The Yoga of a Temper Tantrum

What brings us to our bended knees? Not just in defeat, but hopefully also in love? On the subjects of surrender and devotion, eeshwar praanidhan is art and science in the realm of yoga.

In the practice of swaadhya (see previous blog entry), Patanjali's instruction was to study the Self, the universal life element present in every living being.  In this next thread or sutra, Patanjali is inviting us to deepen the practice, which already seemed so complete, to the level of not just noticing and being curious about the Self, but practicing eeshwar pranidhaan, devotion and surrender, to the Self.

We're not that fond of the idea of surrender, let alone the practice.  And devotion is traditionally found in religious spheres that require a particular membership to be considered valid.  In yoga, often free of sign-up contracts, surrender refers to a state in which we are able to unclench our everything, especially our striving to get control over that which is uncontrollable, i.e., the natural world.  For example, a two-year-old, a wild and uncontrollable natural phenomena.

I recently had the good fortune of coming across a library book called "The Happiest Toddler on the Block," which I highly recommend.  I had been enduring regular tantrums from my newly-two boy, and could barely keep it together myself, and that's after 18 years of daily meditation.  

It didn't seem to matter what I did or said, my son would rage to get out of basic things like diapers, tooth brushings, baths, getting dressed, getting out of the car, going into the car, comings and goings of call kinds.  It was exhausting and demoralizing to us both. 

What I learned then, in the "Happiest Toddler," was that toddlers can hear three only things, and require all three things, while they are in a tantrum and you hope it to end:   

To be heard, to be understood, and to be respected.  

Being heard isn't enough; being heard and understood, still not enough; you have to add (and muster up with full honesty during a gale-force behavior storm) respect.  

I might add, you don't have to give the toddler (or presumably anyone) what they want, or let them get out of doing the thing they don't want to do.  When I'm able to pull off the technique, it works 100% of the time, what a shocker!  I now realize that we likely all need these three things when we lose our marbles, even in our sophisticated, socially acceptable ways.  

This falls perfectly with what Patanjali is saying.  The force of life (is there a bigger example than a two-year-old?), even in a violent state, is not to be hated and fought against, even if that did work.  

What happens when we hate and fight with a natural force?  One thing is we miss the opportunities for resolution, said Tony Krawats from my Thursday yoga class.  If we are consumed by fighting against and being unsatisfied with what’s happening, then we can't see the cracks, or finite, fleeting and passing nature that is inherently there in any weather system.

Another way to say this is: 

Come up with enough awareness in the moment to love what is there unlovable by our standards, and flow with the situation, be with it, if only briefly, as it is. This can bring it to extremely quick, nearly miraculous resolution.  

The flow of life is always our teacher, a deep angle message in the sutras on eeswar praanidhaan  If we can set this as a goal, what is happening, in the moment, will tell us how to be, what to do and where to go - our dharm, in Buddhist terms.  If we fight against what it is trying to teach us, we of course miss the teachings, but also the satisfaction with your every day, every moment to moment life.  Simple and yet incredibly difficult to practice.  Tell me what you think!

Sky Kissing the Ground

Our culture has become accustomed to self-reflection, with a small "s" on self.  The practice of swaadhaaya, the study of the Self according to ancient sage, Patanjali, with a large "S," is less popular.  The capital letter denotes a person, place or thing whose nature is divine.  

This week, while I muddled through the challenges of keeping it together as a mother, and not, I threw water melon at my kid.  I meant to throw it, but not at him, and in my madness, it slipped out of my hands and got him.  It was a moment of break-through realization that I need not lose it like that, and that I was caught like a fly in my small "s" self.

We become so obsessed by our small "s" self - body, mind, intellect, ego, that  we feel separate from every other small "s" self, and even from all the events that connect every other one.  We are stuck in a moment that no longer exists.  Perhaps that's because we haven't learned to do swaadhyaa, study the Self that is common to every being, that is alive and fully present in every moment. 

It's a snake eating it's own tail.  

A cosmic loop.

The full moon.

A repetitive joke. 

Infinite flow.

Low lying cloud,

sky kissing the ground.

Slogging it Out Yoga-Style

Photo by Gisele Beaupre

This week's yoga study is tapas (I'm not talking snacks with drinks).  It means enlightenment through tackling necessary hardship.  Right out of the hopper it leads my attention to the unnecessary hardship in our lives.  

Patanjali says tacking the hardships, over which we have no control to change, without complaining, feeling hard-done-by or self-pitying, is an act of purification, and that through our practiced and loving efforts we can gain a light, healthy body and acute powers of hearing and understanding.

