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<iframe title=”YouTube video player” width=”640″ height=”390″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/y86RuvgsV5w” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>One of the most difficult things for me to sustain in a consistent manner is a personal practice. You may (or not) be surprised to hear that it’s hard to get me to sit still. I’m the kind of monkey who is distracted my shiny things.
The second I finally get myself onto my mat, I see how dusty the spot is beneath my altar – until the next thing I know, I’ve moved all of my furniture to sweep my room. Then, while I’m at it, I might as well clean the bathroom, too. Once the bathroom’s clean, I may as well take a shower in the nice, clean shower. And once I’m clean, I’m sure not interested ingetting sweaty by practicing.
Good excuses, eh?
But when I do finally find myself on my mat, participating more fully with my breath and witnessing my thoughts as I improv the movements of my body, I find that I more often than not end up making myself laugh at my seriousness.
I mean, seriously – who practices trying to wrap their leg behind their head at home by themselves and never once cracks a smile?
Who wakes up in the morning and tries to touch their toes and never once smirks at how fantastic it is to have the availability of a million different ways to move the body and still let the breath play through the lungs?
Get out there and use your body. Might as well.
“PAAAAAAAAHHHHH-TERRRRRRRRR!”
I rolled over in bed and buried my head under a pile of pillows, unsure of my whereabouts. The stomping that followed signaled the quick-approaching footsteps of my roommate/best-friend/heterosexual-life-partner Lara making her way from her back-of-the-house bedroom, across the kitchen and straight toward my room.
She cracked open my bedroom door. “Potterrrrr?” she whispered.
“Ah-yeah?” I gurgled, mostly not awake.
“Potter, the birds are pecking on my head.” This got my attention enough to prop myself almost-upright in my bed, nearly concerned that she was bringing a halo of wild birds into my room.
“Sorry?” I said, not so much apology as an inquiry.
“The birds are pecking on my head in my room! Potter, you don’t hear the woodpeckers?”
Just like that, we had new houseguests. I refer to them as the Knocking-birds.
Our landlady came over multiple times through the next few weeks, bringing all kinds of anti-Knocking-bird regalia. My sister sat with the electric air mattress pump, blowing up giant beach balls with big bullseyes all the way around. Once they were inflated, we tied iridescent streamers to the bottoms of each of them and went outside with the landlady to hang one up on each corner of the house. Over time, the collection of kitsch hanging from the roof came to include color-changing light-spheres, shiny garlands, blinking Christmas lights and even a motion-sensored owl that turns its head to give the evil eye to anything that crosses its path.
And still, every morning I would hear the cadence of Lara’s feet stamping across the kitchen floor and across to the back porch door to go outside and shout at the Knocking-birds.
At the front desk of the Boulder studio one day, I was laughing and telling a fellow teacher about how Lara had begun to throw leftover Christmas mints at the house to try to scare the Knocking-birds away. A customer with her daughter overheard and said, “Good luck with those woodpeckers.”
She walked up to the desk to purchase a new mat for her daughter (a Manduka, in case you were wondering). “We had a family of woodpeckers at our old house.” Apparently, when Knocking-birds find their nesting place, they will come back year after year. “Animal services took the birds and tried to relocate them far, far away and the next spring… tap tap tap. There they were again.”
Uh-oh, I thought. That’s not good.
Some people know exactly where their heart belongs – and it’s the place that they revisit time and time again.
For others, they’d rather be able to distance themselves from the cyclical visitors in life – bad relationships, old habits, health problems – and have them not come back year after year.
It’s an interesting cycle. You can pack up your problems and try to ship them to the other side of the world. You can hope and pray that they will find a new place to nest and new skies to fly through that are far, far away from the freedom of your own.
You never know when it will come back around. You can’t simply come up with a way to kill a Knocking-bird (it’s illegal; I checked). But where would the Yoga be in that anyway?
We are yogis – we find the balance in situations like this. Find ways to live with it but also ways to fortify the container of our life so that maybe we can become strong enough to finally keep those pests from taking up their residency in our hearts.
Until our house is Knocking-bird-proofed with new siding or stucco or something, our amazing landlady gave Lara the greatest consolation prize.
I received a very loud and excited voicemail from Lara while I was teaching class one evening.
“Paaaaahhhh-terrrrr!!!!!” she sang. “Ohmigosh, POTTER! I came home! And there was a box on the couch! And a note! Ohmigosh, POTTERRRRRR!!! Hurry home and see!”
