sciencedaily.com“Your task is not to seek love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” ~ Rumi via Daily Good
Daily Good’s post is a part of my every day regiment. The fine folks who run the site put together a poignant, inspiring post every day. It always resonates with me. Their recent post inspired by Rumi’s quote made me start to think differently of how I work to achieve my goals. Is my focus on the goal itself misplaced? Could I actually be more efficient (which I love to be!) if I focused not on the goal itself, but on the barriers that I need to hurdle over to get to the goal.
The 2-inch picture frame
In college, one of my roommates gave me a 2-inch dual picture frame. One one side, I have a picture of a row-boat – it reminds me of the importance of embarking on new journeys. On the other side, I have a picture of a park bench that has two sitting spots clearly worn through the paint – it reminds me of the importance of having companionship along our journeys.
Whenever I have a very large task ahead of me, that 2-inch picture frame reminds me to break the task apart into small pieces. I just need to work on the masterpiece of my life one 2-inch portion at a time, just as a painter or sculptor does. Each piece feeds into the whole, bit by bit.
Playing pool
A number of years ago I dated a guy who was a master pool player. I liked to play pool though I was pretty bad at it. I focused on the cue ball, and not the ball I was trying to send into a pocket of the table. Once he helped me shift my focus to the long-term ball I wanted to sink, my pool playing improved dramatically. In this case it wasn’t the task at hand (hitting the cue ball) that mattered most, but rather what I hoped that task helped to do for me in the long-run (sinking the ball in the pocket.)
Equal amount of attention on the details and on the grand vision
For a long time I thought the focus on short-term and long-term was an either / or decision, and for the most part I focused on the long-term. I don’t think this was a bad choice; it helped me to make some serious short-term trade-offs so that I could reach goals like putting myself through college and through graduate school, both of which yielded huge benefits on my life overall.
The quote by Rumi reminded me that as I take on bigger life goals, such as working on Compass Yoga full-time, making peace with my dad, and finding the guy who is going to be my partner in life, seeking to remove the barriers to my success is a viable and fruitful way to travel down the path.
“When you feel pain, question it. Why is it there and how can we heal it? The body wants to heal.” ~ Cheri Clampett
In the last few weeks, there has been an opening. A pain that’s been hidden, so deep for so long, refused to lay down any longer. It had to bubble up in me so that finally after far too long it could release. The pain asked to be looked at, considered, appreciated, and then, finally forgiven.
This reminded me of something Cheri Clampett said a few weeks ago in the therapeutic yoga teacher training at Integral Yoga Institute. Pain is our friend. It may not feel like it at first brush, but it is there to teach us. You can ignore it, medicate it, and try like heck to forget about it. It will not be dissuaded. Loyally, it will wait for you to be ready, to have the strength to meet it, sit with it, and understand it. That moment has finally arrived for me and my dad. We are ready to forgive, release, and move on.
I have known this pain a long time. In some odd and uncomfortable way, it has become a friend. It’s been my fallback and my excuse for certain circumstances in my life. “I can’t do this because my dad was like that.” And for a while that was true; it’s just not true anymore. I am healed. I am whole. And I can do anything, even if I my dad didn’t he could.
Yesterday, I wrote about my regret that I didn’t go say goodbye to my dad when he was dying. What I didn’t mention is that I was 16 at the time. I didn’t have the tools to look so much pain in the face and not crumble. I needed to grow up before that was possible, and at 16 I wasn’t grown up, not by a long shot, and I couldn’t possibly have been expected to be. It was my dad’s time to go but it wasn’t yet my time to let go. Sometimes life is like that. Sometimes our timing is just off, and in those moments we do the best we can with what we’ve got. We operate with imperfect information all the time.