In the old days, before the enlightenment of the Buddha, for example, it was thought that suffering was a necessary path to liberation.  That's how you got the homeless beggars with their bowls, sitting naked on snowy mountains, laying on beds of nails and such nasty things. Thank God I didn't live in those times!  The Buddha came along (and obviously Patanjali - or the translator I'm reading) and said, no, you don't need to seek out suffering.  Enough of that shows up all by itself, sooner or later, or even all the time.

Everyone is different in the amount that life calls them to go through disasters.  For the recent flood (2nd worst of the century in Manitoba), my two-year-old son and I had to self-evacuate for four days to a lovely woman's lovely home with her lovely daughter in Lindenwoods.  On the flip side, I saw a picture from the Philipines of a man and woman up to their necks in water, floating their oblivious-looking infant in a wash tub.  Suffering is relative and taking the time to notice we are not the only one suffering can often make us grateful for the challenges we face.  

Left to our own device, there's a tendency to avoid necessary hardships.  We don't want to, don't feel like it, you can't make me, I would rather poke my eyes out.  And yet, the frequency with which we will turn around and create all kinds of unnecessary hardships for ourselves, and guess what, all the people around us, is astounding.   

On that note, almost ten years ago, having practiced yoga and meditation for most of the decade, I was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma, stage four by the time I got to bottom of what was bringing me down.  I won't tell the whole story here, but as it relates to tapas, it was an opportunity to see what I was really made of when all my defenses were down and my identities were blown.  

Along the way to getting really sick I avoided the necessary hardship of quitting my job with a family business in the high-stress public relations arena.  I knew it would devastate my father after he'd invested so much in training me, and I wanted to help the family with the business that had given me so much growing up.  However, I knew the job was killing my body, never mind my soul.  Feeling the pull of my soul stronger than my body I ramped up the time I gave to yoga, meditation and organizing gatherings in the midst of a full-time-plus business life was so stressful, that it frequently made me want to jump off the building in which I worked. Suddenly (or so it seemed) I had a lump in my neck, and within months the low grade malaise turned into very sick.  

This was the beginning of an end, and the point at which I systematically lost and gave away everything - the things I couldn't manage anymore:  my house, my pets, my things, many of my friends (though the loved ones who showed up gave me immeasurable love and support), my hair, the use of my hands at times, even the ability to deep breath and sit up in the midst of brutal chemo regimes.  

I faced the loss of my life twice.  The first time found me laying on my back for a whole day. That never happened.  No matter how bad I felt, I had always managed to sit myself up and at least meditate on the space of infinity, reaching unexpected hights and experiencing joy like never before, despite the state of my body.  That day, after 11 months of chemotherapy, I was defeated.  There was no more fight in me.  I had lost it all and there was not yet signs of the treatments working.  After the day was done and the day light turned to dusk, I suddenly woke up from my funk by the realization that there I was, with nothing I knew to be myself, but I was there whole, perfectly complete and full - amazing!  Who would have thought it?  Then I knew that I never again needed to do anything for myself or to make myself fulfilled.  With nothing, not even a real hope to live on in my body, I was already that.

The second time I was diagnosed, my oncologist was sure I was headed for death, as this is statistically the case.  They ramped up the chemo to daily doses, five days a week, for a few months.  At the end of it they recommended a stem-cell transplant, a procedure that half the people die doing and said this was my only chance.  By this time my life had turned into one therapeutic act after another, the medical stuff being the least of it.  That story will be for another time.  For all the efforts I'd made, all the self-educating I had done and all the great guides and healers I'd invited into my life, I still had not yet come around the corner of recovery.  It broke me at this point while I deliberated about the looming and heroic medical process that took up to a year, if one lived through it.  

Hanging in the balance led me again to face the loss of my life, and ultimately to be at peace with that very real possibility and to see what lay at the heart of keeping me in a down-spiral of illness.  In the heart, I discovered that I had been making all my efforts, fabulous and expensive as they were, out of fear - the fear of death, fear of authority (especially medical/conventional) and fear of being sick.  

I then realized that I needed be at peace with death, be at peace with authority and the reality of becoming ill, and most importantly that I needed to start acting out of a love - love for myself, love for all the good things available for supporting my health and most importantly a love for Life itself.  At that moment I decided not to do the transplant and accepted that if I was to die at that time, let it be of cancer, not chemo.  I began a sometimes moment-to-moment practice of conscious love, and a constant digestion (not denial) of the fears that ometimes moment-to-moment came to the surface.  As you guessed, I turned the corner and have never looked back.  I'm in better health now than I was in my twenties, save for the mothering injuries I'm nursing.  My oncologist pretends I don't exist, by the way, and he never asked me what my secret was.  He didn't lack anything truly, but curiosity.

