Will & Guidance
This last month I had a flare up of endometriosis, an old, familiar acquaintance that I had not encountered in quite some time. In discomfort and exhausted for a few weeks, I was reminded how much I struggle with accessing my guidance when I’m not feeling well. In part it’s because my body, my main receptor for the sensations I’ve learned to equate with guidance, is so distracted from discomfort that it becomes harder to discern the more subtle voice of guidance. But it’s also because, in a way, I really don’t want to know what my guidance has to say about why I’m not feeling well or what to do about it.
As far as I can tell this is for two reasons, made apparent by two tendencies: 1.) I try to ignore that I’m not feeling well and hope it will go away as I keep going about business as usual (hard to admit based on what I teach day in and day out, but true!), or 2.) Once I start feeling really bad (no doubt because I haven’t rested enough!) I go to the opposite end of the spectrum and begin to suspect that I’m feeling so badly because I must be sick with cancer, or something equally horrible.
Neither are useful, and both are based in fear; I’m scared that if I have to take off from work I won’t be able to pay my bills, all the way to I’m scared that if I get really sick my life will drastically change and I won’t be able to do my work or my partner will freak out and our relationship will end and, and and…the fears kinda’ snowball like that.
But the truth is, my fear that I could get sick and not get better could happen, as I was reminded this last week when a young and vital acquaintance died and a family member became suddenly and drastically ill. I was reminded that I can have the best of intentions, I can eat healthy and do yoga and do all the “right” things–and still get sick. In other words, my will can only get me so far. After that, it just makes me so exhausted from pushing against what is, that I collapse.
And I’m not just talking about willfulness around health, like I experienced in the last few weeks. We all are walking around with a burden—whether physical, emotional, mental or spiritual—that is oppressive and that we fear might never go away. We’ve used our will to be able to make it through the days and weeks and years and still function, but that doesn’t make whatever “it” is go away. It just makes us more tired.
I don’t mean to suggest that willfulness is wrong or bad. It is good to develop your will so as to learn how to stand up for yourself, to learn your own preferences to someone else’s, and to cultivate inner strength and courage in yourself. Lacking any self-will leads to a type of collapse, too. But the thing is, our culture puts a premium on beefing up your will. Even in yoga, all the exercises I can find that have to do with the third chakra, or solar plexus–the place in the body that is understood to be the energetic center of will–have to do with expanding it. There’s hardly any talk in our culture, and in yoga these days, about how to soften one’s will, what it feels like and why it’s useful.
However, two weekends ago I received a profound teaching on this from my friend and incredibly skilled and artful yoga teacher, Ada Lusardi. She taught a workshop on releasing the psoas, a deep muscle that runs from the 12th rib on the back of the body, through the abdomen and pelvis and down to connect at the top of the inside of the thigh. This muscle, when tight, causes all sorts of mischief for the lower back and hips, as well as the respiratory, reproductive, and digestive systems in the body. It’s main function, other than aiding with hip flexing (lifting the thigh toward the torso), is stabilization and support.
So what does all of this have to do with will?
The psoas is deep and big. And when it’s gripping or tight, like it is on most of us because of a sedentary lifestyle, it presents itself in our frame in one of two ways: when we’re standing straight in tadasana, either our chest puffs out and our butt sticks out, or the opposite—our chest is sunken in and our tail rounded under. These are pretty familiar holding patterns. You can probably recognize which camp you’re in. I’m definitely in the first camp.
What I recognized as we were exploring this in the workshop is that it’s the solar plexus, the third chakra—the center of will—that either puffs up or sinks back. The first way of standing is kind of what it feels like to “stand up” to something, to stick our chest out and be defended. The second way is what it feels like to shy away and hide. Another two familiar emotional patterns that you can probably relate to. Not surprisingly, I relate to the first one better; my unconscious pattern is to puff up and defend.
Here’s the brilliant thing: when Ada had us stand in our habitual way of standing (puffed up or sunken in) and came around and pressed on our shoulders, it was all we could do to not collapse onto the ground. The thing is, when we stand that way, we’re putting all of our weight on the soft tissue, rather than on the bones that are designed to hold the weight. And any extra gravity—scientific or emotional—is enough to take us out.
The psoas, when it’s not gripping, allows us to rest our weight onto the bones of the spine so that the skeleton takes the weight of our body, like it’s designed to. Once we had released our psoas muscles through a series of subtle movements—all of which in some way revolved around softening the solar plexus—and Ada had us come back to standing in tadasana and pushed down hard on our shoulders—we didn’t budge. Not even a smidge. It was mind-blowing.
