Prepare to Waver

Several times I've started to write about the George Zimmerman case, but I realized I had nothing to add to the conversation, except to say that I do not think justice was served. A 17-year-old boy lies dead, and he is not only accused of using concrete pavement as a weapon, of being a pothead, but of causing his own death. If only he hadn't tried to defend himself against a guy who was following him because he was stranger and he was black. I'll leave it to essayists who have more considered opinions, like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jelani Cobb.

An excellent demonstration of Salamba Sirsasana, Headstand

Every writing teacher I've ever had has advised me to stick to writing about what I know. Who'd a thunk I'd  ever be more qualified to talk about standing on my head than about criminal justice? For years I've been tentative about headstand, known as the king of the yoga postures. Headstand has wonderful benefits: clearing and calming the mind and strengthening the arms, shoulders, neck, spine and abdominals. In yoga we balance on our feet, sometimes on only one, on our sitting bones, our hands and knees, our forearms, and the backs of our shoulders. All of these seem very doable. I might not be great in arm balances, but I knew if I got stronger through my arms and abs I'd be able to do them.

But balancing on my head? I had the idea that only people who had attained some kind of physical empowerment could do it. My teacher Shar Lee teaches headstand between two chairs. Below is a very good demo of the technique, similar to Shar's.

I've done it this way many times because it puts no strain on the neck and head. But then another teacher pointed out you don't get the crown chakra stimulation that only Headstand and Rabbit provide. Sirsasana was one of the poses I learned in teacher training. There I learned it without props. To my amazement I was able to get into the posture, under my teacher's careful direction and observation. She correctly pointed out that success in Headstand is predicated on pressing the forearms into the floor so that the crown of the head is only very lightly touching. Stabilizing the shoulders and engaging the abdominals is also part of the formula. Put them all together, and you have lift-off.

I haven't felt comfortable doing it in my practice until recently. It kept calling to me. Primarily I've had to work on overcoming my fear. I was afraid of falling and breaking my neck. That is a legitimate, material fear. My underlying fear was more subtle. I discovered I just can't stand instability, and headstand is all about finding equilibrium within instability.

I don't know anyone who loves instability. I'm not alone in wanting to know where my next meal is coming from, where my next kiss is coming from. I like knowing where I stand with the people I care for most. I like knowing that the Earth is spinning on its axis, and the earth is solid beneath my feet.

What I'm discovering in my current explorations of headstand is that stability is at best a wavering presence. Stability can't last, though it is a field we can play in.When I'm in Sirsasana, it's a constant interplay between swaying and stabilizing. Just as your mind never completely stills in meditation or at any other time, your body never stops moving. In the posture, I'm continually reminding myself to press my foreams more firmly into the floor. As soon as I do that, the structure stabilizes. But then I have a slight form break somewhere else, either in my side waists or in my shoulder blades. Then it's back to lengthening through my sides, and sending my shoulder blades toward my sacrum. Some days I can't stabilize at all.

Achieving stability, in Sirsasana or in life, is not a market to corner or a deal to nail down. It's very much about practicing skills and making adjustments that support your being, whether you're upside down and balancing on your head, or right side up and giving your children their independence.

Which Dog Do You Feed?

The puppies next door, Packer and Harley

I love animals, cats (we have two), gerbils (we have one), dogs (none yet, but I think I'm wearing my husband down :D), cows, horses. Even these guys (sorry, Jo Hansen, may you rest in peace, but I'm still crazy about raccoons):

Awww--isn't he cute?

Everyone in my family thinks I'm crazy to spend time watching the puppy cams on explore.com. Watching puppies grow up and receive training to become service dogs for wounded veterans opens my heart. I overdose on their cuteness.

Unfortunately, some of the puppy lovers bring along their ambivalent attitudes about human beings. I admit to this myself. Some days I like animals better than people. It's easy to love someone who doesn't talk back, and who looks at you with huge, soulful eyes. A few of the commenters on Dog Bless You have forgotten that the primary attraction is the pups and their moms. Instead they want to make unflattering comparisons between the different organizations Explore features on its website. I find that as offensive as comparing the child-rearing abilities of parents. Raising young things is the most creative work people can do. There are better practices than others, for sure. But if you're going to appoint yourself judge and jury, make sure that you're seeing and hearing everything in 3-D, not from a computer screen, before you make any decisions.

When people on the Dog Bless You comment section call out the critical folks, they reply that they have the right to express their opinion. OK, fine. So open up a Blogger or Wordpress account and express away. But don't bother me and the others who simply want to love on the pups and the people, many of them volunteers, who are raising the babies with your critical, unflattering comparisons. No one who's watching a computer screen can seriously believe that they can see the whole of the operation, and therefore have the right to express an uninformed opinion. Because they don't. This is rife in political discourse as well. People go straight to trash talk before they even have a clue about the subject. This highlights one of the reasons I sometimes prefer animals to people--an unattractive tendency to seek, and to inevitably find, what is wrong in any given scenario.

