How the Lotus Helped the Grasshopper

I did yoga for the first time out of class this week.  I took the GRE this morning, so on Friday of last week I decided that I really need to crack down on my internet use in order to better study on top of getting everything else done.  It sort of worked.  I successfully dropped Facebook for the week, but was unable to stay off YouTube past the first couple of days (which was sort of disconcerting and is making me reevaluate how much time I spend on the internet).  I found that I had more time than I was expecting by simply giving up that one site, and the hardest part was I really had made a habit out of going straight to Facebook as soon as I had any extra time.  So, I started coming up with different things I could do (how pathetic does that sound?)  Then I remember Tyler’s blog about her considering doing yoga for thirty minutes instead of taking a nap, and I got on the floor and attempted to do the few stretches I felt comfortable enough doing on my own.  I did two stretches, then three, then four, and before I knew it I had done enough stretches to take up thirty minutes.  I wasn’t trying to do it for half an hour.  It just sort of happened, and it surprised me because I honestly didn’t think I would be able to remember that many.  I’m sure I did them all in the completely wrong order, but it felt really good to realize just how much the stretches have become engrained in me.  

Yoga from the Inside Out: Part 4

I met this elderly woman this summer named Lu.  She’s one of those people you meet and think to yourself, “I thought you people only existed in the movies.”  She and her husband are in their late 70s, the head cheerleader who married the captain of the football team.  Lu is simultaneously the epitome and the antithesis of what you would expect.  She is beautiful and giddy, and yet stubborn and passionate as hell, unafraid to call you out in a moments notice.  After meeting her for the first time, she hugged me and said, “I already love you more than I should.”  I’ve always thought that sentiment was the best example of who she is as well as what her and I have in common.  After reading Christina’s chapter on gurus, I realized that is exactly what Lu is to me.  In the later years of her life Lu decided to take her faith more seriously.  She learned how to read and write in Greek all on her own, and began translating the New Testament from its original language.  Now, she is a source of a wealth of knowledge whenever I feel like I’m reading the Bible but not exactly getting anything from it.  Lu encourages me daily, and roots for my faith and my studies constantly.  I really liked how Christina explained that everyone’s path is their own, and that it really is okay if your particular spiritual path does not lead you to pursue a relationship with a guru.  My relationship with Lu is not traditional.  I don’t sit and soak up all of her words as truth, and I don’t think she would want me to.  Her and I disagree on many topics, but the point is she allows me argue.  Lu knows that I grasp concepts best when I write about them and then discuss them with someone.  Most of the time when we’re debating, my ideas are not fully formed, and thus my opinions are weak.  Lu allows me to babble back and forth with myself until I finally get across my ideas or, more often, realize that I don’t actually believe a word I am saying and have to start from scratch.  She never treats me like I’m ignorant for disagreeing with her or for having half-baked sentiments about my faith, which always amazes me since she is so concrete in hers.  Lu is there to keep me moving.  She knows that any sort of stirring in me, even if it is struggle, is better than apathy towards my faith.  She knows that with every disagreement we have I am led to think more deeply about my faith, and that is progress to her.  Lu does very much what Christina suggests we all do for ourselves, and something I struggle doing for myself.  She accepts me where I am at.  She doesn’t expect anything from me.  She just cares, and she wants me to grow in all areas of my life.  Although, I’m sure she’d have a heart attack if I told her she’s my guru haha. 

Yoga from the Inside Out: Part 3

I am not a pessimist (one of my five strengths on the Strengths Finders Test was actually Positivity), but I struggle with the idea of humans being intrinsically good.  I’ll accept that some of it is probably due to my upbringing in Christianity.  I was raised with the Lutheran doctrine that we are under “bondage to sin.”  So, yes.  The idea that we are born with original sin is engrained in me; however, my experience with the reality of humanity and what we are capable of has never really been a great counter argument to the theory.  Are there good people in the world?  Yes, of course, but when people are given the opportunity and the freedom to turn against one another, most of the time they do.  Again, I’m not trying to be excessively severe, but take even social media as a small example.  How many times over the past year alone has their been story after story about a teen suicide due to bullying, both in person and over the internet.  When people have a sense of anonymity, and therefore perceive a lack of real responsibility for their actions, it’s like their morals (and rhetoric I might add) deteriorate back to a primal state.  Only after celebrities step in to say something do people take a stand, and in those instances I would say that people’s willingness to stand alongside them are an aftereffect of groupthink, not an actual activation of any sort of moral compass.  There are very few people who are sincere and can maintain their sense of integrity once it is tested.  I’ve witnessed it.  I believe that people have no hope of being good if they are not encouraged to be so and find that goodness within them, but I disagree that it’s our natural state of being.  I just don’t see how it can be when we are capable of destroying each other the way we do, often not realizing what we have done until years later.  Believe me, I would love to be proven wrong, but after the amount of ignorant, and worse, complacent within their ignorance, people I have met in my short years, it would take a lot to convince me otherwise.  What I do believe is that most people desire to be good.  Most people believe that they are good.  But few will act to better themselves, and even fewer will hardly fight to remain good under pressure.  We are creatures of community, and good is defined by the communities we associate with.  If the community says go to church, we go to church.  If the community says Jews are a disease that needs eradicating, then we eradicate them.  I know the Holocaust is an exhausted example of what human beings are capable of, but what it demonstrates to me more so than a certain depth of depravity is how easily swayed our morality is.  I don’t doubt that there were truly good people that went along with creating such a tragedy, but if at our most basic core we are naturally good, how on earth are we capable of straying so far from the good itself, and even believe it to be the true good?  Is it possible to look at the reality of human kind and truly accept that we are intrinsically good?    