In the post yesterday I spoke about yesterday lessons, the lessons that our past teaches us so that we can improve going forward. Another yesterday lesson that my father’s passing taught me had to do with forgiveness. That lesson appeared more slowly, over a very long period of time, and in fits and starts: if we’re truly sorry, then pure, true forgiveness will find us. The “I’m sorry” moment starts us down the road to healing of every kind. All we have to do is ask for it. Forgiveness is a life force in and of itself. It changes everything. And if we believe in learning, in growing, in constantly evolving, then we must believe in forgiveness, of others and even more importantly, of ourselves.
In Buddhism there is a belief that every moment provides the exact teaching we need exactly when we need it. There’s no way at 16 that I could have known how deeply it would affect me to not say goodbye to my father. And in some strange, cosmically-correct way, I think the moment came and went exactly as it was supposed to be. I know so deeply that every moment comes to pass this way, and because of this belief, I have to forgive my dad and I have to forgive myself. We were two people who were doing the best we could with what we had. And even though we didn’t get a chance to meet in the middle this time around, in our own ways, in our own now separate worlds, we are both finding our way to forgiveness – of ourselves and of one another.
“If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.” ~ Pearl Buck
Searching yesterday is valuable, difficult work. I take it on every day because I believe so fully in the process of continuous improvement. I know and accept that I am not perfect, that I will never be perfect, and that there is always a way to do something better. This strong belief is helping me to make peace with yesterday and to lay down the heavy backpack of perfectionism. Perfection is a losing battle, and I hate losing even more than I hate imperfection.
Even with this strong belief in continuous improvement, some yesterdays have a way of gnawing at me even in my best moments. Not all yesterdays are created equal. I try to be thorough, thoughtful, and well-informed. I am the decision tree queen. I’d be willing to test my pro / con list speed and dexterity against anyone. I’ve been at this game of choice and decision-making for a very long time and for me, it’s an art.
My last yesterday with my father
So it’s sometimes especially difficult when I wish I had handled a situation from yesterday in a better way. I wish I had gone to the hospital and said good-bye to my father when I had the chance. I wish I could have swallowed my pride and my desire to be “right” – it might have saved me a lot of heartache in the aftermath. It’s not that I didn’t say good-bye to my father that bothers me so much; it’s that I made the free-willed choice to not say good-bye. I had good reasons for making that choice, though I wish I could have just laid them aside, whether they were right or wrong, and just been there with my mother to bear witness at the passing of a life that gave me life. It is my greatest and deepest regret, and with the finality of death it is something that I will never be able to do better. I can’t go back and say good-bye to my father in a better way, or for that matter, at all.
Keeping and living the lesson
The night my father died, I lost in a big way. His Holiness the Dalai Lama once said, “When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.” And in every day since my father passed I have tried to retain a very big yesterday lesson: when you walk away understand that you may not be able to retrace your steps.
Sometimes walking away is the best answer. Sometimes the only way you can really help someone heal is to remove yourself from the situation. Be very conscious of the downstream effects – for you and for that person – and understand that your decision in that moment has the ability to entirely alter your course going forward.
You will relive all of your yesterdays every day; act accordingly.
Army soldier in Trikonasana (Triangle Pose) at Fort Hood“The Bhagavad Gita’s subject is the war within, the struggle for self-mastery that every human being must wage if he or she is to emerge from life victorious.” ~ Eknath Easwaran
“We prepare soldiers for war. We train them to kill. Why don’t we also prepare them for peace and train them to stop killing?” ~ Wartorn 1861 – 2010
The quote above is by a mother who was interviewed in the HBO documentary Wartorn 1861 – 2010. 4 weeks after her son returned from Afghanistan, he was arrested for aggravated assault of a taxi driver of Middle Eastern decent. He was sentenced to 6 years in prison and has untreated PTSD, as do 39% of incarcerated vets in our country. “They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” he tells his family the night before his sentencing. “That’s bulls*it because I came back from Afghanistan weaker than I was before.”
