Tuesday, 20 April 2010 15:49 Written by Lezlie Laws

Time goes so much more slowly when you have not much to do.  Since the foot injury, I can do very little.  I can meditate.  I can read.  I can watch TV or a movie.  I can write.  I can sit on the deck and look at the garden, which is beautiful right now.  I am confined to this house, and my whole life is pretty much in my head right now.  Thinking, pondering, writing, wondering, obsessing:  that’s my activity.   

     I realize that, before the accident, I lived much of my life in the body.  Working in the yard.  Doing yoga.  Teaching yoga.  Biking.  Walking.  Training with Anthony.  A huge part of my days used to be devoted to pure physical activity, grounding in the body, body awareness, attention to body facility.  The thinking stops.  The mind-clutter disappears.  Anxiety goes away.  Presence abides.   Before the accident, I was living my days in the calm centeredness of  “ground of being” and in the creative urgency of “transformative becoming.”   I felt a connection to the earth, to the body, to the world of form, but I also had a strong sense of an upward spiraling toward the next evolutionary stage.  It is a wonderful sense of tautness between what might be considered two opposing metaphysical poles.  And I see now, from this sedentary perspective, what a delightfully balanced way this is to live.  To be a body, and a mind, and a spirit.  To give time to each of these parts each day. 

    This, in essence, is what Integral Life Practice is all about.  ILP provides “an organizing framework for a lifetime of learning and transformation.  By illuminating the big picture of consciousness, life, growth, and awakening, and distilling the essentials of practice, it helps you drop any unnecessary baggage and focus on the potent, juicy heart of the matter.”  That is, it gives you the tools you need to answer the big questions:  who am I?  why am I here?  how am I to use this life?  It is a practice that helps us move ever more deeply into the basic goodness and wisdom that reside at the core of our being, and continue to deepen and extend consciousness.

     A daily practice helps us address our need to fulfill  longings for experiencing life fully. And that’s why I’ve been so frustrated.  I feel like I’ve been derailed in my ability to experience life fully.  I feel anger and frustration at having been thrown off my course, thrown totally out of life balance.  Instead of living a full life, I’m trapped in this house and expending enormous energy just getting to the bathroom.

Abraham Maslow is known for his articulation of hierarchy of needs that drive human behavior.  The most basic need is physical.  We need food, clothing, shelter.  The next is safety, followed by belongingness, and then self-esteem.  These are what he calls deficiency needs.  When these basic needs are not fulfilled, we seek ways to get them satisfied.  If I’m hungry, I seek food.  I eat, and I’m fine for a while until the need for food returns.  Humans start working on the top two needs, self-actualization and self-transcendence, only when these lower four needs are met.  So, lucky are the people who have the time, energy, and interest to think about self-actualization. 

    In the last two weeks I’ve been on crutches, unable to put any weight on my right foot.  I can tell you that for two weeks, I’ve been fairly pre-occupied with Maslow’s deficiency needs.  It’s hard getting food together.  Just getting a carton of juice out of the refrigerator takes several minutes to accomplish.  Putting together a salad is a major undertaking, as is cleaning up the mess.  I spend lots of time with my foot propped up and an ice pack around my ankle.  The pain is very distracting and sometimes consuming.  I have never been more aware of how alone I am.  Even though I have some really good friends who will do anything for me, I am basically alone in this one-legged project I’ve been given.  It’s hard work most of the time.  And if I’m not careful, self-esteem can plummet.  I don’t like seeing myself in such a debilitated state.  I don’t like to depend on others.  I don’t like not being able to pursue my pre-accident goals.  I am out of balance in a number of ways.

     Still, I have to keep telling myself there is something to work with here.  In the Buddhist tradition, this is the constant lesson.  No matter what experience is in front of you, it is workable.  Chogyam Trungpa says not to

 suppress or destroy energy of an experience but to transmute it; go with the pattern of energy.  When you go with the pattern of energy, then experience becomes very creative. . . . .  You realize that you no longer have to abandon anything.  You begin to see the underlying qualities of wisdom in your life-situation.

