Thanksgiving

Because I'm human and there are many things in life to be thankful for:

I'm so happy to have friends who love me even when I'm totally buried in my own pain.

I'm lucky to have a place to go where I can be myself.

I'm very fortunate to have this opportunity to find myself and figure out what I want.

I'm deeply grateful to be alive and healthy.

I'm thankful for my time at Michigan State, and for the amazing and lasting friendships that resulted.

I'm thankful for my family, who told me today to not listen to anyone but myself about this, including them.

I have enough financial stability to live for a while.

I can go anywhere and do anything.

I'm actually thankful for the last year.

I'm thankful for what I know about myself from this experience. No matter what, it will be useful in the future.

I'm thankful for yoga, and thankful for how yoga and meditation have helped me in dealing with the absence of music in my life.

I'm also grateful for how yoga has helped me realize how necessary it is to me to have music.

I'm thankful for wine and organic cotton.

I'm thankful for the earth under my feet.

I'm thankful for this song.

I'm thankful for the person that I am.

I'm thankful for the person that I am.

I'm thankful for the person that I am.

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?

Habit

Habit is a funny word, isn't it? The first definition that pops into my head is actually the nun's habit. When I was little and we used to take walks in the seminary down the street, sometimes we'd see nuns walking around and my dad would always say "hello, sister" very politely, like he was a kid in Catholic school. Their habits, all black with white around the face and neck and a cross hanging down, made them look otherworldly and untouchable.

Supposedly it takes six weeks to change a habit (not a nun's habit- I'm sure you could change that in five minutes). I'm always frustrated with myself when I try to change something. I feel like I make it a few days, then slip. Then maybe I have a couple more good days before I slip again. This hasn't always been the case (I became a vegetarian successfully almost three years ago), but I struggle with making and breaking habits all over the place in my life.

I know it's because I over-think things. I'll be intending to practice, but won't be sure that I want to apply to DMA programs, so I'll put it off... and in my uncertainty, I don't get anything done. I wish most of the time that I could just turn off my brain and live, maybe, in a state of perpetual hangover. If I didn't ask "why?" all the time, maybe I'd just do things, go for things, stop selling myself short. Maybe then I could get through more than a few days and actually make a habit.

Maybe, though, it's just a different way of looking at it. If I were a nun, I wouldn't think "I have to wear this stupid piece of clothing again?! Why? Do I even believe in everything this stands for?" Rather, I'd want to think "This habit elevates me as a person. It removes me from a lot of harmful things and brings me closer to the divinity that I'm seeking. Even if it's the same old thing I put on every day, of course I want to wear it."

Mahamrityunjaya Mantra

This mantra is addressed to the trinity of Hinduism, composed of Brahma (the creator), Vishnu (the preserver) and Shiva (the destroyer). The mantra comes from the Rigveda, a collection of scriptures about 4000 or so years old. I'm a latecomer to the scene as I learned it yesterday.

Om tryambakaṃ yajāmahe sugandhiṃ puṣṭi-vardhanam

urvārukam iva bandhanān mṛtyor mukṣīya māmṛtāt

Some interesting translations (note to self: learn Sansrit):

We meditate on the Three-eyed reality which nourishes and increases the sweet fullness of life. Like a cucumber from its stem may we be separated ("liberated"), not from immortality but from death.

We Meditate on the Three-eyed reality

Which permeates and nourishes all like a fragrance.

May we be liberated from death for the sake of immortality,

Even as the cucumber is severed from bondage to the creeper.

We worship the Three-eyed One who is fragrant, immensely merciful and who is the Protector of the devotees. May he liberate us from death for the sake of immortality, Even as the cucumber is severed from bondage to the creeper.

Moving On Up

When I started teacher training, we wrote a list of goals and put them into an envelope. We get them back when we graduate. I love that idea- it's like a time capsule of goals and emotions. I don't remember too much of what I wrote on my card, but I know I was really unhappy when I wrote it. I was in the midst of my blah job and really wishing I was back where I feel like I belong- in school or in a teaching situation. Or out of Boston. You know, whatever.

I know some things have changed. I may not be one hundred percent out of my rut, but I know I'm making progress. Some of the more expensive progress came in the form of the $160 charge on my card for the GRE.

Sherman used to say that he only advised students to go into music if they didn't have a choice. That is, if they absolutely couldn't see any road ahead of them except for music, if music was their only option aside from desperate unhappiness, then music was a good idea.

I haven't been the most driven person in the last few years, and I know that. I haven't even come close to what I feel I could potentially do. It's hard to be in your twenties and getting ready to enter a PhD or DMA program (hopefully!), without any promise that you'll have a job when you exit. I don't think this was the case forty (or even twenty) years ago. But I want to do what I want to do, and I can't see myself doing anything else with or in my life.

So this time, I'm ready.