It was interesting to watch this film on the heals of talking to a friend of mine about my desire to help veterans and their families through Compass Yoga. “Yoga for veterans? Um, aren’t you trying to offer classes to the population most unlikely to take them? What kind of business plan is that?” It was the first time I ever received this kind of feedback on the idea and it gave me pause. And then I asked myself the question that every entrepreneur asks herself at one point or another: “Am I crazy?”
Yoga-strong
My moment of doubt lasted only a moment but it was a powerful moment. It gave me more objectivity; it helped me to strengthen my story in a more creative and powerful way. There’s a perception that yoga is some kind of hippy dippy practice, that we all decorate our homes with butterflies and unicorns and rainbows, and that its main purpose is to figure out how to tie ourselves into pretzels. The truth is that the practice of yoga has much more in common with the United States Military than we realize, and therefore makes it an ideal complement to soldiers’ training and should be an integral part of their wellness programs when they return home.
The idea of war is an integral part of yogic texts The Bhagavad Gita is a central text for all yogis and many consider it the most important text. It is a small part of the larger Hindu epic, the Mahabharata. I’m re-reading it right now to remind myself all of the wisdom it stores in its 97 short pages. It’s setting is a battlefield likened to Armageddon, and its central characters are Lord Krishna (who also plays the role of guide and charioteer) and Prince Arjuna, a warrior. The Gita is the conversation between Krishna and Arjuna prior to the climatic battle of the Kurukshetra War. Arjuna is plagued by inner moral conflict over going to battle with his own loved ones, even though those loved ones have done horrible things to others, and the potential harm he will inflict on them. Krishna talks him through the conflict, ultimately explaining that the battle Arjuna is about to wage is the manifestation of karmic action, a righteous war for the purpose of justice. At the recent NYS Health Foundation conference I attended, guest speaker Colonel Sutherland explained, “War is vile, but there are things more vile to us: injustice. And that is why we fight.” Krishna concurs.
And this is only one example of war in Vedic texts. There are many others including the epic Ramayana, the story of how a war was fought by King Rama to rescue his kidnapped wife, Sita. Hanuman, the famed monkey-god of strength and masculinity and devotee of King Rama, is largely hailed for his never-say-die attitude that ultimately led him to rescue Sita and return her to Rama and to her home.
Where the gap isn’t being closed is that all of these text explain when war is necessary and then how to come down from conflict. It takes peace as the baseline, and gives warriors a context for understanding not only how to prepare for war in a time of peace but just as importantly how to prepare for peace in a time of war. This latter points is the great teaching of these texts. We need to provide that to our military – to arm them with tools to protect themselves in mind and body even in a time of war so that when they return home they can find peace.
Meditation seeks to settle the war of the mind
Many beginning meditators will say:
“I can’t meditate.”
“I can’t get my mind to calm down.”
“I can’t get my mind to stop wandering.”
Meditation is a practice to strengthen the discipline and focus of the mind. It drives our clarity and creativity. It helps us to quiet the chatter so that we can access the deep wisdom that already exists within each of us. It, in and of itself, is an act of faith. To be certain it is a hard thing to do – I failed on many attempts before I was finally ready to learn and understand it. We have to approach the mastery of our minds as a warrior approaches battle – with steadfast resolve and commitment to see the mission through. Because of a soldier’s strong sense of commitment and determination, the self-nurturing practice of meditation is a natural process to undertake in their own healing of mind and body.
Postures for warriors
Several of the base postures of the asana (physical) practice of yoga are named for warriors. There is a series of Warrior postures – 1, 2, 3, and Peaceful Warrior – that are central to all standing sequences. In yoga practice, warriors are emulated and admired as masters of poise and control.
Authenticity is critical for soldiers and yogis alike There is a common belief that yoga is about peace at any cost. When I tell people I practice and teach yoga I sometimes garner a funny look. Someone once said to me, “Aren’t you a little too tough to teach yoga?” And by tough, he meant honest, strong-willed, and opinionated. I am all of those things, and yes, I’m a yogi, too. And no, that is not a contradiction.