I obviously had no idea what the heck was going on, but the second I walked in the front door it all became very apparent very quickly.
Lara stood in the kitchen with a giant SuperSoaker perched on her shoulder. She aimed, pumped and shot me right in the chest with a big surge of cold water.
It’s still pretty dangerous at our house, whether or not you are a Knocking-bird – there’s always a chance that something unexpected will hit you.
When I drive home from the Denver studio, I take the same path. Every time. Every day.
Next-to-furthest-left lane until I take the first necessary right turn… third lane over which turns into a turn-lane-only that takes me directly to where I need to go.
Every time, I dodge, swerve, barely miss and sometimes hit the same dozen potholes.
I always curse and hold my breath, wishing away the rough BUMP. I should have seen those coming, I think to myself. I know those are going to be there.
Each drive home, I maneuver – sometimes with less grace than other times. Keeping an eye out for impending opportunities for flat-tire-disasters.
It finally hit me last week.
There are a zillion different ways to get home. And of the streets that I DO take home, it’s only the specific lane that I’m in that have all the stinkin’ potholes.
protect your wheels. (Ha!!)
Sure, I could keep going the exact same path because it’s familiar, it’s habit, it’s comfortable and requires less inclination to adventure outside of my comfort zone – or I could change it up.
Maybe it’s me who is driving myself into these rough spots. Maybe it’s time to try a different path. Maybe I don’t have to face the same demons over and over again by subjecting myself to cross paths with them.
Inevitably, there will be a pothole or two your journey. But if you could literally choose whether to take the disastrously bumpy road that you’ve been down a million times or the road that has been freshly paved and still serves your ultimate journey… doesn’t it seem obvious that you are the one who can make a change here?
It was Ash Wednesday in Dublin, Ireland where I was attending school for a semester in college and two of my Catholic friends had invited me to Mass. I’ve always been mystified by Catholic practices and was secretly jealous of all the folks who had already had ash smudged on their foreheads that morning, so I decided to go as a means to seek out adventure (it was a slow day). After all, I was attending a Catholic College (in Ireland… big surprise, I know…)
I filed into the red velvet covered pew between my two friends, Ania from Poland and Cecile, a fellow Coloradoan. I stood up when they did, sat down when they did, knelt and tried to mimic every hand gesture and obediently murmur every reply the congregation did. I’d be damned if I was going to let anyone in that church know I didn’t know what the heck what going on. And all in all, I thought I was doing a great job.
When time came for communion, I was swept away by the river of participants, stiffly filed after Ania and before Cecile. The nun blessed me as she dipped her finger in ash and schmeared a cross in the center of my forehead. I kept firm eye contact the whole time, determined to not give away my cluelessness. I crossed to the old Father, who gave me the body of Christ himself.
“Bless you, my child,” he croaked to me.
“Thank you,” I replied, as if I had sneezed.
I wrapped my fingers around the little wafer and began to make the crowded walk back to my seat. Cecile rushed down the aisle after me and grabbed my arm.
“Have you taken your First Sacrament?” she whisper-hissed. My oblivious blank stare was enough of an answer. “Oh my god. You should not have even gone up there.”
I opened my mouth, desperately searching for a response and realizing I was totally in trouble. “Do not put that in your mouth, Elle. Do NOT.”
I could feel all the blood drain from my face. I sat through the rest of the sermon with my fingers delicately wrapped around the holy cracker, trying to softly balance it in a way that wouldn’t make it obvious that I was still harboring the body of sweet Jesus. I prayed to stop sweating, doing everything I could to try and keep the piece of peace from getting all soggy in my palm.
When the service finished with its ultimate Amen, I rushed out of the chapel as quickly as I could for fear of Cecile’s scolding. What was I supposed to do? I in no way had meant any disrespect to the ancient tradition – I had found the sacred ritual fascinating and really wanted to participate.
I could imagine walking back up to the priest; “Excuse me, Father. Um, hi. Hey, look, thank you so much for sharing the body of God’s only son with me but I can’t really accept this. See, I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to take it… long story short, it’s really soggy and I wouldn’t recommend putting it back in the dish for the next mass, but I just wanted you to know I was completely clueless and shouldn’t have taken this. Oh hey, so do you need to wipe off the ash on my forehead now, too? Can we use holy water for that, or should I just go wash my face at home…?”