     For the last two weeks, it has been hard for me to see the wisdom underlying this broken foot.  I have so wanted my situation to be different from what it is.  I have so railed against this new set of circumstances that I must endure.   Sitting up in bed with my leg propped up most of the day seems so useless, so unproductive, such a waste of precious time.  And at the very most beautiful time of the year, too!  But John Welwood says the practice is to “meet experience fully and directly, without filtering it through any conceptual or strategic agenda” (116).  Ha!  Imagine that.  I am the Queen of Agendas!  But if Welwood is correct, then maybe there is something to be gained from sitting in bed all day with my leg propped up.  Maybe this is the last opportunity of my sabbatical to really stop, to get really quiet, to let something different arise.  Again, I rely on Welwood’s insights:

The subtle spiritual pitfall of psychological work is that it can reinforce certain tendencies inherent in the conditioned personality:  to see ourselves as a doer, to always look for meaning in experience, or to continually strive for “something better.”  . . . At some point even the slightest desire for change or improvement can interfere with the deeper letting go and realization that are necessary for moving from the realm of personality into the realm of being, which is only discoverable in and through nowness—in moments when all conceptualizing and striving cease (116).

That sounds a lot like self-actualization, doesn’t it?   Maybe even self-transcendence. And if that is true, then maybe, just maybe there’s a whole lot more happening here than the physical pain of a broken foot and the emotional frustration of a shattered life-plan.  If I can see this from another angle, maybe I can stop working out of deficiency needs and move myself into abundance needs, those categories that Maslow defines as coming about from an overflowing of love and compassion and wisdom. 

   So I’m on my way to the freezer to get another ice pack.  I’ll hobble on my crutches back to the sofa in the living room.   I’ll wrap the pack around my ankle, prop up my leg, and spend a little time looking out at the greenness of my tiny urban garden.  I’ll be in pain, and I’ll use that pain as a way of being in the body.   I’ll breathe into it all.  And for right now this minute, I’ll see the possibility of a new way of being in balance.

Sunday, 18 April 2010 17:48 Written by Lezlie Laws

Becky and I met today to talk about the future, our goals and intentions, and our deeper mission.   We strive to answer the question, “What are you doing with your life?”

     We both committed to projects that are somewhat outside our areas of expertise and outside of our comfort zone.  She is in the process of remaking her large yard into a series of garden spaces.  Her desire is to use the gardens as sites of healing, as well as for more deeply appreciating the experience of being alive.  And she wants to share this healing and appreciation in many forms with as many people as seem naturally drawn to her, the gardens, and her work. 

     I am dedicated to learning to be a good yoga teacher and to developing my own deep ashtanga yoga practice.  Part of my distress with the foot injury I’ve received is that I’ve feared that I’m once again derailed from what seemed to be such a good trajectory I was on.  But I’m suspecting that part of present moment lesson is to let go of my own plans for myself, learn to accept what is before me, and to let a path unfold that is not marked by “craving and clinging,” as the Buddhist say. 

     We decided that both of us would undertake what we see as our deep work in the world without overlaying the issue of money onto the work.  For her, the work is her gardens.  For me, the work is teaching yoga (in a variety of forms:  yoga asana, yoga & writing workshops, yoga&writing at Rollins, etc.).  But the focus has to be on the practice.  Not on the end product, and certainly not on how much income the end product will produce.   Becky must approach the garden in devotion.  Her work there must become her practice, her devotion to her higher spirit and to her deepest calling in this world.  This is the way of a yoga practice, too:  it is a devotional act that must be lovingly embodied each day.  In this way, our work becomes the vehicle by which we serve the world.

     As with any deep path, the lessons and service of the path come out of the practice of the person who walks the path.  So for me, my ability to be of service, to be a gifted yoga teacher, is through the daily devotion I give to my practice.  Out of that practice comes my offering.  As with Becky, her daily experience in the garden will help her create the space she envisions, and this will deepen her ability to draw to her those people who will be best served by her sacred space.  So it’s not a matter of making a marketing plan, or deciding how many clients we need to make a living.  It’s a matter of focusing completely on ourselves and our willingness to go deep into our practice.  Slowly, without our even being aware of it, the real work will unfold.

