Stage fright and Patanjali. Oh, and hamsters.

I was a theatre actor for many years, and I had terrible stage fright. About a week before the show, the little hamster voices inside my head started to whisper:

“You’re going to trip.”

“You’re going to mess this dance step up.  It’s so hard.  You messed it up in rehearsal.”

“You’re going to go up on your lines.”

Rather than tell these insidious little voices to fuck off, I would gasp and run to my script, and study my lines over and over until I was certain that I would be wordperfect.  Unfortunately, I was really practicing being terrified and in my head.  During performance itself, I would have an out of body experience where I spoke and moved on cue while my hamster brain was frozen in the headlights of the audience.  Being a proficient actor, sure, I looked fine from the outside; but my worry had killed my artistic joy and abandon.

This year – as a present to myself – I decided to confront my hamsters and perform again.  I would sing for my office.  Karaoke backtracks, done in the lobby: nothing fancy, but meaningful to me. About a week before showtime, the hamsters started sniffing around, their pert little noses twitching.  “Just run through the words in your head,” they cajoled, “make sure you know them backwards and forwards.”  The rubbed their little paws together, “You don’t want to mess it up…in front of all those people…”

This time, when the hamster voices arose, I stepped in and firmly grabbed their furry little tails. “Look, hamsters,” I said, “Fuck off.  It’s going to be great.  It’s going to be tons of fun.”  And I put them firmly back into their cages.

Don’t believe everything you think.

We all have these little voices, our little hamsters of worry and anxiety and what it.  “He’s going to leave me,”  “I’m going to blow the interview,”  “I can’t run the extra mile,”  “Dolphin plank sucks,” “I can never balance in Ardha Chandrasana” or, “I’ll forget all my lines.”   Patanjali (ancient yogi guy) says when we have negative thoughts, we need to step in and cultivate the opposite.  He calls this pratipaksha bhavanam.  A more recent sage, Wayne Dyer, says, “change your thoughts, change your life.”  The Dalai Lama adds that if we can’t find something positive in a challenging situation, we should simply put it out of our heads entirely.  Worry is a waste of time.  Worry is hoping for something bad to happen.

We can change this. By noticing when the hamsters start, we can step in and redirect our thoughts towards something positive. We train our minds to practice good stuff rather than bad.  Sure we’ll have some hamster thoughts, but that doesn’t mean we have to run around in their fetid little cages with them for hours. Whether the hamsters fret about singing, the relationship, running a mile, or dolphin plank, let’s take the proactive moment to question the mind chatter.  Create the space to respond from our highest vision for ourselves rather than react from our hamster brains.  If we’re going to create a vision, let’s aim high.  Let’s aim for joy.

So put the damn hamster down.  And start singing.

What zombie hands have to do with yoga

I have a bad habit of reading my phone while walking into heavy traffic.

Yesterday, walking to lunch, I had to deliberately return my phone to my bag on three separate occasions after, zombie like, my hand decided to reach in and pull it out.

“No, Rachel, No!” I muttered out loud, as if my hand were a recalcitrant child that could be scolded into behaving, “Jesus.” I nearly walked into a parked Volvo. “Get it together.”

We are growing so connected, so “on” all the time. Information is strapped to our bodies, “Let’s google that,” we say, rather than “I don’t know.” “I’ll text her now,” rather than “I’ll ask her later when I see her.”

When there is that odd moment between the doing – like when walking or waiting in line – I instinctively rush to fill it with this information/ connection glut. It is much more comfortable to reach for my phone than to take a breath. There are so many delightful options at my fingertips that provide an immediate rush of competence and popularity: email, texting, Tinder (ahem), flipping through Facebook…there’s always some hook to catch.

It’s not our fault that we are uptrained to technology. Our culture supports this electric conductivity, encouraging us to be in our virtual minds as much as possible to be popular (you’re not on instagram?), well-informed (you don’t get google scholar alerts? what about the political gabfest podcast?), connected (you’re not on linked in?). Information and connection, at this point, are so prevalent that it is no longer a matter of if we can connect, but how we filter out the noise. For human beings, wired for community, connective technology is sugar for our psyche.

Connecting out is easy, fast, satisfying.
Connecting in is slower, messier, and can be scary.

When the furor dies down and the waters become still, pausing and turning into ourselves can reveal hurts, thoughts, vulnerabilities that are easily  scotched over in the fluster of our lives. At the end of my day at home, I sit and watch my compulsion to do anything (budget, email, eat glutinos, watch House of Cards) rather than breathe into the soft animal of loneliness that sometimes comes to visit. But when I am brave enough to turn in, connect, and invite myself to feel, then through the bittersweet human pangs there arises the deep sense of hereness, of being, of safety in myself.

The space between the doings reveals us again as human beings, breathing in the vast, unfathomable, and heart breaking space of simple aliveness and all our unfinished business. We move (as Jon Kabat Zinn eloquently states) from the digital world to the analog. Time is slower, counted by the footfalls on a forest hike rather than in the impatient milliseconds it takes a page to load. In the being moments, we are perfectly imperfect, practicing just being with ourselves as we are.

Yoga practice offers us a rare and precious space to turn inwards. To feel. To reclaim our deeper, older, and wildish aspects. We connect with that which is beyond words and speaks in the language of sensation. We make space to feel our physical bodies, our animal desires, our emotions, our intuition, our breath.

As we move in, we nourish the deep roots, dig into the dark soil of who we are. This re-integration gives us the solidity and form that we need to be steady amidst the winds. We can remember our purpose, our love, our softness.

Our hand then remembers to leave the phone in the bag. Because the walk is so much sweeter without it.