Hazel’s first week of middle school

Walking to school

Hazel started sixth grade this week. Dave and I had plans to help her arrive extra-early on the first day of school so she could drop off school supplies into appropriate bins, find her locker, pick up her updated schedule and make it to her first class on time. Despite our hopes and dreams for a stress-free first morning, it didn’t work out like that. I think Hazel handled her side of things fairly well, but the moment I walked through the glass doors of the massive middle school, the most dysfunctional sixth grade version of myself emerged. I felt my anxiety spike and recognized the uniquely pre-teen feeling of equal parts fascination and aversion about all the people and happenings around me. It was so weird. When I think about the first day crazies in Hazel’s middle school, I have this picture in my head that all of us were scurrying, kind of like cockroaches running willy-nilly, trying to move out of the way but not knowing where, exactly, the massive shoe  would come down.

Aaah. Middle school.

As Dave and I drove away from the school, I laughed off some of my old baggage and stress and reminded myself that this is only one of a whole series of days at this school. Gradually, all this stuff won’t feel so new. Hazel will learn her way around, get to know the teachers, the staff, and the kids, and she’ll come up with a rhythm for her week. So will I. Pretty soon, she’ll be carrying on a conversation with friends and she won’t have to think about how to get to her next class. She’ll be able to focus on friendships and learning and getting to know who she is and what she enjoys. All of these experiences will become a part of her.

Patanjali’s Yoga Sūtra I.17  vitarka vicāra ānanda asmitā rūpa anugamāt saṁprajñātaḥ

This process is the same one we all go through when something new begins and slowly becomes part of our lives. It can feel awkward and difficult at the start but after going through it again and again, it becomes second nature. Patañjali talks about this very process in yoga sūtra I.17. At first, we have a gross understanding of something (vitarka). With experience, we refine our understanding and our experience, and we know it in a more subtle way (vicāra). This process brings deep satisfaction or joy (ānanda). And as we continue in this way and follow these movements or processes (anugamāt) , the experience, knowledge, or object becomes a part of you (asmitā) and we know it deeply and take complete ownership* of the object (saṁprajñātaḥ)

We’ll continue to make efforts to help the school days go smoothly– getting up with plenty of time to make the bus, providing nourishing food, appropriate amounts of 11-year-old sleep, and preparing what we can the evening before. Establishing an efficient routine is just one way our family will go through vitarka vicāra ānanca asmitā rūpa anugamāt saṁprajñātaḥ. As we repeat the process again and again and continue to make efforts, it will be refined in subtle ways and our mornings will go more and more smoothly. Of course, these efforts aren’t for the mornings or the routines themselves. A smooth and low-stress start to the day means that Hazel can do the important work of being Hazel. As she develops and goes through middle school, what she experiences becomes a part of her. And I’m sure her special middle school years will become a part of me in significant and important ways, too.

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*From Liberating Isolation, Yogasutra of Patañjali by Franz Moors; Media Garuda 2012

Insecurity sucks.

Happy Independence Day!

I’ve felt insecure lately.

There wasn’t an incident that shook me up.  No one confronted me or called me a fraud or questioned my ability to parent or anything that dramatic.  I just have the feeling that what I’m doing or thinking is somehow wrong.  I don’t feel easy and clear.  And as it happens, if I’m insecure about one thing, then I start to wonder if I’m actually unsure about a whole bunch of other stuff, too.  I send a text.  “Ugh, I shouldn’t have sent that text.”  I make plans for Friday. “Do I even want to go out on Friday?”  I prepare to teach a class. “I don’t think I know enough to teach a class about yoga.”  I could go on, but you get the idea. Insecurity starts to infect all sorts of experiences.

One of the many reasons I like yoga is because it deals in the currency of feelings. There are lots of arenas where the careful consideration of feelings isn’t encouraged or valued, but with yoga, it’s one of the main ways that we come to understand ourselves.  We get sensation in our body, we learn how to work with that.  We have habits and desires that come through as feelings, we start to distinguish between the ones that are helpful and the ones that aren’t so helpful.   We feel the urge to say “yes” and the urge to say “no” at the same exact time, and we develop an ability to discern between them to know which one to follow. It’s in our ability to be quiet and still and to hold our focus and attention in one place that we are able to begin to understand our feelings.

The yoga sutras offer great insight into the role of feelings in our lives. Feelings can become habits and habits can start to become beliefs.  This insecurity could move in and take over.  Or. Or I could connect with a different kind of feeling and go a different route.  The sutras are so practical. As I sit with this insecurity, I’ve been revisiting the following sutra quartet and I like what they have to say.

1.17 vitarka vichara ananda asmitarupa anugamat samprajnatah.