Yoga from the Inside Out: Part 2

Christina’s description of the body as the way to reach the Divine is totally contrary to my upbringing, and by that I don’t mean that my parents looked at me and said, “the body is bad.”  It was more like taboo.  There was an overwhelming sensation within my church and my home that the physical side of life, whether it be the functions of the body, physical desires, or physique in general were subjects that God disapproved of and therefore meant to be handled privately.  Now, all of that might be exaggerated since it’s being translated from the memory of an adolescent, but nevertheless it was certainly how I felt growing up.   The idea that the body itself can actually be used to worship God is a new one for me, but it makes complete sense.  I especially loved when Christina was quoting John Friend about how asana specifically can be used to deepen our spiritual understanding and he said, “Without the limitation me might not have a good contrast and so the understanding of the Universal might not be as deep...through that limitation, that contrast, one can really appreciate freedom.”  I have always related this idea to suffering in general.  I know a lot of people ask, “if there is a god, why is there suffering,” and they hate the answer so that we might better understand God’s grace, but that has always been the response that made any sense to me at all.  In fact, I would go so far as to say it’s not just so that we might understand grace better, but so we might be able to understand grace at all.  Taking this concept and relating it back to the limitations of our bodies informing us of freedom is one I had never thought of before, and was somewhat of a revelation for me when I read it.  That statement alone changes the way I view the body simply by giving it a new and deeper purpose.  Another purpose of yoga I hadn’t given much thought to was its ability to train the mind to “live in the moment.”  After thinking about it some, I realized that I really don’t think about anything but the poses while we’re in class.  It’s probably the only class I can say my mind doesn’t wander in, even with the classes I really love and am passionate about.  Christina named a lot of reasons for practicing this skill that I did not realized applied, such as when our mind wanders is when we most often allow ourselves to be self-critical.  I had always loved that the ability to live in the moment would allow me to not waste or take for granted the fleeting time we are given in life, but I never thought of it as a way to better myself.  That learning to be present would could actually help my self-image.  By learning to be aware of when I am bringing myself down or comparing myself to others, I can recognize it and put a stop to it, enabling me to be more confident in who I am both emotionally and physically.

Creating the Habit

Practice this week got me thinking about how exactly to start a new habit.  It’s really hard to change, especially if in order to change, you don’t just have to start new habits, you have to break old ones as well.  People love to say that change is easy, but the fact is it’s not.  Most of us have a really hard time changing, even if it is for the better.  I have always wondered why that is, and have come up with every reason from we are all just too stubborn to wondering if there’s a biological connection.  I read a story somewhere about how a guy discovered if he just kept his guitar outside of his closet, he was more likely to play it because the thought of “I’d have to do all the work just to get it out” didn’t occur to him anymore.  What struck me as odd is, walking to the closet and pulling out the guitar would have taken him maybe five seconds, so what makes it seem like so much work?  Doing yoga daily might take thirty minutes out of my day, and I say that’s too much, but really, what else would I be doing with that time?  I’m the least productive person with my free time anyways, so why do I always kid myself when it comes to creating a good habit?  What is so hard about simply getting started?  From everyone I have talked to about it, it seems like the common dilemma, and that no one has quite figured it out.  

