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.

Coming home

“Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.” This line came into my head the other day. I don’t recall the first time I read it, but it is a line from a short story called “The Painful Case,” in James Joyce’s Dubliners.

It’s staggering how many people don’t inhabit their bodies. Even seasoned yogis show up to their mat and settle into themselves with a big sigh as if to suggest they’ve been out for a long morning of running errands and are just now arriving back at home.

The thing about really living in our bodies is that it requires us to feel, and as we all know, opening ourselves to feeling in general puts us at risk of feeling things we’d rather not feel. And so, most people lock the door to their body and go back to incessantly running mental errands.

Yet what is so inspiring to me is how students show up at yoga class, whether consciously or not, with the longing to come back home to themselves. It happens slowly at first, tentatively, and usually only during the poses that feeeel reaaally gooooood. There is a deep breath or a sigh that indicates they are really there and feeling it feel good. And that’s great. That’s the place to start — the place of support and softness.

And then gradually a student will choose to stay with a challenging pose without going back into their head and hardening physically (as those two things always happen together). Instead, they’ll stay in their body. They’ll remember what it felt like to soften and be present, and they’ll apply it here even though it’s hard, and they’ll feel. And once they feel the hard place, they have the opportunity to respond by softening and the whole situation transforms.

Lately, as I’m coming up against my own edge in this place of learning how to stay in my body, feel and be soft even when it’s hard and uncomfortable and even when I’m around other people (especially the people around whom I feel most vulnerable), I am touched by how truly revolutionary it is for a classroom full of people to transform into a community of people at home in themselves.

That’s what the Mr. Duffy’s of the world don’t ever get; in addition to saying that he “lived a short distance from his body,” in the short story Joyce also describes Mr. Duffy as meticulous, ordered, and-not surprisingly–as isolated. I believe we come to class not only because we want to feel at home in ourselves, but also because we long to be in communion with others (as those two things always happen together, too). And God knows that communion is not terribly ordered!

So this is at once my letter of gratitude to you for coming to class and for doing the courageous work of arriving in your life, inhabited and open. This is also my invitation to you to come back home to yourself if you’ve been living elsewhere for awhile. I don’t just mean by coming to a class, but come back to your body right now where you are. And now. And now.

Finally, this is my challenge to you: The next time you come to the community of class, really let yourself feel the extraordinariness of being in your center, soft, and open among a group of people. Feel it so that you can know yourself well in this place of openness and softness so that you can access this off your mat among the people in your life. Feel it because the world needs fewer “painful cases” like Mr. Duffy, and more courageous yogis like you.

Observing the wonders

Last Thursday morning as I was completing my morning meditation and praying for guidance about a question that has been troubling my spirit, a bird collided with the large picture window in my house and fell to the ground. I rushed outside and found a red-headed woodpecker lying still on the deck. Certain he had broken his neck, I scooped him into my hands to offer him a prayer.
Yet as I held him, I felt his heart racing and saw his eyes trying to open. I sat with him in my hands, holding him warm and looking very closely at his exquisite feathers and intricate claws for nearly 10 minutes. At one point I moved slightly, and he suddenly hopped to his feet and clutched to my hand. Still a bit confused, he perched himself on my hand only inches from my face.  For another 10 minutes or so he sat there until he turned, looked right at me, and quite suddenly flew off back to the tree where I had been hearing him peck for the past few weeks. I simply sat there filled with awe and gratitude for our exchange.
A few days later I was doing a walking meditation in the labyrinth at Breitenbush, seeking clarity on the same question from the previous meditation. As I was walking, something quite peculiar caught my eye. I saw what looked like a maple tree seed pod standing up on end. I crouched onto my knees and brought my face very close to the ground. To my amazement the seed pod was sticking straight up off of a root that it had sent down into the pebbly ground. Looking very closely, I saw where green life on the inside of the pod was in the process of unfurling itself and busting out of its shell. I have seen thousands of these seed pods in my life, but never one that has rooted itself. It wasn’t until this moment that it really hit me that this tiny feather of a thing actually becomes a tree. I laid there on the ground totally transfixed, my question shelved.
Telling these stories now, I am struck by how both began with an attempt on my part to seek comfort by dismissing uncertainty. I wanted to know the answer so I could stop being so uncomfortable. I wanted the voice of Spirit to whisper in my ear and say “JAY, THE ANSWER TO YOUR QUESTION IS…” so I could stop spinning and find solid ground.
Instead Spirit said, “Hey! Stop looking for comfort in the answers! Come observe the wonders around you. Feel my presence and be comforted.”
I think that’s all we ever want—to know that we are supported, that we’re not alone—especially in times of personal and collective uncertainty. We can become accustomed to thinking that knowing the answers to the big questions is the only way to know we’re truly supported. Paradoxically it’s when we participate with the Mystery around us and we fill with awe at all we don’t know that we can feel the most connected. Like the woodpecker, we find that we are held until we’re ready to fly again; like the seed pod, regardless of whether we are spinning or firmly rooted in sacred ground, we are more than what we seem.

