Yoga can help you weather life’s changes with steadiness and calm

Adorable Small Texas frog (My mom thinks it’s a toad…)

Austin, Texas is quite possibly the nicest place on the planet this week. The temperature is perfect. The mosquitoes haven’t yet hatched and there are lots of beautiful wildflowers and tiny creatures around the yard. When the weather is like this, I’m so ridiculously happy. I sit on the porch to eat and read and drink tea so I can soak it in. When the weather is nice, my kids are funnier, I have a heart full of gratitude for my husband for just existing on this planet and I appreciate my parents to the point of tears. I am way more friendly with strangers when the weather is nice. Just today, I hung out at the check out counter and had a great 10-min conversation with the pharmacist after paying my bill. Wow, is she a nice lady.

This is in contrast to how I feel when it is rainy, dark and cold.   In the winter, I don’t take off my scarf and 1970’s green ski-jacket for months. I’m noticeably less happy and I don’t chat with people in the check-out line nearly as much. I get cold easily and when I’m cold, I’m more easily annoyed with  my children or with my husband. I tend to feel bad about myself. I lived in Seattle for 10 years and I’d get so depressed in the grey, cold of winter that I think I lost months of my life to SAAD-ness. Months of my life just passed me by…I’m not even kidding.

It’s been like this for years. My mood shifts with the turns of weather and so does my energy, friendliness and level of happiness. It’s pretty exhausting to have my feelings so entwined with something as unpredictable and as out of my control as the weather. Fortunately, with the last few years of regular yoga practice, this is changing. I’m less dependant on good weather for good times because a daily yoga practice gives me time to connect to things that are more rooted and stable.  Every day, there’s a little time set aside to connect to a sense inside of myself that is unaffected by the weather and other fleeting, ever-changing things. Even so, with this week’s exceptional sunshine-y experience this came up again. My sunshine-drunk self sincerely wished it could stay nice forever because, at a deeper level I thought, if the weather stays nice, then I might be able to stay nice, too.

Mine is a classic experience of rāga– a misperception that something outside of me can make me happy. Rāga is one of the five kleśas, or roots of suffering, listed in Patañjali’s Sutra II.3.* Just because I’d like the weather to be lovely for more than 3-weeks per year doesn’t mean it will be. The weather changes, and it is natural for my moods to change, too. The overall outlook of nice, positive feelings is possible to cultivate but it needs to come from something that is more stable than the Austin climes. It comes from within.  Queue the steady and appropriate daily yoga practice.

Fundamentally, yoga isn’t about tricky poses that you bust out on a sticky mat, though that can certainly be part of the process. Yoga is about the mind and regularly and intentionally connecting that mind to something stable, good and unchanging inside of, rather than outside of, yourself. It’s a practice that helps bring us to a place that is more steady, still, and focused so we come to know the difference between the stuff that changes and that which doesn’t. When we experience a calm mind on a daily basis, we have a better chance at being aware of avidyā, the ways we misperceive. Once we have the awareness, we can start to do something about it. As we do something about it, life gets better. The changing weather, or whatever change we struggle to accept, doesn’t sway our deeper sense of satisfaction and peace in quite the same way. I haven’t found a better or more effective way to support this kind of change than a daily, personal breath-centered yoga practice with meditation. It’s what I practice and what I teach. I believe in it, 100% and my life is better for it.  Yours can be, too.

 

How beautiful is this flower? To the max.

 

*Patañjali’s Yoga Sutra II.3

Avidyā asmitā rāga dveṣa abhiniveśāḥ klēśāh

 

Avidyā is the umbrella category for the misperception that we humans experience. When we don’t see something for what it really is, the lack of clarity causes suffering. How? We make different decisions when we perceive incorrectly and decisions based on misperception don’t take us in the right direction. We all do it. And there are ways that we start to see more clearly. (Hint: it involves yoga)

Asmitā– we misidentify and think that an experience that is temporary is who we really are.   “I am sad.” “I’m so perky.” “I am angry.” No, you are not an angry person or any of these other things. They aren’t who you are or permanent qualities, they are feelings. Feelings are temporary and changing. You, at your essence, are not.