For me yoga has always been about authenticity, about having the strength to honestly call a spade and spade. It’s in this honesty to recognize the actual state of being that allows us to then transcend that state. Without honesty and awareness of self and others, without a strong sense of justice and a desire to make things right, yoga has very little hope of achieving anything, peace included. The same is true for the missions of our military forces.
Bringing more yoga to the U.S. military
For all these reasons, I have to disagree with my friend who felt soldiers would never take to yoga. Soldiers are the perfect population to focus my yoga teaching efforts on through Compass Yoga. I’m doing a lot of business development and networking at the moment, and hope to announce my first yoga program for veterans and their families in short order. Stay tuned!
To move a project forward, focus is necessary. You can’t know what beat to march to unless you can hear the drum. Without at least a general idea of where to go, a lot of effort is spent wandering around aimlessly. I’m an efficiency junky and I hate wasting time, or worse yet having someone else waste my time, so focus is incredibly important to me.
Stop and Get Clear Compass Yoga is beginning to occupy a great portion of my life, which is what I’ve been working toward for the past 18 months. It’s very much the work of my lifetime, or many lifetimes, and it’s my legacy. I feel blessed to have found this calling so early on in my life and to have so much clarity on its direction and purpose. My yoga practice and teaching is very much focused on its therapeutic aspects and the relief it can provide us for both mental and physical wellbeing.
To get to this clarity, I had to really put aside to outside influences, get quiet, and listen. There were lots of people who wanted to send me off in different directions once I finished my first leg of yoga teacher training. I am very grateful that they were so interested, but when I really stopped and considered their advice, I just couldn’t follow their instructions and be authentic. I had to go my own way and forge my own path. It’s the message I received in my daily meditation practice and it’s the one that felt most worthwhile.
Assessment Time – Take Off the Blinders and Expand the Mind
Once I knew I wanted to have a therapeutic focus in my teaching, I took a look at the landscape of where to take further training and where to begin looking for opportunities to teach. I quickly realized that few training programs focus on therapeutics (which will be another focus of Compass Yoga once I build up the organization a bit more) and there is an incredible amount of need for it. I hit the opportunity jackpot with this road, and it dovetailed perfectly with my own unique personal experience with yoga.
I found my way to yoga for therapeutic purposes and it made a tremendous difference in my life. Finding this same emphasis as my teaching purpose brought all of my experiences, as challenging as they were, full circle. It gave them great value and purpose. Once I realized all of this available opportunity and all that I have to give in this realm, I felt like someone took off the blinders that I have been wearing for so many years. Now I see opportunity everywhere.
Choice – the Final Frontier
I quickly realized that I could easily spin myself around in a circle if I didn’t narrow down my business development efforts to a population or a cause that I feel most passionately about. There’s no end to the amount of work that can be done in therapeutic yoga and it’s easy to get caught up in wanting to help everyone. I’ve always found that by trying to serve everyone, you serve no one well. I had to choose, and choose I did.
How I chose to focus on helping veterans and their families
I found my way to yoga as a means of recovery – from trauma, stress, anxiety, and insomnia. By my early twenties, I found that my mind and body were sufficiently battered. Yoga helped me to pick up the pieces and put myself back together again. Over time, it helped to heal old and new wounds alike and continues to do so. It became so much more than an exercise I did on a mat. It became a way of life. I live my practice; it’s always with me and within me and that’s a powerful possession to have.
A Teacher Finds Her Students
My goal with my teaching is to help others like me, others who feel battered, beaten down, or lost, and want very much to feel independent and in control of their own lives again. When I hear and read the stories of veterans, when I hear the stats of how much help they and their families need, on some very basic level I understand that need. I have never been into battle as they have. I’ve never even held a weapon of any kind. I do personally understand the aftermath of trauma and what it does to a family, particularly to children. I understand profound, irreversible loss, grief, and guilt. I understand the feeling of not being whole, present, and engaged. I’ve been there, too.