So here’s what I’m getting at for the other folks with me in the camp of puffer-outers and defenders (which I see as the more populated camp in my classes): we can’t rest our weight onto the psoas muscle and spine that are designed to support us without softening the solar plexus. Or, using the body as a metaphor for our spirit, we can’t rest into the very center of ourselves, the place of our deepest knowing, our divine will, our guidance, without softening our will. And if we don’t learn to soften our will, any extra emotional gravity or weight placed on our shoulders will take us down. Our will alone can’t support us. There is something much deeper and stronger that is there to support us, but it takes softening the defenses.
Though I will admit that it felt a little vulnerable to have stood in tadasana with my solar plexus soft and undefended and my weight on my built-in support system, it was also the easiest and lightest and strongest stance I have ever experienced.
I can’t think of a more perfect, visceral and powerful remembrance for what it feels like to soften my own will and turn to the support of my inner guidance. My inner guidance that is always kind, always loving and steady like a rock, even if it feels vulnerable to stand in it.
Thanks, Ada, for gifting me with this teaching. You’ll be missed when you return to the bay area!
P.S. If you want to feel your own solid tadasana, come to class as we’re playing with this idea. Or if you want to rest into the support of your own inner guidance more reliably, contact me for a private session.
Regaining Trust
You know the times that you thought you were listening to guidance, and you even dared to act on it…and then it didn’t turn out anywhere near how you thought it would? Instead of having a wonderfully surprising and joyous revelation or experience bestowed upon you, instead you got hurt. You got angry. You felt misguided. And all the trust you had been carefully placing drop by drop into your trust bucket got kicked over and abruptly spilled out, leaving only a few measly drops.
Now what?
You’re thinking, “If guidance is always supposed to be compassionate, why would it have had me experience this? Or maybe that wasn’t even guidance at all–but if it wasn’t, I don’t know what is! If I can’t trust my own guidance, what or who can I trust?”
You’re stuck. You feel alone. You don’t know where to turn to find the right answer!
The first thing to remember is that guidance isn’t about the right answer. It’s not about making your life feel more comfortable and blessed—though it very often will. Guidance is about coming to a more complete knowing and embodiment of your essential self, your divine self, or whatever you want to call the part of you that is and always has been whole, healed and loved and that has a purpose in this world.
So that means that guidance is sometimes about revealing some of the negative thought patterns or layers of defense that you habitually wear as a way of offering you the opportunity to remove them. And though to your essential self this is the most compassionate and healing thing that could happen, to your egoic self this is not comfortable. It can even be downright excruciating or heartbreaking.
This actually happened to me this past week. An opportunity had presented itself earlier in the week that I wasn’t sure about. I checked my guidance about it, but I couldn’t get a clear read on it—I could tell that my own doubt, fear and expectations were affecting my ability to confirm my guidance. As the time to make the decision came closer, I decided to go with what I thought was guidance—and it had an outcome that I would have never wanted! I ended up feeling the sickening discomfort of some old familiar fears and patterns that I thought I had outgrown.
Though part of me thought I must have been wrong, that it had been the voice of fear rather than the voice of guidance I had acted on, I knew that it had been guidance. And after years of consciously engaging with my guidance I knew this wasn’t a cruel trick. I recognized this as a gift from Spirit to my essential self who desperately wants to be out in the world and witnessed.
The truth is, guidance is always compassionate and does have your best and highest good in its interest, and sometimes that’s not easy for your egoic self to swallow. But remember, you always get what you’re ready for and you never get what you don’t need when it comes to growth and learning. And I don’t mean that in a blaming, “you brought this upon yourself” kind of way, I mean it in the most loving and supportive, “hey didn’t you say you were ready to move past this, sweetie” kind of way.
But the tendency, having acted on guidance that brings you to pain, is to get angry, kick the damn trust bucket over yourself, and get away from the pain as quick as possible. And yet you know that every relationship, including the most loving ones, involve some pain and suffering that ultimately leads to a greater capacity to love if you can keep your heart open. As my wise friend Bob says, “all love involves suffering, so learn to suffer well so that you can love well.” And our relationship with Spirit is no different.
So if this happens to you, or if this has happened to you in the past and your trust bucket is still regrettably light in its lack of fullness, see if you can muster the courage to let yourself feel what got triggered for you that made you lose your trust.