Wishing you the blessings of the many wonders all around you.

Transformation

There’s been a lot of talk about change lately; not only in the collective, but also in very personal ways for many people, including myself. There is a call on many levels for what has been to dissolve and for something new to take its place.

Over the last few weeks I was reminded of the difference between change and transformation: change is external and transformation is internal. One cannot happen without the other. Either something external to us changes and we have to transform to meet it, or we transform and that which we have been wanting to change suddenly does.

Like me, I’m sure you all know this somewhere in your bones, but it’s so difficult to re-member when we’re longing so much for something to be different than it is. We find ourselves holding to illusions of what we want and know to be possible rather than acknowledging what is actually real. And the more we don’t let ourselves feel what’s real, the tighter we hold to our illusions…

The only way to move into what is possible is to feel what is real right now. And when we feel what is real, if it doesn’t match what we want, we get to change it. But we can’t directly change the external event, thing or person by simply wishing it were different. That’s a way of negating the truth that is disempowering and usually rife with agendas, illusions and expectations. It just won’t work. Instead, we have to transform. But how?

With transformation we are called to not only feel what is real, but also to feel what it would feel like to be living the possible. And when I say feel, I don’t just mean emotionally, but also literally in your body and your breath. Think of an aspect of your life where you’re longing for change. Feel what it actually is like right now. And then feel what you want and know to be possible-feel how open your chest gets, how deep your breath becomes, how weight drops off your shoulders, how peaceful and alive you feel.

Rather than waiting for external reality to change so that you can get to a point where you can feel this all the time, claim this feeling as your own and commit to it. Use this feeling as your guidance for making decisions. That is, make choices that support you feeling the way you do when you are imagining living what is possible. This feeling is your TRUTH, and the more you choose to align with it, the more you will inspire external reality to align with inner truth.

It may sound like woo-woo fluff, and it’s definitely easier said than done, but it works because it is spiritual teaching grounded in the wisdom of the body, and all it takes is your commitment to this very clear feeling. “Can I stay in alignment with this feeling of truth when I hang out with this friend? Is eating this in alignment with that feeling? Is this choice I’m making right now, no matter how small, in alignment?” You’ll find you become intolerant for any choice that doesn’t support this feeling. You’ll also find that you’re creating soil that is rich for the change you are longing for to take root in and sprout.

So as we come into the month of the return of Spring when the body of the earth is receiving the seeds of what is possible and cultivating the sprouting of new growth, so may our bodies.

Valentine

Yesterday I wrote a newsletter about the perils and promises of peace and change because this dynamic is present in my life, and obviously, also in the collective. But I also wrote about this because I was avoiding writing about the topic of most February newsletters: love.

To tell you the truth, love is a complete mystery to me, and it terrifies me to broach the subject in front of a group of people. As I’m standing in front of a yoga class wanting to mention the “L” word, the thought has crossed my mind countless times, “Who am I to talk about love??” But today I received a series of teachings about love that made me scrap the other newsletter and venture into the scary territory of writing about love to all of you. (If you want to read the other letter, I’ve posted it on my below).

So…deep breath…here goes.

As I said, love is a complete mystery to me. Funny, then, that the teaching from today was–and read carefully, because it’s so close that it can be tricky–is that love is complete engagement with Mystery. Did you catch that? Love is so freakin’ huge and indescribable and mysterious because it’s what happens when we experience the sacred, the numinous, the divine, in all it’s myriad forms.

You probably know this already, but bear with me because I’m learning here!

