BernieBirney

Surrender to Something Good

Sometimes I think the yoga community has a one track mind.  When the conversation turns to the study of yoga philosophy, everyone wants to talk about the Patanjali's Yogasutra.  Although it's just one in an ocean of yoga texts, it seems like all I ever hear is, "Patanjali, Patanjali, Patanjali."  

"What about the Shiva Sutras," I want to ask?  What about the Upanishads?  What about the plethora of texts with long jumbles of sanskrit titles that I won't inflict on you?

Nope.  Everyone wants to talk Yogasutra.

So, I do.  I have to.   If you want to be able to talk yoga in today's world, you're going to have to, too. 

Every time I teach any kind of formal program, I trot out the highlighted, dogeared copy that saw me through my very first teacher training.  Thumbing through, I invariably flash back to that first reading, which, although so very earnest, was also confusing, daunting, and because I barely understood a word of it, dare I say, boring as all hell.  

Today, after much use, my copy of the sutras falls open to the portion on practice.   I'm drawn immediately, as I often am, straight to sutra 2.1, and have to smile, and admit that somewhere along the way, this sutra won me over.  It's been translated in vastly different ways, and trust me, the translation makes all the difference.  I particularly like this one:

"The divine activity in yoga involves creative energy, putting one's heart into study, and surrender to the Lord."

This is a much loved sutra in the Anusara Yoga community.  We talk about it in terms of effort and surrender, the complementary actions of yoga.  Personally, I've always taken it to mean something along the lines of crossing T's, and dotting I's, and doing everything within my power, while simultaneously aquiesing to the fact that there are things in this world that, ultimately, I do not control.  I've always seen it as a study in both encouragement and solace, reminding me to get my butt up off the couch, but also that there are some walls that are not worth repeatedly flinging myself up against.  Recently, in class, a teacher invoked that old Kenny Rogers adage, you gotta know when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em.  

I guess what I'm saying is that, unconsciously, I've always associated effort and surrender with winning and losing, which makes surrender both synonymous with defeat, and the strategy that shrewd yogis take to deal with it.  Do you tend to think similarly?

Well, what if we did the typically tantric thing?  What if we took that idea and stood it on its head, in good yogic fashion?  Suppose we redefine our definition such that surrender isn't just something to do when things don't go our way?  

Just now I looked surrender up in the dictionary and one of the first definitions given is, "abandonment."  What if, with wild abandon, we just got out of our own way and capitulated to the possibilities that life is actually offering up?  What if we acquiesced to the art of allowing life's benedictions to wash over?   What if surrendering is just another way to open to grace? 

What would it be like, unmitigated surrender to something good?   

The only thing in your way is you.  

Resistance is futile.  

Last Week I Got Called The "Anti Yoga Teacher"

I was inordinately pleased.

Interesting Phenomenon

Every now and then I check out the stats for this blog. It amazes me how many people find their way here because they've googled, "sanskrit word for heart." Which is especially interesting because, to date, I don't think they've actually found the answer they were seeking here.

So here's my public service announcement for the day:

the sanskrit word for 'heart' is hrydaya.

Isn't Life Funny?

There are days like this one.

Then there are days like today, when there's a roomful of exuberant yogis in class, and my heart is so full it cracks open like an egg.

Thank you for your comments and emails. They mean a lot.

On days like this one, I'm quite certain that I must be the luckiest person in the whole world.

Fine

"You should really go get checked out," my friend told me, as we compared notes. Like her, I was fatigued all the time, cold all the time and bruised ridiculously easily. I was losing hair by the handfuls and constantly felt like I was getting a sore throat. Despite the fact that I was a yoga teacher, my body ached and I'd get the kind of headaches that forced me to take to bed. I'd lost two desperately wanted pregnancies this year.

She was right. Not only did the test for Celiac Disease come back positive, so did the one for Hashimoto Disease, as well as one for a blood clotting disorder called thrombophilia. I was an autoimmune mess. I didn't know how to feel. In the six long years I'd been going to fertility doctors, no one had caught it. I'd asked for an autoimmune work up, and been told I didn't need it. I'd insisted, received an incomplete panel of tests, and been told I was fine. Nobody had bothered to ask how I felt on an everyday basis. They told me I was fine but I wasn't. I wasn't fine. I was sick all that time.

