The theme of exploring "what's valid" in my life continues…. with twists and turns included. This week I entered a new land… the land of teaching yoga. The subtle desire to do this has been a quiet voice I have heard for many years but never acted on. But this week, the correct timing arrived…. as, exiting my shower stall in preparation of attending a new morning yoga class, I received a text from my close friend the instructor informing me that todays class was cancelled (due to her daughter's sudden fever). I had been a bit rushed earlier when arising and had skipped meditating… so since I now wasn't going to class, I chose to sit and meditate a bit. What arose after a few minutes was the inspiration to contact my teacher-friend and offer to teach her other class later that day. My offer was enthusiastically accepted…and I was suddenly stoked…lit up…yes! yes! yes! my heart-song danced... And thus it happened that a couple of hours later, with a few words of coaching and a lot of my teachers trust in my heart, there I was, meeting my first yoga class.
I must say in retrospect it was like a dress rehearsal… I had not fully embodied being a yoga instructor yet, and I had some learning moments. But they were just moments… the class as a whole was successful. And, next day (as the child's fever had continued) I also taught my second class (to a different group of students). As I had used what I had learned in the first experience and had done some preparatory work before class this time (instead of 'winging it'), I felt the yoga instructor in me emerge much much more powerfully. I've been in the impact of that experience since…
Just like when I discovered I was a painter, I can see responding to this meditatively given impulse to offer to teach yoga has created a seminal event in my life. It's almost like 'how did I not see this before?'…. this activity being a so perfectly positive way of both strengthening my own on-again/off-again personal practice AND, at the same time, contributing directly to the lives of other people too… in the very subject area that I am recognizing I am quite well designed to contribute in… consciousness awareness training via teaching the physical and mental and emotional principles of yoga. Teaching yoga was like discovering a level of knowing inside me that I had not known…. because… as soon as I knew I'd chosen what the next posture was going to be, the words of how to teach it just came into me without hesitation…. and beyond that, additional commentary also often arose, sharings about why and how and in what ways doing that asana would assist the life of the practitioner. It wasn't just physical yoga I was sharing… it was a synthesis, the best synthesis I could be the channel of in that moment… of philosophy, breathwork, posture, attitude, intentionality… all done through me in a way that I can see was intended to create a specific kind of space in the room--- where--- if people were attentive-- jewels of wisdom that could transform a life were available to be acquired. That's what just came out to be spoken…jewels… like, that the first principle of yoga (union) was/is Paying Attention. Meaning, first of course, to the body and the muscles and the breath, but also to the mind, and to the movement of the emotions. How'd I know to say that? I discovered that even though the 'I' of my mind often doesn't know the 'how', THAT which uses me as yoga teacher, it most certainly does.
It's also like that when writing… same/same… how do I know what to write? I often don't. I just let THAT write. Or, when I paint, I just let THAT paint. same/same. When writing, I become THAT's pen… when painting, I become THAT's brush… when doing yoga, I become THAT's non-doer… the Self…the knowing of the Yoga. And the quality that is present is that because it is shared with others, it becomes a communion. For everyone there (meaning 'Being Here') and willing to enter. That's what is so great about classes… that the joining into a group communion is sooooo much easier than communing alone. Because to really get the taste of union/communion only requires two (or more) releasing their separate-mindedness and joining into 'the one spirit' mindedness. So… so funny… in this sense of it, leading yoga is actually (without ever saying anything 'religious') exactly like… leading worship.
Switching to another subject… 'Working with Anger'…. an insight recently was given. I was surfing Facebook, and found my self reading a story about a woman being horribly treated by police in a way that was so inexcusable and highly offensive to my sense of justice that I was flooded with anger and hate towards such abusive authorities (and of course truth be told, not for the first time either). I felt myself to be on the edge of enragement, and because of that, I recognized I seriously needed to 'get under' the reactions being triggered. So I intentionally followed my breathing a while, and worked to release the grip of the anger. Suddenly, I remembered a phrase… 'You feel my pain!', and a new view opened up. This view was liberating and deeply compassionate… both being states that are natural antidotes to intense anger. And I was suddenly deeply grateful for my mid-1990's Body Electronics classes, and my then teacher, who had installed this view in me so many years ago….
Allow me to explain a bit. From Freud onward, psychologists have created more and more refined human 'emotional tone scales'. These track and model the movement of human emotions, both evolving and devolving. One of the states is 'Anger'. It is placed above 'Apathy' and 'Grief' in terms of expression energy, but well below 'Enthusiasm' and 'Joy'. And the operative intentionality of anger is defined as: 'to communicate pain'… as, when angry, what we are doing is trying to get someone else to feel the pain we are then in… hence: "YOU! Feel MY Pain!" And the way it usually (doesn't) work(s) is that if the other is unwilling to do that, to get that, 'we' just get angrier. Why? Because when IN anger, we are blinded by the active pain body to any healthy way to heal ourselves.