This aha moment came for me because of two circumstances that happened to me today that I’d like to share with you. The first one is interactive. This came to me in an email-aptly titled “Share the Love”-from my friend Todd Williamson, the co-owner of Ombase. Check it out at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQ3d3KigPQM

I mean it. Check it out right now. It’s only 2 and a half minutes. (And I promise it’s not corny or syrupy sweet). Check it out and then come back and finish reading. ☺

****

Are you feeling it??? (How’s that for ecstatic dance?!) Can you imagine what it would have felt like to be there? You would have had no idea what was going on (mystery), but you would have felt the wave of connection with everyone else (Mystery). And it’s somewhere between the little “m” mystery and the big “M” mystery that love blows open our hearts.

So I know what you’re thinking–that was beautiful and all, but that was such a huge production, it’s just not feasible to do that on a daily basis. Here’s where the second part of the teaching comes in.

Right after watching this clip, I ran out the door to meet a client in Forest Park for a spiritual mentoring session. As we were walking along the trail that he often walks to a site that he considers sacred, we paused and I noticed a funny looking tree; a deciduous tree with leaves on it. Odd for this time of year, yes. But even more odd is that the leaves were wrapped in cylinders around the branches. As my brain was trying to figure this out, my client pointed to the tree and said, “This is part of my offering when I come to this place.” And he invited me to join him in picking a long leaf off the ground, twisting it around my finger into a tight coil, piercing the coil with the stem of the leaf so it would stay in place, and then choosing a branch to slide it onto. As I did this, the same opening in my heart came as when I watched the above clip.

So here it was again, the little “m” mystery and the big “M” mystery together: by adding the leaves, my client had evoked the unknown and had drawn me into what is sacred through the curiousness and simple magic of his offering. It happened again: a moment of heart-opening love.

So here is your assignment for the month: conspire to share a mystery with someone that engages them with the Mystery, thereby creating an act of love. (Extra points for doing it through something body- or nature-inspired!) I look forward to hearing your stories.

The promise and peril of peace

“Unfortunately, peace is boring.”
Having both read the book Three Cups of Tea while we were on vacation (which I highly recommend!!), my partner and I were debating why America would agree to spend millions to bomb Afghanistan, but not the $12,000 per school it would cost to bring balanced education to the children or Afghanistan.
I kept pondering the concept that peace is boring as I witnessed how I subtly resisted dropping into a state of non-doing bliss while on vacation—was I avoiding sinking into peace because I thought I would be bored?
In my questioning, what I realized is not that peace is boring, but that peace is terrifying. Peace is powerful. Peace is revolutionary. We avoid peace not because it is boring, but because if we really felt it, if we knew it in our bones, we wouldn’t accept the way things have been, both in our personal lives and globally. We would have to change. Everything.
And yet, that’s what’s happening. The consciousness toward change and choosing peace is rising. (I heard that there were no arrests in Washington D.C. on Inauguration Day!) But if we understand that it isn’t simply that change inspires peace, but that peace inspires change, how do we find the courage to choose peace, knowing that inherent in peace is a continuous process of change, a dying away of what has been?
Rites of passage and personal ceremony have taught me so much about the cycle of death and rebirth, and about celebrating in community the way we die a little all of the time in order to fully live and offer our gifts. And with all the hopefulness of this year, we all know that there is a lot of dying away happening—people are losing their jobs, their homes, and an entire way of life. Whereas this is all ultimately for the greater good of the rebirth of a sustainable and peaceful way of being, it can be painful.

In addition to having a practice like yoga or meditation where we can access a place of essential peace, in order to be a citizen in the daily world, we must also be willing to be hospice workers. What I mean by this is that we must become comfortable with death and versed in grief. Not just about the death of a loved one or the unspeakable violence that is going on in the world, but also all the little things that we must let go of on a daily basis.

Admittedly I do not have the answers, and as I’m writing this I’m realizing I’m very much in the thick of a peace-inspired death cycle right now. But what I do know is that aparigraha (non-attachment, especially in relation to self-identity)and ishvara pranidhana (devotion to God or surrender to the Mystery) are a huge part of transforming the exquisiteness of pain or grief into peace.

It is my hope that we find the courage to celebrate the tide of peace rising and to grieve all that is washed away as it does.

The life we have planned

Happy New Year!