The tapas I practiced in those days prepared me to live a life so full I could never have imagined it.  And life continues to throw me curve balls, to say the least.  The most humbling part is waking up to the fact that when we turn down our choices in the time that that choice is ripe, the scene may turn, and our "get to" may turn into some other "have to."  Here's a prayer that I and we all learn to do as much "get to" as we can.   Please do send me your thoughts.

Cheers and kind love, Beth

Contentment

Being content is a technique offered by the sage, Patanjali.  If someone were to ask, "how do you be content?" he might answer, "be content," even though you don't like it, even though you don't feel like it, even though you're right about being discontented.  Try it as an experiment, take it as it is, and see what happens and appears before you that you didn't expect, a unique way into the next moment we may not have noticed if we were all bothered.  

"Don't be complacent and careless about things you can control, but do be content with what you can't, if at all humanly possible."  That's one great answer that came out of tonight's satsang at Norwood.  The satsang topic is santosh (contentedness), the state in which there are no vrittis, or unconscious, pre-thought lines that move and guide our attention away from our centre, away from the moment, into agitating thoughts.  Vrittis are the long-standing, crazy mental habits of a human being's lifetime.  

This is to be distinguished, however, from the movement of thought for the sake of creating something, or solving something or some life supportive thing.  This is completely different than the unintentional stream of the sum total of all our impressions that rule us and everyone from the underground.

To what extent do we wait for fear to motivate us? The fear of poverty to work, fear of loneliness to relate, fear of death and sickness to be healthy, fear of stupidity to get educated (that's a good one, we should fear stupidity).  If we are moved by fear, however, then fear follows the movement through and tends to attract the very thing we are afraid of.  If love moves us, then love follows us and tends to attract the very thing that we love.  If joy moves us, then joy follows and attracts what gives us joy.  If contentedness moves us, then supreme happiness is there, under all circumstances.

Be content.  So simple, and yet so humbling to practice.  If we are present to what is there in front of us, we are not in our vritti, we are in a moment.  And that moment so powerfully is, that it's potency cannot be denied, argued with or mistaken.  "Take it as it is...it's all there is and you're it...there in lies the Bliss.  Shine a light on this." (From 'Take It As It Is,' The Yoga Lullabies)

Cleanliness and Godliness

Did you ever spend time in someone's house that was so clean and tidy it was scary?  My grandmother, who was always up to her and everyone's ears in the clutter of projects, i.e., not tidy, would comment about their neighbors whose home was always manicured perfectly, but dead (in my words), not a book or magazine, no pets, no children.  My grandma liked it wild, like a pea patch in her foresty gardens.  

In Patanjali's yog sutras he invites us to consider shauch on the path to self awareness.  It means cleanliness, and refers to everything from our homes, our streets, our bodies and our minds.  The dark side of this we've seen in the most extreme historical examples, such as Hitler, who was a vegetarian trying to rid the species of impurities.  His ability to kill to attain such results shows the deep fear that motivated him.   

If fear drives our efforts to be orderly and pure, it can be deeply wounding to ourselves and those around us.  Being aware of this,  we can drop the fear (simply be aware of it, stare it in the face) and learn to love the fruit of our  efforts to practice  shauch, for example the time we save from knowing where our keys always are, or enjoy the wellbeing we experience through self care and good eating.   And sleeping, right.  Do you think we actually need sleep?  What do  you think?

Getting More Established

Being established under all circumstances ~ can you take a vow like this?  Getting established so you're ready when all hell breaks loose (and it does).  Established in what?  Watching the waves from the still bottom of the sea.  

Be aware of how opportunities to be established in our awareness require us to be alert. And like a snake eating its tail, to be alert requires we seize every opportunity to get established.

Our neighborhood has been declared in a state of flood emergency thanks to the frozen and rising Red River, and there are a few hundred sandbags on the driveway.  My bags are packed and in the car for possible evacuation. It's all very surreal, now and always, and I can keep hearing these words: Do you get it, do you get it now, how about now?  

Send me what gets you established.

Namaste

Treat all the circumstances like a chance to get established and then get into the game of it. Win some, lose some.  What the heck.  Gotta try.

Prayer for the Sleep Deprived

Prayer for the sleep deprived:  Lord please guide me through the blur to take care of and respect the life in and around me.  Help me remember that what I over-give to my work, I take from my health because this is work too.  Thank you for my work, every day I am privileged to be with so many wise and beautiful souls, and be totally humbled by how good my health needs to be to fulfill my commitments.  And take into your hands the errors, the impatience and bad judgments that come so easily after not having slept for two years.  Finally Lord, I pray for sweet, dreamless sleep and awakenings so bright I need my sunglasses all night long.