Aparigraha

I wrote the following essay in June 2014 for an assignment during my Yoga Therapy Training at Niroga Institute in Oakland. More recently I had the chance to discuss the meaning of Aparigraha with the incredible group of women that comprise Samyama’s Book Club. We’re reading Deborah Adelle’s book The Yamas and Niyamas. We cling to more than those things that fit in our hands. We cling to ideas. To emotions. To states of being. Aparigraha reminds us to step back. To soften our physical and spiritual on things that are simple paper tigers.

 

IMG_0179For the past seven days I have been living the lesson of aparigraha, the fifth of five suggested restraints known as the Yama that Patanjali invites us to practice. An individual who practices aparigraha neither hoards nor clings to possessions, individuals, ideas or ways of being.

Attachment in the form of too many possessions clutters our physical space. We can practice aparigraha in our home environment not by choosing the life of an ascetic (which to me is clinging to a way of being) but by mindful consumption: having what we need but no more, not always buying new, reusing and recycling. I live in a small studio apartment and yet I find my emotional attachment to objects that serve no purpose prevents me from letting go.

Attachment to individuals clutters our thought processes. It can rob us of our autonomy and blur the line between truth and fiction. My friend left for a ten-day visit to see his parents in Israel last week. It was our first time apart for an extended period and his absence, rather than creating space, actually filled my head and heart with stories of my own making. Until I made a conscious effort to step back from the habit of ‘spinning stories’ did I become grounded and focused.

Attachment to ideas clutters our objectivity. The yoga studio where I attended my very first yoga class in 1984 and where I have been teaching for eight years is closing next week. I am attempting to transfer my classes and students to a studio I’ve been teaching at for sixteen months but recently my attachment to what I believe should happen built a wall that prevented me from seeing how it could happen.

Attachment to our way of being clutters our experience of the world. We cling to the words and phrases we use to describe ourselves. Of all the ways attachment might manifest, perhaps our attachment to how we see ourselves is the most important to consider as it relates to yoga therapy.

A client in chronic pain may be afraid to release their attachment to the pain they experience because it is their pain that defines them. Who are they if they are not the individual who always hurts?

As yoga therapists it is important to understand the client’s attachment to the story about their injury and pain. At the same time we must not develop an attachment to the desired outcome. As yoga therapists we might release attachment to the notion of a cure and perhaps shift our focus toward helping the client detach from the story.

A New Practice

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To say it has been a busy few months is an understatement.

A friend asked the other day, “So, how do you feel now that it’s all over?”  She was referring to the conclusion of two years of study at Sofia University and the success of my final paper (which you can read here), my year-long adventure in yoga-therapy training at Niroga Institute, and the end of Samyama’s first 8-week teacher training program, The Dharma Path, where I had the honor of assisting John Berg in the teaching of asana and methodology.

“Are you excited?  Or is there a void?”

The possibility of there being a void in my life was something I hadn’t considered.  But Hillary’s question encouraged me to step back and assess how it felt to reach the end of this hectic and amazing chapter.  When I did, I realized there is indeed a gaping hole where writing assignments and reading texts and lesson preparations used to reside.  The undercurrent of urgency that roiled through my psyche has mellowed to a gentle ramble.  The fractal-esque symmetry of life’s repeating pattern of work, teach, study, sleep, work, teach, study, sleep has been disrupted.  Like a Jenga tower with one too many blocks pulled form its foundation, I’m teetering toward the unknown.  I’m restless.

And it’s unnerving.

It’s the faith I hold in the order of life that binds my fragile personal yoga practice together.  When my faith is challenged and order is disrupted, my practice is challenged, too.

The charge, however, is not how to keep my practice alive, it’s how to keep it moving forward.

The key, I think, is to accept this shift in my space/time continuum as a gift.  The end of school and the other recent commitments that took constant and attentive energy did not generate a gaping black hole.  Nor did they manifest a void in my life.  If anything, the end of these commitments created an opportunity for me to see my world and my personal practice with a new perspective.  I have a chance to re-tool my practice and to put the pieces of my life together in a new way.

And that’s what I intend to do.  To accept the gift of open space instead of searching for ways to see it filled.  Is it possible that this is what my personal practice was meant to be all along?  That I should allow my arms to open wide and that I should listen – really listen – to the sound of my breath and beating heart echoing in the space of a less busy life?

 

Blue Sky Mornings

CIMG2291I love grey sky mornings. I love blue sky mornings, too, but there’s something about grey mornings – at least during the Bay Area summer – that are especially nice. Wrapping my hands around a mug of coffee feels different on a grey sky morning. It feels comforting and somehow warms me more than it might on those days when the world is shimmering with clear light.

The pace of a grey sky morning is different, too. Life – the same frenetic full life that was bright and busy yesterday – rests easy through dawn and then breathes itself awake. Muted, soft and lazy yet full of hope and holding the promise of a blue sky afternoon.

On some mornings the shift from grey to blue goes by almost unnoticed. On other mornings the sun burns through the thick cloud fast and hot like a torch.

But that’s what change is like, isn’t it? Sometimes it hangs gently around us until we’re ready to notice. And at other times it’s unexpected. It’s speed and ferocity with which it hits is blinding.