I want to thank all of you who have shared your journey through 2008 with me in
some way. In looking back, so much of what I learned as a teacher and claimed as
an individual is because of how I’ve been touched and inspired by you. Thank you
for your presence in my life, for leading with your curiosity, and for sharing with
me what is meaningful for you.
If you have attended one of my yoga classes in the last few weeks or the soul-stice
dance with Felix and I, you heard me recite from David Whyte’s poem called “What
to Remember When Waking:” what you can plan is too small for you to live. I have
held these words as a blessing and a challenge for the years that I’ve known them,
and I was touched by how many of you were impacted by these words, too. I received
more requests to hear that line repeated and for the information about the poem
than I have for anything else I’ve read in class before.
To me those words mean that it’s ok to set an intention or to have a plan, but “we
must always be willing to,” as Joseph Campbell says, “get rid of the life we’ve
planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” I like that Campbell uses
the words we and us rather than I and me. It’s a part of the human condition; we
all have a common desire for a life that is not small, for a life that is meaningful.
It’s part of why we seek out spiritual practices like yoga.
Of the eight limbs of yoga, asana (postures) is just one, and not the first. The
first are the yamas and the niyamas, a set of ethical precepts for how to live
one’s life soulfully–from the place where self meets Spirit. The final niyama is
ishvara pranidhana, which translates as offering up your self to God or to the divine.
I think of it as committing myself to the pursuit of alignment with how Spirit wants
to move through me.
So to come back to this pervasive fear of living small–that nagging voice that
says we should be doing more or we should be doing something Great instead of what
it is we are already doing–what if small had nothing to do with what we did and
everything to do with how we did it? What I mean is, when we open ourselves to
divine will rather than to our ego’s will, we’re putting aside the plans that keep
our lives small. This doesn’t’ mean getting rid of personal accountability and plans
altogether, it means finding enough presence to listen for our intuition or guidance
about what’s true, about, as Whyte says later in that same poem, “becoming visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.” So not being small has nothing
to do with being BIG and everything to do with living meaningfully and offering
our gifts–each day, in small ways.
As we come into 2009, then, I pray that our intentions and resolutions carry us
forward with a spirit of renewal and possibility, and that we continue to practice
presence so as to hear our biggest, highest selves calling us closer to what is
meaningful.

The dark night of the soul–An initiation into spiritual adulthood

Introduction
I was twenty-two years old when I fell in love with Spirit. I had felt the presence of this mysterious, ineffable other dimension many times throughout my childhood and teenage years, mostly during times spent in nature hiking, rock climbing, or swimming in the ocean. During these times of communion with the natural world, I remember a sometimes vague, sometimes acute sense that there was something indescribably sacred, huge, and mysterious that permeated everything in the world. I would at once feel both a great longing to know it, as well as a deep knowing that even if I didn’t understand what it is, that it most certainly is.  Like a child fascinated by things in the adult world that I did not understand, I resolved to not try to figure it out, but to simply enjoy knowing it was there. Growing up not going to church and not having “Spirit” or “God” ever come up in conversation at home, I didn’t have much encouragement to pursue my personal relationship with this mystery. Therefore, my relationship stayed at this childlike level until, at twenty-two, after two years of teaching yoga in college, I began my national certification as a yoga teacher in order to deepen my own practice and my teaching.
Sitting on my yoga mat just a few days into the teacher training it struck me—here is a setting in which I can not only reliably come in to communion with this mystery, but the people around me are also talking about having the very same experience! And, there’s a whole language and ancient philosophy to describe it! I remember going home that evening and sharing with my then-husband some of the Sanskrit words that had ignited my heart and mind. Ananda. Niyama. Kleisha. Like a schoolgirl breathlessly describing a crush on the new boy in class, I kneeled on the foot of our bed and poured out everything I had learned and experienced that day.
As my infatuation with Spirit grew over the next few months, my marriage withered. Opening myself to being in relationship with the vastness of Spirit awakened a new sense of vastness in my self. And with that expansion of the definition of myself came so many questions and doubts, including the sinking feeling that the life I was living with my husband was too small a container for this new, vast me. Though I loved my husband, I had no idea how to be committed to him and to Spirit. What I did know for sure was that it was a matter of not living fully if I didn’t commit to my relationship with Spirit.

Moving toward the light

This week I had two dreams with Barack Obama in them. In the first dream, Obama has appointed me as White House yoga teacher. (By the way, I love this idea!) In the dream I was honored that I was chosen to do such important work, and though I was a bit intimidated, I remember mostly feeling very at home, like it was the most natural thing I could do.

