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?

Bowing from the shadow side

This month I’ve chosen parsvottanasana as the pose to focus on in my classes. The name translates as “intense side stretch,” but for me it means “intense hamstring stretch”, which further translates into “intensely uncomfortable stretch.” For this reason I tend to avoid this pose at all costs. My left hamstring has been slightly pulled for over a year now and ranges from mildly annoying to deeply painful. For months, I kind of just ignored it–bending my knees in forward folding poses so I wouldn’t feel it, or getting warmed up and stretching right into it without much respect for its edge. Hamstring stretches brought up all my shadow stuff in my practice, sometimes more consciously than others–”I should be able to do this pose, it’s so simple,” “I hate that my hamstring hurts because that means I’m going to have to change how I practice and I don’t want to,” or “You’ve injured yourself, Jay, and you’re never going to heal it.” Perhaps you know all those voices, too, and then some.
So I’ve picked this pose because it so readily brings up a physcial and emotional challenge for me, and perhaps for others who have tight hamstrings…or shoulders, or backs, or hips, as it asks a lot of different parts of our bodies. But I’ve also chosen this pose because of the gesture of reverse namaste that is a part of the full expression of the pose–the gesture of bringing the hands together in prayer behind the back, directly in the middle of the shadow side of the heart, the place that for me holds all the emotions that are hardest for me to look at and accept in myself.

This gesture has been an important one for me lately, as my spiritual practice right now has much to do with integrating the shadow parts of my thoughts and emotions and actions, and of honoring the dark mysteries in my life that I don’t so easily and readily peer into. The gesture of reverse namaste has come to represent to me a willingness to not only touch those places in myself, but to do so with reverence, with honor, and with respect; to claim my fullness as a human being.

I’ve found that just over the last week practicing parsvottanasana, I’ve had so much more gentleness with myself, and curiosity as to how to bring the stretch to where I do need it–my tight calves–rather than trying to compensate (read: avoid dealing with) that tightness and thus overstretching my sore hamstring yet again. I may not go deeply into the pose by bending forward a lot, but I am going deeply into the pose by being with myself where I am; fully expressing the length in my legs and back, shining my heart forward, and bowing from the place of honoring my wholeness–not just what I wish were true.

The lure of endarkenment

I’ve been feeling a downward pull in my life lately. It has been manifesting itself as a nondescript dread; I keep having the sense that something really bad is going to happen. I’ve been on spiritual and psychological “underworld journeys” before in my life, but this one feels different. I am still fully aware of and grateful for the light and joy and abundance in my life. There’s just also a strong sense of a much darker, very still place calling me.
After sitting with this sense of dread and sadness for a few weeks—waiting to get a horrible call that someone close to me had died, half-wondering each time that I drove in to town if I was going to be in a terrible accident—I realized my feeling really isn’t about something bad happening. Really, I just have a longing to crawl into my bed, to be still, to grieve all that is dying right now in nature, in our culture, and in myself. There’s an odd sense of joy in this–a sense of being in right relation with what is.
I realized that the sense of dread I was feeling that something bad was going to happen was my subconscious’ way of creating a situation in my life that would make it socially acceptable to really be still and grieve so that people (and myself!) wouldn’t be concerned that I was depressed or trying to offer to help me “fix” something, to pull me up and get me going. And so, I just need to consciously give myself the permission to just get pulled under–I think of the peacefulness of floating underwater, still, breath held. Quiet. And, when all the air has run out, the rush of senses that greet me when I surface again. It need not be a flail-filled drowning; it can simply be a graceful counterbalance to active and buoyant swimming in the waters of life. Float and swim. Float and swim.
I’ve been revisiting the myth of Persephone quite a bit lately. Persephone, a Greek goddess, was pulled in to the underworld while out picking flowers. Hades, the God of the Underworld, wanted her for his bride. Her mother, Demeter, the goddess of the harvest, became so depressed in Persephone’s absence that the natural world began to die away; the leaves on the trees shriveled and fell off, gardens stopped producing, everything became cold and dull.
While in the underworld, Persephone ate a few pomegranate seeds that Hades had offered her, not knowing that once you have eaten the food of the underworld, you must stay. When the God Mercury came to retrieve her, Hades announced that she had eaten the seeds, but since it was only a few, he would strike a deal: Persephone would only have to stay in the underworld for half of the year, and she could return to the upperworld for the other half.
In addition to being an explanation of the seasons (the time Persephone spends in the underworld is Fall and Winter, and her time in the upperworld is Spring and Summer), this myth is a teaching about the need for balance in our lives. We must go down as well as up, in as well as out. We must seek endarkenment as well as enlightenment.
In revisiting this myth, I found a translation that presented it in a different way: instead of being abducted and forced into marriage by Hades, Persephone actually falls in love with him. Persephone is lured in by his strange balance of otherness and familiarity, and recognizes all that he and the underworld have to offer to her. Though she misses the sun and the flowers of the upperworld, she feels at home in a different way in the underworld.
It made me think–what if we learned to love the part of us that pulls us under? What if we married ourselves to this part of us in recognition of all the gifts and dark blessings it has to offer? In Thomas Moore’s truly endarkening book called Dark Nights of the Soul, he speaks to this myth, too. He encourages us to take some authority in and from our underworlds, and discover, “as Persephone discovered, you are not a guest in the underworld; you are a citizen there” (Moore, 2004, p. 76).
I’m not suggesting that we all dive deeply and exclusively into our underworld journeys for the next few months, but that we allow for a balance; that we not negate the gifts that all the gray wetness of the coming season showers us in. I recognize that our upperworld self—including mine!—might not feel comfortable in the darkness, but there are many ways to seek out comfort for that part of ourselves. Our souls, though, that part of us that is the meeting place of body and spirit, does feel comfortable there, and is lured by the nourishment of the darkness.

