I won’t pretend I knew him more than that. Yet, no matter how little I know people, I always get saddened by death. I know that we will all die, that our bodies will return to the earth as they should. I feel blessed to have been touched by Kelvin, and many others who’ve left this earth, even if just for 5 minutes in the scheme of life. Is this another form of attachment, my sadness? It seems to me that being saddened and mourning the loss of someone leaving the world as I know it is a normal and healthy part of being human. In death I feel like I easily notice someone’s inner most goddess nature immediately. Maybe we would all benefit from trying to notice that without death prompting us. I feel like the love and good karma we put into the world lasts so much longer than our lives do. Kelvin’s tiny conversations, smile, sweaty dreadlocks, and presence in the background of my yoga practice, they left their positive mark on me. I am reminded today just how short this life can be. None of us has a guarantee for tomorrow. Yet, somehow we live on in what we gave even though the losses will always be there.

Let’s say that you are a business person and after two years of intense stress and strain you finally manage to come out with a product or service that sells well and makes money. Success? In conventional terms, yes. In reality, you spent two years polluting your body as well as the earth with negative energy, made yourself and those around you miserable, and affected many others you never even met. The unconscious assumption behind all such action is that success is a future event, and that the end justifies the means. But the end and the means are one. And if the means did not contribute to human happiness, neither will the end. The outcome, which is inseparable from the actions that led to it, is already contaminated by those actions and so will create further unhappiness. This is karmic action, which is the unconscious perpetuation of unhappiness.

When we were finally able to talk it out it was great to be able to be honest and share.  I think being able to be honest with someone is one of the best feelings in the world.  Almost as good as being able to be honest with yourself.  To be understood and heard is one of those things that makes being human and having these things called relationships so scrumptious.  I also realized that dealing with the conflict immediately may also prevent my ego from running amuck which is what it did this weekend.  We laughed recalling the absurd thoughts that had popped into each of our heads while we were apart and unable to resolve our issues.  I thank yoga for helping me be able to sit in the pain of the conflict, face the rejection that conflict implies, and not freak out, run, cry hysterically, or turn to numb myself.  It feels the same, sitting in conflict or sitting in hanumanasana (monkey pose or splits)!  It hurts, it feels so uncomfortable it’s crazy how bad you want to get up and run out of the pose, or yell at your loved ones and push them away…but it too shall pass.  I learned that sitting with it together felt good, that we didn’t need to continually talk to fix it or fight or fill the space with more than what was there.

Forgiveness is not something you do solely for the person who hurt you. It is something you do for yourself, for the sake of your own inner freedom. You forgive so that you can live in the present instead of being stuck in the past. You forgive because your grievances and grudges—even more than hopes and attachments and fears—bind you to old patterns, old identities, and especially to old stories.

“I’m this way because s/he did that to me!” you say—he or she being the unloving parent, the unfaithful lover, the guru who didn’t deliver. The problem is, when you hold on to the grievance, you also hold on to its shadow belief: “I must be flawed in some way to have attracted that hurt.”

When I began my own personal forgiveness project, the only tools I had were meditation and some basic yogic teachings about how to shift thoughts. I hadn’t a clue how to access the actual state of forgiveness, so I concentrated on trying to talk back to my grudges. My model was the instruction from Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra 2:33: “When obstructive thoughts arise, practice the opposite thought.” It became my discipline to notice my grudge-bearing thoughts and try to reverse them, usually by sending kind wishes to the person I was angry at. The practice cleared out underbrush in my mind. But trying to “do” forgiveness is different from experiencing the feeling state. Some of this has to do with the organization of the brain.

Many of these patterns play out automatically in the body, regardless of your intentions or rational decisions. That’s why my friend Lisa gets a knot in her stomach whenever she hears someone speaking in a certain angry tone of voice—even when the person isn’t speaking to her. It’s the same tone her mother used when she was displeased with Lisa as a child. This made Lisa anxious, and her stomach would knot up. Now she can’t keep her stomach from knotting at the sound of an angry voice overheard in a supermarket. In the same way, each of us holds countless ancient grudges in our cells, ready to be triggered by a chance word or careless glance.

Shifting those patterns requires more than practice and choice. It requires intervention from your own depths, from the awareness-presence that you cultivate in meditation. Brain-wave researchers mapping the brain states accessed during meditation say that meditation slows the patterns called delta waves. These patterns, similar to those activated in deep sleep, are associated with healing the body. Meditators learn to access this deep state consciously—with full alertness.

I recently read the testimony of a mother who experienced a spontaneous movement of forgiveness in a most unlikely circumstance. Her 20-year-old son had been beaten to death in a street fight. His assailant was tried and sentenced to a long prison term. The mother asked to meet with him after his sentencing because she wanted the satisfaction of telling him to his face how much she hated him for what he had done. When she was ushered into the holding room where she was to meet the boy, he was standing in a corner, shackled and crying. The woman said later, “As I watched that boy, so forlorn—no parents, no friends, and no support—all I saw was another mother’s son.”

