change space September 29, 2008

How many books talk about change being hard, the most difficult thing to do. People have habits, ruts, patterns they can’t seem to escape, half of which we don’t even realize we have. Yogis and Buddhists tell us about samskaras, those actions we do over and over again. Scientists who study the brain tell us about neurological patterns that develop and link our thoughts to actions, creating actual grooves in the brain that get deeper and deeper the longer we stay in these patterns. This makes real change almost impossible, right?

What if change isn’t hard?

People talk about changing all the time, for years, for decades. But the actual change I think happens in a second, almost instantaneously. Suddenly, I think one thing and respond in a certain way, and then the next second I respond in some other way. It’s not a process; it’s the opposite of process. It’s not a series of steps or actions. It’s just one step, one action, from doing something to not doing it.

My yoga teacher talks about the madhya (not sure how it’s spelled) in pranayama, that point in breathing when you change from inhaling to exhaling. I think Deepak Chopra calls it a “gap”.  It’s a still point, a space.  This change space that’s neither inhaling nor exhaling, but one changing into the other. I’ve said before, I feel like I’ve changed so much in the last couple of years (and I have), but the externals look the same.  Am I in the change space? How long can I stay in the change space before I lose my breath? How long can I wait to exhale?

20 Years January 20, 2008

My father died 20 years ago today (January 19). It’s been a long 20 years, but still, somehow, unproductive. I still miss him. I’m still angry that he died when he did. I’m still adrift in some ways since then.

When he died I was a senior in college about to start my last semester. This is a pivotal point in a person’s life. Especially a person like me who can just sort of, go with the flow. I had no real goals, although I applied to graduate school. (That was one of the last things my father helped me do, get out those applications, edit my essay, help me decide where to apply.)  Not really thinking about it. I just thought graduate school would be a safe bet, a continuation of school, which was pretty much all I knew after 16 years. And I’m great at doing what I’m told.

When he died I just floated, not with lightness, but without any sort of grounding. I went through the motions, again without really thinking about what I wanted, whatever was easiest, whatever caused the least stress for everyone. So I went to graduate school. Again with no goal in mind for the education or the degree.

Real goals, things I really really really want to do, rest at the back of my mind, waiting for me to pick them up and do something with them. I never do. Let me restate that: I often let them continue to rest, until they fade away, and I forget them completely. Because as I sit here now, I can’t think of a single real goal from graduate school. Everything I did was along the path of least resistance. Everything I chose required little action from me, little choice.  Somehow hoping my stillness would bring great change.

I was left with this wanting, this feeling of incompleteness and joylessness. I wanted more, but not only did I not know how to go after it, I didn’t even how to think of it. I would try something and hope it would magically change my life. At the first sign that it would not, or the changes I would have to make would be too great, I would drop it and move on to something else. I’ve done this with hobbies, sports, cities, people.  I’m constantly starting over, beginning again. And I’m a fabulous beginner. I can go from absolutely no knowledge to low intermediate in the time it takes others to figure out how to pronounce the thing. But I leave. I always have.

Yoga will be the challenge to this. I’ve been doing yoga for a year now and I don’t see giving it up any time soon.  Just when I think it’s routine and just an exercise, I’ll have to leave a class in a hurry racing to my car before I burst into tears. Holding it in the parking lot. Then safely away at the first stop light, I Sob. Sob for whatever feeling that came up in whatever asana. Sob for my life. Sob for my fatherless family. Sob that I still feel lost after all these years.

Uncharted Happiness September 8, 2007

I was rereading an article from Yoga Journal about change: the willingness to change, how to change, the change process. In the past year I’ve made huge leaps and strides. Found mulitiple edges and reached over all of them. I feel different from the person I was a year ago. I am different, I feel it in my bones and my flesh.

But the anxious one in me constantly brings up a really good point: How can I be so different, when my life looks just the same? Same job, apartment, body, loneliness. How can I possible be different? Or is the external change coming? First inside then outsite, maybe. I don’t know.

I’ve been running into lonely poems. Last night, well at this point two nights ago, my yoga teach put up part of a poem by Hafiz:

Something missing in my heart tonight
Has made my eyes so soft,
My voice
So tender,

My need of God
Absolutely
Clear.

It was so sad and beautiful that I looked it up, and found the first part even more sad and beautiful:

Don’t surrender your loneliness
So quickly.
Let it cut more deep.

Let it ferment and season you
As few human
Or even divine ingredients can.

“Don’t surrender your loneliness so quickly/let it cut more deep.” I can’t get over that. The loneliness is a constant. I can’t imagine it going even deeper. It never goes away, no matter the city or job or body, or how many people around me, it stays. It’s the same. It makes the same grooves, the same cuts, unchanged.

But I want to change, be different not just feel different. I want new grooves, paper cuts making a new map of uncharted happiness, newly discovered joy.

Yoga is destructive August 10, 2007

I’ve been taking classes at my place of yoga, at a small Buddhist yoga studio, for about 7 months. At the beginning of my first class with my yoga teacher he said that if he had to distill yoga down to two words it would be ‘let go’. What I didn’t realize then is that in order to let something, anything go, you have to feel it first.

For a person who keeps it all in, feeling any emotion, bad or good, is extremely difficult. The first few months of yoga were incredibly painful. Emotionally painful. It’s only recently have I been able to leave yoga without feeling destroyed, my self in a million little pieces, my body twitching and heavy with emotional energy more than physical exhaustion. Why did I keep going back? Because every time I put my self back together again, I have a little more clarity.

Now, most of the time, I leave feeling good, relaxed, released, but not tonight. Tonight I’m feeling that bottle energy that I don’t know what to do with. The kind I’m trying to release, but I don’t know where to go with it. Is it sadness or anger or frustration? And about what. I had a pretty good day honestly, but there’s just this heightened energy coming from somewhere.