Yoga, which literally translates to “union”, helped me to bring it all back together for me and I know I can use it to help veterans and their families. The practice gave me direction, discipline, and an outlet to process and feel my feelings so that I could move on, so that I could transcend. No matter what the cause, that’s what all people in trauma are looking for – not a way to forget but a way to move on and honor all that we learned in the process. Yoga gets us there. It takes time and patience, but the door is open if we have the courage to walk through.
“The journey of a thousand miles begins beneath one’s feet.” ~ Lao-tzu, Chinese philosopher
Tucked away on a quiet section of East 11th Street, there’s literally a tower of healing. Formerly the St. Denis Hotel, 80 East 11th Street is home to private practice wellness practitioners, now including Compass Yoga. I’ll be teaching yoga private clients and very small group classes at this address.
I learned about the building through an ad on Craig’s List. That ad led me to one place that wasn’t exactly right for me, though that place led me to connect with the building’s Facebook page where I posted a message and got a number of responses. Today I picked up the keys to a space I’ll be renting on an hourly basis, and took a look at a few additional space so that I can have a network of options for added flexibility in my client scheduling. I took the advice of my dear friend, Lon, and celebrated this big yesterday evening. Today, I’m rolling up my sleeves and getting down to work on my business development plans. Time to build a client base!
Breaking the chicken and egg cycle of commercial real estate
There’s a tough paradigm about being a private practice practitioner of any kind: it’s tough to start to build a client book without an office space and it’s tough (and expensive!) to commit to office space without having a client book. So what’s an enterprising lady to do? Set her priorities / nonnegotiables and plan to move forward. Here’s what mine looked like:
Priorities / nonnegotiables
Easy access by a number of subway lines
Quiet
Safe space – for client and for me
Doorman
Clean space conducive to healing
Rent by the hour at a reasonable rate
Opportunity to cancel if I needed to
No lease signing or commitment of hours required
Action plan:
Decide if there is an amount of money I’m willing to lose on the space – could I afford to rent it to do my practice teaching with friend?
Poke around Craig’s List to get an idea of going rates for this kind of space
Identify a few key possibilities to call and email to ask LOTS of questions
Check out the spaces in person if they pass the sniff test via phone and email
Establish a network of spaces to call on when I book a client
Knowing what you want is half the battle
This set of priorities and action plan gave me maximum flexibility, convenience, and an appropriate level of financial and operational risk that I could live with. I was lucky to find an entire building of wellness private practice spaces that I could cobble together to fulfill my priorities. Though I was also prepared to be lucky and very clear on what I needed. If you know what you’re looking for, it’s much easier to find it!
A step in the right direction
So now the fun begins – I start to build up my client base with the confidence that I have a few places that my students and I can call our home. My friend and client, Crystal, has graciously offered to cater sushi when I’m ready for my grand opening reception in the space. There’s an invite heading to an inbox near you!
I’m ready to dive in and see where all of this takes me in due time. It feels so good to begin. I am continually amazed by the direct correlation between the clarity of our asks of the Universe and its willingness to fulfill those asks just when we need them to fall in to place. Onward and upward in the name of greater healing!
”]This week I had to make the tough decision to let go of the idea of submitting to speak for a second time at SXSW. I had an incredible experience in March speaking about the topic of yoga and creative focusand teaching yoga to SXSW conference participants. The people at SXSW are inspiring and generous. I packed so much learning into those 5 days; it made me feel alive. When I got home, I immediately began thinking about speaking topics for SXSW 2012.
And this in the past few weeks an odd and wonderful possibility came into focus for me. For many years, I have wanted to travel to India, the original seat of yoga. This desire has become increasingly stronger over the past couple of years as I’ve committed more fully to my yoga path – as a student and as a teacher. India is a tough place, and particularly difficult for independent travelers. I have tried to plan a trip before and once I got the tome of a guidebook in the mail, it became immediately apparent that this trip would have to be much more carefully planned and measured than my other globe-trotting adventures. India seemed to be new terrain in every way, though as the birthplace of yoga, a practice I am very deeply committed to, it holds an odd familiarity for me, too. .
