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.

The benefits of a stroke

"The limbic system functions by placing an affect, or emotion, on information streaming through our senses. Because we share these structures with other creatures, the limbic system cells are often referred to as the "reptilian brain" or the "emotional brain." When we are newborns, theses cells become wired together in response to sensory stimulation. It is interesting to note that although our limbic system functions throughout our lifetime, it does not mature. As a result, when our emotional "buttons" are pushed, we retain the ability to react to incoming stimulation as though we were a two year old, even when we are adults." --Jill Bolte Taylor, My Stroke of Insight

Two things I love about this: the science that allows us to separate the making and existing of "cells" and "brains" and "senses" from the experience of having them, and the positivity with which she speaks of having the ability to react like a child. And a third: that a friend coincidentally passed this book on to me just a few weeks ago.

This book My Stroke of Insight is fitting neatly into conversations started in meditation class . . . people craving the equanimity and calm they get from meditating but not able to let themselves sit. When Jill Taylor had her left brain capacity removed by brain hemorrhage she was forcibly placed in just the position my classmates desire: floating, without a sense of time, in a world defined by perceiving rather than judging. When we want to suspend or slow down physical activity we are all fighting our own personal and our culture's left brain directives to be DOING no matter what.

In school each day my children are asked to move cognitively through hoop after hoop in training to be DOING for the rest of their lives. Ag! It's enough to make me move them to a freeschool! A friend's son told him about having an experience of being there (in the classroom, trying to attend) and then not there (for an unknown amount of time) and then there again (when asked to attend by the teacher). "Well we call that daydreaming," Says dad. "I think that's what I'm doing" says son, in quiet awe.

Just like Dora with her moments of wondering about non-existence. Given the choice, many kids would rather jump on a trampoline for 5 hours than sit in a classroom. They are all about living in the moment and experiencing the right brain. 30 years later, we struggle to allow ourselves 5 minutes of that kind of experience. My personal experience with that: it bites! I know the sparks of my creativity come from that place and it is SO dang hard to guard the space for it. Like speaking to a domineering partner, I have to say

LEFT BRAIN BACK OFF

That's the only way I'm going to be able to appreciate that you can do amazing things as well.

And a last cautionary tale for parents from Jill Taylor: "As a society we do not teach our children that they need to tend carefully the garden of their minds. Without structure, censorship, or discipline, our thoughts run rampant on automatic. Because we have not learned how to more carefully manage what goes on inside our brains, we remain vulnerable to not only what other people think about us, but also to advertising and/or political manipulation." Now that sinister spin makes it seem essential, doesn't it?

What if I can't hang on to it?

I was thinking the next post would happen sooner and be more about loving-kindness meditation because there's much more to say and I basically side-stepped that last time. But right now I am investigating what I am currently experiencing like a good student of vipassana: two things I bring home tonight from our last meeting of meditation class.

One from our handout:

"Celebrate returning. Meditation practice is about returning again and again. Sometimes it's about returning to the next breath, sometimes it's about returning to meditation after a lapse. We can learn to recognize our lapses and return to our breath or our practice--not with condemnation--but celebration."

One a little personal insight:

Instinctively when time is pressing and lists are growing I think moving faster is the way through. If I can really convince myself this instinct is misguided and slow down enough to regain clarity, simplifying is a natural outcome. Believe it.

I had a mystical window there for a month or so. I had time to pour myself into this class and regular practice of what I was learning, almost every day. I was more aware of myself and others moving through the day. I had time to spend with Theo and Dora. I had time to make sure there wasn't anything rotting in the fridge, I had time to see a good friend once a week or maybe every two weeks, I had time to create some paper and textile things I almost caught up on reconciling our bank account I had time to take on a new project designing interior space I adjusted to the new online signup routine for my lifeline of yoga I started working on halloween costumes way early so that I'd have plenty of time to finish them carefully I have to remember to write a note to my father's close friend diagnosed with a brain tumor I want to stay involved with the art class and the library at school but it's so much time

what has happened everything has sped up and is running together and I am right back to that struggle of how to find time to take care of everything and everyone much less to make time for the thinking and not-thinking of meditation.

