What if I can learn what the lion has to teach us?

At a yoga class I missed recently my teacher read this poem, and two different people told me about it, saying they thought of me.

Sweet Darkness

When your eyes are tired

the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone

no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark

where the night has eyes

to recognize its own.

There you can be sure

you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb tonight.

The night will give you a horizon

further than you can see.

You must learn one thing:

the world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds

except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet

confinement of your aloneness to learn

anything or anyone

that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

--David Whyte

They know me well, the two who thought of me. These are the kind of words that are hard to read if your heart feels empty and your mind is dark. I was getting pretty sure I was beyond love, and if you haven't been there, living and breathing and everything in between is painful.

I haven't written much about yoga here yet but be sure it is a big part of my life. I try to do it three to five times a week, and on the days I get to go I just can't wait to get there. This morning I realized that my experience of it has changed recently. Up to now the experience has been physical, and often (in the last three years) emotional. These are my natural first reactions to anything, I think, physical and emotional--that's what you get from 5 water signs and a moon in cancer, apparently. I'm attached to how my body feels while I practice, if I can get to a place of mastery of any part of it, and how I feel after I am done. If emotions came, grief or bewilderment, contentment or joy would sweep through me without leaving a clue as to why. I could sense no end, or even release in these emotions, but at lease the yoga mat was a contained, safe place in which to have them. If I didn't have to pack up at the end of class and be back in the day's routine who knows what would happen.

The yoga teacher I found two years ago is gifted in her ability to bring your mind into the practice. Last summer she finished up a day long yoga retreat with a sitting meditation on the Open Sky of Mind from Jack Kornfield, and it was the first time I glimpsed with all my senses that a world in which I belonged was inside and outside of me (Thank you, thank you, and thank you Jen.) I'm sure I will be talking about her and what I'm learning from her more in this space.

With starting a meditation practice in addition to a mental aspect to the yoga it is like phosphorescence on top of moonlight--slowly I've begun to feel my mind expanding to hold my whole self and the darkness and the aloneness. It's not perfect all the time, certainly. But it means my days are more full of those moments when I see that in a given situation there is a way to become all outcomes, to move within it to a positive choice. So different from feeling pushed, driven, corralled into acting or reacting in defense.

It means turning towards things that I would have dreaded: the darkness. It means welcoming things I would have avoided: responsibility. It means loving things I would have felt alienated from: singing or dancing or communicating with others. So many levels are affected by these changes!

As if I needed another example, my daughter gave me another reason why she is easy to love. She naturally, effortlessly moves through her days setting herself up for positive outcomes. She lost a tooth yesterday at school. This morning she came downstairs smiling and she said "mommy, do you want to come and watch me look under my pillow?" The answer, of course, is yes, complicated by the fact that I forgot to be the fairy last night and I am pretty near 99% certain Steve did too. So I say: "Yes! Go ask pop if he wants to come too." Exit Dora. Run upstairs with two quarters, grope under pillow, where is that tooth ag! she's got three pillows and a pile of covers . . . ah, get tooth, leave money, come downstairs . . . Dora coming out of back room saying Pop's not quite ready because he's shaving, "Theo's not awake yet," I say as a reason for having been upstairs. The three of us go up, and . . . smiling gap toothed sweet girl has two new quarters for her flower bank.

That whole experience is literally money in the flower bank of life. Same thing that Jill Taylor is doing with her fascination and openness to the experience of recovering from her stroke. Same thing Edward Abbey is describing when he writes about meeting a mountain lion, standing still and staring at him, on an Arizona wilderness trail, and realizes even if the mountain lion is ready to meet him, he is not yet ready to meet the lion. Same thing everywhere you look. You can fear or you can love. Incredibly complicated, and incredibly simple.

Yesterday in yoga my teacher said "every exhalation is an opportunity to let something go." With three deep breaths at the end of yoga practice I lift my arms and lower them, and a beautiful, blue bowl opens above my head, without moving I am floating in the center of light without an ominous vibration in sight. Here the emotion is connected to an identifiable center, now I cry and know why.

It takes a membrane

From The Lives of a Cell

Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the earth, catching the breath, is that it is alive. The photographs show the dry, pounded surface of the moon in the foreground, dead as an old bone. Aloft, floating free beneath the moist, gleaming membrane of the bright blue sky, is the rising earth, the only exuberant thing in this part of the cosmos. If you could look long enough, you would see the swirling of the great drifts of white cloud, covering and uncovering the half-hidden masses of land. If you had been looking for a very long, geologic time, you could have seen the continents themselves in motion, drifting apart on their crustal plates, held afloat by the fire beneath. It has the organized, self-contained look of a live creature, full of information, marvelously skilled in handling the sun.

