My experiences have felt so fragile this last month that I have retreated into myself. It's become increasingly difficult to externalize where I am on my path, as sometimes I am not sure I have a clue. Thus, the silence. Oh, the silence has been good to me... I'd rather be silent than dishonest, or insincere, I think.
On my plane to Perth, Australia, a little girl wailed the entire flight. It was anything but a cry. It was as if this two years old girl was mourning death; loud, piercing, aching screams. At times I became frightened, and closed my eyes and reminded myself to breathe deeply. Her wails made it seem like the metal we were in was descending, like she might know something.
I don't think I have ever heard a child cry like this - and certainly not for three hours straight. Her throat must have been raw, and I know crying can be exhausting. While it became familiar and less alarming, I began to observe the sounds with a sense of curiosity. What compels a child to cry like this? I don't think she was in physical pain. Her parents didn't seem stressed, just really really really amazingly patient and calm. Maybe she was processing something, maybe it was an expression, maybe her ears were popping and the pressure in her head was unfamiliar.
I started to think about crying. I have so much ego around crying. I've been working hard on getting past that for years, y-e-a-r-s, because my intellectual side understands that holding back my emotions is not healthy for my spiritual anatomy. However, it's so, so, so freaking challenging. Whether we recognize the unfortunate affect it has on us, our society favours the concept of strength vs softness. We confuse courage with picking up arms, and cowardice with laying them down.
However, that is a learned concept. It's a construct of external conditioning. And because babies and young children have yet to grasp this concept, there is no shame around it. They wail, they sob, they release. And since I believe that at birth we are closer to our elevated selves, I wonder if there is something to this. I wonder if we, as adults, could also benefit from wailing, sobbing, crying - more often. I think about all the times I swallow my tears, or my hurt, or my pain, and I wonder now ... where in my body did you go pain, hurt, and un-cried tears?What organ, what part of me now carries this burden?
Intellectually, I understood that a sense of loss was inevitable, but never could I have predicted the ache and longing that I sometimes feel for home and/or the souls that define home. The irony is that one of (the many) reasons I ventured off was because a tiny seed in me never quite felt AT home. With each sunrise, I became increasingly reluctant to grow roots, and thrive, period. Envision the molasses, the thickness of the stagnancy.
To not wilt, I had to leave.
Yes, here I am, putting the overbearingly private facet of my cosmic personality to the side to say: I royally MISS; sometimes there is such an overwhelming sense of longing that the ache almost seems unbearable – especially when I feel all too far removed from everything and everyone. The lessons I am learning are real, raw, and ruthless - one can certainly come at me with a million cliché sayings; knock yourself out in the comments, if you fancy. I’ve already considered and meditated on them all, and am slowly treading from an understanding-self to a knowing-self.
Needless to say, deep inside I was somewhat rattled of the idea of being away from everyone, as I turned, you know, old-er. [ha-ha] I feared I would unwillingly become engulfed by loneliness. But there you all were.
There you all were!
I certainly don’t favor crying in public, but there I was, at some random Japanese restaurant in Bali, face flooded with salty tears, as all of you showered me with love. In all sincerity, I was an emotional storm, a hot mess - thundering with sadness that all of you were not with me, yet simultaneously lighting up and exploding with pure happiness to be able to see all of your bright faces. I was beyond surprised, and it was the BEST surprise. Best surprise I think my heart has ever felt.
I am so grateful for every single one of you. Mami Rudite, Dadi Jim, Tommy, Farfar Tom and Farmor Karen, Vecteev Alfons un Vecmamma, David, Emmie, Shanti, Frankie, Michael, Jess, Jessica, Woo, Shahrazad, Kelly, Kamille, Rasmus, Simon, Natalie, Courtney, Kristiine, and Tanja. Thank you for making, yes, m.a.k.i.n.g my life, for loving me, and accepting my love.Lionda, not even Kings have what we have. It is precious. It is irreplaceable, I am grateful and I vow to nurture it with utmost care for the rest of my life. Paldies par vakardienu, un katru dienu, dupsis fruktis.
"I was in the pool today, by myself, with not a soul around - head throbbing, hung over because I think last night I had a beer for every worry... and I was playing with this plumeria that had fallen into the water ... Playing, twirling it around, dizzy, falling under its spell ... And for a moment, I was there, truly there, magnificently present, in a pool, in Bali, Indonesia, living out the last days of being 26 - my biggest worries being uncertainty and finances, which are two things most people, everywhere, generically, feel burdened with... Even somewhere at a sterile grocery store behind the Orange Curtain. And in that moment I remembered how fucking okay, how fucking beautiful everything is. But those moments, like waves, come and go. That capacity to see past the bullshit, and see the truth; life as it is, without the veils, is there. But I don't want to just go there from time to time, I want to practice and one day, be IN that space every waking, every breathing, pulsing moment of my life."
