Lessons from the Mat

This is the title of my next book, though the book is only a seed in my imagination right now.  I have come to see my yoga practice as a savvy metaphor for experiences in life.  In this section of the blog, I will explore some of those metaphors as a way of watering that dormant seed.

Misguided Yogi

Thursday, 20 May 2010 20:42 Written by Lezlie Laws

After yoga last night, Theresa and Calvin (my yoga teachers) and I were talking about the injuries T and I have endured.  Both of us have broken our right foot and have had to work through long recovery and painful rehabilitation.  Theresa was saying how much she had learned about herself as she practiced through the injury.  I, too, have been aware of huge lessons in this painful moment of my life, and we enjoyed a few moments sharing our very mixed feelings about living with a physical challenge.  We agreed :  Deep lessons hide within every difficulty.

     But as I drove away from the studio on a moonless night,  I began to see yet another lesson, maybe THE lesson, in this injury  I have labeled a “derailing.”   I began to see how hard I have been working to “get somewhere” in my yoga practice and for the first time maybe really got how that attitude is destructive and very un-yogic.  I’ll try to explain. 

     I started yoga late in life—age 55.  I have never been very flexible, so the practice, though appealing to me, has been challenging.  I have not been a natural to the asana practice, and I’m not especially strong.   And still I’ve taken up the eight-limbed path of ashtanga yoga, believing that the part of the path that has to do with asana (the poses) is not about perfect performance, but about getting focused through deep breathing and creating spacious awareness in the mind and body.  We hear this over and over in our classes.  No competition on the mat.  Be where you are.   Accept your practice where it is, and don’t judge it.  However, though I have espoused these notions, for myself I’ve always had a private set of standards that I felt obligated to uphold.  In spite of knowing I should “be here, now” in my practice, I have unconsciously sought a goal, a beautiful point in the future where I will finally be a proficient yogi.  In my practice, have driven myself to get better and better, thinking that better asana would pave the way to being a better yoga teacher.  I know I will never have the practice that Theresa has, but I have thought that through hard and regular practice, I could become good enough at performing asana.    This has been my dirty little secret.

    But now, with the knee surgery last July, and with the foot injury this April, I am set back so far that the possibility of having a practice anywhere near where I think I should be is annihilated.  I am awkward.  I am stiff.   I hurt all over.  I have to modify my practice so much that it looks nothing like the vigorous practice I once had, or once strove to have.  In my darkest moments of this injury, I thought maybe I should just stop. 

    But I know the practice goes on, no matter what condition I am in.  This is the amazing lesson of yoga.  And though I’ve heard this lesson and spoken this lesson over and over for the last eight years, until last night on the drive home from the studio, I hadn’t really absorbed that lesson.  On April 9, 2010, I felt strong and confident that I was moving steadily toward that illusive goal I had set for myself.  I really thought that in the foreseeable future I was going to be satisfied with my practice; and finally, I would be worthy of being a yoga teacher for CPY.  I wasn’t unrealistic.  I will never be a flexy-bendy person, I know.  But I believed I could be solid, strong, disciplined, and highly competent in my practice.  And at that point, I thought I would have an acceptable practice.  I was judging myself all over the place.

     When I fell, my first thought was that my movement toward reaching that illusive practice was halted.  As I lay sprawled on the landing of the stairs, I screamed, not from the pain, but because of my great disappointment in experiencing yet another set back.   I knew it would be a while before I could get back to yoga, and even when I returned it would be such a limited practice that it would take me months, maybe over a year, to get back to where I was on April 8.  It is clear that my thoughts about my practice have been in the future.  I am aware of where I am in my body work, of course, but my effort has been devoted to making myself better, to working hard enough to possess the qualities of a yogi.  I am so aware now of the suffering this thinking has caused. 

     Last night, as I practiced with Calvin leading the class, I struggled to hold back tears.  The class was so hard for me.  I had to stop often.  I had to modify almost every pose.  I had trouble even with movements I used to perform easily because of an injury in my back and soreness in my wrists caused from walking on crutches.  It just seemed so hopeless.  How am I ever going to come back from this? I kept thinking.  Will my ankle be strong enough to hold me in a balancing pose?  Will my hamstring ever repair?  Will my left knee ever regain full range of motion?  At what point do you realize there is just too much to overcome?  What a misguided yogi I was being.