Rāga – something outside of me has made me happy in the past so I spend energy and time to try and repeat that experience. (good weather)

Dveśa – something outside of me has made me unhappy in the past so I spend energy and time to avoid that thing (cold and grey weather)

Abhiniveṣā – fear. No matter how refined and progressed we are, this one gets us all. According to Sutra 4.10 fear stems from a fear of death. Biologically, we are wired to stay alive. Fear is programmed in. We all get stuck with this one.

Pollination in action! Little buzzing bees on a Texas wildflower

Ruby red chard in the garden

Texas wildflowers in May

Why do we think we have to be happy all the time?

“There was that day when you lost your charm”

–From the song “Arms” by Seabear

This morning, I woke up cranky.  I felt off and uninteresting. I wasn’t digesting well and I had the painful realization that I’m neglecting important things far too often and I spend way too much money and now it is probably too late to ever recover. This all came on the tail of some unfortunate incidents: My car broke down last week and I had an expensive repair.  My plumbing leaked under the cement foundation and the plumbers tore up my floor and then mixed cement in my house. Ugh. So messy.  My little one started kindergarten and my friend left town for graduate school, and my “no coffee resolve” dissolved.  There were the circumstances that left me feeling blegh and there were the feelings, but it gets worse because right after registering this initial funk, another layer of sludge came over me. I was angry with myself for feeling off.  My unconscious and I have an unspoken belief that I should always feel special and happy, no whining and no exceptions.

If you ask me if I believe that I should always feel happy, there’s no way I’d admit to it.  At an intellectual level and after many years of yoga and therapy, I know that there is a healthy range of emotions that we all feel.  They can be useful and informative and we can learn to look at them from the eyes of a neutral observer in order to discover things about ourselves. Svadyaya or self-reflection can help us understand these patterns and problems.  We can recognize that we are not our feelings, that instead, we are something unchanging and divine and when we practice listening to that voice, the unchanging voice of our true self,  we experience a lot less suffering.  We have a clarity and perhaps more peace about all the things that do change because we know there’s something that doesn’t.  It sounds like I’ve got it, right? When I’m balanced and happy, I’m really good at keeping these things in mind.  I’m very comforted by this perspective.  But then a few crummy things come my way and I forget.  It’s like the me of 10 years ago takes over and I forget all about being kind to myself and things that are temporary and tuning into my feelings. Any deep understanding that might come from self-reflection is missed because I’m too caught up with the disappointment of not feeling happy.

Yoga has a way of describing this experience. The five Klesas describe ways that we misperceive and the problems that arise.  When some part of us mistakenly operates as if these changing things that come up (car, crankiness, digestion) are permanent or are who we are, this causes suffering for us.  The yoga sutras say that if we act based on a misperception, it doesn’t turn out well.  It always leaves a stain.  Avidya is the mother of all misperceptions.  It is based on what we see and believe to be true, which feels really true, but maybe we miss something or confuse what we see and we haven’t actually gotten it right.  Believing I always need to feel happy is definitely avidya.  Feeling all the things that come up, not stuffing them down or refusing to look at them, gives me a much greater chance at contentment and balance which might lead to happiness… but when avidya is in effect, I have this misperception that I should be able to maintain constant happiness.  When I’m not happy, this makes me more unhappy.

The other four Klesas are all based on avidya.  Asmita is a tendency to confuse our identity.  We mix up who we are with things that aren’t really who we are.  Asmita says “I am a cranky person,” but this could more accurately be expressed as, “I feel cranky today”. Raga is the belief that something outside of me can make me happy. If only Summer could last a few more weeks and I could hang out with the girls, then I’d be happy. Dvesa is the belief that something outside of me can make me unhappy: Car and plumbing issues.  Abhinivesa is fear or even fear of death: I might never feel happy again.

It’s crazy that I should believe (again, not at an intellectual level but more at a gut/cellular level) that I should be happy all of the time. I’m really glad I recognized it, because when I was able to notice I had this “you WILL be happy” thing going on, I could chill out a little bit.   I was able to take a look at what was going on and why I was feeling off  and I was able to allow myself a little time to acknowledge my week of emotions.  I miss my children and I’m worried that I wasted the time when they were home with me.  Car and plumbing problems suck. etc. As this happened gradually and throughout the day, my mood shifted and I could see the genuine happiness that was in me already.