For me this week it was that my inner perfectionist got a jab, and my inner pleaser got a punch to the gut, and the not-confident part of me came in and stole my voice and hunched my body over in a way that made me feel like I couldn’t breathe. Ugh.
I gave myself time to really feel all those things and what ended up happening, as it always does, is that in feeling those things they loosened their control over me and another thin layer of the way that they conceal who I really am fell away. Of course they’re not all the way gone over night, but I am conscious that I am letting them go.
Know that you don’t have to figure out what the lesson was or understand why guidance told you something that caused you suffering, all you have to do is feel what you honestly feel—really feel it—and in feeling it realize that those really are patterns and thoughts that you’re ready to no longer let rule you. And that Spirit is here to compassionately, lovingly and sometimes fiercely support you in that.
Revelationary Yoga Workshop~~January 30
Saturday, January 30
10-5pm
$90 ($75 if paid by 1/20/10)
Motion Massage Studio
1829 NE Alberta St
You have been engaged in yoga practice or another embodied spiritual practice for a while now, and the time you spend practicing is the anchor for your week. You wish your daily life could feel as alive, whole, loving, certain and connected to Spirit and to others as it does when you’re practicing. Your life is already changing in subtle and profound ways because of your practice, and you also know that your life off the mat is no longer in alignment with who you are. You realize that you value your life coming into alignment—you need it to!—but you are scared to change, you’re scared to lose the relationships that are dear to you, or a lifestyle that, though not fully satisfying, is comfortable and familiar…
This workshop will:
reveal greater possibilities in your practice
lead to a whole new way of living off your mat
strengthen your inner guidance
and help you to bring forth your unique offering to the world.
The workshop will include:
Yoga & Meditation
(all experience levels welcome)
Experiential Activities
Sacred Sharing
Journaling
You will walk away with a new paradigm for your practice and with tools that you can apply immediately and successfully to your practice and to your life.
You could call Jay Fields, MA, RYT a counselor for your relationship with Spirit. Through teaching and practicing yoga for over ten years, guiding and going on vision quests for over five years, and receiving a masters in integral transformative education, she has learned a thing or two about how we relate with Spirit in self, other and nature, and how we can use that relationship to live in the world in a meaningful way. She doesn’t propose to have all the answers—relationships are all unique. But she is totally committed to her relationship with Spirit, and to helping you find your own answers and your own relationship with Spirit.
Contact: jay@revelationaryliving.com
Move past the stuckness of fear into the flow of guidance
The most frequently asked question from the people who attended my first public talk in Portland was: “How do you deal with the fear-driven voices of the mind that can drown out the voice of guidance?”
Well…
What does it feel like?
First, it’s important to clarify how to distinguish the fear-driven voices of the mind from the voice of guidance. The short answer is that you have to go by what it feels like.
Guidance isn’t just a voice inside, nor is it only a mental thought. Guidance is a mixture of an inner voice or inner vision that has a distinct physical feeling that accompanies it. It feels peaceful, still, open and calm. Think of a time you have deeply known something in every cell of your body. Aaaah. Feel that.
Fear, on the other hand, feels like contraction, tightness, not being able to breathe. And it can come crashing in so very quickly! The feeling of fear itself is not inherently bad, but it can be so uncomfortable that our mind creates thoughts that are designed to help us avoid feeling the fear—this is what I call “fear-driven voices of the mind.”
Maybe you’re familiar with how this plays out? You receive guidance to say, ask for a raise at your job. There is a moment of peacefulness and calm as you feel into that guidance, that knowing that you have been increasingly aware of over the last few months, and then WHAM! Your stomach knots up and you can’t breathe. You’re scared.
The next thing that happens is that your mind might say something like, “Who are you to ask for a raise? You’re too chicken! Plus, you’re not worth anymore than you’re already getting!” And your trust in the voice of guidance is lost, much less your ability to act on it.
So how do you keep flowing with guidance rather than coming to a screeching halt with fear?
Stay present!
Unless you’re really closely tracking your inner dialogue and your body, the shift from guidance into fear will be unconscious, and you’ll begin to spin back into letting the fear-driven voices run your life. This is why embodied practices like yoga, dance, and tai chi are so powerful for helping you to first gain access to and then to trust your guidance.
At first you have to give yourself time to listen to your guidance—set aside time when lying in bed in the morning or on your meditation cushion—somewhere where you can be quiet, undisturbed and comfortable in your body.