An excerpt from an e-mail I sent to a friend recently. I think it sums up my experience, and my yoga practice, in this moment in life, rather adequately. And that's that. Cheers.
Singapore, Singapore - today is our last day here, and we are finally off to Indonesia.
This is by far one of my favourite "yoga articles" circulating on the internet, written by Karin Burke, and I feel like I want to share it with everyone. It spoke to me immensely, and what Burke so eloquently writes about is a vital aspect of the path that all yogis need not forget. On this journey, I myself have had so many different emotions arise, and this piece was a reenforcement of what I already know deep inside: to not fear any of them, to look them in the eye, and face myself in all my light, and all my shadows. To not be afraid to go there, and see all my facets.
This is exactly why I am here.
A few days ago, while on the road, we were met with another unexpected detour. While in Singapore, in transit to Indonesia, we were told that we would not be allowed on our flight (politics shmolotics).
Lionda and I just stood in the middle of the airport and held each other ... for a long time. We were bloody exhausted, and it was almost as if we were holding each other up. In fact - and this may be slightly on the esoteric side but - I could almost feel eyes on us, as if the Universe was observing, and softening with our love.
It went beyond the flight trouble. I won't go into all the factors, and details - there's no need to put more attention on anything or anyone that was weighing us down - but needless to say, it was felt hauntingly taxing.
Yet, simultaneously, as we moved through all that thick molasses of unexpected bullshit, negativity, and unaware human beings, I felt myself richer, and more rooted in all those that I love, that love me, and my trust in the Universe.
It still doesn't really what to make of it all. And that's okay. I give myself permission to feel every inch of my rage, fear, sadness, and fatigue. And I give myself permission to be excited to finally be getting out of Singapore.
Adios Singaporean Amigos.
Rage, fear, sadness, fatigue. The yoga of darkness.
“Emotion is the chief source of all becoming-conscious. There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.” -Carl Jung
I once had a student who started to drift away and began to look sheepishly apologetic when she did come to class. She avoided my eyes and had an invisible wall around her mat. She used to ask questions or chat after class; now she was the first out of the room and gone from the studio by the time I’d left my mat. Eventually, though, we did talk a little. She told me things were busy. She talked about her kids. Then she looked somewhere into the middle distance and said she didn’t know, really; yoga just wasn’t working any more.
Sometimes, she said, all I feel in child’s pose is anger and disappointment.
Yoga has a corner market on feel good words. I recently had a massage therapist tell me we were both in the ‘feel good industry’. The promise of ‘enlightenment’ tends to make us think we will be more spiritual, and this somehow means we’ll be a little less freakish about time, our kids, our money. There is truth to this. Yoga can show us how good it feels to be alive.
But yoga will also show us exactly how badly we feel. Usually, when honest emotion starts to come up, students leave. They skip class or decide yoga wasn’t what they wanted. They say ‘it’s not working any longer’. The emotion itself keeps them away; they’re ‘not in the mood’, ‘too busy’, or ‘too depressed to move’. They will - trust me, this is real – feel guilty for feeling so crummy when others are just trying to get their savasana on.
This doesn’t indicate that the yoga isn’t working, but that it IS. The end isn’t this negativity, this disappointment. But negativity is part of the path, and it has to be gone through if you want to understand it, to understand yourself, at all. If you don’t, you’ll be shutting down half of your experience of life, and probably the best strengths you’ll ever find. If you don’t, you’ll continue to skip, overcompensate, repeat, and lull. You’ll segue irritation into nicety, stuff it, and it will erupt later as rage toward an intimate or yourself.
Most of us have spent the majority of our lives stuffing and repressing our feelings, rationalizing them, avoiding them, or sublimating them into exercise, food, cigarettes, television, shallow relationships. Women are taught not to feel anger because it’s not nice, not feminine (or too feminine and bitchy, emotional, hormonal and out of control). Men are supposed to feel competence, all the time. In our efforts to feel better, many of us start shutting it off, wholesale, in favor of pop psychology or easy spirituality. It’s called spiritual bypass. It’s an attempt to avoid painful feelings, unresolved issues, or truthful developmental needs with such words as ‘everything happens for a reason’, ’god’s ways are not our ways’, or ‘choose happiness’.
There will be a yoga class, someday, online or at your local studio, where your teacher will start singing. She’ll say ‘exhale’ as if there’s something orgasmic about it. She might allude to the goodness of your heart, your hamstrings, or the light inside.