what can I do to bolster up my friend who is in the middle of a terrible divorce

what about the friends I haven't had time to call or see

what was I thinking saying I could do this design work everything is needed yesterday and I am so rusty

the build up of cat hair is making my eyes itch

one of the cats has an abscess and requires antibiotics and swabbing twice a day and being enclosed in a place where she won't ooze on the furniture until she heals who bit her?

the halloween costumes--how do I make this wire-frame felt-covered pumpkin head with eyes that glow??

oh my god the floors, the toilets, the litter boxes, the laundry

what shall I plan for the next meal to nourish my family so we stay healthy

how is dora's cold she is still blowing out gobs of snot is she getting better or worse?

my wrist is so sore and does not seem to be getting stronger will it ever not hurt?

will the kids get the flu? I didn't get them to the clinic last week now they are out of vaccine again . . .

I can't stay up to work on any of this stuff now I need to go to sleep

I am definitely lapsing. I look forward to celebrating my return.

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.

What if I were a deck of cards?

Yesterday I took part in a SoulCollage workshop. The term "SoulCollage" is trademarked and there is a whole book about it and the skeptic in me feels a bit, um, skeptical. It's all a bit woo-woo, referenced to the tradition of tarot and its unnameable, intangible life energies and spiritual mythologies. However. I had complete beginner's mind, as I do anytime I'm starting something new, and enjoyed the process of sorting through images, cutting, and gluing to make a collage mounted to matt board, in a short amount of time, that feels very solid and finished. I felt a lot of freedom in being asked simply to choose from a big messy pile of cut and ripped out magazine pages. So much easier than creating my own images on a blank surface. It's not a work of art! Nothing to lose! It's just a collage. Much easier to pick up momentum and get into the zone, and hard to stop!

Meditation on the finished cards was the extra component that I found unexpectedly interesting. Holding and looking at a finished card we imagined it being the size of a doorway. Step in and engage all our senses. What is it like there? Know we can return any time. Ask for a message or a gift. Say thank you. Come back through. Then write.

Here's what I wrote about this card:

I feel sleepy but there is a lot of movement. The spiral is changing shape and color above me. It is my life, myself within life, and I'll never be able to predict or contain it. I'll see if I can make a comfortable place for myself, and there will be places I'm not comfortable, but all around me are the textures and the food of life. The chair, an anchor, a haven, a place that's clean and well-lit-- is big enough for others to join me. An egg, the beginnings of pattern or design printed on nubby linen and sketched on old stone . . . grain? flower? insect? prehistoric elements of life that I can watch and that even cast light and perspective on my own small corner of life. I didn't get a gift or message but realize afterward that I couldn't tell the passage of time. I was a bit cold.

Hmmm. Kinda interesting considering I pretty carelessly selected a bunch of magazine images and slapped them down together with glue. Considering I have spent much of the past three years feeling stuck (as an artist, wondering if I am indeed even an artist). Feeling like I am trapped in my role of safe haven and food provider for my family, feeling called by but far away from hints of big ideas about pattern and design. Considering I have felt the drag of days, passing so excruciatingly slowly, filled with menial chores while others pursue lives of meaning and creativity.

Well. Maybe it's all so obvious. But when I looked at what I had made, and what I had written, both without much forethought or planning, it looked so much more like a life over which I have some control. About which I may decide to change some things. Through which I may allow myself to find the connection and meaning I feel I've been missing.

When I meditated this morning I used a new cd track that asked me to imagine my mind reaching in succession to the limits of the room, beyond the room, to the clouds, to the sun, and finally to the stars. I tried this, mmm, perhaps with a bit of feeling like I was in a movie instead of really imagining the molecules of my body connected somehow to the molecules of the stars. When I was done I felt expanded, though, which was cool. Even better was the moment when the cd player changed over to the next cd and what came on was . . . Star Wars. No kidding.