Without thinking, she heard herself saying, “Can I give you a hug?” She says that when she felt his body against hers, her anger literally melted away. What arose instead was a natural feeling of tender connection with this suffering human being. That amazing story speaks to what forgiveness really is—a spontaneous and natural uprush of peaceful letting go, even of tenderness. This woman has no idea where her ability to forgive her son’s killer came from; she says she couldn’t have imagined ever coming close to having such a feeling. She treasures the peace it gave her.

She called it a gift from God. I’d call it an opening of the soul. The point is, heartfelt forgiveness—the natural, spontaneous opening to someone who has hurt you—is not something that the ego can make happen. The separatist, culturally conditioned ego-self, formed by thousands of years of judgment and vengeance, demands punishment as the price of forgiveness. When your heart forgives, it has stepped beyond the ego to grasp your innate kinship—even your identity—with another person.

An article on YogaJournal.com By Sara Avant Stover

“Yoga is a way to live.  We use the yoga mat to practice on and take our thoughts and beliefs into the world so that we may touch others. Yoga actually is the process of skillfully turning challenges, failures, hurts, and mistakes into opportunities.  As bad as it was is how good it can be.”

“Interruptions to one’s yoga practice or teaching are not necessarily bad things.  They are opportunities to realize that yoga never leaves you. Yoga waits. Returning from a hiatus also allows you to start fresh, to revisit old ground and discover new things. Often it has been briefly starting over that has made me love yoga all the more.”

• If you have lost a loved one, dedicate your class/practice to their specific virtues and acknowledge how every life leaves blessings behind for us all to bathe in. Use the opportunity to explore the idea of living fully now and guide students/yourself to consider the powerful legacy you might also want to leave behind.
• If you have been betrayed, consider how yoga philosophy and deeper self-awareness could have been applied to prevent the betrayal, and teach your class/remember the virtues of truth, friendship, integrity, and making life-affirming choices.
• If you are going through a crisis, teach/remember that the only constant in life is change, and that from crisis always comes opportunity.
• Take time in private to cry, grieve, and feel your experience fully.
• Make very sure you have an outlet for anger, disappointment, and hurt (so that your students never have to be your therapists). Reach out to peers, counselors, and your teachers for support.

Throughout, no matter how you are feeling inside, resist wishing your difficult experiences away. Trust that by feeling it deeply and sharing it honestly with others greater openness, happiness, and freedom await you. When this happens, there is no division between practicing yoga and living your life.

“Yoga and life cannot be separated—they exist simultaneously,” Sanford says. “Teaching and practicing through difficult times is part of grounding this realization.”

]]> http://www.roxtaryoga.com/teaching-and-practicing-through-tough-times/feed/ 0 http://www.roxtaryoga.com/lets-be-hontest/ http://www.roxtaryoga.com/lets-be-hontest/#comments Wed, 23 Jul 2008 00:11:29 +0000 admin http://www.roxtaryoga.com/?p=42 An article about honesty and it’s implications by Sally Kempton from YogaJournal.com.

…
An argument for radical truthfulness goes deep: Lying takes you out of alignment with reality. This was Gandhi’s position, based on the insight that truth lies at the very heart of existence, of reality. A yogic text, the Taittiriya Upanishad, says that God is truth itself, while a Kabbalistic text, the Zohar, calls truth “the signet ring of God.” In psychological terms, lying disconnects us from reality and it always makes us a little bit crazy. Anyone who grew up in a family that kept secrets will recognize the eerie feeling of cognitive dissonance that arises when facts are concealed. That dissonance currently rages through the bloodstream of society; lies and secrets having become so embedded in our corporate, governmental, and personal lives that most of us assume that the president, the media, and our religious institutions are continually lying to us.

When the consequences of lying are so spiritually and socially destructive, why would an ethical person ever choose to tell an untruth? First, an ethical person might decide to lie if telling the factual truth would compromise other, equally important values. In the Mahabharata, the great ethical treatise of the Indian tradition, there is a famous moment involving a lie. Krishna is guiding the righteous Pandavas in a pivotal battle against the forces of evil. Krishna, who is considered by orthodox Hindus to embody divine truth in human form, orders the righteous king Yudhisthira to tell a lie in order to demoralize the enemy general. Yudhisthira agrees to tell the first lie of his life—that the general’s son, Aswatthama, has been killed in battle. Krishna’s position is that in a battle against terrible evil, one does what one must to win. (The position is similar to the Allied disinformation tactic in World War II, which misled the Nazi intelligence about the real target of D-day.) In short, Krishna makes the decision to lie because it serves what he perceives as higher values: those of justice and, ultimately, peace.

My college philosophy teacher used to make this point with a personal example. As a Jewish child living in Germany, she was saved from being captured by the Nazis because a Catholic family lied to the Gestapo about her presence in their back bedroom. For the family to have told the truth would have brought about her death. It was a small lie for a larger truth.