As you begin softening your body to listen for guidance, know that as soon as you get a response from guidance you should keep listening attentively to your body so that you can feel when you might start to experience the physical sensation of fear and be conscious of any defense patterns that the fear-driven voices might try to run.
I call my most prominent fear-driven voice Tough Girl. She’s been invested in trying to protect me for a very long time, and from the perspective of my highest self, the part of me that is conscious of being sourced from Spirit, the Tough Girl’s words are never encouraging of living fully and meaningfully. Tough Girl is only concerned with living safely and free from discomfort.
We all have our own version of Tough Girl. Who is yours?
Go away!
Believe me, I know that it’s literally painful at times to feel fear, and that’s why the fear-driven voices are all about getting you to avoid having to feel the pain. But the good news is that if you’re aware of the pain, you have gotten past the tendency to keep yourself distracted and out of your body through any number of distractions (T.V., internet, iPod, constant companionship, workaholism) and you are in a place of empowerment where you can make choices to become unstuck from the habitual mind patterns that keep you feeling stuck.
When we do become aware of the fear and the corresponding voices, we tend to put our energy into avoiding the feeling and ignoring the voices. “La, la, la, la, la, I can’t hear you!” If we do decide to engage with the nasty inner voices it’s usually to refute what they are saying and defend ourselves with positive statements. “I can do it!” “I know I’m not selfish and that I’m smart enough. Go away!”
But have you noticed that the fear doesn’t really go away when you argue with the voices? And that the voices don’t go away just by being aware of them (think spiritual practice) or by knowing and analyzing where they came from (think some forms of western psychology). So how do you get the fear-driven voices to quiet down so you can hear your guidance?
The wave and the ocean
The only way to come back to the peacefulness of your guidance is to let yourself experience and feel the physical sensations and emotions that go along with the voice of fear. You have to cultivate your ability to experience embodied fear with a witness rather than the kind of hysterical fear that happens in the mind and paralyzes action.
Let’s take the example from above. When your stomach gets all knotted up about the thought of asking for a raise, instead of checking out back up to your head to figure out a plan or to get away from the discomfort, stay with the feeling in your belly. Allow yourself to feel the sadness, or perhaps anger or heart break that comes with feeling like you’re not worth receiving a raise. The inner voices might keep adding their two cents, and that’s ok as long as you also can stay with your body rather than letting your thoughts carry you away into your head. What is literally happening when you do that is that you’re thoughts are putting a wedge between you and Spirit, making you feel disconnected and alone and utterly and completely fearful.
But letting the feelings happen and the inner thoughts say what they have to say while keeping your awareness of your body is like watching the waves of you’re breath in meditation. Except in this case you’re watching the waves of your feelings while staying aware of the ocean of Spirit that you are held in.
I know this is really scary. Your mind will tell you not to jump into the waves of your emotions at all because you’ll drown, or that the waves will relentlessly keep crashing on you and you’ll become completely stuck and exhausted.
But if you go into the waves of difficult emotions and uncomfortable physical sensations in a conscious and embodied way, what you will inevitably find is that you will move through the breaking waves and into the vast calmness of Spirit again. The place where your guidance has been all along.
Except this time, you have experienced a shift in perception—not just in your mind, but a visceral, emotional and spiritual shift in perception that has actually rewired the habitual patterns of your mind, making it possible for you to not only trust in the peaceful knowing of your guidance, but to act on it.
Easier said than done? Sure. But it is something you are capable of doing. You can go into the waves of your emotions and find peace because you are a wave in the ocean of Spirit, a unique expression of the incredible vastness.
If you want to have a “lifeguard” present the first few times you dive in, contact me for a private session or for a free 15 minute consultation.
Rejoicing and Receiving
I find myself with much to be thankful for and to rejoice in this season…
Last week I finished my thesis and graduate work (yay!!). Though part of my celebration is that the hard work of researching and writing and deadlines is over, most of my joy is in beginning to see how what has been such a solitary experience for me is now touching others, too. I gave my thesis presentation last week in Arizona and I was absolutely astounded by the response of my committee as well as the people in attendance. (Come see this lecture for free in Portland on January 4 from 7-9pm at the Motion Massage Studio at 1829 NE Alberta!)
What I found surprising after my presentation in Arizona, however, was just how incredibly difficult it was for me to receive the praise, gratitude and love that people offered me in response. It was so difficult, in fact, that all I could say to one woman in particular who so honestly, articulately, and lovingly conveyed her gratitude to me was, “I really am deeply touched by what you shared, and I am having a hard time fully receiving it.”