If you are like me, this may make you clench your bandhas like a fist. There may come a day you lower down into child’s pose, “sweet, receptive, safe” child’s pose and feel nothing but boredom, irritability, and dis-ease. You keep lifting your head off the mat, looking at the clock. There may come a day your brain starts swearing at the lovely yoga teacher saying something vapid about love in your newly blossomed chakra.
Here is the thing. Yoga is not about bliss, but about honesty. Spirituality is not certainty, but the longing of the heart. Enlightenment is not ‘letting go’ of bad feelings, but understanding them, what they’re doing to us, and how they are expressed in the body. Non-harming and forgiveness are not about feeling generous or big enough (bigger than and condescending), but knowing the difficulty of right actions and assuming responsibility for the difficult. Forgiveness often comes directly out of acknowledging how bloody bitter we are. Love is not joy, all the time. Sometimes, love hurts. Love is raw.
Yoga is a love story. Not the fluffy, romanticized love story, but the real one. The kind that leaves you changed.
Emotions are doorways, ways in. The goal is not to exist without shadows, to become so spiritual we no longer feel fat, bored, envious, or impatient. The goal is to swallow hard as we take on willingness to go into the dark.
Because yoga asks you to work with both your body and your mind, the inevitable result is going to be messy. There will be times the body itself will start in on anger, hot and fast, trembly, without the reasoning mind having a clue what is going on. There will be days the boredom or loneliness seem so sharp they may actually wound. There will be five thousand ways your mind will tell you it isn’t worth it, it won’t work, that love is not real.
Yet, yoga has probably already given you a clue to this. You’ve probably already felt how love – whether it be romantic or ethical, compassion, right living, making a solidity of your name – is the only thing that is real. The highest and best in human beings is subtle, mysterious, and tied directly to the shadows. Life is both unbearably cruel and devastatingly sweet, often at the same time.
The shadows will show up. Go there. Apathy, acedia, what Christian mystics called desolation, existentials call despair, moves when we move toward it. It isn’t the passage of time that heals us, but the passing through experiences.
There are hundreds of things telling us to ‘get over it’, to ‘think positively’, or to ‘let it go’. Be wary of these as the roadside distractions that they are.
Yoga is the love story where in things fall apart. God moves away, often at the same time he takes away the ground. First goes this, then goes that. Gone are the thrill of the first months of yoga class, the ease of learning something new every time you walked in the door. Gone is the schedule that allowed you class three times a week. Gone is the strength in your shoulders, the ability to keep on a diet. Gone is the confidence of conversion.
And then a small movement in the heart. And then two.
A day after I wrote my last post, I found out that our stay in Latvia had to be extended. I won't go into detail, but in short, the matter was unexpected and we were forced to entirely re-route. The process proved to be rather taxing -- as those things usually are. When we finally did make it on a plane to South East Asia, it was taking us to Hanoi, Vietnam - about 1500km from our original destination point. And as we sardine-packed ourselves into a rusty minibus to the city center, and the heat, and smells, and the stomach-wrenching sound of the girl vomiting in front began to rapidly engulf us, Lionda and I just looked at each other and smiled. Hello Vietnam.
We spent the following week traveling down the coast of Vietnam to Cambodia (Ha Noi ---> Da Nang/ Hội An ---> Ho Chi Minh City ---> Phnom Phen). In total, we spent over 60 hours on trains, sleeping buses, taxis, and so forth. It felt a bit intense at first, constantly moving from place to place, but the unexpected detour turned out to be surprisingly fruitful and educational. With everything behind us now, there is a sense of appreciation for life's little complications. I feel grateful to have seen this unique, beautiful, and buzzing country, which otherwise we may have missed.
I can say that we especially enjoyed the food experience in The Old Quarter in Hanoi, where an array of low tables and plastic stools color every street corner. We even had fried noodles and Tiger Beer for breakfast. That is one of my fondest memories -- perhaps because it was so unlike us, and a reflection of our unwitting appetite to experience the food culture in its authentic form. We also took delight in the historic city of Hội An.
This is a video of us eating street food style breakfast in Hanoi, Vietnam.
Now we are on Koh Rong island in Cambodia. Life is relaxed here, and most days Lionda and I read, write, or research future ventures. We've started to regularly practice together. Unless the weather conditions don't permit it, we wake up with the roosters and either head to the beach or a little vacant bungalow deck that we have discovered, and do about a 60-75 minute practice. I still don't have a mat, but plan on getting one at soon as I find the opportunity. When I was in Siem Reap, I visited the Peace Cafe, where I took yoga last time I visited Cambodia. They had the cheap (think Target-style) mats there for $18. Looking back at it, I should have just gotten one - it would have been better than nothing - but in the moment, it just seemed ludicrous.
So that was my best effort in summarizing the past month -- which really has felt like 6 months, due to the density of each day. I will make a better effort to stay more consistent.