So I did what any good, God-fearing woman would do – avoided eye contact with everyone I passed on my way back to the dorm and locked myself in my bedroom, waiting to see if I would be smote down.
Until I remembered that I don’t fear God. I sat at my desk and placed the divine loaf in front of me. What was I supposed to do with this now? I certainly wasn’t going to eat it even in the privacy of my own room because now I feared showing some level of disrespect. And throwing it in the trash was absolutely out of the question – Maria, the surely Catholic housekeeper would surely recognize it when she came to clear the rubbish in the morning. It’d be the friggen Spanish inquisition.
I looked down at Jesus sitting on my desk. He looked up with me, curious to see my next move. Who could I call on in this, my time of need?
Then I remembered that my cousin had been on a wide-ranged spiritual search in her life. She was reading a number of religious texts, studying a number of spiritual practices… sure she’d know what to do about this whole ordeal.
So I packed Jesus up in the day before’s Irish Post and shipped him Par Avon across the Atlantic to Kansas City for my cousin to deal with.
Ultimately, life is not about the specific religious practices you subscribe to – but rather about those who support you completely in the search for your own heart… and the way you do the same for those you love.
Below is an excerpt from my first post on elephantjournal.com! They posed the question, “What does the Divine mean to you?” …and never one to just NOT answer a question… I did…
“Religion is for people afraid of going to hell. Spirituality is for people who have been there.” -A bumper sticker, as tweeted by a friend of a friend.
In a place like Boulder, there is undoubtedly no shortage of opportunities to experience the most way-out-there of spiritual practices with a bunch of tie-dyed nut-jobs.
Was that too harsh?
…follow here to read the rest of my post on Elephantjournal.com!
One of my students is a sweet man whose early onset Parkinson’s symptoms are increasing. Instead of waiting quietly for the symptoms to take over his life, he has taken a very inspiring approach of radical participation in his own life. He remains very active as a means of keeping his mind connected to the space of his own skin. He practices yoga, plays squash and is always mentioning in passing a number of other activities he completed since the last time I’ve seen him in class.
The other night he said that after his most recent visit to the neurologist, he has been practicing smiling.
“Most of the time, I don’t realize that I’m not smiling,” he said to me, then paused to think. He looked up at me and flashed me a beautiful, full-on smile.
It looked good on him, that whole-hearted smile. It was completely contagious, too.
That smile has got me thinking – how hard is it to smile a lot of the time? I like to play a game of “smile at passers-by” while walking down the sidewalk. And it’s quite possibly one of the most difficult things for me to do. Sharing a smile with a stranger is very intimate and uncomfortable, especially if you are not necessarily feeling particularly jolly that day.
Smiling in front of a camera is nearly impossible for millions of folks. Last Friday at öm time Denver, Peggy Dyer of One Million Faces photographed 139 different faces that came through the studio. Peggy has a way of putting even unwilling participants completely at ease on the other side of the camera lense – but even with so many faces, there were so many more who flat-out refused to have their picture taken. Some people were even a little snippy when I tried to charm them into participating. There was absolutely no way they would get in front of a camera and share their smile with the world.
Smile. Do it – right now. What does it feel like to smile at your computer? Anyone who watches me reply to emails knows that I smile silently to the person I am emailing. It is my way of making sure my response is genuine.
Why is smiling so hard? What are you afraid you’ll say with your smile that you wouldn’t want a stranger to know? Feel joy on the outside by connecting from the inside and make yourself vulnerable enough to give others permission to smile back.
The greatest feeling in the world is when I pass someone on the street and they smile so genuinely at me that it catches me off guard – and I blush and giggle the whole rest of my walk.
One summer, my cousin and I decided to have a contest to see who could find the most four-leaf clovers in our grandmother’s yard. There seemed to be an overabundance of lucky finds, particularly on the south side of her house, and even five- and six-leaf variations were not uncommon.
I was probably about eleven years old, making my cousin somewhere around seven at the time, but digging deep for signs of luck was no foreign concept to us. We each had the little patches of clover that we declared OURS, dragging the garden hose across the yard to water our crops. Gramma’s kitchen counters became holding grounds of dozens upon dozens of freshly picked four-leaf clovers every day, each needing to be expertly pressed between sheets of waxed paper, set under the toaster, the sugar canister, the cookie jar and endless cookbooks. It was imperative that each wax paper pressing kit was labeled with the date and the finder’s name on a bit of masking tape to ensure there were no discrepancies.