What if I could become the awareness behind my thoughts?

Nothing brings suffering as does

the untamed, uncontrolled, unattended and unrestrained mind.

That mind brings suffering.

Nothing brings joy as does a

tamed, controlled, attended and restrained mind.

This mind brings joy.

----The Buddha

While I was sitting this morning I heard some whispering. "Don't ask mommy any questions!" "Move over." "Shh!" My son and daughter have caught up with the shift to an earlier schedule, and this morning they were watching me. I felt my breathing slow. Model the perfect meditating mommy, if you can. It was very sweet of them to tip toe round me so. Perhaps because I was discovered near the end of the window, I allowed myself to enjoy it instead of tensing up with anticipation of what interruption would come despite their best intentions. Could it be I was aware of my thoughts about them instead of being my thoughts about them? Yesterday I asked them what they thought the difference was between "hope" and "expectation." My son thought that the difference was that with hope, you know there might be a chance it won't happen. "So you're more flexible about the outcome?" I asked. Yeah, he said, there might be a million in one chance that you won't get what you want. Which tells you a little bit about how often he is disappointed, hoping for (or expecting) odds like that!

Tonight in class we talked about skills to use with the "monkey mind." If simply meditating on the breath is blocked by too many thoughts or one that that is too big you can make them, or it, the object of the meditation. How much the actual practice of this would be different from just flat out having the thought might well depend on how much you love, or how badly you want off, the roller coaster. You can count, or name, or observe thoughts. "You don't get more points for having fewer thoughts," my teacher said. Competitive types are crestfallen, while I sigh with relief. "Although that is a very nice place to be," she added. Hmm.

Some of the other suggestions have to do with visualizing moving receptacles for thoughts that float (like clouds in the sky, or leaves on a river) or trundle (like cars on a train) away from you. You can imagine you are a cat, waiting at a mouse hole, and hope that your thoughts are as wise as a mouse would be in this scenario. If you are waiting, the reasoning goes, perhaps the thoughts will find somewhere else to play. Or at least, if they make a break for it, you will not be surprised or disturbed? With feline grace, you deal them summary blows and silence ensues? Not sure about this.

We practiced twice in class. I love this! Several of us commented on the power of meditating in the group. I could hear others breathing, I felt the ease of concentration for just a bit, I settled right down into my bones. I went through the list. Counting: not so good. Made me want a thought for each breath, to keep rhythm. Naming: okay, I've sort of been doing this already, it's pretty useful and I'll practice it more . . . planning, gardening, judging. Clouds felt too wispy--if I set my thoughts on clouds it would be like Wiley Coyote's anvil falling from the sky. Boxcars worked okay, but I really didn't want to let all of my thoughts go off down the track forever . . . I just wanted a break from them right now.

What ended up happening was pretty cool. I just listened for a little bit and looked around behind my eyelids. I saw that reddish blackness that is the back of your eyelid. A small shaped appeared and swelled into a ball. I could put my thoughts in the ball, where they would ricochet around like children in a bouncy house. I could keep an eye on them. I could step away, watch from over here. And if I needed any of them I could call them. Those were the thoughts I had about it, anyway. I may have done it a bit. I may have nodded a bit, too. I was super relaxed and peaceful. Very different from when I have been sitting in the mornings.

It made me think of the reading I did about Sensory Integration when Theo was diagnosed, and how one book said that true happiness is receiving all the information from your senses and being able to process it and respond appropriately in real time. Just think! Physically, it is the equivalent of being Philip Petit, that serenely crazy high wire walker, who is one of the few people, by the way, who have rendered Stephen Colbert speechless. SO living in the moment. SO in tune with every nuance of balance. HUGELY egocentric, of course, which must be what stumped S.C., because his persona on that show is all about eclipsing any piddling news item or famous guest with the self-perceived luminosity of his being, right?

So. Integrating. Physical and mental, internal and external, awareness and serenity, all bundled up into a little person sitting on a stool. Luminous. That's what I'm aiming for. (hoping, not expecting.)