Best Laid Plans. . .

Sunday, 03 January 2010 15:55 Written by Lezlie Laws

It’s the second day of my annual retreat, and I rise early to read The Wise Heart and do some writing.  I had wanted to finish my Wise Heart posts before the end of the year.  Alas, the soul was willing, the body not so.  The first day of a retreat is usually exhilarating for me, but yesterday was brutal.  I cried most of the day.  Undoubtedly, it is the beginning of coming to terms with some hard truths.  And the big one is this:  things are not going as I had planned.  God is laughing.  Yes, the big thought I grappled with yesterday was my deep disappointment at the huge turn of events in my sabbatical year. 

     First, the knee is healing slowly, holding me back severely in my yoga practice.  And in addition to the knee (my left), I have sustained a severe hamstring injury in my right leg.  These injuries have posed a huge problem for my yoga teacher-training.  How can I be a yoga teacher when I can’t seem to do yoga very well?  The skill of any teaching grows out of the depth of the teacher’s practice.  And though I do have a deep practice in breathing, moving, and striving for focus on the mat, and though I do practice the ashtanga eight-limbed path, I don’t have a strong or flexible asana practice right now.  This causes me distress.  And if I examine this distress, I would surely find it based in ego (the ego loves to quantify things, doesn’t it?).  I want to present myself in a certain positive and successful way for my students and fellow practitioners (and certainly for my teachers), and for right now, that is not going to happen on the mat.  And since the mat has become a huge metaphor for life, I have to examine how this belief plays out in other areas.  Another opportunity for practice.

   There are great contradictions, though, in this state of events.  First, right at the time when I seem to be debilitated, Theresa and Calvin are entrusting me with more and more opportunities to teach.  I am so happy about this.  And Jeff Davis has asked me to be a part of a small core of yogi/writers who will go through his first intensive training to be facilitators of Yoga as Muse workshops.  So opportunities for growth have not stopped, even though it appears my qualifications are questionable.  I cannot tell you how this has shaken my confidence.  

     Second disappointment and alteration to Lezlie’s plans for the sabbatical: the book stalls out.  Comes to a crashing halt, actually, at the end of October.  I cried, I was afraid, I wanted to quit.  It was a very familiar pattern for Lezlie:  things get hard and I cave.  Jeff helped me tremendously, becoming not just my writing coach, but my therapist, too.  I wondered if my extreme anxiety about and dislike of writing was a sign that I simply should not be doing it.  Aren’t we called to be joyful?  If so, why do I keep returning to what makes me unhappy?  (Could this be a destructive conditioned response??)  I’ve written about this in other blogs, so I won’t belabor this point YET AGAIN.  Still these feelings have been baffling and confidence rocking. 

    Then, Tim Lynch sends me an email on his reading of scientist Paul Dirac.  Dirac, commenting on the process of creative discovery, says that this process is riddled with anxiety.  “Anxiety (not joy), felt during the creative process, is in direct proportion to the magnitude of the breakthrough.”  Aha!  Maybe what I’m experiencing is the beginning of breakthrough!   But how do I know?  How do I know this?  I need confidence to move forward.

    And finally, the third blow of the greatly anticipated year of white space came last month when it was discovered there is a mass of cells-gone-wild in my left breast.  The last six weeks have been filled with brutal tests, doctor’s appointments, and research scary enough to send me to Pine Lawn to buy a plot.  Surgery will take place in two weeks, followed by radiation, and I don’t know how many weeks of further debilitation.   This seems like much more than a minor derailing of my plans.  It seems like a multiple-car train wreck.  Everything is in disarray.  Cars are strewn all over the place and it will take an energy greater than my own to get them back on track.

   Again, the wretched ego rears its knobby head.  In addition to the huge distraction that surgery and recovery pose for me, there is the dealing with another huge contradiction to my version of identity.  I have thought of myself as a person of health, of energy, of fitness.  I am not that person any longer and this is unnerving and anxiety inducing.   I know this is a temporary state of being.  I know I have the ability to heal.  I know I will muster the energy to work toward healing.  I will do what is necessary because I can “do the work.”  But it just wasn’t part of my plans.  And I fear that, at my age, the chances for full recovery are fairly slim.  So goes one version of Lezlie’s identity.    

     I know, I know, I already hear what you’re saying:  No, Lezlie, this is a good thing!  Stripping away the “personal” versions of self is exactly what evolution is all about.  I get it.  But I’m just trying to tell you what is in my heart right now, in spite of what my head knows.  I’m sad, and disappointed, and fearful, and I’m not quite sure how to proceed.  What am I supposed to be now that my identity props are buckling underneath me?  The small self is pretty much ruling the roost these days, scrambling for territory in a mad panic.  I’d rather things be going another way, even though I know there is much to gain from these apparent losses.  Right now, I can’t see myself on the other shore, though I want to have full faith that I will get there.

     So, from one perspective, projects of the sabbatical come to a standstill.  I can hear what you’re saying, again, this time you’re jumping up and down and saying it louder:  “YES, YES, Lezlie, this may be true (temporarily) IF you assume that writing the book and doing yoga are the primary projects of the sabbatical.  But what about the larger project?  The project of Lezlie growing up and stepping more fully into her skin?”  Yes, I remember that project.  I just didn’t expect it would be quite this hard.

    But what about my plans? I can hear myself whining.  There’s a little girl inside me who is throwing a fit.  She feels completely dismissed, and quite frankly she feels completely helpless.  She as no idea how to proceed, how to think about herself, how to fix herself, how to make decisions about the future.

    In this state, this first Sunday morning of the new decade, I pick up Kornfield’s The Wise Heart.  In Chapter 23 he writes about being at ease with insecurity.  It’s so easy to talk about this as a useful practice—until you’re really in a state of insecurity, and your mind is fighting to find some tiny bit of firm ground, and you’re flailing against a self-declared set of conditions for living that suddenly appear untenable.  What if I can’t do yoga any more?  What if I really can’t write a mediocre book, much less a good one?  What if my version of a future has to be amended?   Such thoughts reduce bold, happy, confident, capable Lezlie to a wobbly bowl of insecurity. 

    But Kornfield says we can bring fearlessness and trust to any circumstance.    He talks at length about trusting the process of life.  Andrew Cohen talks about trusting the process, too—and learning to participate in the process.   I have wise teachers all around me.  Kornfield quotes a Zen text:  “To live in trusting mind is to be without anxiety about non-perfection.”  To live in trusting mind.  I must cultivate a way to live in trusting mind.  He says, “Instead of struggling to perfect the world, we relax, we rest in the uncertainty” (372).

    This is, of course, good advice, and as I read this chapter, I can feel the tightness in my chest loosening a bit.  But just a bit.  Because right now, in my current state of disappointment, I don’t know quite how to do this.  But I have no choice right now but to try.  My plan for this year is demolished. My version of perfection is out the window.  I have no idea how to proceed. But the practice abides:  To breathe.  To sit.  To get quiet.   It’s the hardest practice I’ve undertaken.

P.S.

I feel the need to place a small disclaimer on these comments, for fear I seem to be catastrophizing the physical challenges of the moment. Please know that I am very aware that my physical challenges are not life-threatening, or even life-style threatening.  The body will repair.  I know so many people who are facing life-threatening physical challenges, and I do not in any way want to equate my circumstances to theirs.  It’s the state of being that resides under my health issues that is the core of this writing.  My willingness to be aware of life as it emerges, to resist judging what emerges, to experience what emerges fully, and to be open to the wisdom that every experience offers up.  That's the topic I'm addressing.