How did insecurity take over? Well, I have the feeling, dwell on it, believe it a little bit and experience insecurity again and again.  Slowly, the insecurity is so familiar, I don’t even notice that it’s there.  It moves in and colors how I text or parent or teach.  I find that once insecurity starts to operate under the radar it can seem beyond my control. Like it’s just a part of me.  And this is what this sutra is all about.  The feeling starts off “gross”, vitarka, it’s noticeable and maybe we put up a little resistance.  Then the feeling becomes more subtle, vichara, and it gets easier and easier to just follow that familiar path, it even feels good, ananda, until eventually these patterns are so much a part of who we are that they become a part of us, samprajnatah .  The patterns become our second nature.  This can happen with icky things like insecurity, but the good news is the same path can work with good stuff, too.  I can have other experiences, conscious and intentional experiences, that can help me to connect more strongly with something good.  Something that isn’t insecure.  Maybe it’s the feelings of clarity and balance that move from through this process and become a part of me.  That would be much better.

1.18 viramapratyaya abhyasapurvah samskarasesah anyah

Cultivating feelings in a conscious way doesn’t just happen.  There has to be a quiet, active, and intentional Amanda in order for this to work.  This sutra says that in order to follow the pattern from 1.17 (gross –>subtle–>joy–>perfect understanding) over and over again, I will find a quiet state called virama.  This is a highly refined state of mind in which my big bundle of habits and patterns, my samskaras, chill out.  In this state, instead of operating from samskaras, reacting without thinking or letting insecurity run the show, I find space to notice a feeling underneath all the habits.  I’m not made up of insecurity.  It’s just showing up.  Underneath that, I’m in there somewhere and it’s through still and quiet focus that I have a better chance of getting in touch with that.  It’s when I’m connected to my inner voice and I can hear it, know what it is and follow it, the insecurity has much less of a chance of moving in.

1.19 bhavapratyayo videhaprakritilayanam

Some people are born, hearing, knowing and following their inner voice.  These are very special people… like Jesus.

1.20 srddha virya smrti samadhiprajna purvaka itaresam

This is a really awesome sutra because it’s here that we hear about sraddha.  Sraddha is a feeling, a deep sense that supports us in this listening to our feelings and this path of yoga. For us regular folks who aren’t direct offspring of a deity, sraddha is the belief, the confidence, THE FAITH that what I am doing will work. It’s knowing that I won’t always feel insecure and that this path will help me to be able to hear and know and follow my inner voice…sraddha is the feeling that it’s possible.   I can be more connected to my Self and when I am, this sutra says I can know the feeling of deep connection and concentration of Samadhi, and to wisdom, prajna.  Since evidence is mounting that I wasn’t born with the inner-voice connection like Jesus was,  I’m so glad I have some sraddha to go along with my continued practice and efforts.

My experience of insecurity is really different from what it used to be.  It’s still annoying and I’d much prefer that it not visit, but when it does, it doesn’t take over anymore.  I don’t fall down the deep depression-crevasse like I used to, and believe that it’s me, that I’m just an insecure person and maybe it’s all true.  I know that it’s not true that the texts I send are all wrong or that I should quit teaching yoga or whatever. This knowing is connected to sraddha, to the ability to believe that I’ll eventually come out the other side even when, in the middle of the experience, the insecurity can feel so true and real.  I have faith that this yoga business is worth the continued effort—that it works and that it works for me.  Aaaah. I’m feeling more confident already.

If you need a dose of sutra-based confidence and wisdom, Chase Bossart is coming to Austin, TX and will be teaching at Yoga Yoga on July 11th and 12^th.  I’m here to tell you, he’s a wonderful teacher and boy does he know how to teach the yoga sutras.   You should sign up. I’ll save you a spot next to me!  CLICK HERE for more information.

Don’t be so nice to me. It freaks me out.

Yoga Sutra 1.17

vitarka vicara ananda asmitarupa anutamat smprajnatah.

I was driving around the other day wondering why Dave is so nice to me.  We were married for a while, had two kids, split and now we are dating again and it is going really well.  Over the latest months of dating, I am slowly wanting to make more space for him in my life.  I’m opening to him again, gradually, and even though it has been scary and I have felt some old hard feelings come up along the way, it is actually working.  We are working.  Some of those old, less-functional patterns we used to operate under don’t have such a strong hold over us and we are creating new ways of being together.  It can be so lovely and beautiful in these moments. Truly. But as is the case in life, the work isn’t ever actually over. Even with all the beauty and lovliness, there are still some die-hard patterns.