Now, after all that, my friend had diagnosed me. My friend, who had to get so much sicker before she got better, because they told her she was fine when she wasn't. My friend, who, because she recognized my symptoms, saved me from having to get sicker than I already was.

I don't mean to sound melodramatic here, or anything. I'm not dying. Well, no more than anyone else is, anyway. I'd be remiss if I didn't say clearly that, as far as diseases go, the ones I've got aren't half bad. They're entirely treatable.

Which, in a sense, was sort of the problem. The night I came home from the doctor, diagnosis in hand, finally, I curled up on the couch and wept tears of rage. I felt utterly betrayed. I've never been the kind of yogi who's felt at odds with western medicine. Whether we're talking gurus or doctors, I'm a big fan of credentials. I'd trusted those doctors to help me. I counted on them to know more than I did. I was absolutely incensed that none of the specialists I'd seen had been able to connect the dots and see the big picture. That night, I wept for all the years I'd lived with the ramifications of diseases that were so treatable.

I started to tell a few trusted people. Most of them, bless their hearts, insistently pointed out how positive it was to have a diagnosis. One person replied, "that's great." And it was great. I was on the road to getting well. I'm all about a yoga that teaches empowerment over victimization, making lemonade from our lemons and seizing hold of the bright spot that lies concealed in even in the darkest of circumstances. One of the names this yoga goes by is Sri Vidya, or the Teaching of Auspiciousness. So then why, when I found myself explaining, "well, I found out I've got this disease but it's ultimately going to be a good thing," did I feel so fucking pissed off?

We humans are complex beings, not simple ones. It was one hundred percent true that I felt grateful, relieved and happy to finally have the information that would make all the difference to my health. It's just that it didn't make me feel any less furious, or sorry for myself. I had to go there first. I had to feel it. My teacher calls that radical affirmation. You gotta feel what you feel.

Last week, I saw my yoga peeps at our annual August retreat. When J. asked how I was, I told her. Later that day, she pulled me aside in the kitchen. I can't remember her exact words but she said she'd been thinking about my story and how heavily it sat with her, and how I must be so angry. I stood there, wanting to speak, wanting to find the words to thank her. I couldn't find the words to tell her that she'd gotten it exactly right. She got it. She got me. The relief was palpable. If someone else got it, then maybe I wasn't such a freak after all.

After that, I didn't feel quite so angry.

The next day, I told another friend. When he said, "how annoying," I smiled.

Turns out, I needed somebody to say, "you know, that really sucks. I'm sorry you had to go through that." Only then could I turn to all the teachings of empowerment that I've taken to heart over the years, and really mean them.

If you're out there, going through something difficult, then please allow me to say, I'm sorry. It really sucks. It's okay to go there. In fact, sometimes there's just no way around it. It's where you go from there that makes all the difference.

These days, I count my blessings, and when someone asks me how I am, I tell them that I'm doing just fine.

And I really mean it.

Funny? Or Just Plain Stupid?

I vote funny.
But my threshold for stupid is pretty high.

Falling From Grace

Before the alarm even sounds, the percussion of raindrops on the roof awakens me. I stretch, listening intently, pleased. This is no paltry shower but a bonafide downpour. It's perfectly rainy. Soft and gray, ideal indoors weather, perfect for curling up with a book, it's the kind of morning I love. Maybe it's the Irish in me.

I hunker over a mug of steaming tea, my morning ritual, marveling from the window at the velocity, and satisfying splatter, of torrents that dash themselves from the roof to the stone patio below. And because I'm only half awake, and because the cascade lulls me into meditation, the raindrops on the roof begin to whisper, "shaktinipata-anusarena shishyo'nugraham arhati." And then I'm gone. Just like that. Lost in memory.

I think I've always been a seeker but it took me a while to hit my stride. When I was young I went to public school. My parents, whom I adore, sent me, with the very best intentions, every Wednesday for religious instruction. The instructor, let's call her Mrs. B, did not take lightly the precarious position of our immortal souls. She wore a helmet of perfectly shellacked hair, nary a one foolish enough to venture out of place, and two perfectly rouged circles on her cheeks. She had a penchant for blouses that tied in a prim bow at the neck. She invariably looked flushed, I'd guess now from hot flashes, but at the time it appeared she'd come fresh from battle with Satan himself.