It takes a membrane to make sense out of disorder in biology. You have to be able to catch energy and hold it, storing precisely the needed amount and releasing it in measured shares. A cell does this, and so do the organelles inside. Each assemblage is poised in the flow of solar energy, tapping off energy from the metabolic surrogates of the sun. To stay alive, you have to be able to hold out against equilibrium, maintain imbalance, bank against entropy, and you can only transact this business with membranes in our kind of world.

--Lewis Thomas

My daughter said"I've been feeling kind of weird lately. Not in my tummy," she said, looking at me, anticipating my concern, "but in my mind. I have all these questions in my head . . . what would it be like to not exist, or to not have a friend? I mean, how can my body even hear, or taste?" Wowza. I remember having those thoughts too. If I had to guess I was a little older though, maybe third grade instead of first. "Who IS Martha?" Yes indeedy. The big questions resonate from a young age I think. What to make of them? There you are, in your body, going through each day sleeping, eating, walking and talking, and then one day for the first time your mind expands into a silent endlessness for a moment or two.

What is the world, really? How is it possible to understand what it is from a different place than inside my mind?

One thing I am loving about meditation is feeling eager to return to those questions--like a roomful of friends, all gently jostling elbows and waiting, getting to know each other. I have renewed belief that the questions, the possibility of answers, and the thinking process itself matters.

But I haven't been making time this past week. Feeling a bit tired and like the dark morning comes too soon. Part of me wants to mark the days I meditate on the calendar with a yellow circle but I am resisting, I guess because I want the emphasis to be on whenever and however I make it happen it will make itself felt, and I don't need the left brain recordkeeper to put its stamp of approval on the process.

Anyway if I were marking the calendar the last week and a half would be blank until this morning. I keep thinking that I can get to a place where I've built up some reserve, banked against entropy, where the daily facts of not being able to work through to the end of a thought without being interrupted or where children bickering will not pierce the softness, acceptance, and deep calm I've cultivated for the past month. HA!

I'd like for this process to allow me to put permanent distance between myself and the defensive, truculent aspect of myself that has seemed more and more to replace the flexible, empathetic person I thought I was. But it's all in response to life being out of my control. I can't stop life and the reality is that it will be the daily practice of making time for yoga and meditation that will repair the membrane that filters my experience.

I think it is allowing me to laugh and be happy with small things more. I have noticed on at least three occasions in the last month that I have laughed in a true, deep, involuntary way, that I thought something was so perfectly turned on its head as to be funny, that I wasn't making the motion of a laugh with a shadow of judgment across it. Now that is a feeling I want to remember. Slightly hysterical, but with a connectedness, a freshness, a center that held. It didn't cost me anything. I felt bouyed up by it.

Last week we learned about loving-kindness meditation in class. One of the class members described practicing this towards George W. during his presidency, and how difficult it was. The man sitting next to her, whom we were all so glad to see because he has been dealing with extreme pain and does not always make it to class, said "As long as you didn't vote for him!" He said it with such a warm, smiling tone that we all understood--and it was so TRUE. It was so funny. Many class members had interesting and thoughtful things to say about their good experiences or challenges with loving-kindness meditation. I listened. I tried to understand what I understood about it, if anything.

I had started with directing the mantra towards my daughter, who is so easy to love so much of the time. And then I had fallen forward into a big pool of blackness, sleepy yet riding a wave of breathing energy. In the end what came to mind is I felt like Pooh. My classmates were discussing some deep and lively points, and I felt that I was sitting by their river of thoughts, not really getting it, dabbling my toes in the water and humming, trying out some tentative rhymes . . . this thought made me laugh too, in a helpless, uninhibited way, and cover my face with a need to show humility to myself. Going in circles, looking bravely for a woozle! I really don't understand. I hope that's okay and I hope to someday. One of the yoga greats, Sri K. Patabhi Jois, who just died in May, would say "Practice and all is coming." Alrighty then.

I Am The One Who

The Guest House

This being human is a guest-house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

Some momentary awareness comes

As an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,

Who violently sweep your house

Empty of its furniture.

Still, treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you

Out for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

Meet them at the door laughing,

And invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,

Because each has been sent

As a guide from beyond.

--Rumi

Tonight in meditation class we practiced working with emotions that come up in during meditation.

• You allow the feeling to be in your body. Be open, curious.

• You see if you can find where in the body you feel it.

• You give the feeling space.

• You see if you can find a name or names for the emotion/s.

• Tell all the stories that go with the emotions, and let them go.

• Try not to judge.

I had tried this already on Monday morning, after I woke up with the thought "what would I do if Dora died?" Nice one, that. Very juicy. There were some visuals, too. Not surprised, but somewhat heavily baffled by my mind's popping it up now, I thought at first "woah. time to go meditate." I think I meant to try escaping it. I'm sure if Steve hadn't happened to still be in bed and available to talk I wouldn't have pieced together that it was probably a tangled mess of reactions to just recently learning that a woman I'm acquainted with lost a daughter several years ago, and anxiety about the fact that Steve and I were supposed to be leaving Dora to go with Theo's class on a fun field trip for three days.