Now, take the situation that I was reading about. I could tell by the headlines that it 'wasn't happy-making fluff', and I could have chosen to not read it. But I have seen that (for me) such avoidance or denial of interest of things that actually DO interest me is also a signal that I'm choosing to not rock my own boat….that right then, being blind and staying unhealed is somehow preferable to facing my growth path. Meaning, if I recognize the passionate voice in me that is triggered by social injustices as a signal that my own similar wounds are not yet healed, somehow I need to be responsible for that woundedness in myself or my fate will be to UNCONSCIOUSLY perpetuate it. This is the human dilemma… that we, in our unhealedness, perpetuate our unhealedness, especially by traumatizing others as we have been traumatized. This is 'The Golden Rule, reversed. My view is that the only way out of this is through the heart… via compassion on ourselves and others. To do either, we/I need to SEE the truth of the matter, and that is not done by not looking. So, I chose to not avoid…I read the article, I felt the pain it brought up, and I worked with it. From a 'staying in the comfort zone' analogy, this is akin to walking across the hot coals, yes?
Internally, the 'working with it' was/is like allowing a battle within myself while remembering at the same time to remain whole. I say 'allowing', as that is what I see God does (as we exist within the Godness Wholeness, which (or who) obviously allows everything that we wish to call negative to be, as well as allowing everything we call positive to also be). So this allowing, to me, is key to being authentic, as to just 'focus on the positive' misses 'including EVERYTHING' by just about 50%. Which is like acknowledging only half of the Yin/Yang symbol to be real. Doing that leaves us/me, like a 'halfling', a 'half-master'…at best. To me, that's why Positivity teachings are somewhat suspect… because most teach to 'deny the negative' and it will disappear from your life. (By the way, THIS is me voicing 'the battle'.) I would love that to be the Truth Universal, but I do not experience it… especially when the view is expanded beyond the personal. What I mean by that is that, while yes, we can personally attract and create an individual world full of beauty and abundance via positive thinking (and my world is full of many such blessing because I have a predominating positivity of being)…. what I know by direct realization is that I am the whole thing here, and here on this planet no matter how positive I am personally, I still see great suffering being perpetuated by unconsciousness. As I am at least potentially 'one with all', and all includes that there is still suffering here, what I currently can see is that 1. ending suffering starts with me ceasing to suffer, and 2. teaching others how to end their own suffering. I'm pretty sure this does not mean ending up in a positivity-based denial of my pain… I sense it means that when I suffer, that I not resist it…. thus do I understand the Buddhist principle of 'suffering that is not suffering'. Onward.
Now, as an affirmation, I will say: fully conscious beings don't hate. Why would they…. they know everything is themselves. And being that I have chosen to be fully conscious, that means I have also given up 'the right' to hate (anyone, including myself). Even though I sometimes forget this in the moment, that is the fire of the internal battle… that hate is not an option, yet hate is present in us/me (at least occasionally) if we/I are not fully healed. This is the zone the early 2oth century Sufi teacher and mystic Harzat Inayat Khan spoke of when he said: "Shatter your ideals on the rock of Truth". Meaning, get real, and deal with it. Which further means to me: LOOK at it…SEE through it. And regarding this reading-triggered incident, all that I am reporting to you is that when Ilooked at it asking for help to SEE through it, the gift I was given liberated me from the hate I was feeling in me. Because by remembering the thought "You feel my pain!" (in the context of the emotional tone scale teachings)---what I was seeing immediately shifted from being 'brutalizing cops' to simply seeing 'people being cops because they had been themselves brutalized, and who were then brutalizing others as the only way they had found to express their pain… by unconsciously doing to others as had been done to them…. by placing others in similar pain". That shift allowed for compassion, just like similar shifts by the Dalai Lama allow him to be compassionate towards the Chinese… just like similar shifts allowed Martin Luther King to not be reduced to hating those who hated him… Compassion for others and self are the foundations of our own healing process, for it allows for us to experience forgiveness. When freed by that forgiveness, I see that that is the first time we can then take non-angry action, if that is what we are led to see is necessary to do. I believe that sometimes, as lightworkers, that may be necessary. If we have forgiven, and have Love, such action could be done without creating negative karma. To me, that is the goal. For a healed world is a world without the karma of suffering being perpetuated into perpetuity.
This was a nice win for me… to see through the hate and to get the 'compassion pop' pretty quickly. It's what I see the true work is really like… everywhere/everywhen… to see into the situations arising always more deeply… evermore quickly remembering the truth while doing so… immediately recognizing the lies that will appear within us… lies that are waiting to set their hooks into our peace. As we walk this walk, we naturally deepen as beings, and become more and more foundational, more trustable---both within ourselves and to ourselves, and also without, to others. This, in my view, is the Way of the Godness…. for nothing more impacts the world toward transformation than a transformed man or woman living fully self-expressed in their freedom . In time, through practice, we all know… this is our own personal destiny.
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