Author: subincontinentia

A few years ago, a friend called me feeling down. She had a very demanding job and wasn’t always so good about taking care of herself, but for the past year she had been really turning her health around. She’d been exercising regularly and paying more attention to her diet, and creating healthier barriers between her work and her personal time. And it had paid off. She had lost the pounds she had always wanted to shed, and she’d been feeling really positive mentally to boot. Then she fell ill. Nothing terribly serious, just regular garden variety flu. But it took her weeks to fully recover. She complained to me on the phone that she felt that the illness had really set her back and that all that work she had done on herself now seemed like a waste of time. She had not felt up to doing any exercise or even cooking proper meals. She felt like she was going back to square one.

I felt strongly that this was not the case. There was another way to look at it, I said. “All of that self-care, it doesn’t just go down the drain. It’s part of your condition now. It’s in you. It’s part of the reason you take care of yourself, so you can get through times like this.” She was sincere in her efforts and had built up positive habits. I knew that she would return to them more easily than she thought. This turned out to be the case, and not long after we spoke, she was her bouncy positive self again and quickly shed the extra pounds she’d gained snacking in bed.

When we build substantive familiarity in our practice–whether it’s yoga or some other form of mind/body system, meditation, mindfulness, whatever—when (not if) we have times when we’re just not up to it, the results of our practice are still there, available to us, however subtly. By substantive familiarity I mean when we have invested time, energy, attention and effort in our practice. Then those off times are unlikely to seriously derail us, though we may end up in the bushes for a while. And who knows what we might find there. They’re mysterious things these energy cycles, and time in the bushes might be exactly what we need.

Yesterday was not a great day for me. I didn’t feel like doing much yoga and kind of phoned in my practice. I over-ate, spent too much time online, and began to plummet mentally and physically by the afternoon. It took some effort to get up this morning. I dragged myself like a sack of spuds to my morning practice, which I eventually did a bit half-heartedly on the carpet in my room instead of outside on the grass like I usually do. But what happened was, that although, yes, it took some initial effort, after that effort, something warmly familiar kicked in. It was like the practice had created a groove that I could slip into without too much huffing and puffing. It wasn’t a brilliant session, but I knew I wasn’t plummeting any more, that all was not lost, that I could RE-SOURCE.

Regular practice puts something into storage. It turns into a resource, and when we return to it, as long as we have built a robust and sincere relationship, it will respond like a caring and supportive friend. It takes less effort than we imagine to enter that ‘groove’ again. We just need to have a bit of faith that it’s still there, and orient ourselves towards it. Not even a second of such practice is wasted.

It’s natural to have days when we aren’t particularly motivated, and worse. There will be the good, the bad, the ugly, and – sometimes the toughest nut of all – the meh. Just remember this. Your practice hasn’t gone anywhere. It doesn’t disperse like water on the ground. It feeds the well. And the well is there waiting. Sometimes it takes a  bit longer and demands a bit more effort to lower the pail. But the well has not run dry. And neither have you.

While there is much investigation into the physical and mental health benefits of yoga, there is another aspect of the yoga experience often overlooked but known by anyone who regularly joins a class. This is the social aspect, an area that is now being given some serious study.

A few years ago, a study by Queen’s University, Ontario, Canada, showed that activities such as yoga can positively impact people with social anxiety disorders, to ‘literally change the way people perceive the world’. The research demonstrated that people who do yoga regularly view the environment in a less threatening and less negative way. Yoga activates a key feature of our nervous system, what American scientist Dr. Stephen Porges calls our ‘social engagement system’, vectored by the Vagus Nerve through its effect of informing and transmitting signals of safety, trust, and relaxation. Safety, as Porges explains, is like the ‘preamble’ to social engagement. It gives us the sense of security to engage with confidence.

This social engagement system can be activated singularly and then reinforced by a group, or activated within a group and reinforced singularly in a feedback loop. By attuning us more to our own nervous systems, yoga performed alone can help us to more skillfully interpret and demonstrate social signals to develop a more connected and coherent orientation of self in relation to others. These benefits can be further actualized and reinforced by a group of other practitioners, serving as a grounding template for our interactions throughout the day.