In the second dream I’m in the oval office just hanging out with Barack (with all that yoga we’ve become friends I guess!). He begins flirting with me, and I’m thinking, “this can’t be happening.” Suddenly, he leans over and kisses me sweetly on the neck. Though I feel honored and I’m definitely interested, I don’t respond. I stand there stiffly as the thought goes through my head, “as nice as this feels now, this is going to wreak all sorts of havoc in my life.”

The power and beauty of dreams is that they’re very rarely taken literally. In my dreams-not unlike in reality-Obama represents the part of me who unabashedly creates and lives from unity consciousness and the energy of hope, and who promotes and lives the extraordinary change and transformation inspired by both.

If you open yourself to the election’s residual inspiration and opportunity to change, if you align yourself with the consciousness that you can create anything and that you are part of something much bigger than you can imagine, then you will find that we are all being appointed to serve from the deepest parts of ourselves in the highest possible way. Like my first dream, it’s an invitation that is both naturally simple and exceptionally daunting to accept. And no matter how alluring the flirting with or sweet the touch of these powerful and visionary parts of ourselves is, we do tend to just stand there stiffly, not quite knowing what to do with our interest.

The truth is, leaning into that part of yourself will create havoc in your life. It will destroy the status quo. But I think back to election night; the moment of collective release when we all knew that change was happening. As I and everyone I was with began to cry, I was astonished by how much I (we) had been holding that suddenly released, by how this nameless, massive weight energetically and spontaneously just slipped away.

Change necessitates release. We think that the letting go will be painful, and sometimes it is. But sometimes the release, not unlike election night, is simply the silent elation of acknowledging all that can be actualized with our new-found lightness.

As we come upon a new year, a time when many of us vow to change in ways that bring us more in alignment with our highest selves, I invite you to use the last month of this year to release what makes you feel burdened. You don’t even have to name what it is, just continue to give yourself opportunities to feel what it feels like to be lighter. The more you can identify the feeling of lightness, the more you’ll want it, and the more it will begin to naturally occur. And when that happens, forward movement and change become unimpeded.

Where’s the love?

In the world of yoga and spirituality, one hears a lot about love, and how it is the answer to all spiritual questions and the way to enlightenment. No kidding: as I’ve been writing this newsletter, I’ve received four emails in my inbox about how “anything other than love will split us from God,” how we should “learn to be extensions of Mother Earth’s love” in this world, how we should choose to “align with a loving consciousness,” and signed “in love and light.” Yikes.
It’s not that I disagree. I can hang with the reality that we are all One, and that light and love permeate this fabric of Oneness, like all the great mystical traditions propose; indeed, I have been blessed to experience this reality in numerous and powerful ways in my lifetime. But as a human being, I don’t always feel that way. Like yesterday morning, when I listened to one devastating news story after another on NPR, becoming nothing short of enraged and dispirited. Or this morning, when I woke from a disturbing dream into an emotional funk and then had another driver knowingly cut me off and nearly kill us both as I drove to a yoga class. By the time I sat on my mat, I was in no place to take in the sweet teacher’s reminders to “love yourself” and to “love your life.” Yes, that’s there, too, but sometimes the love is simmering on the back burner while my other emotions are boiling on the front one. Someone pointing out that I can turn up the flame on the love pot doesn’t magically make the other pot disappear.
What then?

I read something the other day that suggested that love isn’t a feeling one has, but one’s willingness to be present with what is. I like this definition of love, as I feel like it honors my divine capacity–as well as my humanity. As human beings we’re not always going to feel warm and cozy and adoring—we’re human!  We have bodies that experience pain, we have egos that keep tempting us to react rather than respond, and we have brains that want to judge as much as our hearts want to love.
Not to say that sustained presence is necessarily any easier than sustained feelings of love (!), and not to say that there aren’t many other ways to consider love, but speaking from my non-enlightened state in the midst of countless emotions, love as presence seems a whole lot more realistic—and interesting—than love as emotion. What if I could stay with myself through an entire yoga practice, not checking out when I felt the old familiar feeling of discomfort or judgment arise? What if I could give myself the permission to express my anger with another person, rather than stuffing it and pretending everything is ok? What if I chose not to ignore the despairing events in the world, hoping that praying for others and thinking good thoughts is enough?
Outrage can make the world shift. Grief can breed astonishing creativity. Fear can inspire great acts of courage. But only if we’re present to feeling outrage, grief, and fear, among countless other emotions.
Through being present with what is, we’re acknowledging what is real, and since love is the ultimate reality, couldn’t we say that being present—even in the emotions that we don’t want to admit we have—really is being love?