Saturday 4 September 2021
I just wrote a description of the live online class I taught yesterday (Friday 3 September) and I thought I’d share it. Go to the end of this intro to see it or read on to see what else is on my mind before you get there.
Information is only useful to us if we can access it. That’s true if it’s stored in a book or in our mind. We need a way in, and we benefit from a guide to the place where what we need is stored/resides. Ultimately that guide is our Self, but along the way to that relationship being fully established in us, it can be very helpful to have the shared energy and enthusiasm of fellow seekers on the path, and someone who knows a bit more about where we’re going. I’ve recently reflected a lot on these simple truths, because when we entrust something as important as our hearts and minds to the guidance of someone else there are risks and responsibilities.
Both the risks and responsibilities have been front and centre in my thoughts because my long-term yoga teacher recently became the latest superstar teacher outed for having sex with a student. I’ll admit I wasn’t surprised. Also, I didn’t think the sex was the biggest part of the problem in this case. It was just the boundary crossing that flagged up the problem. To be honest, I was somewhat relieved because I’ve known since I first met him that he has unresolved issues with women that play out in his teaching. I’ve also known for several years that he was exhausting himself with suffering, and that he was unfortunately spreading his suffering around instead of facing and working on it. I hope the public reveal provides the opportunity to step off the stage and out of the spotlight to give himself time to self-reflect and to heal.
You might wonder, like I did, why I stuck around knowing these things. Here’s my logic. The pain that arose in me in response to certain (and certainly not all) interactions with him was because of pain stored in me that needed a way to be seen and let go. So long as I took the opportunity to learn and grow, and in that way be a good student, there was enough benefit to keep going. My view of things was the teacher was flawed like all of us, but he was an awesome conduit for the teachings which felt extremely valuable to me. I held these 2 beliefs side by side. I did not deny to myself or excuse his hurtful words and actions, I just tried to figure out how to get more of the good stuff without getting the bad. You must know that often didn’t work. It was such a relief when I found other people who saw the same things I did. It’s lonely without someone else validating your sense of reality. He wasn’t going to confirm it. He was mostly unconscious/blind to the painful role he played and instead repeatedly made exaggerated claims of his own enlightened capacity to see what his students needed. I’m sure he aspired to be that idealised self, and to some degree, and in some cases, he achieved it. I also know, in the world of the mind, rife with the potential for misperception and misinterpretation, we could both be wrong about each other. It’s easy for that all to feel crazy making and to undermine trust in the accuracy of our own perceptions. Somehow we have to decide what’s true and decide what to do.
For this to work for me, I felt I had to ignore the candy offerings of what he thought he was and could give and accept the bitter pills that showed me some of the deepest sources of my pain. I also accepted the practices that might make me more capable of taking care of myself. Before me was an image of what could happen if I forgot to remember that I have my own work to do just like everyone else. We all come to yoga practice for a reason, and we keep at it for a reason. For as long as we live, we have opportunity to learn, grow, and transform our experience into something beneficial. That belief keeps me going. So does the sangha of fellow seekers I met through study with him, and the good and joyful experiences that were part of it all.
Here’s something else. Let’s acknowledge that as humans we completely rely upon someone else to perform necessary survival functions for us long before we have the capacity to do it ourselves. As an infant our survival depends on a good-enough caretaker. So deep in our psyche resides a memory that we can’t do it ourselves and we really, really need someone else to nourish and soothe us. To some degree we carry on the rest of our lives looking for someone other than ourselves who can do that for us. Although some of us take the counter approach and think never again will I be that vulnerable to anyone else. It depends on so many different moments that cumulatively shape our capacity for experiencing relationship safety, trust, dependency, mutuality, reciprocity, and independence. These same experiences shape our sense of ourselves as reliable, effective, and trustworthy providers of our own self-care. Or not.
With this is mind, it struck a chord in me when I heard Indu Arora say sva dharma is self-care. Like breath between mind and body, sva dharma is the bridge between tapas and Ishvara Pranidhana on the kriya yoga path. It is usually translated as self-awareness, self-reflection, and guidance found in study of (scriptural) yoga texts. It’s the awareness that guides our choices of self-effort in tapas and to surrender to rest in Ishvara. We often speak of our dharma as the big guiding purpose of our lives, and many of us struggle to figure out what that is. My aforementioned teacher wrote a book about it with lots of exercises to help us work it out. What I took from what Indu said is sva dharma is lived in our everyday choices and activities, and those need to be undertaken in a way that we take care of ourselves. She identified 3 areas: 1) lifestyle choices (what we do and don’t do), 2) nourishment (food, ideas, space, and time), and 3) rest (pause, reflect, rest, and sleep). Here was the kicker. She said, we can’t out-source or for very long or neglect self-care. It is our first duty in life. Our second duty is to take care of the place where we live. So ideally, the people we depend upon early in life, first do for us what we need, then teach us how to do for ourselves. There’s nothing really novel in that idea, but it is apparently quite hard to achieve with wisdom, compassion, and joy and to widely put into practice.