When I was in teacher training, one of my professors was fond of pointing out how no one needs any training to notice students' disruptive behaviors. Looking for these same students' positive behaviors, or as he called it, "to catch 'em being good," requires much more finesse. Some students are conditioned to act out because they consistently receive attention for it, whereas their good deeds are taken for granted. "Which behavior do you want to reinforce?" he would ask.

To put it more poetically, here is a bit of Native American wisdom: "Inside of me are two dogs. The Black Dog is mean and angry; the White Dog is good and kind. The Black Dog fights the White Dog all day. Which one wins? The one I feed the most."

Becoming like Water

          
Now that it's spring here in the Colorado Rockies, I hear the song of the western meadowlark every time I'm in the wide open spaces. Their song sounds like flowing water to me. It feels like they're praising its sound in song.

In my yoga classes, I often speak of building the poses from the ground up, whether one is balancing on their seat, their feet, or their tete. Or their front, back and side. Building speaks of solidity, of structure, even of permanence. It's very important to have that sense of structure, of container. Eventually I contradict myself and tell them to become soft and fluid, to pour themselves into the posture.

It's all George Hernandez' fault. George was my tai chi and wing chun teacher. He would tell students we were painstakingly learning the forms, only to throw them out once we mastered them, in five or ten years, depending on how willful we were. Every time he'd say that I'd think to myself, What's the use of learning something we're only going to throw out? He would explain that you would never go into a fight using a form. You'd not only be an easy target, you'd be a laughingstock. You adapt your form and your movements to your opponents' and gain the advantage. Through dedicated practice, your lens becomes bigger than the forms and postures can contain. You see openings, and you thread your punches through them. You're certainly drawing from what you learned in choreographed fights, but the biggest thing you're really learning from them is awareness and improvisation.

Bruce Lee. What a specimen.

The exact same, except for the punches, is true of yoga. It would seem that martial arts and yoga are polar opposites, but they both work with energy, chi, prana, ki, or whatever your tradition calls it. Martial arts and yoga make the best use of the energy each practice generates, for different ends. Wing chun master Bruce Lee famously said, "You must be shapeless, formless, like water. When you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup. When you pour water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. When you pour water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can drip and it can crash. Become like water my friend." It's about inhabiting space to the fullest extent, and being able to move from one space to the next. In both yoga and martial arts, the breath is the catalyst for filling space.

I often feel that certain problems are solid and intractable. Sometimes I dream that the solution to the problem was right in front of me all along. My mind was making it hard. I am not alone in this. I see it in my yoga students' bodies. The chips on their shoulders. Defiant posture. Defeatist posture. Being too hard on themselves. Less often, in go-go, bad-ass American culture, being too easy on themselves. Non-responsiveness. Non-awareness of the unnecessary, soul-sucking tension they carry within their beings. I touch their shoulders, the backs of their necks, their backs, inviting them to let breath and awareness melt the solidity, to find the softness and fluidity that is just beneath, like water beneath hard ground.

I don't claim to know what enlightenment is. It feels like water, letting water carry me where it will, rather than where I will. If I could sing like a bird, I'd sing the meadowlark's song. Yoga is practical enlightenment, in the sense that you are gradually letting go of burdens you never needed to carry in the first place.

                          

"I Need Something to Change Your Mind"

Shortly after voters approved a bond for our local school district in 2002, the school board announced a $13.8 million budget shortfall. District accountants had forgotten to factor in staff salaries for the new schools built in one of the fastest-growing districts in the state.

Around this time I ran into someone I know from church, a physical therapist who contracted with the school district. When the subject of the budget deficit came up, she shrugged. "At least we got a few things we'd really needed for a long time."

Uh-huh. But really? Why were we putting essentials on the credit card? If the district could afford to build schools, and there were more taxpayers moving into the area, why were we in this pickle? My own best, and probably woefully underinformed guess, is that the state's history of skimping on tax collection had finally caught up with itself. There was no evidence of criminal malfeasance on the part of the district accountant. He wasn't embezzling money, but he got fired for incompetence. Chalk it up to human error. SNAFU is another explanation. Mainly because I like to say SNAFU.

The community came through in a big way, as did the state, and the school district eventually climbed out of debt in 2007. Over the last ten years, voters also have voted in favor of two mill levies, something that had never happened in the district's history. People in this community had changed their minds. We got stuff we'd needed for a long time, and not even a budget crisis could stop that from happening. Maybe there's hope for other crises this country faces.