    And then, as I was driving home last night, I thought, what’s to overcome?  There’s nothing to overcome if you can get your head out of some future dream that may or may not be possible (or even necessary).  Calvin says often in class, “Anyone can do this practice.”  He’s says this for the benefit of those new to yoga who think they need a degree of agility to do the poses.  No, he says.  You adjust as necessary.  You breathe.  You get focused.  Anyone can do the practice because it’s your private experience with yourself, with learning your body, with understanding your mind, with attending to breathing, and with being willing to be present.  I’ve heard this dozens of times.  I love hearing it every time.  I’ve believed it.  I’ve promoted this to others.  So why has this not applied to Lezlie?

     I'm sad realizing how unwilling I have been to accept Calvin’s teaching for myself.  I so regret driving myself, being unwilling to grant myself the same ease and safety I offer to my own students.  I see so clearly how my new rules for living will absolutely transform my current yoga practice, which is what it is for all its awkwardness.

1.  Do what you want to do.

 Do you want to do yoga?  Yes.  Then just do it.

2.  Express your feelings.

Examine them honestly, too, so that you don’t move forward in illusion or delusion or with ego needs.

3.  Drop judgment.

Just stop comparing yourself to anyone, including some illusive future version of yourself.

4.  Trust emergence. 

Let your body develop and change the way it will.  Be in it fully and love it for what it is doing for you.

5.  Be kind and be grateful. 

Be kind to yourself, at the very least as kind as you try to be to others.  And always, always be thankful that you are alive to enjoy this amazing practice.

I really wonder if I could have received this lesson had I not fallen and broken my foot on April 9, 2010.

"There's always a five-year-old!"

Tuesday, 30 March 2010 11:18 Written by Lezlie Laws

Jeffrey Davis, yogi and writing teacher, tells the story of a participant in a workshop he was conducting who complained  she couldn’t really undertake the “practice” he was advocating for becoming a more disciplined writer.  Her reason was that she had a five-year old, and thus it would be impossible to shape time in the ways he was suggesting.  And he replied immediately, “Yes! There’s always  a five-year old!”

 

Our job:  find the skillful means to address or overcome the obstacles. 

Benediction

Friday, 02 October 2009 15:07 Written by Lezlie Laws

May your body be strong and agile.

May your mind be clear and radiant.

And may your heart be filled with compassion

Benign Silence

Thursday, 01 October 2009 18:46 Written by Lezlie Laws

For quite a while now, I’ve been watching closely the many ways in which I am conditioned to behave and to think.  It’s a practice.  Learning that I am deeply conditioned to feel, think, and react in certain ways is just a beginning.  Catching myself in the midst of conditioned reaction is the second challenge of this practice.  And then, resisting the conditioned reaction and allowing a genuine response, on that comes from the authentic self, is goal of those seeking to live consciously. 

     Lately, I’ve been dealing quite intensively with one particular such conditioned reaction, and that is my seemingly unrelenting tendency to want to fix things.  And I don’t mean that I’m interested in mechanical engineering.  How nice it would be if that were my bent.  I wouldn’t have to spend a fortune hiring people to build a deck, adjust the thermostat of the refrigerator, re-wire the light switches in the bathroom, un-clog the garbage disposal, or get the fountain pump to bubble properly.  

     No, the fixing I’m talking about has to do with interpersonal situations.  When there is tension or disarray, or unproductive complexity between/among people I know, I have the need to straighten things out, to seek clarity, to search out a solution, to soothe in some way, and in the best of all possible interactions, to resolve the disorder.  I’ve written earlier about my need to explain and define, and this is a part of the fix-it syndrome too.  There’s some powerful need I have to understand the way things work best and then get things working that way.  In some circumstances, these are valuable traits.  As a teacher, I’ve been put in the position of being the one who explains things, the one who guides students to solutions about a whole array of problems, issues, and tasks.  It’s my job.

     But too often, in interpersonal situations, this conditioning causes me anxiety and my friends and associates discomfort, I’m sure.  Not too long ago, I inadvertently caused two of my friends a good deal of discomfort in an assessment I made of one of them.  I may have over-stepped my bounds; I’m not sure.  But the feeling I have now, after offering advice on a very personal matter, is that my desire to clarify a pattern I observed in my friend failed to achieve the clarity or resolution I must have felt it would. 

     A few weeks ago, my meditation teacher, Peter Carlson, offered me an invitation in response to a discussion about this tendency.  He said, “Practice benign silence.”  Catch yourself when you feel the familiar need to fix or resolve a problem for someone and just sit in silence.  I knew his suggestion was good and appropriate, and surely grew out of a deep understanding of the psychological pattern.  But just hearing the suggestion caused me anxious.  If I can’t talk, what do I do??  How would I interact with people?  Would I be useful in any way?  What could possibly be solved by “benign silence”?   