My friend, Akash, had a birthday a few weeks ago. I wrote him a simple message on Facebook and got the kindest reply back. He wanted to know when I was finally going to get to India (where he and his wife live now) and said he was prepared to roll out the red carpet. There was something in his simple message and beyond-kind offer that set my imagination on fire. Here was the opportunity I was hoping to find; here was a way to India.
Now of course this trip will cost money and time, and the best time to travel in India is during our winter months. Given the timing of SXSW in March, I needed to make a tough choice – commit to applying to SXSW and letting the chips fall where they may or forgoing the trip to Austin in 2012 in favor of an incredible experience in India. There is something about this magical time in my life that makes India feel like the right fit. I feel like I am about to break open and free, about to start zooming along my path, and a trip to India to experience yoga in place of origin seems to be in order.
So bring on the swirls of color, the jasmine and saffron, the bustle, the crowds. Austin, I’ll miss you, though India is pulling so strongly at my heartstrings that I just can’t put it off any longer. I am ready to take it all in, to grow and learn in its presence and with its guidance. Now I just hope India is ready for me, too.
I remember watching the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 from my couch. It was two days after my birthday and I was sitting in my living room with my sister, Weez. Our eyes were fixed on the television, silent. It was that moment in which I began to turn my attention toward trying to understand the Middle East, trying to understand the sacrifices made by the noble 1% of U.S. citizens who give everything so that the other 99% of us can know freedom. 8 years later I have only begun to scratch the surface.
“The tide of war is receding,” said President Obama in his announcement last night about the draw down of U.S. troops in Afghanistan beginning next month. I heard those words with mixed emotions – happiness that our troops will begin to leave a war zone that has caused so much pain in their lives and the lives of their families, and sadness because I have some concept of the war they will face within themselves when they return home. And it’s this latter point that motivates me to keep pushing forward with Compass Yoga and my focus on using yoga for therapeutic purposes to help people dealing with the effects of PTSD.
This motivation led me to attend the New York State Health Foundation’s event “Paving the Path Back Home: Mobilizing Communities to Meet the Needs of Returning Veterans“. The purpose of the event is best summarized by a short video that was shown during Colonel David Sutherland‘s speech: “When our vets return from serving their country, let’s make sure their country is ready to serve them.” There are a lot of concerned community members who want to help; I am one of them. There are a lot of veterans and their families who want and need help when they return home. This conference wanted to provide information and inspiration to close the gap between the two.
New York State Health Foundation‘s President and CEO James Knickman gave the opening remarks and Colonel David Sutherland, Special Assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – Warrior and Family Support at The Department of Defense, gave a heart-stopping speech. It was part of his 50 States in 50 Weeks tour to raise awareness about the needs of returning veterans and their families. He didn’t use notes. He never paused. He never cracked, and every word carried a strength and profound emotion that made every listener sit up and take note. By the end of his speech I had an enormous lump in my throat and teary eyes. After his last word, I shot up out of my seat to join the standing ovation faster than I ever have in any audience. (You can learn more about Colonel Sutherland’s initiative Vets Prevail by visiting this Facebook page and website.)
A few facts revealed at the conference
The conference sought to dispel a number of rumors about the process of returning home from deployment:
– 1/3 of returning vets receive an inadequate amount of care. 1/3 of returning vets receive no care at all, to say nothing of the lack of care of families of veterans.
– “We don’t come home to big government. We come home to our communities. We come home to you. We trust you.” ~ Colonel David Sutherland. Most returning veterans and their families seek help, support, and services in their communities, not on military bases. This makes the development of community-based plans crucial to their health and wellness.
– There is a “Sea of Good” out there. There are 4,000+ vet organizations in the U.S. The challenge is not finding people who want to help, it’s connecting those people to the veterans, who aren’t always readily visible in their communities.