So this season I am realizing just how easy giving thanks is for me, but how difficult receiving is. In this, I’ve been considering the word rejoice lately. It’s one that pops up this time of year in many spiritual traditions, and also one that I have never really reflected upon. It means to be joyful and to take delight and pleasure in your own experience or the experience of another.
“Take delight.” Whoa. That sounds a lot different than “give thanks.”
Be joyful? Take? We’re taught that this is selfish and superficial. No wonder it is so hard!
And yet it is so important! Imagine what would happen if in your yoga practice or in something else that has great potential to feed your spirit you only focused on the things that aren’t working and that don’t feel good? Unfortunately it happens all the time, and it is certainly a telling metaphor for how we live off our mats, too.
I don’t mean to be Pollyanna and to negate the immense personal and planetary suffering that exists by suggesting we simply tune in to joy-but if we don’t, we are missing many blessings and one remarkably lovely way to touch in with our true nature.
In googling “rejoice and receive” (I completely rejoice in Google!) I found the text of a sermon given in the 1800′s on the topic. The pastor said:
Mariners tell us that there are some parts of the sea where there is a strong current upon the surface going one way, but that down in the depths there is a strong current running the other way. Two seas do not meet and interfere with one another; but one stream of water on the surface is running in one direction, and another below in an opposite direction. On the surface there is a stream of heaviness rolling with dark waves; but down in the depths there is a strong under-current of great rejoicing that is always flowing there.
This is similar to what yoga teacher Erich Schiffman says about an individual being like a wave on the ocean of Spirit; we are not separate from the ocean, we are sourced from the ocean. We are individual expressions of Spirit. Allowing ourselves to consciously feel our joys and the joys of others-to rejoice-gives us the opportunity to go below the waves and surface currents and experience our vastness.
So I encourage you to join me in these last weeks of 2009 to take time to really feel what you rejoice in, to allow yourself to really receive the joy and delight and pleasure in your life. Start small with how absolutely lovely a yoga pose or a good run feels, or how wonderfully yummy that piece of pumpkin pie is! I’m finding these little things are helping me to share in joys with others in bigger ways.
And so, may I practice by saying that I completely rejoice in your support through the last few months in particular of finishing my degree; I rejoice in the ability to take a few weeks “off” over the holidays before moving into the new year with renewed purpose and new offerings to share with you; and I rejoice in all the joy and love that you receive this holiday season!
Facing Our Fears
I’ve been aware lately of the pervasiveness of fear in our lives. And not because it was Halloween this past weekend, but because, as I return to teaching and hear the stories people share with me, I’m amazed at how many contain a component of fear–I can’t find a job, I might lose my house, my relationship might be over, I’m moving and it brings up a lot of unknowns for me, what if I get H1N1?
I don’t mean to negate or trivialize these fears, as my heart feels for the ways in which we all suffer in relationship to our fears. But I mention these stories because I don’t remember any one of the people who told these stories simply saying, “I’m scared.”
I’ve been learning this lesson myself, too, as I have been trying my best to stay witness to a part of me who holds a ton of fear in relationship, and rather than actually acknowledge it, I usually find every way possible to first avoid it, numb it out, or make it go away.
It has become my practice lately to try to maintain my witness enough in these situations to pause, acknowledge and feel the fear, and say out loud, “I’m scared.” Saying I’m scared is scary, too, but it shifts everything. The feeling of paralysis and struggle go away, and I sense a glimmer of hope that the fear itself might also go away.
I used to be terrified of the dark. My parents could tell you stories of how I would run like a wild person out of the basement when I was a kid because I was certain something would jump out of the darkness and kill me. My family and I made fun of my reaction, and I was ashamed as this fear persisted into my adult years.
I’ve finally mostly gotten over this fear, and not because I’ve just outgrown it, but because at some point I decided living (or trying to live) with this paralyzing fear was worse than facing it and transforming it. It took years of living on my own and many, many nights sleeping in the backcountry alone, feeling just how breathtakingly, devastatingly terrified I was–to realize one night that the fear simply was no longer there. I actually even came to enjoy the dark.
Of course, this fear still gets triggered every once in a while–like this weekend as I went into a neighbor’s pitch-dark house to care for their pets while they were away, and I got so scared that I went home and asked my partner to come with me. If he hadn’t been there I would have faced my fear and fed the dogs anyway, but since he was there, it was just so much easier to ask him to come with me than it was to actually deal with how scared I was. Though I was forthright with him and openly admitted I was scared, internally I remember thinking, “This again? I thought I had dealt with this fear?”
