arjuna, a prince. In the beginning, Arjuna is about to go into battle against some evil usurpers of the throne. He asks Krishna to drive the chariot in between the two armies so he can see what he's up against and looks his whole family smack in the face. His cousins, his uncles, his teachers... they're all there, ready to fight against him. So Arjuna does what any prince would do.

He has a total panic attack. (Sounds familiar.)

So Arjuna starts hyperventilating into a paper bag and saying things like "it'd be better for me to die than all these guys... even if I won, life wouldn't be worth living without my family." He throws down his bow, sits down in the chariot, and starts crying. His chariot driver, Krishna, looks at him and is like "really? Really?" and Arjuna says "what? YOU tell me what to do. I'm your student. Instruct me and I'll do whatever you say." In a surprise twist, Krishna the charioteer is god. So Krishna explains that he has to fight, because choosing not to fight is choosing evil. He's not condoning violence... the whole thing is an allegory for the fight that we have inside ourselves every day. In that fight, it's hard to kill a part of ourselves, but choosing not to fight the bad parts of ourselves is letting them win.

The part that really sticks out to me is when Krishna tells Arjuna not to be attached to the results. "Don't worry about if you win. Just fight." It brought up a lot of memories for me of times when I was much less attached to the results of what I did, mostly musically. When I wasn't so worried about getting a job, or whether getting a graduate degree in flute performance was worth it, I practiced better. I was less worried. I was happier. I tell myself that I'm just being practical, but the worrying and the wondering doesn't do anything but undermine my own fight, just like Arjuna's wondering would have undermined him if he hadn't lucked out and had Krishna for a taxi driver.

So here's to detaching from the results, and to detaching from tomorrow.

To Be or Not To Be

I've always had this idea that I was supposed to be great at something. Like, really great. Ideally world-changing kind of great. It's not that wonderful to have that feeling, because it's a lot of pressure from inside to perform, and I feel like I have no direction beyond the great thing. I don't know what it is that I'm supposed to do so greatly. Sometimes I think I should just pick something, but what if I pick the wrong thing?