The Bodhisattva’s Smile

When I first starting practicing yoga, I knew that it would change my life.

After my first sweet Savasana, I suddenly realized that if I practiced diligently and consistently, I would become calm, kind to stranger, sweet to horrible children, magnanimous with ex-boyfriends and generous with catty women.  As I looked upon the serene and clear faces of sculptured bodhisattvas, I knew that I, too, would undoubtedly become serene, placid, and imperturbable.

Um.  Well.

That didn’t happen.

The more that I practice yoga, the more I feel.  Ugly, gorgeous, complicated, fleeting, terrifying feelings.  Rather than being sweetly equanimous, I have been riding up and down on a rollercoaster of sadness and joy.  Instead of becoming increasingly serene, my palette of experience is widening rather alarmingly.  Rather than muting to a pale and pleasing lavender, the spectrum of my emotions is becoming garish, rainbow, neon.

As kids, we learn to protect ourselves against the heartache of the world by armoring up.  Feel less, guard more.  We are taught to armour up in order to navigate our world with any dexterity; after all, our culture frowns upon open displays of raw emotion.  However, with each application of protective coating, our originally radiant emotional spectrum becomes grimy, dimmed, contained.

In the yoga practice, we are invited into a safe space in which to participate fully with our own experience.  If we allow it, we can peel back the armour that we have diligently applied like so much nail lacquer.  Through our body, we explore a wide array of sensations (some pleasant, some unpleasant) and are asked to breathe, feel, and discover the underlying grace in our the experience.

In our practice, we can choose how we react to discomfort: do we harden and armour up? Or can we soften and sense?  Can we move past an instinctive recoil against uncertainty and instead explore with tenderness the multitude of sensations and feelings that lies beneath our skin?

Practicing courageous and compassionate feeling in our yoga increases the spectrum of emotion that is available to us in our daily lives.  Father than hardening, we learn to soften and sense the wildish emotions off our lives with groundedness and softness.  As we feel into our bodies more with kindness, we begin to increase our graceful fortitude, that is, our ability to ride the waves of feeling and yet stay non-reactive and connected.

I was mistaken about the bodhisattvas: they do not smile so serenely because they only feel peaceful.  No, their emotional cup is not so shallow.

They smile because they feel everything, and hold the ocean of their deep feelings in the open hands of their grace.

Yoga and the Perks of Being a Wallflower

“We accept the love we think we deserve.” – Mr. Anderson, Perks of Being a Wallflower

Consciously, we know that we are good, smart people.  Good people who try hard and deserve to have good things.

So why do we find ourselves in situations in which we would be aghast to find our friends?

Through relationships, the deeper currents of ours subconscious – or hey, let’s call it karma – are revealed.  While our conscious mind is happily thinking that we are cleverly avoiding all our usual traps, unconsciously we are re-creating patterns that expose our deeper hardwiring.  These are the patterns that we ultimately slap ourselves on the forehead about: “God, why am I here again?”

Not only do we accept the love we think we deserve; we accept the jobs, the friends, the criticism, the boundaries, and the lives that we think we deserve.

What a blessing.

Through active and mindful participation in our relationships, therefore, we can begin to gently and compassionately unearth our blindspots…and consciously make choices to reset our patterns and update our beliefs.  When we witness our relationships with the world, we can clearly be in the reality of who we truly are – not just who we think we want to be.  And from that honest and tender place, we can be brave enough to accept our “karma” and make decisions that are more in line with our vision for our highest selves.

Our yoga practice offers a clear and present mirror, where we similarly “accept the practice we think we deserve.”

Do we feel unhappy with ourselves?  Perhaps we have a deep feeling that we’re unworthy and need to be punished.  We will find opportunities to create these experiences in our practice.  Do we think that we are lazy, inept, imbalanced?  These beliefs will show up there, too.  Do we feell like we’re victims?  Bingo – in the practice.  Do we feel that we deserve to feel, to be nourished, and to express ourselves unselfconsciously?  Voila, our practice.

Our yoga practice is a blank canvas, waiting for us to begin to paint.  Through witnessing the art that we create, we are privy to a clear and present window through which to recognize our conscious beliefs, as well as our deeper, hidden patterns.  By honestly watching our thoughts and actions, we can compassionately begin to recognize who we truly are.  And through our yoga practice, we can then sweetly and mindfully untether ourselves from old beliefs and create a higher relationship with ourselves.

First within, then without.

As we begin to shift the tectonic plates of these old beliefs, our outer world will begin to shift too.  And while we will still be accepting the love (and the practice, the job, and the friends) that we believe we deserve, “what we think we deserve” may evolve to be something quite different.