We all have fears; some persistent, some transient, some deeply hidden. And as my friend and grounded-astrologer-extraordinaire Emily Trinkhaus writes about eloquently and insightfully in her November blog, we happen to astrologically be going through a time that is about highlighting our fears. (As I so often say to her–”That explains A LOT!) We also happen to live in a culture–as evidenced in my story above and in the social commentary that is Halloween–that chooses to ignore our worst fears, exaggerate them, turn them into a big joke, or project them in our relationships with other people (personally and collectively) costumed as anger, manipulation, and control.
I revisited the Buddhist nun Pema Chodron’s The Places that Scare You this weekend. She says, “what we most want to avoid in our lives is crucial to awakening.” Gosh that’s hard to swallow. And yet my heart knows it is true.
So what do we do? She reminds us that letting go of the story line and simply abiding with the energy of fear until we can begin to relax with the fear is what transforms it. This is why in my classes lately I am always inviting you back to ease. Relax. Not because the yoga poses are meant to be easy and peaceful, but because when we relax we aren’t fighting with what is. Instead we are allowing ourselves to remember that we are supported, that Spirit and love are present even in the struggle, and with that, the internal warfare subsides and we begin to get a sense of the possibility for transformation that is available in what Pema Chodron refers to as “the nakedness of the present moment.”
In this way our yoga mat is no longer the place that we go to avoid our fears–or anything else for that matter–but a place where we go to relax into and abide in whatever energy is present so that we can be more alive and fearless off our mats.
And so, in this way, never underestimate the courage it takes to go to your yoga mat and the profound power for transformation that comes through abiding with all that is.
It’s good to be back practicing with you all. 
10-8 Courtship
Lord Give Me
Life is always up or down,
or yes, or no.
But there is one person who is always a yes.
Though with the usual human complexities.
Lord, give me a few more years
to enjoy such confusion.
~Mary Oliver
What if that “one person” were you?
Not in a narcissistic way, but in a “your ‘human complexities’ are the doorway to your experience of your world” way, or “your ‘confusion’ is the key to your knowing” way.
I think of Mary Oliver, undoubtedly my favorite poet because her love-affair with the miraculousness of the mundanities of the world is both passionate and deep–I can’t imagine a single day goes by in which she doesn’t pause to marvel at God in some ordinary detail. At 73, she offers the prayer in the above poem for a few more years to steep in her life. At 29, I pray that I can continue to find the passion she has to seek out presence every day, even if only for a few minutes.
After last month’s newsletter in which I talked about practice as relationship, I heard fellow yoga teacher Kira Ryder describe yoga as a “courtship of the Self.” I love this, because it speaks to the excitement and the challenge of coming to know one’s Self (higher Self, Divine Self) through one’s self (individual self). It’s about coming to know our divinity through our humanity. (Which, by the way, is the only way.)
And yet it’s common to say “I’ll go to my mat when I don’t feel so _____” (insert any human condition/emotion here). Or “I’ll practice at home when I know enough about yoga or meditation to feel like I know what I’m doing.” But the reason why this doesn’t work is that our condition as humans is one of complexity and not knowing—you’re always going to feel like something’s not quite right or you could know more! In order to experience simplicity and knowing you have to connect with your Self, and in order to do that you have to rest into your self in the present moment.
And so here’s the challenge: court your Self. Not in the way you would court someone in high school—by making sure your hair is perfect and you are always at your coolest—but simply by going out of your way to make time for that person—YOU.
So the invitation is: spend 10 minutes a day with your Self for the next 8 days. Maybe it’s in meditation, maybe yoga, maybe something else (like simply lying flat on your back on the floor—one of my favorite things to do!)—anything that invites the possibility of Yoga (union with the divine) by bringing your consciousness to the here and now of being YOU. Being you—so you can’t be doing something else at the same time.
I’m calling this the 10-8 Courtship. I’m inviting you to do it because I don’t think there is anything more powerful than this practice—than this relationship with your Self. It’s the foundation for all sorts of transformation and transpersonal development—and everyone can do it. Even you.
I know it can be really hard to do this in your own home by yourself with life and your family whizzing all around. The thing is, you aren’t alone. You’re doing this with everyone else in the world who takes time out of their day to court their Self. And the very act of you doing this affects everyone else in the world. Especially the people closest to you.