I wish I had a way to prove to you how many we found that summer, because you’d never believe me (and yet, maybe they do all still exist in some forgotten cabinet at Gramma’s house….) but between my cousin and I both, we found over 1200 four-leaf, five-leaf, and six-leaf clovers in a matter of months. And being one to take hard-work to heart, my cousin was the winner – only beating me a couple dozen more.
A few summers later, I lazily picked up a four-leaf clover I saw in the corner of my eye while walking up the sidewalk to Gramma’s house. I put it in a tiny bottle, filled it with water, and sealed the top of it shut. It’s been one of my favorite trinkets for over a decade now. There have been times I’ve dabbed a little bit of the water on my wrists and neck, like a perfume for success, praying that the luck o’ the clover may be with me. But because of the exorbitant amount of lucky finds I found in the damp grass as a child, I don’t really believe there’s anything particularly other-worldly about a four-leaf clover.
It’s probably for the better, seeing as how the four-leaf clover has long since dissolved into the water of the little bottle. But I know it’s still in there. I know that my luck hasn’t changed just because I don’t have tangible proof of it anymore. Most importantly, I know that the things you find most brilliant in life, most fascinating and most unexpected are always there if you take the time to look. I believed they existed – and thus I saw the good. And I still do.
Today is my cousin’s birthday. Maybe the only reason we even found as many clovers as we did was because he was born on St. Patrick’s Day. I know he’s a grown-up now and everything, but I hope he never forgets how he spent that summer making his own luck good.
Happy Birthday Joshie.
I opened up my computer to start playing music before my class Sunday morning (the 8:30am in Boulder – aka, “church”). Usually, Inigo (my iBook) boots right up. This time, he screamed like a two-year-old throwing a tantrum.
It was haunting, like when you hear peacocks crying or ostriches in mating season (I had some strange neighbors out in the country growing up). The kind of sound you’re not sure is indicative of impending doom or just your imagination running rampant. But one thing was for sure – my computer was definitively NOT working.
So I did what any normal person would do; kept trying to turn it on again and again, holding my breath and hoping that the wailing would stop.
“Well, when was the last time you backed-up all your files?” Shannon asked me.
“Erm… when did I get this? May? Hm…” I paused. “Yeah, I haven’t ever backed anything up.” I began taking a mental inventory of everything: all the documents, all the programs, all the pictures and all the music that I may lose. Surprisingly, I found myself not too terribly worried. There was nothing I couldn’t live without, when it came down to it. But I was still crossing my fingers. Life would be so much easier if I didn’t have to start from scratch…
I received my computer back this afternoon with good news – all of my documents were still in tact!! I counted my blessings, my files, and my iTunes music library, thankful to have it all.
Until I realized there was an entire file of half-written blogs I could have potentially lost. Barely started ideas, abandoned for lack of inspiration, lack of interest, or lack of time. Those were all stories I may never even remember I started to share if they had ended up being wiped off of the hard drive. To lose all those before I even had an opportunity to complete would have been frustrating, disheartening and discouraging. I would have blamed myself for never having taken the time to sit down and finish a thought.
Why not take advantage of the time you have? With your thoughts, your words, your body, your art… In a yoga class, you can move through haphazardly, spending not enough time experiencing the sensations underneath your own skin. But what happens when one day you wake up and you’re injured? You’re sick? Or you’re 95 years old? Don’t take what you have for granted – experience it fully or else one day, you may regret having never fully appreciated what you had.
That’s not to say you should push yourself through a yoga practice, forcing yourself into poses for the sake of experiencing them. You honor your body, and on the days when you are tired and can’t make it full throttle through an entire yoga class, it’s like backing up your files – you make a conscious decision to save your energy, protect all your hard work, and promise to step back into it when you’re ready.
Sometimes the best of ideas have to be set aside for the sake of career, family and other such responsibilities. But don’t miss out on your creativity because you don’t think it’s worth it to spend a little time humoring your muse. Tell someone you care about exactly how much you love them BEFORE you miss out on the opportunity. Take a deep breath to smell the blooming tree blossoms before it’s suddenly winter again.
Don’t miss out.
Lucky for you, I never run short of stories to tell.