Here then, are the qualities that we will foster in ourselves during the next month:

1.  Devotion to the practice.  We become knowledgeable and skilled by virtue of our own real experience with our practice.

2.  Daily meditation.  Silence is the way to cut through the conditioned responses of the reactive mind, and to clear a space where our natural wisdom, creativity, and joy can rise up to serve our higher mission.

3.  Non-judgment.  We see in others what lives in us.  We will diminish judging and limiting ourselves by refusing to draw conclusions and judgments about the behaviors and attitudes of others.

4.  Trust.  We will trust that the resources necessary to sustain us in our divine purpose will appear.  We trust that is better to do our own work (however small it may seem) than to yearn do someone else’s work.  Success grows out of being who we are meant to be.

Monday, 12 April 2010 21:08 Written by Lezlie Laws

It’s been four days since I fell down the stairs to the landing, sprained my ankle, broke my foot, and changed my life.  My life.  It was getting to be so nice.  The horror of the breast cancer ordeal was in the rear view mirror, diminishing by the minute.  March was a great month for me as my old vigor returned.   I was feeling strong in training, and regaining flexibility in my yoga practice.  Teaching was going great—such a joy--, and I was happy to take up some of the slack at the studio while Theresa and Calvin work on the new place, slated to open in June.  We are all looking forward to Beryl Bender Birch being here for a five-day workshop in May, and I was going to take over more classes during that time so Theresa and Calvin could focus on the workshop.  The book was coming along—slowly, but coming along—and in mid-March I had had a truly fabulous retreat with Jeffrey Davis in Taos.  Spring had finally arrived in Central Florida, and the warm weather along with getting out into the yard was helping me feel full, confident, happy, hopeful in so many ways.  And the biggest way was in the confidence I was gaining in knowing my body, in being grounded in my practice, in the ways I am able to teach and share that practice with others.  I was even looking forward to returning to work and being able to teach my students what I’ve learned this year about practice.  Along with this wonderful present-time happiness, I was clear about what I wanted the next four months of sabbatical to look like.  I had a plan.  I had expectations.  I was moving forward in my life in the best sorts of ways.

    And then there was that horrible little pop.  The ankle bent and contorted and my full body weight pressed into the fifth metatarsal.  I heard the pop and I knew everything would be different for months to come.  I couldn’t move from the landing for a long time.  I was in shock.  Not just from the pain of the break, but from the eradication of a plan.  From the point on, everything I loved to do I would be incapable of doing.  Everything would be difficult.  There would be no gardening.  No yoga.  No teaching.  No training with Anthony.  No long walks in Winter Park neighborhoods.  No biking.  No swimming.  No walking down Park Avenue to meet a friend for dinner.   A full and active life brought to a halt by one little pop.

     Now, I sit in this small house.  I bump my way up the stairs on my butt, pushing the crutches ahead of me.  I hop my way down the stairs, hanging dearly to the railing and wobbling precariously on what is now my “good leg,” the one on which I had knee surgery last summer.  I can sit for about 30 minutes at the computer, then I have to move to get my leg propped up.  I can sit in the chaise and read, but I can’t manage to bring anything to drink up the stairs.   

     Everything is an effort.  Everything.  Making a pot of coffee.  Going to the bathroom.  Taking a bath--ha! you should see that ordeal!  Getting the mail.  Washing the dishes.  Every move requires my full attention.  Deliberate, awkward, labored, excruciatingly slow.  I am reduced to slow motion. 