How can I best express it? Mrs. B and I did not see eye to eye. She was uncomfortable with my questions, any questions, really, and wore her disapproval like a mantle. She was the immovable object to my unstoppable force. Simply put? I loathed her. I thus devoted the entirety of my not inconsiderable creative abilities to ensuring that she enjoyed our time together even less than I did. Looking back from the light of maturity, I can't say that I'm proud.

Ironically, Mrs. B ultimately became exactly what she set out to be, a formative figure in my spiritual evolution. Eventually, my petty personal dislike and adolescent petulance gave way to an authentic longing to find something that I could honestly turn toward. I went looking. Rather than reflexively turning away, which is what I'd been doing, I began to read voraciously. I didn't yet know how to be discriminating and some of what I got my hands on was pure drivel. But some of it? Some of it was magic. I devoured authors like Starhawk who opened my eyes to a concept of the sacred that could take all forms, the feminine included. I read Jung. I got my first taste of Eastern philosophy.

I did a lot of that early reading in the bathtub of the house where I grew up. I didn't understand all of what I read but I was deeply curious. On this particular occasion I'd been reading about non-dualism, which I didn't really get. It was about raindrops merging into the ocean, or something. The bathroom was steamy, my head was full and I set the book de jour aside and began to drift off. Head back I let my eyes rest, unfocused, on the tiled wall where clouds of steam condensed into individual droplets. Drowsy in the warm water, I watched the little drops grow bigger and heavier, then slip down the wall into the bathwater below. Drip. . . drip. . . drip.

The idea formed as slowly as the condensation before my eyes. It was all the same stuff, all water, the clouds of steam, the droplets and the bathwater. Both the beginning and ending were undifferentiated. In between was a single luminous drop. I saw myself. I saw it all. We're merged, we emerge and we merge again. We fall into form like rain, and then dissolve back into an ocean of formlessness. From formlessness to formlessness, with a human lifetime in between.

I don't know how long I soaked like that but well past prune territory. Perhaps it was not a particularly original revelation but it was my own. I've never forgotten it and find it beautiful to this day. I didn't know, then, that years later I would meet a teacher who would teach me that Grace pours down like rain. I didn't know I would meet someone who would teach me a verse from the Kularnava Tantra that means, "By entering the current of the Divine Shakti's descent into the heart, the true disciple becomes capable of receiving grace". I didn't know then, that I would come to teach yoga, and that Anusara Yoga, the kind of yoga I teach, would take its name from this verse.

I didn't know that I would meet someone who would tell me that I have, indeed, fallen from grace, but who would mean something entirely different by it. And so I have come to believe that we are, as my teacher says, book-ended by eternity and that, in between is this time spent in embodiment: ephemeral, luminous and perfect. I have come to believe that we fall from grace, to grace, as the very form of grace itself.

What teaching could be more joyful than this one that claims grace is your very own nature? It might seem easy to take to heart, and it is. It's as intuitive as breathing in and breathing out. But it's hard too. While most days I see grace falling all around me, I must confess that sometimes I take a hard look in the mirror and find it difficult to believe that grace looks like what I find staring back. Sometimes I forget. Sometimes I need a reminder.

And then I smile, back in the present, as I lift my head and turn from morning tea toward the torrential downpour just outside my window.

You Say Tomato, I Say Yoga

Surely, this is what we mean when we talk about the midline?
(That would be madhyama for the geeks.)

It's the place of potency and potential.
And of yoga, of course.

Sometimes poetry says it best.

The Decision
There is a moment before a shape
hardens, a color sets.
Before the fixative or heat of kiln.
The letter might still be taken
from the mailbox.
The hand held back by the elbow,
the word kept between the larynx pulse
and the amplifying drum-skin of the room's air.
The thorax of an ant is not as narrow.
The green coat on old copper weighs more.
Yet something slips through it--
looks around,
sets out in the new direction, for other lands.
Not into exile, not into hope. Simply changed.
As a sandy track-rut changes when called a Silk Road:
it cannot be after turned back from.

~Jane Hirshfield

Secret Gardens

So, apparently, I'd been holding the map upside down. "Trout Brook Valley" is not an address that my GPS recognizes and it's already been established that I'm navigationally challenged.

