on flight

This is not a blog about levitation. So stop reading if you wanted to hear about how I started floating during meditation. Hasn’t happened. Yet.

As I write this, I’m aboard a small plane headed from the east coast back to the Midwest. My two-week vacation of yoga, family, food and rest is over.

Most people, especially nowadays, experience some level of anxiety when they travel. This includes but is not limited to: packing anxiety, worry regarding time, fears about the safety of traveling and that other scary T-word that you’re not even supposed to think about when you’re within 10 square miles of any airport because the government may hunt you down and pat you on your private parts.

Like many people, I find packing to be a very painful activity. There really should be a way for me to bring my entire closet with me wherever I go. But I can still somehow manage to squeeze two weeks of clothing and personal needs into a carry-on.

My real panic begins about 20 minutes from any airport. The bottom of my stomach start to shift and churn and I’m sure I’m about to go number two right there in the car. I’m not sure why, but it happens every single time.

I always have my boarding pass ready to go when I get to the airport so I don’t have to speak to a soul until I ask for my ginger ale on the plane. I head straight to security to possibly get naked and take my bag apart for the under-qualified, underpaid teenagers they have protecting our airports.

Even though I am quite careful not to transport any illegal items when I travel, I’m always afraid I’ll get patted down and someone will discover something I’m not supposed to have. Read: I watch too much Law and Order.

Once I get to the gate, I sit quietly. Sometimes I cry after saying goodbye to loved ones. Sometimes I listen to music. Sometimes I read. Sometimes I stare unflinchingly at strangers without an ounce of shame. Okay, full disclosure: most times I do the latter.

As soon as everyone has boarded the plane, settled in and secured safely via their seatbelts, I sit back and fixate on the employees on the tarmac. I’ve always wanted to job shadow someone out there. It’s like some foreign world. You have to have thick skin to hang out with planes outdoors all day long, all year long.

After a bit more obtrusive staring at strangers, I’ve been known to pass out before the plane taxis and not wake up until my ears start popping during the descent.

When I can’t or choose not to sleep, I find myself letting out a very long, slow moving exhale once we’re in the air and we’re not in that crooked, sky-rocket-in-flight position.

From this point, until we land, I am at peace. I am neither here nor there. The vehicle in which I travel is going quite fast, but I just feel suspended in time and space. There was a seven-month period when I was in a 1,000-mile, long-distance relationship, and even though parting ways with my boyfriend was a really difficult thing to do, I remember getting up high in the air, exhaling and feeling perfectly peaceful mingling with the clouds.

I imagine this is the “just be” mentality for which many yogis and yoginis strive. Just suspended in space and time, with the inevitable subtitles containing thoughts of where you just were and where you’re going, but those fade in and out while you just sort of hover until it isn’t time to hover anymore.

yoga = mind over matter (much easier said than done)

In my reading of the yoga sutras (A.K.A the yoga bible), I've come across one phrase, several times, said in several different ways. This phrase makes sense on the surface, but when I try to put it into practice, my brain shorts out. Have you ever repeated your name out loud so many times that after awhile it sounds foreign to you? That's exactly what these phrases do to me when I think about them and try to meditate on them. It's pretty disorienting.

"There is nothing wrong with this world. You can make it a heaven or a hell according to your approach."

or

"By changing your mind, you change everything...there is nothing wrong with the outside, it is all in the mind."

excerpts from the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

Yoga is essentially the ability to control your mind. The entire world is as you view it. If I can control my mind and how it takes everything in, I am living yoga.

What?! How now brown cow?

So, what I'm saying is: If you perceive it to be true, it is. If I stare at a piece of green cloth and tell myself it is red, it will become red. Right? Sounds weird.

Here's a more practical, real world application. It's almost 2:30 a.m. My boyfriend isn't home from hanging out with his friends at the bar. He said he would be home by midnight. He hasn't responded to any of my texts and when I've called him, it goes straight to voice mail or only rings twice. How many scenarios can you come up with, explaining what could possibly be happening in this situation? Before you even started thinking, I've come up with at least seven.