And just so you feel less alone, I invite you to use this blog to share your experience—How do you spend your 10 minutes? What time of day? Where? What’s hard about it? What’s lovely? What surprises you?
It’s only 10 minutes for 8 days. Are you in?
Your Self is waiting. 
Practice as Relationship
When I decided to take these three months off to write my thesis, I had three intentions that I wrote down and posted on my fridge:
1. Get to know myself outside of my normal roles
2. Deepen my relationship with Spirit
3. Write my thesis
Though I understood, at least in part, that my ability to write my thesis could only come out of knowing myself and spending more time in conscious relationship with Spirit, I didn’t realize at the time the significance of writing my intentions in that order. What seemed relatively insignificant at the time revealed itself to be the very crux of a transformational experience for me.
I chose to do yoga and meditate as my means to knowing myself simply because this is what my spiritual practice has been for ten years. Like any practice, I have struggled with it; there have been weeks on end where I didn’t practice, and many mornings when I forced myself to; there have been times when I’ve used my practice as a way to beat myself up for not being good enough; and as a teacher, I have many times reduced my practice to be about being a better teacher to my students.
But something happened in those first few weeks of my sabbatical in getting to know myself outside of my role as teacher—I realized that my practice itself is a relationship. Yoga, meaning to yoke or join with the Divine, is all about relationship. It was so obvious that I had not seen it. I go to my mat to consciously be in relationship with Spirit: to pray (talk to God) and to meditate (listen to God). When I let myself see my yoga as a relationship to Self and God rather than as a practice, I became SO much more willing to go to my mat everyday!
As I’ve opened myself more and more to acknowledging and receiving the relational gifts available in connecting with my Self and with Spirit through yoga and meditation, I’ve found that I actually look forward to going to my mat the way I would look forward to hanging out with my best friend or with my partner.
Not to say that practice isn’t involved—any intimate relationship, as you know, calls for practice. But even though we understand that relationship can be a spiritual practice, we wouldn’t refer to our marriage or our parenting as (solely) our practice (“let me introduce you to the person I practice with” or “I’m going to take a break from work and play with my son because I haven’t practiced yet today”); we would say that they are relationships AND that they take practice and dedication. Calling a relationship a practice takes the heart out of it; it drains the relationship of the love, the compassion, and the longing to be known and accepted.
In sharing this with the participants in the Guided from Within Workshop yesterday (which was wonderful!), I found that this paradigm shift was big for them, too. It seems both subtle and obvious, and it opens up a whole slew of conversations and teachings in light of the relational context of yoga—conversations and teachings that I look forward to engaging with you in when I come back to teaching in October!
In the meantime, I invite you to consider: What changes for you if you consider your yoga (or whatever your spiritual practice is) a relationship to Self and Spirit rather than a practice?
Ruminations
Well, it’s been a few weeks now that I have not been teaching and have been dedicating my time to writing. I have had some lovely days spent writing, reading, walking in nature, doing yoga and meditating—all as I had intended and had anxiously awaited.
AND, I have also had many days filled with fixing flat tires, grocery shopping, cleaning the house, returning emails and phone calls—among a myriad of other things I had no idea could consume hours of my day. I have been startled by my prickliness and crankiness when it comes to how this time off has borne very little resemblance to the focused, retreat-like vision in my head.
I think the crankiness is because I somehow imagined that if I had no external obligations, I would finally have the time and space to do just what I wanted. But I’m learning that was a tricky assumption, for two reasons:
First: Almost all external obligations—things that I feel bound to do—are mostly of my own making. Many of these things really need not be done, but if they aren’t done, I must accept that my life will transform in a way that is beyond my knowing. Because of a nagging fear of the unknown even within the persistent longing for a new way of being, in the absence of traditional obligations such as work, I will simply create new obligations seemingly out of habit. The extra crappy thing about having intentionally and publically removed myself from my daily life as it has been, I’m learning, is that I can’t deny that it really is ME that’s creating these distractions!
Second: Taking this time off really never was about doing what I want to do, but doing what I felt called to do. That’s a big difference: though I also do want to write my thesis, there is something deeper to taking this time off and focusing my attention inward. If it was simply up to what I wanted to do, well, let’s just say my days would probably look quite different. A call, as in a higher purpose or a spiritual service or heart-offering, also includes the mundane as well as the uncomfortable.