– The DOD and the VA are two separate government agencies and there is a good-sized gap that exists between them. Community-based organizations should focus on helping to fill that gap, not compete with the VA. As Dr. Alfonso Bates, Chief Officer of Readjustment Counseling Service at the VA so simply said, “There is plenty of work to go around. Cooperation is the key.”
– Welcome home events are incredibly valuable experiences for returning vets, and they are only the tip of the iceberg. If organizations and individual community members really want to help veterans and their families, then they need to commit to be in this for the long haul. The needs of vets will change over time, and we have to be with them through those changes.
– And this last point is the one that really got me. It was confirmation of another piece of work that I know is so critical for Compass Yoga to carry-out. The children of vets are a population that needs so much support, and they get precious little of what they need.
A personal note I’ve talked on this blog about my own struggles with bouts of PTSD brought on by specific incidents in my life. These incidents gave me only a small idea of what these returning vets are going through. What you don’t know is that I also understand what it’s like to be a child raised in a traumatic environment, to watch family members whom I love so fiercely wrestle with trauma and feel helpless in the process. And it’s that experience that I know in great detail, and where I am completely confident that I can guide children of returning vets toward happy, healthy, productive lives.
I will put those children first, where children deserve to be
I will never accept that kids are too far gone to be helped, nor will I let them be defeated
I will not quit on them or let them quit on themselves
And if and when they fall down, I will make sure to help them lift themselves up
NYC yogis welcome summer http://bornintocolor.tumblr.comI welcomed the long days of the year by wrapping up what felt like a too-long day in the middle of Times Square. Douglass Stewart taught a yoga class right in the heart of it all. He helped us to focus on how to feel a part of all of that energy without letting it frazzle our nerves. Could we be present and embrace the energy without letting it burn us out? Could we focus on internal hum as we embraced the outer hum of the city all around us, and in the process could we still have fun with it all? By the end of the class, I found myself feeling so much gratitude for the energy that surrounded us. It is a conscious, deliberate choice to live in this crazy city, and I’m thankful for its energy and it dynamism. So are the 8,000 yogis who took in one of three classes held today in Times Square in honor of the solstice.
Solstice 2007 When I moved back to New York in 2007, I attended the yoga in Times Square event for the first time and wrote this post about the experience. It was a much smaller event then. I had been back for all of 10 days and I hadn’t found a job yet so I had plenty of time to get re-acquainted with New York. I spent the first part of my career in Times Square managing Broadway Shows, and spent some time living on 49th & 9th just above the beloved Coffee Pot. In many ways, this area of the city helped to sculpt my view of the world as an adult because for many years this handful of blocks was my world.
Throughout Douglass’s class, I thought back to the summer solstice of 2007. I distinctly remember being on my mat in Savasana and feeling some street dust (or what I hoped was only street dust!) fly up my nose. I was a newly-minted MBA, a novice blogger, and a little hazy at best about my future. I felt adrift but distinctly certain that I was meant to be in New York City. I couldn’t articulate why I felt that I had to be in New York; all I knew is that it felt like home and I was craving to feel at home.
Looking back, I really should have been scared out of my mind with no job, a few suitcases of clothes, and a shared apartment sublet in Astoria, Queens, graciously offered up by a friend of mine. I had enough money to survive for a month or so and then I would hit rock bottom. And here I was lying on the ground in the middle of Times Square focusing on trying to find peace in the madness. I am more optimistic than I give myself credit for!
Solstice 2011
Fast forward to 2011, and I am amazed at the transformation – in my yoga and in my life. New York has indeed become my home, I am financial stable, earn part of my income from writing and teaching yoga, and have put the art and science of business together by beginning my own company, Compass Yoga. Despite all of this change, I laid down in the middle of Times Square on my yoga mat, still excited about the future, still soaking in all the vibes the same way I did 4 years ago. Though I could mentally register all the changes that have taken place in my life in the past 4 years, I was struck by how much my body’s experience of this year’s solstice class mirrored my experience 4 years ago.