1. He drank too much and he got arrested for being drunk in public.
2. He got hit by a drunk driver on his way home.
3. He was the drunk driver who hit someone.
4. He fell asleep behind the wheel and is in a ditch somewhere.
5. He hit a deer.
6. He met some charming girl and has gone home with her and when he comes home he will break up with me.
7. He didn't go where he said he was going when he left the house and he's joined a secret society and is now planning my death.
8. He is purposefully ignoring my calls because he finds me annoying and he doesn't love me anymore.
9. He left his phone in the car on purpose because he knew I would be worried about him and he doesn't want to talk to me. Because he's a big, fat jerk.
10. I said seven scenarios, didn't I? Here I am at 10, already.

Now, no matter which option I choose, I can totally convince myself that it is a reality. He will get home and I will be a fit of nerves, shaking with the certainty of the reality I've created. All by myself in my brain. Granted, I will use past experiences, my friends' situations, films, and other fun fabrications to foster this forged reality, but it will be anything but reality.

What a waste of energy, no? I could have just said to myself, I'm really annoyed that he's not available to communicate right now. But, instead of worrying about something over which I have no control, I'm going to pour myself a glass of wine, pop in a movie, make a bowl of popcorn and enjoy this peaceful night at home. Then, when he gets home, instead of accosting him with the questions that I could have been forming to figure out if my alternative universe was indeed a reality, I could just say, "Hi. How are you? How was your night?" And then after he shares that information with me, I am totally allowed to say, "I was a little worried about you for awhile. You didn't take my calls or answer any of my texts. I'm glad you're safe." Because that's honesty. And honesty is important.

But what about for harder situations? Like illness? I'm currently developing a handsome, little cold. Can I convince myself that this won't be a full blown virus and thereby I will feel better as soon as I perceive that to be true? How do I convince myself that I'm not getting sick, while I feel like absolute crud? 

I believe the answer is: very carefully.

on faith

Before this blog gets too far along, I'd like to explain my thoughts on faith/religion/spirituality. I know I'll end up referencing this as we go along.

The reason I like yoga and the lifestyle it embodies is that it allows you to cherry pick your faith. If you lean towards the Jesus faiths, you can do your yoga to honor Him. If you're Jewish, you can do your down dog in the spirit of God. You can even say Shalom at the end of your practice. If you're Muslim, you can bow to Allah in your Mountain Pose. If you're atheist, you can thank Reason for your life. If you love the earth, you can thank its mother. So on and so forth.

In the literature I've been studying, every single introduction begs the reader to continue on his or her own personal walk of faith or non-faith and to use yoga as a supplement to a higher form of living.

Higher form of living? What? That sounds pretty hippie-dippy, right? I know. I agree. But, simply put, "higher form of living" can mean whatever you want it to mean.

I want it to mean this: I want to take time out to breathe. I want to take time out to just be. I want to be able to listen to nothing and not feel unsettled and nervous. I want to, instead of jumping to every possible conclusion of every uncertain situation I encounter, be at peace with the unknown. I want to enjoy eating a tangerine, slowly, with pleasure, just for the sheer fact that it's a delicious tangerine (yes, that was for you, Joe).

But you might be different. You might want to find enlightenment (whatever that is). You might want to use the power of prayer to fix your problems. You might want to get fit. You might want to use it as an excuse to get an hour to yourself every day with no interuptions.

The beauty of yoga is: ALL OF THIS IS OKAY. Just don't use yoga to take over the world or kill people. That's not really kosher. The general public frowns on negativity combined with yoga.

So, walk on, homie. And go in peace.

big ups, ganesha. you did good. real good.

Ganesha did indeed remove the obstacles I was worried about for my little babysitting adventure. We played catch, pretend, and charades. We ate. We watched educational movies. We read books, we sang. They slept. They didn't get out of bed once after I put them down. And I didn't even drug them. Promise. This morning, they creeped into my room at the bright, silly hour of 6 a.m. (the earliest they are allowed to disturb adults from their slumber). We had a little cereal, read several books and then did some sunny salutations out on the deck. Now we're watching more educational movies while I write this blog and prep a bigger breakfast.