Ask yourself:

  • how do I treat myself in my yoga?
  • what beliefs surface about myself?
  • are there any consistent thoughts that keep surfacing?
  • how do I want my practice to be?
  • what would I have to give up – or let go of – in order to allow this to happen?
  • what do I lose if I do?
  • what do I gain?

Go explore, you beautiful creature.

Feel, move, love.

The courage of awkward

Awkward happens when “who we want to be” is revealed to be different than “who we are at this moment”.  Maybe we are trying be suave in front of that cute guy, savvy when we talk to our new boss, or awesome in all our yoga poses….when suddenly we insert foot in mouth, lose the thread, topple over, and sheepishly look up from a crumpled heap on the proverbial  floor.

But here’s the sweet soft spot in the middle of that embarrassment: awkward only happens when we are invested, when our hearts are engaged, and when we’re trying.  There is an earnest beauty to awkward that only comes from putting our hearts on the line, risking embarrassment, and testing our boundaries.  Awkward, as it turns out, is incredibly brave.

How often do we stay safe rather than risking awkward?  Over time, to avoid that hot flush of embarrassment, we start to limit our behaviour and our possibilities.  Perhaps we hide our Star Trek books and pretend we don’t wear a mouthguard (um, that’s me), or we resist walking up to cute guys and girls because the potential risk of looking interested just isn’t “cool.”  We hug in the boundaries of our potential in order to be hip or socially acceptable.  And in doing so, we limit our freedom to really express our silliness, our joy, and our abandon.

We can only grow from pushing our boundaries, falling over, and getting back up.  So give me your awkward family Christmas videos, Star Trek memorabilia, and posed cat photos!  Show me someone who isn’t afraid to fall over, share their enthusiasm, and be excited about their lives.

In your yoga practice, have the courage to risk being awkward by testing your boundaries, embracing failure, and laughing as you pick yourself up.

Through the fire of awkwardness, new possibilities will be revealed.  And as you embrace your inner ugly duckling, you give permission to those around you to similarly free themselves from the restrictions of cool and hip, and instead get down to the business of living from their beautiful, earnest, vulnerable hearts.

 

 

The Power of Meow

JonesyI took my kitty to the vet.

Now for any pet owners, you know that taking your kitty to the vet can be a pretty harrowing experience.  There could be claws, there could be flying fur, there could be plaintive meowing to break a kitty mama’s heart.

Jonesy – my cat – was a little trooper.  Primarily because she was terrified.  At the vet’s, she shook uncontrollably, kept her claws to herself, and quietly subjected herself to the indignities of palpation and a heart check.  Her silence in the vehicle on the way home had me fearing the worst.  If she hadn’t had a heart attack, certainly I was in store for days of skulking and litter box abstinence.

When I got her home and opened her carrier, she popped out her head and jumped from the carrier.  Finding herself in a familiar setting, she gave herself a little shake, perked her ears, put her tail in the air, and made for her favorite kitty tower, none the worse for the wear.

After giving her some well-deserved catnip, I took a moment to marvel at her process.  Here was kitty, fully in the moment, allowing herself to be afraid, meow, and shake.  And because she’d be completely in the experience, once her vet visit as over, she had been able to completely let go of the distress and move on.

When something hurtful and scary happens to me, I do not react like kitty.  Rather than meow and shake (or articulate my feelings and cry), I batten down the hatches, act reasonably, and stuff my feelings into the box labelled “unacceptable and vulnerable reactions.”   Then later, instead of moving on, all the little goodies from that box start to leak out and worm their way into my thoughts and actions.  The experience lingers.

What if we could be more like kitty?  To fully experience the breadth of feelings in the moment without apology, and then – because our feelings had been given their due – to move on and freshly into the next experience?   Now, reason is a lovely tool, so I’m not suggesting that we all run amok with our emotions without reflection.  But kitty’s ability to experience the moment and then move on also gave her the capacity to immediately forgive me, enjoy some pets, and peacefully nap for the rest of her day.  Her teachings remind of Eckhart Tolle’s passion for the Power of Now, in which he invites us to be awake fully to the present moment.

We can learn a lot about life from our little furry friends, feline and canine.  In our yoga practice, consider how we hold onto our day, our agenda, or even our experience of one pose to the next.  In the practice, can we instead return again and again to the current moment and our experience?  In doing so, we give ourself the opportunity to be fully present to the breadth of our sensations and emotions, and we also clear our palate to available for the experiences to come.

Then, we could say that we too would experience, “The Power of Meow.”