     It’s as if an unseen god has commanded me to stop.  To slow down.  To pay attention.  To get quiet.  To forget achieving.  To stop planning.  And to get very, very small.  Thirty minutes after the fall I knew all of this, and I resisted it with every fiber of my body.  I screamed at the top of my lungs.  I wailed.  I railed against this fate.  My plans were dashed.  My expectations eradicated.  My striving pinched out like an errant bud on an heirloom tomato plant.  My joy in living a life rooted in body, mind, and spirit gone.  I looked at my distorted ankle, a huge knot forming on the side and the foot already purple.  Everything I wanted was over.

     In a his book on Buddhism and psychotherapy, John Welwood talks about the three marks of existence—three unavoidable facts of life that shape the basic context in which human existence unfolds.  The first mark of existence is impermanence—nothing stays the same.  The second mark of existence is egolessness—the impossibility of pinning down a continuous self-entity.  And the third mark of existence is the one that really applies to me at this point in my life.  Welwood says,

Human life always entails some kind of unsatisfactoriness or pain—the pain of birth, old age, sickness, and death; the pain of trying to hold on to things that change; the pain of not getting what you want; the pain of getting what you don’t want; and the pain of being conditioned by circumstances beyond your control.  Because nothing in life is ever final or complete, everything is in flux, and we cannot even control what happens to us, dependable satisfaction remains as elusive as a rainbow in the sky.

   As I started down those steps on Friday morning, I knew what was ahead of me, and I so looked forward to it.  I thought I was in control.  How delusional was I? But now, I’m afraid to even put words to what is ahead of me.  I have nothing in my head.  I have no idea how to shape the future.  I am left only with the present moment.  And to be sure, I do have a choice about how to be in the moment.  I can drop the story that my mind wants to spin:  that all is lost; that I have been set back months in my progress; that life will be hard work with little joy.  That’s the bitter girl in my head and she’s pretty loud these days.  She’s mean and jaded and she seems to really like feeling bad, accepting the negative view.  She has a tattoo on her left arm of a black lizard with an open mouth.  It’s hissing, I’m sure.  Her arms are strong and nicely defined.  I really like her arms, but she’s a little scary.

  But there’s another girl in my head too.  And she’s pretty calm.  She isn’t saying too much right now, she’s just sitting easy, not making much of a fuss, and looking slightly disdainful when she hears jaded girl whining.  She’s breathing easily and she’s really noticing her breath, in and out with amazing regularity.  She seems assured, and though she doesn’t talk about taking action, she seems to know right action will rise up in her and move her forward.  She seems disinterested in controlling things.   She’s not really happy about the sore foot, but she doesn’t seem worried about it.  She’s flexing her left foot, back and forth, and on the inside of her left ankle is a tiny pink heart.  Very tiny, but plump.

So what do I do now?  No choice but to be out of control.  The house a mess, the yard a mess, the body a mess, the mind a mess, the life-plan toppled.  Re-think who’s in charge, Lezlie.  It just seems so obvious doesn’t it?  But even knowing this,  I still ask, what do I do now?  My friend Karen would say don’t do anything, just be.  There is the book, of course.  No obstacles keeping me from that now. And isn’t that just the irony of ironies?  The one thing I don’t want to do is the only thing I am able to do now.  Do you think this is a message? 

Here’s what I can do:  I can read.  I can write.  I can meditate.   I can take naps.   I can stare out the window at the garden that needs so much attention.   I could learn to stop saying that the garden needs so much attention.  I could practice it daily.  That might be a worthy endeavor.   I can watch the planes fly overhead.  I can sit on the back porch and watch the squirrels.  I can have a glass of wine in the evening now that I’m not practicing yoga.  Maybe I’ll develop an imaginative life inside my head and just stay there for a while.   Seems unlikely, but you never know, do you?

Thursday, 21 January 2010 13:31 Written by Lezlie Laws

There is one thing that, when cultivated and regularly

practiced, leads to deep spiritual intention, to peace,

to mindfulness and clear comprehension, to vision and

knowledge, to a happy life here and now, and to the

culmination of wisdom and awakening.

And what is that one thing? 

It is mindfulness centered on the body.

                        The Buddha, from the Satipatthana Sutta