Thank god for Tim. Somehow, he always knows exactly where he is and how to get where he's going. He calmly points the car in the exact opposite direction I'm insisting we need to go, and five minutes later we arrive at our destination.

That's right. The shameful truth is that this is all happening five minutes from our house. Go right ahead and insert joke about paper bag at your convenience.

The jeep bumps along a wooded dirt road that ends abruptly in an open field. Ah, this must be the place. I recognize it by the utter lack of identifying signs. These beekeepers are tricky like that.

(This isn't a post about bees or beekeeping. Not for the most part, anyway. But about that bee thing? Have I mentioned that on my personal coolness factor scale it rates super ridiculously high? What's that, you say? I have mentioned it? Oh, um, okay. Right.)

It's a perfect day. We find ourselves standing in a meadow under the bluest sky imaginable. The grass is impossibly green and flecked with wildflowers. It rolls out to meet the horizon, climbing a gentle slope to touch the sky. It bows in the breeze, and in it I can see the unseen, that same invisible movement I feel against my cheek, the breath of the universe.

The trees rustle and toss their heads as I look up into the silvery undersides of their branches. They sound like the sea. To the left is a blueberry orchard. Did you know that blueberry flowers are fragrant and white? I didn't. A cheerful sign emblazoned with a potbellied blue pig gives a friendly admonishment not to pick more than 2 quarts of berries at a time. Up the hill lies a grove of mature apple trees, improbably graceful for their gnarled branches. The local beekeepers group have been asked to place hives here to support the orchards and this has become the home of their pet project, the rearing of heartier queens.

Astonished, I feel like I've tumbled out the other side of the wardrobe into Narnia. The earth beneath my feet is part of a thousand acre land trust. It's less than five minutes from my house, it's ginormous, and it's utterly concealed behind a busy road. I'd driven past it a thousand times without ever knowing it was there.

In the midst of this wide open space I begin to soften around the edges. My heart becomes a terrain that's as expansive as the one around me and, suddenly, I can really breathe.

Have I stepped inside The Secret Garden, a favorite childhood book? Do you remember that story? I read my copy until the pages fell out. Sullen and jaundiced, the newly orphaned Mary Lenox is sent from her home in India to England, to live in her widowed uncle's care. Inevitably, she finds her way past a locked gate and high walls into the garden, which is, or course, a metaphor for her own heart, which has been locked away since the death of her parents. Of course the process requires a community, or a kula, and along the way the whole coterie of maladjusted misfits learn to flourish in the garden of self-discovery.

What I find interesting is that the flowering of the heart requires each of the characters to see past the walls, past the limitations of their own construction. They must look outside themselves to see within themselves, they must venture beyond what is comfortable and familiar to regain entry into the inner chambers of the heart, a place one from which one could never truly be denied access at all. And, of course, the story reminds us that there are undiscovered territories without and within and that yoga is a process of discovery.

So, I ask you, what undetected realms might be no more than five minutes from your own front door? What domains lie unexplored within your own heart? And what the heck are you waiting for?

Utterly gratuitous bee photo is used with the express permission of photographer Tim.

Taking Stock While Making Stock

It was a rude awakening. Living in Brooklyn, we ate takeout from a different restaurant every night. Then four years ago, we moved to a woodsy suburb in Ct. After a marathon december day we finally watched the taillights of the moving truck pull away, leaving us, for the first time, alone in our new home. I can't remember the exact details of that evening but it was probably me who said, "I'm wiped. Let's just order a pizza." We finally located a puny yellow pages, it was nowhere near the size of the brooklyn behemoth I was accustomed to, and found listings for a couple of local pizzerias.

"I'd like to place an order for delivery. . ." I started.

"Where do you live?"

Smiling at my husband, I spoke my brand new address into the telephone for the first time. A milestone!

"That's too far. We don't deliver out there."

Click.

I couldn't believe my ears. We repeated the experience a few more times as we ran through every pizzeria in the phone book. Panic began to set in. Had we moved to the hub of nowhere? Apparently, the brave new world had never heard of delivery. If we couldn't get a pizza delivered then what were the odds of ordering in Chinese? Indian? Thai? For the love of god, what were we going to EAT?