During periods of leisure our ancestors gathered together to eat, play and relax–to share a common experience of calm and trust. Group yoga harnesses the essential mechanisms of such activities on our nervous systems. Moving our bodies together in a shared space, while synchronizing the breath and posture, can enhance our social intelligence and help us to feel more connected to the people in our lives. We can foster this experience of connection on our mat at home by activating our sympathetic nervous system through the slow mindful movements, breathing techniques and concentration practices of yoga. This science of the nervous system helps to explain the spontaneous feelings of goodwill and loving-kindness that we can experience during our practice even when others are not around. As Albert Einstein beautifully put it:

“Although I am a typical loner in my daily life, my awareness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty and justice has prevented me from feelings of isolation.”

Yoga, therefore, not only helps to build a bridge between the body and the mind, but also between ourselves and others.

We all want to change something.

Perhaps we want to lose weight, run a marathon, learn to play an instrument or learn a foreign language. But sometimes these goals remain stubbornly elusive and the lack of perceived progress can lead to a sense of defeat, and ultimately, to giving up. We try again and again, but there seems an invisible force blocking our progress. All we seem to end up doing, is reinforcing a pattern of failure so that we feel defeated even before we’ve hardly begun.

In his remarkable book ‘Philosophy of Hatha Yoga,’ Swami Veda Bharati quotes his father as saying, ‘If you’ve fallen in mud, you cannot expect to get up from a marble floor.’ This perfectly down-to-earth expression captures the practical importance of beginning from where you find yourself N THIS IS ALWAYS here and now. No matter how ‘muddy’ things might seem where you find yourself now, THIS IS YOUR STARTING POINT.

This seems almost ridiculously obvious. After all, we are only ever here and now, aren’t we? Yet oftentimes, and especially when we are learning something new, there is a tendency to think of ourselves somewhere ‘out there’ — like a phantom self, a product of our desire to supercede our current image of ourselves. To be ‘better’. It is certainly possible for that phantom to become a muse that inspires us to develop our practice. More often than not, however, it hangs around our head like a nagging aunt, berating us for our inadequacies and driving a wedge between our desire for change and any possibility for meaningful growth.

In accepting that we first need to rise in mud, we take our imperfect selves with us on the journey. We accept the unvarnished reality of where we are, without plans or embellishment. This is what Zen masters call ‘beginner’s mind’. This ‘beginner’s mind’ is the womb of all effort.  In meeting this reality we meet ourselves exactly as we find ourselves–imperfect, vulnerable, undisciplined. In short a little on the muddy side.

The biggest obstacle to leveling up our practice is the idea that there is something wrong with where we are.

Engaged Curiosity

Progress comes not so much from believing we are capable of more than we think, but from becoming actively curious about our capacities as they present to us in this very hour. Replacing goals with curiosity is a magic key. Goals lie outside our immediate control, and we can even wonder if they are truly our own or ‘expectations’ that we have become conditioned to internalize. Curiosity is always within our agency. Curiosity has a childlike quality that softens the nose-down toil and struggle with breezier elements of exploration, play and adventure. When we struggle through our endeavours, we fall victim to an uncompromising logic that says, ‘If I do this, then such and such should occur….’ Curiosity says, ‘Let’s see what happens when/if….’

There is nothing wrong with aspirations in and of themselves, so long as they don’t launch us away from the step right in front of us. It reminds me of a friend who keeps telling me, “I must learn French” when, in fact, he is already learning French. Perhaps the aspiration itself needs to remain grounded in the respiration of this very moment. Yoga is anchored in the breath for good reason. When we inhabit the spacious allowance of where we find ourselves now, we don’t need to hunt down our future. The future  finds us.

Just as the full bloom exists within the bud, so is the future budded within the present. If you want to know where you are headed, bring your attention to where you are now. You are not just on the path. YOU ARE THE PATH.

Admittedly, it’s not fun to realize that you’ve fallen in mud. It’s grubby and humbling. But this is the essential beauty of the image of the lotus that in Buddhism depicts the path from ignorance to enlightenment — with its roots in the mud providing the compost from which the unsullied lotus flower emerges. What we are now, in the present moment is our compost. This is perfect effort, the path of least resistance, where we say ‘yes’ to the mud even as we rise and grow out of it. Like all good gardeners know, you don’t fiddle and poke at young shoots; you give them what they need to thrive. It’s amazing how little they need. A little water and sunlight. Then the growth takes care of itself.