The week of April 15-19 was one of the saddest I can remember. The Boston Marathon bombings. The fertilizer plant explosion in Texas. The Senate's epic fail to do even one thing about gun violence, despite the public's overwhelming support for a variety of measures to address it. This last is the one that hurts the most, because 30,000 people die in gun violence every year in this country.

Twenty kids, six educators, and the shooter's mother dead doesn't change them. Not even one of their own getting shot in the head changes their mind about their position on gun violence.It's all NRA, all the time. SNAFU doesn't even begin to describe the whole sad, pathetic situation.

It brings to mind a Talking Heads song, "Mind," from the band's 1979 Album.

The salient line: "I need something to change your mind," because nothing so far has done it. Not time, money, drugs, religion, or science.

None of it has changed New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte's mind. She voted against instituting background checks and other gun control measures. Watch this exchange between Sen. Ayotte and Erica Lafferty, the daughter of slain Sandy Hook Elementary principal Dawn Hochstrung:

I'm not going to congratulate Sen Ayotte was doing her job to host Ms. Lafferty in her office. Ayotte's votes on the Senate gun control measures were obviously a slap in the face to Erica Lafferty and others who have been affected by gun violence. Sen. Ayotte brings up mental health, as have many other in public life, including NRA veep Wayne LaPierre, who has proposed a national registry for the mentally ill, but God forbid there should be a national registry for gun owners.

I believe they're as serious about addressing the crisis in mental health care as they are about addressing gun violence. Not a single Republican in the Congress voted for Obamacare, which includes provisons for mental health care reform. Congressional Republicans have voted unsuccessfully to void Obamacare more than 30 times in three years. Given their history of obstructionism on health care and so many other issues, reforming mental health care in this country would be a lot more difficult than passing laws that restrict who has access to guns.

Which leads me to the question--What will change their minds about gun violence? What has to happen that is worse than a Congresswoman with a life-changing gunshot wound or 20 dead first-graders? This question, to quote David Byrne, "comes directly from my heart to you."

Poor in Spirit

Brennan Manning, author photo in his book, All Is Grace

When Brennan Manning died last Friday, the world lost a champion for the poor in spirit. Though he was a Franciscan priest, a gifted teacher, and the writer of a treasure trove of spiritual books, he would have called himself poor of spirit. His long struggle with alcoholism took him far beyond the holy hush of his vows to the depths of hell on earth. A kind stranger peeled him off the pavement in New Orleans, a step in a process of recovery that lasted the rest of his life. The first beatitude says, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." May he be so blessed.

Brennan after his stroke, with All Is Grace co-author John Blase. People who smile that openly, that joyfully, are usually children.

 I would say he earned his place, but there's no earning the kingdom of heaven, no matter what most of the Christian churches in this country and beyond try to tell you. There is only the unconditional surrender of your heart, and I like to think Brennan succeeded. I like the idea of succeeding rather than earning.



Few want to be poor in spirit, or poor in any way. Most want to bless the world with their achievements, their generosity, their sheer awesomeness. The poor in spirit confess their multiple deficiencies without being the least bit proud of them, or even ashamed of them. It is then that the spiritual blessings begin to transfuse in, mostly so slowly they don't notice.

Anuvittasana. This is a tough pose to do well. The model could stand to initiate the pose through lengthening her spine upward and lifting her heart, rather than leaning back and initiating the bend from the low back.

My first and most beloved yoga teacher, Shar Lee, exhorts students to give up their hearts to God in back bends. That's a natural teaching for me, as I often experience emotion and insight through physical exertion. In Anuvittasana, Standing Back Bend, Shar invites students to initiate the back bend through the lifting of the heart and the ribcage, rather than through the low back and hips. For me, this pose is the physical expression of surrendering the heart, and a baby step in the process at that. Through this pose, I gain insight into the technical difficulty of surrender.

Brennan Manning was a master at the art of surrender. He made no claim of being chosen. He acknowledged the difficulty of life, his own and those of all the other ragamuffins he loved and wrote about. Ragamuffins couldn't gussy themselves up in furs and perfumes to go before their Maker even if they wanted to. They come to the feast as they are.

Leonard Cohen says it well, in "Anthem:" "Every heart, every heart/to love will come/but like a refugee."

I highly recommend this book. I love the cover photo. It invites readers to offer themselves, even in pieces.

In "Anthem," Leonard Cohen also sings:

"Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in."

Rest in peace, Brennan.

Forgiveness Project

Crocuses in snow

There is nothing more hopeful than blooms in the snow. Spring is technically here, but in the Rockies snow respects no calendar. With the drought, I welcome the blessing of this snow. I hope the land remembers this snowstorm come June and July, when the sun is scorching the rancher's fields. We'll all be able to use a little mercy then.

I lost a friend last week. She let me know in no uncertain terms that I had gone straight to the top of her shit list because of my lifelong tendency for faithlessness and fickleness, not to mention a whole host of other undesirable characteristics, like anger and hostility. Guilty as charged.