All I’m suggesting, is that we honor our dual citizenship, as it were, and endeavor to learn as much about ourselves and each other in both places.

Stop spiritual windowshopping! Holistic spiritual mentoring in support of practice spirituality

These spiritual windowshoppers,
who idly ask, ‘How much is that?’ Oh, I’m just looking.
They handle a hundred items and put them down,
shadows with no capital.

What is spent is love, and two eyes wet with weeping.
But these walk into a shop,
and their whole lives pass suddenly in that moment,
in that shop.

Where did you go? “Nowhere.”
What did you have to eat? “Nothing much.”

Even if you don’t know what you want,
buy something, to be part of the exchanging flow.

Start a huge, foolish project,
like Noah.

It makes absolutely no difference
what people think of you.

(Rumi in Bly, 1995, p. 161)

Abstract:
This paper is a call for a spiritual direction that facilitates spiritual integrity and initiated spiritual adults within this current culture of spiritual seekers and spiritual windowshoppers. After offering background on the tradition of spiritual direction, the nature of generation X spirituality, and the distinction between spiritual seeking, spiritual dwelling, and spiritual practice, it is my intention to show how the next generation of spiritual directors can offer guidance on how spiritual seekers can reclaim spirituality without a religious or psychological overlay, but rather a spirituality in the context of relationship.

Yoga: not spiritually fluffy

I highly recommend you check out Krista Tippett’s interview with Seane Corn on NPR’s Speaking of Faith. http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2008/yoga/

Corn, internationally known yoga teacher and self-proclaimed “yoga-activist” has some beautiful and pertinent things to say about yoga as “body prayer,” as well as a doorway to embracing the shadow in ourselves through our practice and through recognizing our self in the people we want to deny in our lives.

Some of my favorite things she said:

“Yoga is an active form of prayer, meditation, grace. You can use your body to express your devotion…so the way you place your hand or move your body is an expression of that grace. Everything in your yoga practice is done as an offering.”

“Don’t pray for experiences to change. Pray for the strength for a change of perspective. That’s all we have control over.”

“Yoga offers an opportunity for growth and grace-it’s a fierce journey. It’s not spiritually fluffy.”

“God is hysterical.”

Aug/Sept 08 The American Dream?

August has been a month of shifting ground for me and for many of the people in my life. I had the honor of co-guiding a Vision Fast in New Mexico with my friend and mentor Em North, acting as midwives to a group of amazing, soulful people who came in to new and courageous ways of being. I also had the honor of officiating my first wedding for my dear friends Wendy and Byron, and getting to stand with them as they committed to spend the rest of their lives in conscious relationship with one another.

Between my travels, I also quite abruptly moved, leaving Wing Rock Sanctuary and all that it meant behind. And now, nearing the end of the month, I am left holding in my heart many people who are close to me who have gone through abrupt transitions and painful loss this month, and coming back to the consideration of what is important to me and how do I express that in how I am in the world?