“I’ve been thinking about trying this whole ‘yoga’ thing,” confided an 18-year-old guy who stopped by the studio one summer afternoon.
I smiled and clapped my hands together in excitement. “Oh, you should! It’s great, I think you’ll enjoy it.”
He grinned at my enthusiasm. “You do this stuff then?” I nodded. “Well, what has it done for you?”
The question stopped me dead in my tracks. It was the delicate adjustment of his words – rather than asking me what, in general, yoga accomplishes on average, he wanted to know specifically about MY experience.
“Well… wow, I haven’t actually been asked that. Hm…” I began to go through my brief list of medical history in my own head, and began to notice that most of the things I didn’t identify with anymore.
I realized I had not had an anxiety attack since I had begun practicing – and not because of a lack of things that could stress me out. My chronic headaches were much less than chronic. As a matter of fact, at that very moment, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been bed-ridden with a migraine. My over-dramatically low blood pressure had not been an issue when I went to the doctor a few weeks before. My feet were no longer swollen from plantar fasciitis when I woke up in the mornings. Through being more mindful of my body’s needs, I was eating healthier and I suppose I had lost about thirty pounds in the first six months…
I was smiling more.
I was happy in my career.
I was hopeful.
I felt good about myself – from the inside out.
As I rambled through my spur-of-the-moment realizations to this kid, I was more and more impressed with all of the changes in my life that I had not even noticed. It made me realize that the process of yoga is never-ending. There is always more in your life that is shifting than what is seen, even when you ARE seeing changes.
He came back and took a few classes, and then I did not see much of him once summer was over. But I wonder, when he relays his experience of yoga to friends and family; what will he say yoga did for him?
Whenever I hear the sirens of an ambulance or firetruck, I always feel the urge to cross myself. Catholic-style.
I’m not Catholic. Trust me.
It goes back to when I lived in Dublin, Ireland. I spent a semester at school there, working a crappy job at Hard Rock Café to make a little extra pub-money. Each day, I took one of those double-decker buses into the heart of downtown always going immediately upstairs in hopes of finding a spot right by the front window. It made the trip seem like I was taking a spaceship, hovering just over the bumper-to-bumper traffic and making it possible to take in all the sights.
From time to time, the bus would have to scoot and wiggle its way as far toward the curb as possible on the narrow city streets to make room for a wailing ambulance to hustle on past. When this would happen, nearly every Irishman and woman on the bus would spontaneously cross themselves.
I took a road trip some time later with a friend of mine across the green quilt of somewhere-in-Ireland. While driving down a rainy road through a small town, a firetruck raced past, narrowly missing my friend’s car. He crossed himself before putting the car back in drive and continuing on.
“Why does everyone do that?” I asked, although the answer seemed obvious.
He looked at me, puzzled. “Do what, so?”
“Cross themselves when an emergency vehicle goes past?” I looked over my shoulder to see if the large truck had made it all the way down the narrow, stone-walled streets.
“Ah. Well, someone’s in trouble, right? Just a bit of a way to share a prayer of safe returns and may God take them, I suppose.”
Ever since then, I hear the sirens and I feel compelled to make the Sign of the Cross. Because it’s not a habit for me, I can never do it without thinking of the pneumonic someone shared with me once – “Spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch…” and by then, the firetruck is on its way and I’m still fumbling to show a sign of respect, love and prayer.
I have yet to find any other way to send a prayer that I feel is truly working. But we all have ways of sending our love to exactly where it needs to go – whether it needs to go halfway around the world to a loved one on deployment, to your little ones on their first day all by themselves at school, or out to an entire nation of people in crisis that you’ve never even met. The simple nod of acknowledgement and honest sense of love is the most potent prayer ever uttered.
When I hear the sirens, I feel that it is not just me that is sending a prayer out to whoever needs it most – I feel that it is the practice of everyone I encountered on the buses in Ireland. If that is the case, then it is every single person in each of their lives that they’ve learned it from… and everyone they learned it from… until suddenly, my awkward fumble of symbolic prayer is charged with the collaborative prayer of more than just my humble self.
Next time you hear the sirens, try it. Send an anonymous prayer out and offer it up to whoever is in need of it. Notice how it makes you feel. And know that when you’re praying, I’m praying with you – and beyond that, so is the rest of the world.
Posted February 24th, 2010. Add a comment