Moral: If you're tweaking about something, let go. As hard as it might be, just let go. It will take care of itself and everything will be okay. Because honestly, besides seeing that shape of an elephant in the clouds yesterday, I did nothing more than let go of my stress and welcome in the love I needed to care for these beautiful little babes. As a result, everything has gone swimmingly.

P.S. I plan to take an earth-shattering nap later.

seeing visions

During my yoga and meditation this morning, I worked with chanting for the first time. I started small, just simply chanting "om," giving the 'oh' and the 'mm' sounds longer stresses than the other, alternatively. It felt a little strange at first, and then, after I stopped caring what people would think if they saw me, it was very grounding. Focusing on the vibrations the sound made throughout my body and just being in that moment was one of the most authentic experiences I've had in toying with open, thoughtless meditation.

In the beginning of many yoga classes, the instructor tells you to set an intention for your practice. This is usually supposed to be the time that you dedicate you practice to someone you love, someone you've been thinking about or worrying about, to an international tragedy, to something you're struggling with internally, to the power of letting go or just to something simple like happiness, love, peace and joy.

Today I dedicated my practice to something pretty unique. I'm going to be babysitting my 2- and 4-year-old cousins this afternoon, into the evening, putting them to bed, waking up with them at 6am, serving them breakfast and playing until my aunt and uncle return from their romantic night away. I am a nervous mess about this. The children are wonderful, but they're also children, little tiny children who are just learning to lie and sass. You would think that because of working at a school, I would have no qualms about this. However, at school, when a child becomes too much to handle, I just radio the principle or the teacher and they swoop in. I have extreme reservations about using any sort of physical force or loud voices with children. I scare myself when I do those things. But, sometimes, taking a child by the hand and walking them to their room (after you've already asked them more than once) and using a firm voice, is what they need. For some reason, this action gives me the heebie jeebies.

So, during my outdoor meditation today, I dedicated my practice to letting go of this fear and to opening my heart to caring for these children with all the love they're capable of giving back. I asked for guidance and patience in the harder moments if they get fussy. I requested that even when they're being difficult that I do all that I'm doing to discipline them with as much love as if we were sitting on the couch reading a book.

I went through my practice (headstands, handstands and shoulder stands) and then, in corpse pose, I took deep breaths, relaxing every part of my body. My eye sockets, my throat, my cheeks. My toes my fingers. My armpits. Then, suddenly, I had the impulse to open my eyes and look at the sky. I was, after all, outside.

This is where things get a little weird.

I looked up and, with a childlike smile, I noticed a shape in the clouds. It looked sort of like an elephant with his trunk turned up.

Wait a minute, I thought. Isn't an elephant one of the Hindu gods or something? Doesn't it mean something in yoga or India? (Yes. I'm still learning about all of this. So give me some credit.)

After I finished my practice, I googled, "India Elephant God." Up popped good old Ganesha, the remover of obstacles. How fitting. I sat at my computer smiling. Well, what do you know? I thought. I'm not as worried about babysitting, after all.

on truth

Today, I read an article in the June issue of Yoga Journal (the publication that inspired my almost daily home practice) that spoke about honesty. It was one of those empowering women stories about all these ladies who are doing amazing things with their lives through the guidance of yoga and its sutras. In the midst of all the inspirational hoopla, there was a section about honesty. The author challenged the reader to be honest with him or herself and said that through this conscious action, the things with which you struggle will start to fade away. Or, at the very least, you'll be able to notice them before they flare up and smooth over the frayed edges.

So I've decided to use this blog as a release. I'm hoping, that by typing this out and sending it into the open interweb, I'll feel more accountable, more honest and thereby more collected in my moments of highest stress and passion.