Wise words from a friend recently also struck a chord that has continued to resonate within me. She was a human rights activist who is now a dedicated seeker of a Zen enlightenment experience. I keep learning from her. She said she became an activist to reduce human suffering, but the work caused her great suffering. It caused her family suffering because they worried for her well-being. Now her heart still goes out to those who suffer, but she has decided reducing her own suffering is also important and must come first. She realised that reducing her suffering reduced suffering in the world. If she couldn’t reduce her own suffering, how could she reduce the suffering of others? For any inaccuracies in my re-telling of this conversation, I apologise. This is what I took from our conversation, and what I have held onto and shared.
The name for the heart chakra is Anahata. It is translated as “unstruck sound.” Perfect potential. The heart before suffering is introduced into it. This is the true Garden of Eden. The paradise of the Self that is joyous, free, and able to manifest anything desired. Within us is also a memory that this is possible. We have an awareness of what could be. The yearning to re-experience drives us to seek freedom from what binds and limits us, to seek pleasure, and to create. When I re-tell the teachings I received from the women cited above, and I say they struck a chord with me, I feel it in my spiritual heart. I feel it as awakening a truth that resides deep inside, a potential that has come into being in me that I want to act on and manifest.
We can all only do our best, but hopefully our best keeps getting better. Apparently, we are responsible for our own self-care after a certain point! Many others may play a role in fostering or limiting our growth. We will learn from teachers the easy and the hard way, what to do and what not to do. It won’t be all or none, and some discernment will be required. We don’t have to do it alone, although ultimately, we alone are responsible and capable of making the most important decisions in our lives regardless of how good or poor the other people in our lives were at helping us get started and keep going.
Here’s one more recent voice in my head to close this reflection out. The other day I was whining/venting/explaining how hard it feels to do some things I need to do because of all the messiness in the world which is living as a mess in my mind. A dear friend and fellow seeker who I can always count on to remind me to keep going replied by sending me an article about doing the hard work. Greatly simplifying, the long and short of it was a Nike ad: Just Do It. She often teaches on the Bhagavad Gita. I’ve got to ask her if she explains Krishna’s first advice to Arjuna this same way. He says in effect: Just Do It. That wasn’t good enough for Arjuna when he was facing a life and death choice that went against many of his values. It took another 17 chapters of answers for Arjuna to feel clear about choosing what to do and acting on it. Life is risky and we have responsibilities. Our dharma is to do what is ours to do. The action we need to take is not the action Arjuna had to take, it’s the right action in our own conflict. And yes, this is a pep talk to me. I hope it helps you too.
If you need a little help getting started, here’s the class description that set this whole reflection in motion. If you want to experience the class, here’s the link: Yoga with Lisa - Calming an Anxious Mind + Prana Dharana This one is freely shared, so feel free to join in. For the next 2 weeks I’m going on a driving holiday to see the places along our new country border. When I’m back I’ll resume teaching.
Take good care of yourselves,
Lisa
Yoga Class with Lisa 4 September 2021
It makes a difference how we start, so we start. What invites you into practice? Today I gave the in-person group a choice of first position: sitting, lying on back or front, or kneeling? The top 2 choices were sitting and lying on back so that's where this class begins. The students asked for something calming, because all the opening up of the world while exciting is also frightening and somewhat overstimulating. How we manage our energy makes a difference too, so we regulated our breath from a relaxed position, moved into stronger movement while maintaining a steady breath awareness and pace, and returned to relaxation then sitting to end. Seated breathing practice today is prana dharana - concentrating energy and awareness in the centre of the forehead, and then linking centre of the forehead to centre of the mind. This practice enables us to connect to our cognitive capacity to see the big picture, see multiple perspectives, and pause in order to reflect and choose, then link this ability to the centres in our minds of memory and emotion. There are many ways that yoga practice can help us nourish and regulate ourselves - I hope todays practice will help you to do the same if that's what you need, too. Practice with awareness of your own condition and modify your actions to be good for you.