For the first few months we subsisted meagerly out of the freezer section at Trader Joe's but, ultimately, resistance was futile. I learned to cook. Not only did I learn to cook, I learned to love to cook. I became almost as enthusiastic about cooking as I am about yoga, which is saying a lot. In fact, I found my two loves shared a lot in common.

Today, finally, my schedule offers the quiet day at home I've been longing for. In my bathrobe, sipping morning tea, I putter between the counter and the fridge, pulling out the makings of stock. I'll often use the boxed stuff for a shortcut, it's not like I'm Martha-frigging-Stewart or anything, but when there's time, homemade is just so much better. Carrots, celery, onion. Anything lingering in the vegetable drawer. Woodsy stems and remnants of fresh herbs I've stashed in the freezer for just this purpose.

Vegetarians, here's your chance to avert your eyes.

Next, I add the bones, which I've also saved in the freezer. This is a yoga blog, so, I'm going to address this taboo, okay? I'm not a vegetarian. I spent nine years veg, which is a quarter of my life. Do the math, if you like. I spent a good portion of those nine years run down and sickly. Today, I feel so much better. I think it's entirely possible for some people to be happy and healthy vegetarians, and I commend them. It just wasn't possible for me. I'm generally reluctant to discuss my choices on this issue with students. Not because I'm ashamed, because I'm not ashamed of taking care of myself, and I do so without apology. I simply consider it to be a personal choice. I have full understanding that the seat of the teacher can be weighty and I don't want anyone to be confused between my choice and some imaginary "right choice." I don't think there's one right choice that can be indiscriminately applied.

I don't aspire to be anybody's role model. I do, however, aspire to make conscious choices about the food I eat. For what it's worth, I buy exclusively grass fed, organic free-range meat, often from a farm about an hour north, where the animals have hundreds of acres to roam freely. I've seen it with my own eyes. It works for me.

If you're vegetarian and come to my house for dinner, I will enthusiastically prepare for you the most delicious meat-free dish within my capability. If you invite me to your home for a meal, I will eat what you put down in front of me, without asking if it's organic, where it comes from, or whether it was gathered by the light of the full moon on the third thursday of the month. I think it's polite. Do I sound defensive? Maybe I am, a little. I've seen many conversations around this topic grow heated. I hope that if we disagree on this topic that we can do so without animosity.

Okay, back to the issue at hand. Put everything into the stockpot, cover with water and add just a little salt. Not too much, you can always add more later. Bring it to a boil, then immediately reduce the heat to a simmer. Skim anything off the top that looks unappealing. Walk away for at least 8 hours.

With the simmering pot perfuming the kitchen, the phrase "yoga kshema" runs through my mind. It appears as early as the Rg Veda, which is early indeed, and, in fact, is the very first recorded usage of the word 'yoga.' It means, "yoga cooks." It occurs to me how very much yoga is like making stock. Both endeavors are a process of distilling down to essence. Both require us to throw the metaphorical bones of our experience into the stockpot, to pare down to the marrow of our being, to be cooked in the transformative fire. In the yogic endeavor, you are not simply the ingredients in the pot, you're the pot, the fire and the chef, as well as the diner who ultimately sups the experience.

But, while a good stock is a thing of beauty in its own right, its true magic lies in its potency, right? It becomes the foundation of whatever you decide to do with it. What will you create? A risotto? A soup? A delicate sauce? A robust one? Ultimately, your stock, like your yoga, means to be expansive. You're limited only by your imagination and your skill in the kitchen, metaphorical or otherwise.

So often, yoga is viewed as the paring down to Self, with a capital S. And that's certainly a key feature of the yoga that I practice. I'd go so far as to say it's imperative. To touch the quintessential, I believe, we must cook in the fire of our own awareness and look deeply inward to the place where we're all, essentially, more similar than different. But to stop there would be reductive. So my aspiration is to touch the core, again and again, and then to expand ecstatically from that place. To create myself as imaginatively, as whimsically and fantastically, as possible. Look for this pulsation of distillation and proliferation in your asana practice, in meditation and in the joyful preparation of a meal. Look for it wherever you go and in your every endeavor.

And, whether you're serving it up on your mat or in the kitchen, don’t forget to have fun when you get cooking.