Yesterday evening, a friend sent me a link to Michelle Obama’s speech from the Democratic National Convention that I had missed because I was teaching. I was impressed by her presence, and touched by the passion and intellect she brought to her speech. But at some point in her speech, she spoke about the hard working Americans who go to work on the day shift, come home and kiss their kids goodnight, and go off to work the night shift-and saying how this is a part of the American dream we should all be so proud of. It totally triggered me!

Yes, I get that sacrifice and hard work and hopefulness are all valuable, and I do respect how hard people work to make ends meet, but in a time when I have to schedule a few weeks in advance just to have lunch with my best friend, and when I see myself and so many of my students exhausted from how much is crammed into their schedules, I was disgusted by the implications of this “American Dream.”

Let me say, it’s not my intention to criticize Michelle or Barack Obama, nor to suggest there’s some government conspiracy to keep us checked out-nor did I really intend to make my newsletter a political statement of any kind (I’ve worked on Capitol Hill and have kept a polite distance from politics since then). Really, I just found it remarkable how pervasive this “go, go, go” attitude is in our culture. People cheered when working the day shift and the night shift was related to the American dream!

It made me realize just how radical–and also how simultaneously spiritual and political–an act it is to do less, to truly listen to and care for ourselves, and to make time for our relationships. In my world, the American dream involves coming home from a day of work that is meaningful to me and in service to others and spending some quality time connecting with myself, with my family and friends, and with the natural world.

In a moment of life-overwhelm earlier this month, my mentor asked me to consider why I do the work that I do. “Jay, don’t worry about the when, what, where, who-figure out the why first and those will fall into place.” In light of what I’ve said above, I do what I do because I truly believe that we all long to be closer to ourselves, each other, God, and nature through simple moments of presence, and that when we choose to do this, we bring meaning to our lives and we begin to heal ourselves and the natural world.

I know I’ve written about this before, but it’s true that I teach what I’m trying to learn, and I’m really trying to walk my talk with this one. It’s not easy! It took me a whole month to decide how my fall schedule would look, even though my guidance and my body knew it all along. I was locked in a mental wrestling match with myself and with all my inner-critics (who are the total opposite of all of you kind, understanding, supportive folks!).

I know you all know how hard it is, too–especially in our culture–and how demonic those inner critics can be, and I so honor how we’re all in this together. It is my hope that the who, how, what, when and where that have come out of aligning myself with the why of my work will serve us all in finding a reality that helps us to continue to wake up from the outdated American Dream.

Some things to consider:

1. When you have to make a decision, whether big or small (do I quit my job or stay, do I take a nap or go to a yoga class?), check in with your guidance. Ask! From my own experience I can say that when checking in with guidance, I don’t always trust the voices inside my head (should anyone? ☺)-but I do always trust my body. When I have a decision to make, I’ve learned to ask my body “Which choice feels lighter?” If I had to pick it up and carry it, which one would be less heavy and easier to carry? Maybe for you it’s a different question, but I’d advise you to not ask your mind-it almost always answers from deeply-rutted patterns that may not be serving you any longer.

2. As we come into the fall, the time of dying away and the time of harvesting, I am reminded of what Clarissa Pinkola Estes says in her book, Women who Run with the Wolves:
“The Life/Death/Life nature in its most wildish form is as simple as a graceful exhalation (ending) and inhalation (beginning). The only trust required is to know that when there is one ending there will be another beginning. There is usually no sense in waiting long enough until we are strong enough to trust, because that day will never come. So yes, we take that chance that what we have been taught by our culture to believe about the Life/Death/Life nature is wrong, and that our instincts are right.” (p. 163)

She goes on to say, “If we live as we breathe, take in and let go, we cannot go wrong,” and to ask the reader the questions:

What must I give more death to today, in order to generate more life?

What do I know should die, but am hesitant to allow to do so?

If not now, when?

Community of Spirit: Mapping Relational Spirituality

It is my intention within this paper to propose a map of how spirituality presents itself in relationships. I will begin by making a case for why traditional models of human and spiritual development do not support such a map, and shift perspectives to the relational emphasis of Gilligan’s work in women’s moral development, as well as to nature-based models of human development such as The Four Shields of Human Nature. A significant portion of this paper will be spent presenting the map and explaining the relationships within the map, as well as their relativity to one another. I will focus on the I-thou relationship in the context of intimate relationship, and on the role of relationship and spirituality within the collective. Drawing on the map, I will apply its implications to the contemporary spiritual movement as well as to the current ecological crisis.
Due to technical difficulites I can’t post the rest of the paper here. If you’d like to read the rest of this paper, please email me: jay@wingrockjourneys.com Thanks!