When I did sit down to meditate and the teacher's voice on this new audio track suggested exploring a strong emotion that is with you now, I chose something else. I couldn't think about Dora dying. But later, I thought the meditation had probably helped me resolve some of the less extreme emotions connected with a certain social situation. So I got that going for me, which is nice.

So then tonight when we did it in class, I couldn't do it at all. ? I don't even have a guess. But. I was so happy. I told the class. I have had an energetically uneven time with my mind during my practice sessions, but one thing that has been consistent is that I am so happy to be sitting. Just like the poem. I am unambitiously enjoying this and I have no idea why. The only thing about that which bothers me is that the other feeling I have had without knowing why was depression.

The image at the top of this post is the other one I made at the SoulCollage workshop. I didn't get time to go into it that day, but I'll do a brief gathering of my thoughts about it in the manner of this sentence (method approved and certified by SoulCollage tm): I am the one who wants to believe that the beauty and richness and safety in life that I felt as a girl still exists; who can leave the drama and skip lightly ahead.

"Are you waiting for time to show you some better thoughts?"

You Reading This, Be Ready

Starting here, what do you want to remember?

How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?

What scent of old wood hovers, what softened

sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world

than the breathing respect that you carry

wherever you go right now? Are you waiting

for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this

new glimpse that you found; carry into evening

all that you want from this day. This interval you spent

reading or hearing this, keep it for life -

What can anyone give you greater than now,

starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

--William Stafford

My husband calls me the "what-if kid." I tend to think of all the possibilities, many of them disastrous of course, before starting something. Talk about a recipe for stalling forward motion. I hope meditation will allow me to sort out those things I need to preview and perhaps avoid, and those with which I can confidently move ahead. Right now it still feels a lot like shooting in the dark, with maybe a pause for "oh, what if I had a bit of light, wouldn't that be nice, well, here I go." I wasn't this way as a child, so it is frustrating to be immobilized by it now. I need a bit of this poem's feeling, that feeling of when I turn around being the right time for what's in my heart.

A bit of success this morning. I got up for sitting meditation at 6 and didn't feel quite so out of breath. I think my body is a bit shocked by moving directly from being the apple butter in a sheepskin-and-down sandwich to propping myself upright on a bolster at that hour. I allowed the emphasis on good posture to slide a bit. We were told that posture gives instant feedback to the psyche, and feeling like I'm trying to breathe through a straw from underwater is my psyche crying for a bit of transition time to grow some gills. After setting up my blankets and candle I rested in child's pose a bit, then slowly raised up to somewhere between a crescent moon's curve and a melting ice cream cone. By the time the bells chimed at the end I was pretty much straight up, and breathing more easily. That said, I feel far less successful with a meditation using simply the breath rather than, say, the bodyscan. There is still quite a clamor going on in there without the presence of a constant guided visualization. The handout says consider your mind as an untrained puppy and that is right on. I am out sniffing, peeing, and chewing on everything in sight.

A bit of success with finding a quiet way to ask Theo to consider his first interaction with us in the morning as well. Nice to feel that a piece of parenting work is a way to converse and bond rather than a gauntlet to be fought over.

A few months ago I found a book which is fundamentally changing the way I look at myself and my challenges in the world. It is called The Introvert Advantage: How to Thrive in an Extrovert World. I have had raging fantasies of this book taking the western world, or at the very least the U.S., by storm and everyone from President Obama to the supermarket cashier talking about how it has completely altered all their social interactions, and I have had small fantasies simply that everyone who knows me would read it and finally understand. Ah. So much for fantasies. I can share a bit, though, of what began a resonating glow in me.

"Introverts like depth and will limit their experiences but feel each of them deeply. Often, they have fewer friends but more intimacy. They like to delve deeply into topics and look for richness more than muchness. This is why it's necessary to limit their topics to one or two, or they can become overwhelmed. Their minds absorb information from the outside environment and then reflect on it and expand it. And long after they have taken in the information, they are still munching and crunching it--a little like cows chewing their cud."

Big clues, there, in relation to my feeling pressed for time to fully complete doing or processing something. There's more, too, about introverts using long-term memory and needing time for ideas and solutions to pop into their heads--we may take longer to remember something but we'll remember it for longer, apparently. "Introverts are in a constant distilling process that requires lots of "innergy." And pressurized situations simply make our minds shut down and go blank. Oh yes, I can relate to that. I know I have a lot of, um, thoughts in here somewhere…just a moment…oh, you're going, oh never mind. More on that later.