Another situation in which lying might be ethical is when the truth is simply too harsh for the person who is receiving it. A friend of mine, when diagnosed with breast cancer, told her 90-year-old mother that everything was fine, because she recognized that telling the truth about her condition would create too much anxiety for her already-fragile mother.

Conversely, there are times when telling a factual truth can be an act of disguised or overt aggression. When Fran tells her friend Allison that she saw Allison’s husband with another woman, Fran may be speaking out of concern for her friend, but she may also be expressing a hidden hostility or envy. Most of us can remember less dramatic but equally painful examples of bitter truth telling: disclosures made in anger, hurtful comments about a friend’s or partner’s secret vulnerabilities, revelations that destroy trust. In the past 30 years, especially in certain spiritual communities, there’s been a prevailing ethic that privileges full disclosure, public confession, and extreme transparency in relationships. The results have been liberating in some respects, destructive in others. So it seems vital that we each find our own way of balancing truthfulness with other values. One great yardstick to use is called “the four gates of speech,” which include the following questions: Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary? and Is this the right moment to say it? When we feel caught between speaking a bitter truth and keeping quiet, these questions help us sort out the priorities.

As I’ve said, balancing the relative value of, say, truth and kindness, is not always easy, and it requires a high degree of honesty—especially about your own deep inner motives. If the compulsion to be relentlessly honest sometimes conceals aggression, the decision to hide the truth because of kindness, or because the time is wrong, can be a cover for your fears or for the desire to stay inside of your comfort zone. Radical truth telling is simple. You just plunge in and do it, regardless of the effect it has on others. Discriminating truth telling demands far more attentiveness, emotional intelligence, and self-understanding.

As you begin to look at how you lie, it becomes possible to find out why you lie. My friend Alice is getting divorced and is facing a child-custody battle. Her lawyer suggested that she write a description of all the incidents in which her ex-husband had failed as a father and husband. She wrote a series of “He said, then I said” dialogues, highlighting the ways in which her husband had hurt her and their daughter. When Alice reread the document, she realized that she hadn’t included her own hurtful words and actions. Part of the reason she hadn’t was tactical: She wanted sole custody of their child. But another part of it was her need to feel justified about leaving her marriage. “Once I started to look deeper at these conversations, I could see that both of us were at fault. In fact, there were times I acted like a total bitch. I so much didn’t want to see myself that way that my memory would literally distort what happened.”

Alice was confronting what most of us would recognize as a particularly insidious form of untruth: the justifications, excuses, and blaming strategies that we use to avoid facing the gap between how we want to act and how we actually behave. For the postmodern, psychologically informed yogi, Patanjali’s vow to unconditional truth demands much more than a commitment to factual accuracy. It asks you to become transparent to yourself, to be willing to gaze unflinchingly, yet without bitterness or self-blame, at the parts of yourself that you are afraid to expose to scrutiny. Only when you’re willing to look at your areas of falseness can you discover the deepest possibilities of the practice of truth.

Here are the basics in the practice of truthfulness: Pay attention to factual truth. Notice and make a point of calling yourself on the urge to conceal embarrassing facts, make yourself look better, justify mistakes, or run away from confrontation. When you notice yourself telling an untruth, acknowledge that you did it. As much as possible, make a point of not saying anything you know to be untrue.

As you learn how to catch your own characteristic patterns of untruth—both inner and outer—you will also begin to notice that sometimes truths need to be spoken, and other times remaining silent is an acceptable alternative. In other words, your commitment to truthfulness comes to include an authentic and trustworthy capacity for discriminating speech. Truth is a genuine teacher. When you decide to follow where it leads—constantly asking questions such as, What is my motive for speaking? Is it kind and necessary to say this? If not now, how will I know that it’s right to say this?—the power of truth will show its subtleties as well as teach its wisdom. Patanjali says that through truthfulness we gain such a power that all our words turn out to be true. I don’t believe that he means we become alchemists, able to turn the base metal of lies into the gold of reality just through our words. Instead, I believe that he is actually talking about the power to speak from inspiration—to hold firmly to the truth that is not only factual, but that illuminates, that can be received, and that reflects the deeper state within the heart.

It also happened at yoga teacher training. After 6 hours of practice the first day I could barely move the second day, I was so weak, tired, emotionally drained, felt like crying half the time. I had never felt so sore from exercise in my life (maybe when I was 14 and tried to run track, I remember that hurt). I just showed up for day two even though every part of me didn’t want to and after 5 minutes on the mat I forgot (well, mostly) how sore I was and just let go.

I wonder how often we feel a little under the weather or there’s some other tiny, uncomfortable reason deterring us from something we really should and could do. How many times do we not go to a yoga class, work, not show up for something, not finish what we start, meet our goals, not take care of ourselves or do something that we know we really want to do?

Later, I’m still laying on my couch feeling pretty miserable, but I am glad I showed up to teach. I am glad my friends and fellow yogis showed up for me, shared their energy with me, and got me out of my head and misery. I would do well to remember this for future reference.