She forgot to mention a troublesome attachment to resentment. Uncharacteristically, this time I refrained from defending myself, because she's right. She gave me a gift, one that many others before her have given me, but that I have consistently refused--a fresh opportunity to let go of my resentment, rather than giving in to it. At first it's sweet to enumerate my opponent's faults, while denying or justifying my own. But in my experience, this is a lot like gorging myself on half a pillow sack of Halloween candy. Afterward, not only do I have a belly ache, I'm loaded with regret, primarily for falling prey to my own weakness.

Bonnie Raitt is one of my favorite performers, and her version of "Sweet Forgiveness" is right at the top of my list of favorite songs. Daniel Moore wrote the song, after ABC Dunhill didn't renew his contract. The song grew out of "trying to forgive them for putting me out of work," he wrote. "I almost did it."

That he almost did it is farther than most of us get. I fool myself when I say I've gone far enough. To paraphrase Moore, I'm "waiting for the cure." As a yogini, I devote myself to opening my heart more and more, so that a miracle cure presents itself. I confess to being better at teaching this to my students than practicing it myself.

The longer I resent someone, the less likely I am to wait for the cure, to allow the true sweetness of forgiveness to seep in. I want it now. I like the believe that my whole life has been leading up to the moment when I ditch the resentment and open up to forgiveness, of myself and those who so easily offend me.

Years ago, one of those people who easily offended me was a woman in my neighborhood. I had scolded her sons for riding their bikes on the sidewalk, heedless that I was eight months pregnant, and that I was using the same sidewalk to walk my son and a neighbor boy to school. Their mother angrily told me that I should find another way to walk to the school, because her sons needed to ride their bikes to on the sidewalk. I later learned that her husband, and the boys' father, had recently died. I could understand her protectiveness, but didn't my kids have rights, too? From then on, she drove her sons to school. For the next year and a half, she and I exchanged dirty looks. I was waiting in line at the school to pick up some paperwork, when she approached me.

"I owe you an apology," she said. I burst into tears at the simplicity and humility of her apology, and we hugged each other while the other bewildered parents looked on. It was the cure Daniel Moore wrote about. As long as I lived in that neighborhood, she and I didn't exactly become friends, but we stopped glaring at each other and exchanged pleasantries instead.

There is a lot of good advice out there about forgiveness. and not surprisingly, much of it centers on releasing resentment. In case you thought I was going to be condescending and "forgive" my friend for dumping me, I'm going to focus first on releasing resentment. Eventually I'd like to get to the place where my need to forgive. whether it's her or someone else, exceeds my need for her to accept my forgiveness. Or for my need for her forgiveness.

My first approach is to view this situation as, in the words of economist Paul Romer, that a "good crisis is a terrible thing to waste." Let the learning begin.

I pray for the miracle of softening my heart of stone.

Catch Your Breath

A video of B.K.S Iyengar demonstrating Ujaii breathing. Not every pranayam is going to be as deep and wide as Mr. Iyengar's, nor does it need to be. The key is to keep practicing.

Last week I was a student in a yoga class, and the teacher said, "It isn't a yoga class unless pranayama is part of it." I wholeheartedly agree.

Pranayama is designed to calm the nervous system, all 6,000 miles coiled within each being, before engaging in the postures and meditation. My classes almost always begin with it, and it is a thread throughout asana.

Off the mat, when you are stressed and you catch yourself breathing shallowly or even holding your breath, remind yourself to breathe, inhaling and exhaling fully. It takes 10-20 breaths to recalibrate. This is especially good to do when you're in traffic or waiting in line at the grocery store or dealing with angry people. Breathing mindfully will bring you back to yourself.

Here is an easy breathing exercise you can do when you find a quiet moment in your day. Sit comfortably and close your eyes.

I am enough, in this moment.
I breathe into being enough.
Today I am enough.
Today I have enough.
Today I do enough.
There is nothing missing. In this moment, I am whole. I experience wholeness.
I am complete. I experience completeness.
Breathe into your wholeness, through your nose, breathing deeply and slowly to your body base.
Pause to experience this sense of fullness.
Slowly exhale, offering your wholeness to the whole world, blazing a deep and generous trail back up and through your body and through your nose.
Pause to enjoy the satisfaction of emptying yourself of the best you have to offer.
Breathe in again and experience the gratitude that is inhalation, sipping the breath through your body.
Pause to enjoy the wonder of fullness. You are full. You are satisfied. You are whole.
Exhale slowly, offering all that you gained during your inhalation to the people you love, to the people you don't currently love but can now afford to love, to people you have never met.
Pause to enjoy how receiving deeply and gratefully allows you to give deeply and gratefully.
Continue for at least ten more breaths.
Repeat as needed.

Namaste.