Yoga from the Inside Out: Part 1

I have really related to Christina’s story, although in different ways.  Growing up I was always in competitive sports, often more than one at a time.  When I ten years old, I started waking up with my dad very early in the morning to workout, both by running long distances with him as well as lift weights.  Unlike Christina, I never felt pressure as far as my body weight goes (when I got older, I felt pressure to stay in sports, but I’ll get to that later).  The only part of my body I didn’t like was the fact that I had so many scars on my legs from soccer.  However, in high school that changed.  I have the ability to gain not just define, but very prominent muscles in a way that most girls can’t.  I never noticed it growing up because it’s the way I always was, which perhaps why no one in my elementary or middle schools ever commented on it because we had all grown up together, and that was the body type I had always had.  However, when I went to a new high school where no one knew me, it became the only thing anyone knew about me.  At first, it just made me feel extremely self-conscious.  It didn’t help that I had to continue to lift weights since I was in sports, and being athletic was the only way I had ever defined myself.  My junior year something happened that took my self-consciousness to self-loathing.  Because I played girls’ basketball and had the physique that I did, people started to assume I was gay.  Now, I won’t get into how humiliating it is when the guy you have a crush on asks you your opinion on a girl’s rack, or the frustration of the paradox where, the more you deny something, the less people believe you.  What pertains more to Christina’s story is I began to feel masculine.  I began to absolutely hate the way I looked, and the fact that I felt like I couldn’t do anything about it.  People defined me by my athleticism, and to be honest that’s how I defined myself as well.  I didn’t know any other world or way of being.  When I got to college, I vowed to never lift weights again.  For a while it worked it worked tremendously.  I shed the muscles fairly quickly, but maintained my skinny physique, and as a result I was getting attention from boys that I wasn’t used to.  Once again, I’ll be honest and say, I liked it.  I liked it a lot.  I felt feminine again, and the attention was a sort of vindication that all those people in high school were wrong to judge and make assumptions about me.  What’s interesting now is, I’m experiencing the reverse.  I never really had good eating habits since I was always burning way more calories than I could consume, and those habits didn’t change much despite the fact that I stopped working out.  I recently discovered that I’ve gained close to twenty pounds since I shed the muscle, and just yesterday I tried on some winter clothes that fit well just last Christmas, but now expose those places that were once slimmer.  It was devastating, more so than I was expecting.  It made me realize how much I had come to rely on my body image and that attention I had come to enjoy, and I was ashamed.  What’s even more embarrassing is, while I was having feelings of shame, I was also trying to figure out if I could lose the love handles before I go home for Christmas.  It was a very strange experience.  One I hadn’t had before, and am still trying to figure out what to do with before that kind of thinking becomes a habit.  Since I share Christina’s upbringing in the fitness world, I also share her mindset of self-criticism and “no pain, no gain”.  Her words of encouragement to abandon that kind of thinking is extremely foreign and yet encouraging to me, and I’m excited to hear the rest of her story since it’s so similar to my own. 

A New Kind of Routine

I really liked practice this week.  The more we do, even though I don’t get much better, I improve just enough to make me wonder what would happen if I really kept up the practice.  I can’t really imagine myself being super flexible, simply because I’ve never experienced the feeling, but how cool would it be if that actually happened?!  With every class that seems less and less impossible.  I think it was when we were practicing the groin stretches where you try to touch you head to the ground when Dr. Schultz suggested if some of us practiced everyday, we would be able to do the full stretch in just a few short weeks.  Obviously, I was not included in that group; however, it got me really thinking about how much progress I could make in two weeks.  Trying to do a lot of different yoga poses daily seems daunting, but if I just picked one or two to focus on and really make a commitment to spend 10 minutes with every day, I think the results would be impressive.  Any sort of exercise is such a mind game.  You begin to think about how much work it is and how much time it will take to get done, and then you let your mind wander.  You say to yourself, “then I have to shower, and I have to figure out when to eat, and I’d have to change clothes” etc. etc. etc.  Eventually, you come up with enough excuses to not even try.  Two stretches.  Ten minutes.  I can do that. 

Divine Atheist?

Chapter 16 got me thinking some because I partially disagree with it, or more the translator’s assessment of it.  Maybe I have no right to, since he clearly knows more about the Gita than I do, but I can’t help but disagree with his explanation of what the ultimate form of “demonic” is.  Easwaran explains that the best way to think of the form of demonic attributes is atheism, but when I read Krishna’s descriptions, I did not think that was the best way to describe it.  For one, just because someone’s an atheist does not mean they are indulging in sinful desires or are self-consumed.  Two, it seems to me that what makes Krishna more angry than lack of faith, is pseudo-faith, or when people falsely present themselves as lovers of god.  I can’t speak for other religions, but I know that within Christianity, there is a lot of this false faith happening.  We chastise atheists for living their lives without Christ, saying that even good deeds mean nothing if they are not done for God, but then many of us turn around in hypocrisy and become consumed with pride or generosity that is aimed at an esteemed reputation rather than serving the poor.  It seems to me that the latter would disturb Krishna much more than an atheist who, while not doing it for any god, may still lead a life closer to Krishna’s divine attributes.  Here I have a question though.  Does the atheist still accrue good karma through their actions despite the fact that it is not done with the ultimate goal of serving and being devoted to Krishna?