Letting the Ocean Instruct, Part II: Receiving the Gift of Life

Despite my intentions of slowing down the pace a bit this year, so much has been going on! So, this is my new year’s blog, a few days late, and hopefully better for the percolating.

I am a person who really likes to mark time; I love the rhythm of the year, the celebration of holidays, the thresholds, the in-between times, the moments where you sense that something new is possible.  Every moment is a threshold moment, containing the possibility for revelation and change, truth be told, but it seems that certain moments present themselves more obviously as such.  And so, not surprisingly, I relish the end of the year, and even look forward to this contemplation and intention-setting time for weeks ahead.  It helps that I’m usually able to nestle in to this process at a cozy coffee shop in Chapel Hill, NC, outside of my normal routine.  This place has a back porch that meanders out into the woods and invites lingering.  It is lovely on a winter’s day.

Before rushing into listing all of the things I’d like to do differently in the year to come (which turns out isn’t what happened at all this year!), I spend ample time looking back on what gifts the waning year has given.  There have been many, there always are.  They have come in the form of friends and challenging folks, opportunities and roadblocks, teachers and students, beginnings, endings, changing forms, great music, glorious food, sunlight through magnificent live oaks, the ocean.  I have been able to actually receive all of these gifts of the previous year because of the supreme gift of yoga, and of Anusara yoga in particular, and all that has been received has brought me to a place of a deeper engagement with life, a deeper responsibility for the freedom that is mine, and more cohesion and steadiness to the powerful light that shines within.  For me, this time of reflection is crucial to actually fully receive what is being offered.  The nature of the universe is that it’s always offering itself to us, always, and always in more ways than we can possibly imagine.  Yoga has taught me how to pay attention and acknowledge more of what’s being offered than I had before, to see the old and familiar in new ways, to penetrate to the essence of the moment, at least some of the time!  And in that attention, acknowledgement, and appreciation that what is being presented is a precious gift, even if it does not seem so at first, I am actually able to receive even more fully what is being given, and in that space of full receptivity, I can make the most of those gifts and even grow them into something greater.  This is the yoga, to apprehend the threshold that exists in each moment, enter into that seam and make of it something only we can.

I was reminded of the lavish giving of this world and also of how easy it is not to pay any attention to it during our trip to the beach (see the last post) right before Christmas.  The town was mostly deserted, deliciously quiet, and we were staying in a condo with the balcony overlooking the ocean, overlooking the ocean!!  And still, I forgot.  There it is, this vast, magnificent sea, right outside my door, the waves always coming in and going out, at once dependable and wild, and for long stretches of time I get caught going in circles in my head about something or other, caught in busy-ness, until my dear teacher of a husband reminds me that there’s an ocean out there.  And, every time, as soon as I pay attention, my breathing deepens, my mind drops into my body, and I am myself again.  This experience is being presented to us all the time in the breath itself, which is giving us our aliveness unconditionally always.  There is no obligation to pay attention and we will continue being breathed. We don’t actually have to receive the gift, but we find that when we do, we’re not only alive, but lively, more of who it is we already are. 

If you’ve not already, I invite you to spend some moments acknowledging what you been given this year. What is that you are always being given?  If you are a yoga practitioner, what specifically have been the gifts of the practice for you?  There’s no obligation to receive them, but if you do, it’ll be worth it, I promise!  Enough for now…I leave you to linger on this side of the threshold before offering my experience of intentions for the new year.

Engaged, or Just Busy?

One of the things I often say in my yoga classes is that I’m only ever talking to myself, instructing my students on what it is I need to learn.  Sure glad they’re there!  So, true to form, my last blog entry was about slowing down and turning inward during this season, making these weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas a sacred time by paying attention.  Mere days later, I was rushing out the door on a Sunday morning (supposedly my day off) to hear one of my teachers, Douglas Brooks, even saying to my husband, “I’m trying to do too much at once.”  I’m walking towards the door of the studio right at the start time, walking and texting at the same time, taking care of one last piece of business, when the notoriously untrustworthy sidewalks of New Orleans rose up to make sure I was indeed paying attention.  I twisted my ankle fiercely, so fiercely that after listening to Douglas for a few hours, I still needed to cancel the rest of my appointments for the day…remember that day off? 

In one crystalline moment of Douglas’s lecture, he was talking, as he often does, about how yoga is an invitation to engage our lives purposefully and skillfully.  He made the statement, ”It’s easy to be busy; it’s hard to be engaged.” Convicted.   

So I’ve been circling around those few words for a couple of weeks now asking myself how to tell the difference. How can I know in any given moment if I’m engaged or just merely busy?  I mean many of us have lives in which it is important that we get things done, move projects forward, take care of family, and the list goes on.  Indeed, this teaching came forward in the midst of a lecture on the Bhagavad Gita in which one of the primary messages is to act. I am realizing, though, that so much of what I “have to do” is distraction from that which truly deserves my attention and engagement.  What I’ve come to, at least for now, is that in busy-ness, my mind is disconnected from the body and the breath.  Often we have so much skittering around in the mind while the body is doing its thing, whether working out or running errands or just sitting there. Air sign that I am, I tend to be very mental and also very much in love with my own ideas (thankfully, a great gift of yoga is that most of the time they’re uplifting ones!), I can go huge periods of time without any idea that I’m in a body and breathing.   

The genius of the yoga asana practice is that it is a very effective way for bringing the three all to the same place and time, though it doesn’t necessarily happen that way.  We can still bring all of our disembodied and distracted habits to the mat if we insist, but that’s another great benefit of the practice, that it reveals to you the ways you are and aren’t with yourself.  If however, we come to the practice with intention and attention, then true engagement follows. What I so love about Anusara yoga particularly is that the body is seen as sacred, equal in glory to the mind, the breath, the heart, and seeks very deliberately to bring all into harmonious engagement. The slower pace and precise alignment give me the time to move the light of awareness through the entire body and feel very present and engaged there.  When my mind, body, and breath are together, I find that my actions seem all at once slower, more deliberate, and yet more efficient and sure.  I am better able to ascertain what actually needs doing, what my heart is longing to do, what will move me towards freeom, and what is mere distraction.  Come to think of it, it’s after these contemplations and practices of the type described below, that this blog moved from lots of ideas skittering around in my head for years into a more grounded and concrete form.  Finally, I’ve engaged this particular calling of my heart, and it is freeing indeed! The world needs your attention, intention, and engagement much more than it needs your busy-ness; it needs you to spend your time and attention on what really matters to you.  In the next cycle, what one distraction can you drop to make space for true engagement? 

(For the Anusara yogis reading this, a great practice to move you from busy to engaged is to focus on the lower body loops, moving the mind into the densest form of consciousness in the legs.  Feel how your energy flies up and out of the body when you move from engaging the lower body loops to hyper-extended knees. Keep the loops going and root into fronts of heels as you move from tadasana to uttanasana and back. Utkatasana, Garudasana – really ground down into feet to stand up, Handstand with Garudasana legs.  Stay low in the lunges, especially during transitions, try moving from Warrior I to Warrior II and back again staying deeply committed in the front leg.  Also, notice any tendencies of unnecessary movement and adjusting. Let me know what you think!) 

Right now, I am keeping a much more sane pace while spending some time at the beach.  The ocean is a great teacher on this topic and many more. More on that later!