The way things change has been on my mind this week. Especially today. We have traveled more than halfway through our journey around the sun and it seems that the first half of this year has been, for me, a constant teaching aboutaccepting change. Not the small moment-by-moment changes that each breath of life brings but the big rock em’ sock em’ changes.

I want to write that some of the changes in my life were exquisite and others filled with grief. But that’s what we do, isn’t it? We love to assign qualities to change: good, bad, sudden, unexpected. But with our need to name change we forget that names offer our mutable circumstances a potency that can direct our emotional state and determine how we look at what simply is and always will be the movement of our lives.

One of my instructors at Niroga Institute, where I’m enrolled in the yoga therapy teacher-training course, spoke of the simplicity of being neutral. Her words have stayed with me.

Change is here. Always. If we don’t notice change in this breath we might in the next or in the breath after that. Change is our one constant. And as it is we may as well sit in the middle of it free of judgment, fear and craving. Neutral. Only in that basic state will we see the purity of change. Only in that basic state will our instincts know if we’re waking a grey sky morning, a blue sky morning or a brand new morning.

 

Breath Taking

IMG_0190Breath taking.

That’s what change can be.  It can take our breath away with the most wonderful gasp of delight, or the breath can be caught tight in our chest, sharp and immovable.

My life has seen so much change in the past six weeks.  The beginning of exciting new projects and sudden changes in circumstances that I didn’t expect.

Awe inspiring change can make us feel lighter than air.  Awful change can make us feel leaden and stuck.

I prefer awe-inspiring change.  Who doesn’t?

Here’s the thing – how we describe change depends on how we process the change.  The story we write about it in our heads and our hearts.  The peace or the violence we ascribe to it.

I’ve been thinking about this because of the labels I’ve been using to describe the changes in my life.

One of our assignments during our first month of training at Niroga Institute in Berkeley was to give some thought to Ahimsa.  Ahimsa is the first of Patanjali’s Yamas – or moral codes.  Ahimsa asks that we be compassionate.  It asks us to walk a path free of violence.

What is violence?  Is there ever a time when an act of violence can be justified?

This is what I wrote for my assignment:

 

Ahimsa

Violence is a small thing.

It is a girl child running through the jungle, arms stretched out, mouth open in silent cry,

clothes seared from her body.

It is a small thing.

Violence is an act of war.

It is a jetliner ripping a skyscraper in half.  It is men detonating the bombs they strap to their bodies.  It is women being gang raped on the back of busses.  Violence is the sting of a mother’s slap on her young son’s frozen cheek.

Non-violence begins when I remember that violence doesn’t ask for much.

Because violence is a small thing.

Violence begins when I wake to curse the haggard reflection staring back at me.

Violence ends when I wake and offer thanks for my humble life.

Violence begins when I whisper secrets that belong to someone else.

It ends when I sit in quiet contemplation.

Violence begins when I fill my eyes with gratuitous images.

It ends when I change the channel.

Violence.  Non-violence.  Ahimsa.  Himsa.

Two sides of the same coin that we toss into the air without a second thought.

We can choose the side on which it lands.

 

 

 

Remarkable Life

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October, 1966 detail

October, 1966 detail

In the next few weeks I’ll be completing my first year in Sofia University’s masters in transpersonal psychology program. There were times over these last twelve months when I considered leaving.

I chose the Global Program so I could continue to work. The Global Program allows me to study at my pace according to my schedule. Prior to Sofia my educational experience had been enjoyed from the comfort of a wooden desk, listening to real-time lectures and taking notes from points scrawled on a blackboard. Now I’m learning from the comfort of my cushy green chair (or bed), reading articles from my laptop and participating in online discussions. The learning curve has been steep, at times very uncomfortable but ultimately rewarding.

When I began at Sofia caring friends asked, “But what will you do with this?” Why would I choose to put myself into debt for a degree that, even on paper, appears to be on the fringe side of academia? While I appreciated their concern I couldn’t help but feel irritated. Of course I was irritated. I knew I couldn’t answer their question and if I couldn’t answer the question wasn’t I proving their point?

But I stuck with it. Something told me I was on the right path.

And now, a year into the program, it’s clear I chose wisely. The work that I’ve completed this year has been transformative on a personal and professional level.

As my fellow cohorts and I begin the transition into our second year the program becomes more focused. We’ll begin to connect our academic and experiential studies at Sofia to our life path. That, for me, means the work that I do as a teacher of yoga. More specifically, it means the work I do with populations who have yet to experience the new dimension and healing potential a yoga practice can add to their life.

During our second year at Sofia we choose electives as part of our course work load. I chose to apply to Niroga Institute’s Yoga Therapy Teacher Training program. Niroga is in Berkeley, founded and led by the inspiring BK Bose.

Last week I was accepted into the Niroga program, which begins in February. Yes, I’ll be taking my courses at Sofia while studying at Niroga.

Next year is going to be one heck of a year. Thinking about it makes me feel like this girl.

But I’m not a girl. Next week I turn an age where many women begin to welcome grandchildren. That has most certainly not been my path this time around. Sometimes it’s difficult to accept that I didn’t enjoy the life I imagined for myself when I was younger. You know what I mean. The house. The husband and kids. A career trajectory that guarantees a comfy retirement. But then I realize that the life I have – as small as it is – is remarkable.

My birthday wish and Thanksgiving hope is that you take a moment to really see – no matter the trajectory – how truly remarkable your life is.