Which brings us back to the wondering why Dave is so nice to me.  It started after a real flood of niceness in the last week.  My 4-year-old and I went on a road trip last weekend to see my friend from elementary school, my friend from middle school and my friend from college.  Dave made us 2 road trip cd’s that were really fun. Nora and I had a rockin’ road trip.  He made breakfast for me one morning.  He invited me to Italy.  He wanted to make sure we had an afternoon to celebrate Valentine’s Day.  He sends me hilarious text messages and videos that he thinks I’ll enjoy.  All around, he’s really great.  But, in the car that day, I wondered, “why all this niceness?  Why???”  And then I got suspicious.  “What if I get used to the niceness and I start to need it and then he takes it away?  What if he has some ulterior motive that I’m just not seeing or that he’s not even conscious of and then I get screwed… and not in the good way?  What… if…”  It went on for a little while like this.  But then I paused.  And this is where it gets interesting.

I stopped wondering about what Dave might be thinking or doing or unconsciously acting upon and I started wondering about myself.  “What is the deal with all this suspicion?  What does it feel like in my body?”  And you know what I noticed? It felt like bracing.  It felt like I was trying to protect myself.  As soon as I quit freaking out about Dave and started to look at Amanda, I realized that I was freaking out about the closeness.  And it wasn’t just the fear associated with painful breaking-up and things we did and said during that time.  This is older than that. And deeper.  I had this sense that I am guarding against the intimacy—the love, really.  Being loved. Feeling loved.  This paranoia about Dave and his motives is the well-worn decoy distracting me from what is really going on.   Something in me wants to protect myself from feeling vulnerable and open to love.

This is big-breakthrough kind of stuff, people.   And it’s really significant because I can’t tell you how many times, in the 18 years I’ve known Dave, I’ve mistaken my own fear for his questionable motives.  This is testament to my determination to not be vulnerable because he’s, quite possibly, the most genuine person around.  I had to really work at pinning the cause on him and not seeing it in myself.  Getting hung up in the first part of the query—the “What’s his deal” part is just the starting point, part A, of this process.  I’m coming to see that part B is looking at what my deal is.  I was pretty much stuck in that first part for 17.5 years.  I guess, sometimes, it takes a while to be ready for part B.

I am reading through my Yoga Sutra study notes from the classes with my teacher, Chase Bossart.  I’m up to 1.17.  And in YS 1.17, there’s this wonderful description of the process of coming to know ourself, our True Self.  It starts with a gross understanding of who we are, vitarka, and it moves toward the subtle stuff, vicara.  Ain’t that the truth? You’ve got to start somewhere and you can’t skip ahead.  So you begin looking at the big/obvious and then once you get that, you can see the not-so-obvious.  This makes sense.  Then this sutra goes on to say that this process of moving from gross to subtle brings us endless joy, ananda.   Right?  Right!  There is this wonderful feedback loop that keeps us coming back for more subtle understanding because there is joy in it.  It is deeply satisfying and joyful to feel more connected to our Self.   When we participate in this process, eventually it becomes our second nature, asmita-rupa.  It gets easier to work with this process.  That’s just built into how we work as humans.  We develop patterns and sometimes, they are actually helpful to us.  The patterns can help us on our path to more subtle self-understanding.  The 1.17 grand finale says that by following this movement of vitarka to vicara to ananda to asmita, eventually we gain complete and perfect understanding of who we are.  It actually says that.  We can come to know ourselves that well.  Samprajnatah.  Amazing.

This five mintues in the car was my little/big taste of what this sutra is all about.  It is what yoga is about.  Getting to know what’s going on with me is so useful in moving toward who I want to be and toward the kind of relationship that I want to be a part of.  And, as Patanjali says,  it feels really good to be in the process.  It is joyful.  I’m going to have to trust that the complete understanding does actually happen for some people because that feels really far away.  I’ll bet it does.  Mr. P hasn’t been wrong yet.

 

oh, and Happy Valentine’s Day to you all if you are into that.

The Dharma of Being Alone

Not having a husband anymore leaves me feeling alone, a lot. For the time being, I’m not dating anyone and I am living life without a partner, so someone might say, “She’s on her own,” or “Yeah, she’s single” and we all know what that means.  As if any of us is really on our own or living singly, especially if, like me, you have two children, a co-parent, friends that you call and talk to all the time and parents that live next door. If you are a teacher, you have students, and if you are a student, you have teachers.  Maybe you have a therapist.  We all have farmers growing our food, store clerks that help us at the stores, factory owners, workers and distributors that get you those cookies that you luuuv…the web of connections is intricate and extensive and wonderful, but still, we all know what “single” means.  Single means that you are still missing that perfect puzzle piece of a person who will fill your hole and complete you.