I’m thinking of all of this in light of my upcoming workshop and class series, Guided from Within. I don’t think I’m alone in allowing/creating external obligations and dictates to eclipse the deeper callings of my heart and soul—a fact that holds both promise and peril—and that ultimately calls for practice.
What if you gave yourself the permission to practice yoga as you are guided, not by what the teacher offers? What if that meant that sometimes you just sat there not knowing what to do, or constructing your grocery list in your head? Or maybe sometimes you did a powerful vinyasa sequence because the person next to you was doing that, even though you knew you longed to rest in a restorative pose? Or maybe, just maybe, it meant that sometimes you felt the calm joy of what it feels like to be perfectly in alignment with yourself and your own knowing? What if all of those things were welcomed and understood?
This learning to be guided from within does take practice—and trust, courage, compassion, curiosity, and a great sense of humor. And, ironic as it may sound, it takes community—a community of people you can trust because they’ve said yes to showing up with the best of their ability with the above qualities to explore the unhinged and ultimately essential idea of moving through yoga (read: Life) by what moves them.
So, if you’re at all called to join us at Ombase for this exploration, we would love to have you.
In the meantime, deep gratitude to you, community, for your continued support of my own fledging transfer of this practice from my mat to my life!
Listening Within
Life is a chain.
Depending on how you look at it, it may feel like a chain that binds and restricts you, or it may feel like a chain of connected experiences and moments that hold purpose, meaning, and possibility. I believe the difference between which type of chain you experience life as lies within where you are guided from.
Are you guided from within or from without?
The thing about internal guidance is that you have to be present to receive it—present to yourself in the ever-changing sequence of life. That’s what vinyasa yoga in particular is all about—practicing staying present to your experience in each pose and each transition within a chain of interconnected postures. Through staying present, you are able to feel in your body how to respond to each pose. The feeling in your body of how to respond is internal guidance.
But most often we default to the external guidance—in the case of a yoga class, it’s the voice of the teacher who conducts the sequence of poses. We might get the cue from our body that this doesn’t feel right but we keep going because that’s what the teacher says to do and it would be too awkward or rude or embarrassing to not do that. Or we simply don’t know what we would do instead.
But as what our internal guidance says is best for us in the moment goes further out of alignment with what the external guidance is, we can feel like we’re getting dragged around on the end of a chain, and we can begin to lose a sense of connection and meaning in something that once brought us joy and inspiration.
(And I don’t know about you, but a yoga class is not the only place that this happens for me, and certainly not the most crucial!)
I don’t think the question is “how do we get supported in hearing our guidance when we’re present to ourselves?” as I think most of us actually do hear that voice, if quietly: “this pose hurts my knee;” “living in this town no longer serves me;” “eat the ice cream.” The chain of guidance usually breaks once we’ve heard it because we don’t want to hear it, don’t know what to do about it, or don’t trust it.
The question is: how do we learn to listen, discern what to do, and trust acting on it??
Well,:
1. Start with the small stuff! When we’re first learning to listen internally, it’s best to start with the small stuff—most of us wouldn’t run a marathon without slowly building our jogging distance, and yet we usually only turn to our guidance with the BIG questions. Erich Schiffman talks about using guidance to decide what shirt to wear in the morning, whether to buy apples or oranges at the store, what yoga pose to do. Start with the small stuff so you start to know how you know when it’s guidance rather than your “should voice.” If you start with things that are inconsequential, you build trust with the inner wisdom.
2. Know that it won’t necessarily make sense to your rational thinking mind. Guidance is active engagement with the Mystery. It is rarely what your mind would suggest, and it doesn’t always tell you why. The best thing you can do is to play the game and be curious to the why after the fact. “Oh, maybe it felt right to go the long way home because it allowed me to run into this person who I’ve been meaning to connect with.”
3. Ask for support from the people in your life, but also from Spirit. When you do come upon one of the heavy duty subjects, you can ask guidance for more information; sometimes it may have it to offer, other times not. When you need more support, tell your trusted friends and family. “Hey, I keep getting this feeling like I should do this thing, but I don’t really know how and it scares me.” I find that people are always hugely supportive of helping you come into alignment with your own knowing.
Remember this: the voice of guidance is always compassionate, AND it doesn’t care if you don’t listen, it will keep offering itself to you unconditionally.
And know that when you do listen and then dare to act on what you’re guided to do, your life will feel less like a binding chain and more like an inspiring chain of interconnected events. Your life.