     And yet, I knew he was right.  I’ve been a student of Buddhist psychology long enough to know the enormous power of silence, the incalculable benefits of simply holding the space for an idea or a problem to exist instead of having to mash the idea or problem all around the room, as I usually do.  So I heard his invitation, and I decided to accept it.  I would begin practicing benign silence every time I felt that old need to fix or resolve rise up in me.

     It has been a challenge for voluble Lezlie.

     But I asked for help.  And I’ve learned that when you ask for help, you’d better be on the lookout for aid, because it always comes.   And in this case, it came in the form of a yoga class.  Last Thursday, I was assisting Theresa in a class she was teaching.  The assistant in a yoga class must be a kind of ninja, moving around the room unobtrusively, staying out of the teacher’s path, and gently approaching practitioners who need adjustments or instruction in the poses, and then quickly stepping back and letting things take their course.  The assistant should be a silent partner to the teacher, moving with ease and as little distraction as possible among the practicing students.  She gives careful and confident instructions through gentle but direct touch.   So in my teacher-training, I’ve been learning a lot about how to give effective assists to students, how to see ways that the pose could be deepened or strengthened.  But as a fairly new assistant, I find myself wanting to explain the pose to the student.  “Drop your shoulders,” I’ll whisper as I touch them, “and pull them back so you can straighten your spine.”  I’ve been reading anatomy books and I’m coming more and more to understand the importance of alignment and grounding.  And I can see in my assisting how much I want to share this knowledge with the students.  But over and over, Theresa and Calvin have told me that the yoga student will find what is right for his or her body.  That part of the process is learning how your own body feels and how it moves.  In some cases, the most astute explanation of a student’s mis-alignment would not even be heard by the student.  They have to learn to feel what’s happening in their body.

   That makes so much sense to me.  And I totally get the importance of their being only one voice in the room—the teacher’s!  And yet, I cannot tell you how difficult it has been to stop myself from giving careful directives to students I assist.  I do it before I’m even aware that I’m doing it.  It seems so much easier to tell the student what you want them to do as you move them into a new position.  Even though I know I’m supposed to withhold verbalizing, I seem compelled to do it.  It’s quite clear that I have become verbally dominant and in the teaching of yoga, this may not be a good thing. 

    So last Thursday, in yet another attempt to help me be aware of my talking, Theresa, my teacher, came up to me in class and held her hands out to me.  She said, “I want you to imagine that your hands can actually hold intention.  Think of a tiny mouth in your palm if you want to, and when you touch a student, do so with the specific intention of moving them to a new place in their pose.  There will be energy in that intention, and you will see that you don’t need the words to accomplish your goal.”

    What a profound directive that was.  It gave me a whole new way to approach making an assist.  I began to think of each student as an energy system that I was entering when I approached.  I tried to feel how my energy (my intention for them) was affecting them as it co-mingled with their energy, and sure enough, the bodies began to respond—without words.  I began to practice “benign silence” in a whole new way.  Another lesson from the mat.

How Willing Are You?

Monday, 24 August 2009 00:34 Written by Lezlie Laws

How willing are you?  That is the question that keeps coming up in my yoga practice.  Doing yoga is not a matter of how capable you are.  It’s a matter of how willing you are. 

 

Here’s the way it can go sometimes:  When your teacher asks you to do a forward fold, you resist.  You say you can’t touch your toes, so you think this must not be the practice for me.  Or, you bristle under the teacher asking you to hold the pose.  This is too long, you think.  Why is he holding us here so long?  I don’t like folding forward this long.  Or, you feel the stress of being asked to straighten your spine.  “No rounded spines,” the teacher says.  Sometimes, you can’t even tell if your spine is rounded or straight.  You fidget or wiggle around to find relief from the pose.   You want out.  Your ego gives you all kinds of reasons why you can’t fold forward. 

 

But the pose is not about what you’re capable of doing.  It’s not about how beautiful you look in the pose.  It’s not about how flexible you are.  It’s about how willing you are to be in the pose. How willing are you to be in your body instead of distracted by someone else’s body?  How willing are you to focus on the breath, and turn your awareness inward?  How willing are you to remain calm in the face of discomfort?   All of which leads to, how willing are you to be in the experience of your life?  This is the practice.

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