Ha ha! Just kidding. I couldn’t resist.  Single is really what we all are.  We need to be able to know our self-separate from our spouse, kids or extended family because it is from this place that we really come to know our personal dharma, or our roles and responsibilities to family, our community and ourselves.  The continued practice of svadyaya or self-study helps you to know your personal dharma. It isn’t impossible to uncover it while married, but I’ll tell you being single has given me a lot more time to contemplate things like my dharma and…well, being single.  Sometimes I miss having a little, traditional nuclear family so much that it hurts.  I miss being able to be in that place where four people are forging a life with the common goal of loving each other, helping each other to grow and doing it together.  And there’s something else that I miss about it…I miss being able to ignore myself. When in nuclear family mode, my personal issues could disguise themselves as group issues, husband issues or general relationship issues. “The kids were a mess today!  That explains why I’m a mess.” I could ignore the little voice that told me that I wasn’t really following my dharma (which is known to have symptoms of malaise, disenchantment, and a lack of joie de vivre) because I was too busy listening to my nuclear family voice that said, “Kids are fed and happy.  We’re just fine.  Let’s sit on the couch together with wine and a movie and put off that troublesome self-reflection.”

Now, I’m single/alone/whatever you want to call it and I have a lot more time to hang out with myself.  This is really nice when I want to read, write or do yoga. I even take myself on dates to the movies. “Do you want some popcorn, Amanda?”  “You know I do, girl.”  But when I’m not doing something enjoyable and instead, I’m grappling with something in my life that isn’t working so well, then it’s a little less nice.  In the past, when there was a family group, the reasons that things weren’t working were mostly my husband’s fault.  But now, he’s not around to blame and to my surprise, I’m finding that there are some things that are totally my deal.  There are things that I do or think or say that cause me heartache and those things are all mine.  I’ve had some dark “alone” moments (picture mascara running down blotchy, tear streaked face) but I see some light in there somewhere, too.  This aloneness has given me time to get to know myself a little better and to better understand my personal dharma.  For example, I now understand that my personal dharma is different from the fake dharma that other people thought I should have and I believed for a while, or the bogus dharma that I thought other people thought I should have.   I’ve learned that it’s important to listen when something is a little off inside and the bogus dharma symptoms appear because those are clues that things might need some reevaluation.

I think we women-moms often find ourselves saddled with a fake dharma and we too easily shrugg off the bogus-dharma-symptoms.  We want to do a good job as women-moms but no one is born with complete know-how.   We saw our moms try their best to be good at that job and our subconscious took notes.  We see friends giving it their best shot and maybe not so subconsciously, we model our behavior after those great gals.  Motherhood can be so overwhelming and it isn’t necessary or possible to figure it all out on our own, but when we just take on someone else’s version of what motherhood means without checking in to see if it is what we think it means, we can get confused about what our personal dharma really is.  We can play a part or be the grease that keeps the family unit running smoothly and it might look good and sometimes it feels good, but when our heart and soul isn’t aligned with the role we play, if it isn’t connected to who we are, singly and individually, then it doesn’t satisfy. This applies to motherhood and to all those other responsibilities we accept and fulfill.  When we do what we are here to do, it feels right and good.  We can feel it and other people can see it in us. Personal dharma is very individual. Gary Kraftsow* says, It is through the fulfillment of our personal dharma that we connect to our ultimate dharma—the one that has to do with reaching our highest potential as human beings.  It is fulfilling our dharma that gets us closer to ananda, an ultimate joy and bliss of connecting to the divine source within.  When we fulfill our personal dharma, we are better able to fulfill our ultimate dharma, the same ultimate dharma that all of us on the planet share.

This fantasy that being a part of a nuclear family will help me feel less alone is beautiful, but it isn’t the answer.  The ache has much more to do with just being a person and feeling who I am in this world, and knowing that, even in the beautiful and extensive web of connections, I have a personal, single, individual dharma to fulfill and that is to be done by me, alone.  I have to figure out who I am without explaining my aches by whom I do or don’t have along, because even though we were never meant to live in isolation from others, we still have the individual roles that we each carry out.  It is through the fulfillment of our personal dharma that we connect with this ultimate, universal and beautiful human-birthright of goodness or ananda. It is in knowing alone-ness, knowing that everyone has their individual role to fulfill that we connect to so many others out there who are working at the same thing.  We are all in this alone-thing together.

*This comes from Gary Kraftsow’s book, Yoga for Transformation: Ancient Teachings and Practices for Healing the Body, Mind and Heart.  Penguin; 2002. It hasn’t made it onto my book list yet, but only because I haven’t gotten to the end.  It probably will.