New York, can I get an OM?
Toward the end of the class, Douglass asked us to do a round robin OM in which you take a breath when you need one and just continue the rolling OM chant. It’s one of my favorite ways to close a practice. The magical part was when our OMs were complete. The OM kept rolling in the city around us. The low hum that the city has sounded remarkably similar to the OM created by all of us. Unity, yoga, at its very best.
We run from the imperfect. We want everything to be flawless. We praise beauty; we seek it out; we convince ourselves that we can’t live without it. Ruin is something we have come to dread. To feel ruined it to feel busted up, disappointed, and taken advantage of. We desperately cling to the perfect – in ourselves, in others, in a moment of time. We try to rush through ruin as quickly as possible, and with closed eyes. By running from ruin we are missing so many opportunities for growth and personal evolution.
Dancing with our disappointment
I know this dance well. I have been running from ruin and toward perfection for many, many years. Brian calls this my intricate skill of “maximize this, minimize that.” In other words, I make the most of the good things and try very hard to ignore the bad things, hoping that those bad things will just magically go away. For the record, they don’t. They accumulate until their collective voice is so loud that they must be reckoned with in one way or another.
We can learn a lot from sadness if we’re willing to sit with it
I received a lot of positive feedback from my last two posts – the first about how my dad taught me that the only advice we can take is our own and the second about how a chance encounter with an ex taught me about feeling and transcending anger. So much so, that I’ve decided to take my writing in a very personal direction. I’m at a point in my story where some previously disjointed pieces are starting to fit together in a very powerful way. Steve Jobs said that, “We can’t expect to understand our lives living forward, but only by looking back.” That’s why reflection is so important, why writing it all down and sharing it is critical to our own understanding. All burdens can be borne if we can put them into a story.
Some of the pieces of my story are jagged and uncomfortable and some of them are smoothly crafted. Somehow, they’re all finding a way to come together and co-exist side-by-side, not stealing the limelight from one another, but sharing in it equally. It’s quite a surprise, even though I’ve been working on this very hope for such a long time. I never thought I’d realize it, and certainly not so early on in my life. And while this surprise is of tremendous benefit to me, I want it to benefit you, too, because I want you to have the same experience of holding up a mirror to the parts of you, of others, and of your experience to see that the good, the bad, and the ugly are all extraordinary teachers.
For a long time I vilified my dad, and many of those reasons were justifiable. What I shunned for too long were all of the lessons he taught me, albeit in a manner that I would never wish on anyone else. He was a cold, austere, sad man, and my family bore the brunt of that for a long time. What I didn’t know as a teenager, what there was no way for me to know, was that his behaviors and his personal history that caused those behaviors, would give me the tools I need to do the work I was meant to do with Compass Yoga.
This is about honoring our whole self, not about making lemonade
And this is not some pathetic attempt by a hopeful gal to make lemonade out of lemons, to make the most of what she’s got even if that isn’t much at all. It’s about honoring every part of our past; it’s about recognizing that in every moment, in every experience, there is a very deliberate, necessary teaching that sets us up to live our dharma, our path. We need the painful, sad parts of our past just as much as we need the joy and light. And I would argue that we need them in equal measure. The poetic Dolly Parton is famous for saying, “The way I see it, if you want rainbows then you gotta put up with the rain.” Truer words were never spoken.
So here in my promise to you: you will learn about my own personal story, layer by layer, piece by piece, even the ugly parts. Especially the ugly parts. It will be revealed in as thoughtful and sacred a manner as I can muster, and you will eventually see the complete picture. None of it will be gratuitous and all of it is intended so that you can benefit from these two learnings:
1.) where and what we come from has every bit to do with who we eventually become
and even more importantly,
2.) the depth of our roots does not determine the spread of our wings. We can fly as high as we choose to fly regardless of how far down we find ourselves at any point in time. It’s all based on our will to find our way. And I intend to find mine.
Christa Avampato 