1. I'm high strung and controlling. I find myself to be happiest when I have something completely planned out and it all happens according to plan.
2. I take my urge to control to the next level: when I'm certain that whatever it is that I'm planning isn't going to go the way I want it to, I explore every other possible outcome: negative and positive, no matter how outlandish they may seem. It makes me feel better to have thought of everything before it happens so that I can deal with it, whatever it might be.
3. I love attention. I will do whatever I can, no matter how crude and lewd (and sometimes dishonest) it may be, to garner laughter or shock from my audience.
4. I have a hot temper. Counting to five or 10 is nearly impossible. If I went on a walk before I talked to someone about something that made me upset, I would save my friends and family a whole world of hurt.
5. I despise fibbing and lying and I assume that every time someone keeps the truth from me, they are doing it to hurt me. Badly.
6. I don't designate my feelings before I share them with other people. I start to feel something and before I assess the situation and make a decision about what I should do, I call other people to see what I should do first. Thereby proving that I don't trust myself.
7. I like to run away from my problems. Ever since the seventh grade. When things get sticky, I start planning a way out. And I'm pretty public about it. But often times, I don't actually leave until a couple years after I knew it was time to go.

I think those are the major ones. I'm sure more will surface once I start my yoga teacher training, because, from what I've heard, stuff really hits the fan and reveals itself in the strangest ways. So look for a part dos in the coming months.

on energy

We hear it all the time: "Send some good energy my way, please." "Oh, do you feel the energy in this room?" "My energy is all off." Some of us might even know people who call themselves energy workers. Others may scoff at the idea of using "energy" in a sentence, reserving that word for a definition regarding inertia or what happens when they drink coffee or a Red Bull.

In this particular instance, I'm speaking of none of the aforementioned uses. In certain types of yoga, they spend a lot of time asking the practitioner to focus on the energy within. This reveals itself in many different forms, but my personal favorite is during savasana when the teacher will take the yogi on a journey through his or her different body parts, usually starting from the heart center (a magical place somewhere in the very middle of your upper torso) and stemming out in all directions. The teacher asks the student to feel the energy in each joint, muscle, tissue and cell of that body part, until it's time to move on to the next. The goals vary, but ultimately it would be great if the practitioner sat up and felt a more connected sense of self (whatever that means, right?).

In a recent class at One Yoga, the instructor used his soothing voice to start us on this journey. Many people fall asleep during this part of yoga. Others (me! me! me!) spend this time thinking about what they plan to do when the class is over, or what they did before class, or about how annoying their significant other was when he/she said that one thing last Thursday. What a jerk. What I should have said to him was...oh no...crap...I'm supposed to be focusing on my -- what body part are we on? Knees? Okay. Knees. I have strange knees. They sometimes look fat. How does one have fat knees? NO! BLAH! What body part now? Ankles...ankles...

And so on. But in this particular class, on this particular day. Energy made sense to me. Perhaps it was the teacher, perhaps it was me, perhaps it was the day, perhaps it was the room. All I know is I used my imagination (which I honestly believe is the core foundation of any faith-based living, but more on that later) to see a little bright light resting somewhere between my sternum and my spine. The light looked very much like this moment in the Neverending Story:

You remember that little glowing grain of sand that the princess handed off to Bastian? That's what I found somewhere inside my innards. Then I turned it into something that looked like one of those old 1995 Windows screen savers and sent that into each body part. First the right hip, then knee, then ankle, then each toe and back up and down the other leg. Then arms, then neck, and throat, then face and head. For the first time in my yoga experience I could not only see these parts with my eyes closed, without touching them, and without twitching them, but also, as I focused on each part, I felt it getting warmer. Those little strands of screensaver energy were somehow making my knee warmer than the rest of my body.

Instead of standing up and shouting, "HOLY CATS! I THINK I FIGURED OUT WHAT ALL YOU CRAZY HIPPIES WERE TALKING ABOUT! THIS IS TOTALLY DOPE, YO!" I relaxed into a pretty beautiful half-concious state where all I cared about was feeling each part to which I was directed. There were plenty of moments when I thought about changing my cat's diet, or buying new plants for the deck, but they were quick little thought bubbles that popped as soon as they were blown.

Since then, in my personal practice, I've managed to get back to that little place using 80s movies and old computer software as my guide. It's been just as amazing and even more pleasurable.

Moral: Using whatever extraneous means possible, you really can do just about anything if you make special use of your imagination.