Katy on Wellbeing

Digesting our Experience

Yesterday was my first day back to "normal life" after an extended holiday period.  Though I was full of good ideas for how to make 2010 even more fabulous than the year before, the best I could do was go to the gym then spend the afternoon lying on my couch reading The Economist.  This morning, I sat poised to write my first blog post in months, but nothing would come.  I felt blocked.  Like a river clogged with branches and leaves.  The image was a perfect one, because it showed the solution as well as the problem.  I needed to begin dismantling the debris that was blocking the flow.  I needed to digest the backlog of recent experiences, to make room for new ones to come in.

Just as we digest our food, we must digest our life experience in order for it to move harmoniously through us, nourishing us then making way for more.  Otherwise it stagnates, taking up permanent, dulling residence in our bodies, closets, thought patterns and habits.  So how do we "digest" our experiences?  Through ACKNOWLEDGMENT.  Pleasure revolutionary Regena Thomashauer (aka Mama Gena) explains it like this:

"Acknowledgment works in a similar way to chewing and swallowing.  If you are eating dinner, you have to chew and swallow your mouthful before you can have another.  When you acknowledge, you consume, or chew and swallow, the wonderful bite you just received, and you are ready for the next one.  No chewing and swallowing, and there will be no next bite -- your mouth is only so big."

Though rarely described in these terms, practices for acknowledgment or digestion are found in many creative and spiritual traditions.  Here are a few that are simple, but deeply powerful:

1. Morning Pages.  This was the tool I used this morning.  Popularized by Julia Cameron in her Artists Way and subsequent books, this involves three 8-1/2 x 11" pages of long-hand writing each day, just spitting out whatever stuff comes to mind.  Yes, long-hand.  Yes, every morning.  And what comes to mind?  Scraps of your life: what you did yesterday; how you feel about something; a worry; a hope; an idea.  For lots more on morning pages, follow this link, then click on Download The Basic Tools PDF.

2. Bragging and Gratitude.  I learned these from Mama Gena.  Both provide a systematic way of reviewing and releasing your experience with appreciation.  Bragging is the practice of listing and sharing things that are going well for you, or that you have done that you are proud of.  E.g., I brag that after I crashed my car last week (yes, I did), I jumped on the train instead and visited my friends anyway.  I brag I signed up for some workshops that look interesting in Florida in February.  I brag I'm blogging again.  Gratitude is listing and sharing the things you are grateful for.  E.g., I am grateful I walked away unharmed from the crash, and they can fix my car.  I am grateful for all the friends I saw last week.  I am grateful for my family / friends / chiropractor, etc.  It's wonderful if you can share these practices daily with friends or family, or a like-minded community.  Or why not post regularly on GratitudeLog.com?

3. Vipassana Meditation.  In this practice, the meditator sits quietly and observes anything that arises -- bodily sensations, thoughts, emotions, etc. -- but does not engage with them.  She does not begin thinking about them, but instead simply notes and releases them, allowing them to float away.  And so on with the next thing that arises, and the next.  This type of meditation is meant to provide insight into the activities of our minds, and teach the experience of impermanence.  But the byproduct is that, when practiced over time, it uses the lightest of acknowledgments to clear our life experiences and give us glimpses of the great still realm beyond.

One thing that years of yoga has taught me is that our bodies quite literally hold emotions and experiences.  In any big, week-long yoga workshop, you will always see someone crying.  I've found myself in tears folded over in a forward bend, and hanging backwards in wheel.  What happens is that during the deep, systematic stretching of yoga, parts of our bodies that were holding experience open up and release them, with the accompanying surge of emotion.  Though it does not acknowledge experience intellectually like the practices above, yoga is very good at helping us digest and release it from our physical bodies.  Prolonged, steady exercise like walking, running, and swimming can have a similar effect.  The combination of movement, deep breathing, and a relaxed mind allow us to start letting go of the branches and leaves, the memories and emotions and logistics.  And this letting go, this digestion, opens us up once again to the fresh and the new.

How do you digest?

What is a Spiritual Practice?

A few weeks ago, a friend asked me, "what is a spiritual practice?"  It's a good question, and one I've been noodling on in spare moments ever since.  I think a spiritual practice is anything you do regularly over a long period of time (i.e. years) that provides direct experience and insights about your inner world and the outer one, seen and unseen.

Take the time-honored practice of meditation, for example, which is perhaps the gold standard in terms of its effectiveness, simplicity, and versatility.  Meditation provides direct experience of the behavior and contents of the mind, our emotions and reactions, the rise and fall of physical sensations, our aversion to discomfort, etc.  With and practice, it provides insights into the larger field of being, the "who is thinking these thoughts", the nature of matter and energy, and the interconnectedness of all things.

But spiritual practice comes in many forms.  The ancient yogis recognized that each one of us is different in our inclinations, needs, and the contours of our souls.  Hence the evolution of many different streams of yoga or spiritual practice, such as:

• Raja yoga - mental yoga, focusing on meditation
• Bhakti yoga - the yoga of devotion to the Divine
• Karma yoga - the yoga of selfless action
• Hatha yoga - the yoga of the physical senses and experience

Among my nearest and dearest, I see people whose long-time spiritual practices include: creativity (including writing, visual arts, etc.); working with plants, animals or the earth; teaching; bird- and butterfly-watching; yoga; meditation; healing; and attending and being active in an organized religious community.  My own spiritual practice has for years consisted of yoga, writing, and trying to be an open channel for divine love to flow out into the world.  Interestingly, only the third actually began as a "spiritual practice".  The other two were just things I wanted to do, for exercise and relaxation, and to address an internal compulsion, respectively, that slowly took hold and transformed me. 

What we do is less important than how we do it.  What makes something a spiritual practice instead of just an activity?  I think the following aspects are key:

• Dedication over a significant period of time -- through thick and thin, pleasure and discomfort, excitement and boredom, faith and disillusionment
• Sincere openness to seeing what arises from the practice, and learning from it
• The practice's ability to reveal both deep inner truths and outer ones
• Alignment of the practice with your deepest values
• Willingness to bring as much as possible of your whole self to the practice
• Allows Spirit a means of access into our lives, and through us into the world
  

What am I missing -- what else makes something a spiritual practice?  What are your spiritual practices?  How did you come to them?  Why do you continue with them year after year?  How do they stretch you?

Today in Yoga Class

Regular hatha yoga practice is one of the best things we can do for our physical, emotional and spiritual wellbeing.  This week marks my joyful return to yoga class, after doing something evil to my back a fortnight ago.  The time away allowed me to experience the classes yesterday and today more vividly.  A few observations:

1. Coming back to class after a few weeks away intensifies the pleasure of the practice.  In that time, my body has become tighter, and my mind has settled into a chattery groove.  In contrast, the open, buttery, stretchy, relaxed, peaceful, during- and post-yoga feeling is particularly noticeable and sweet. 

2. There is something special about a yoga practice when I am recovering from an injury, or working with a mild pain or illness.  (I say mild, because if you're really hurt or sick, it's not the time to be doing hatha yoga.  Better to rest.)  When I'm feeling a little fragile, I am much more aware of going gently and respecting my edges.  And there is nothing like the wash of appreciation I feel when I can do a pose again that an injury would have made impossible a few weeks earlier.  After the back thing, I'm just ecstatic to be moving at all.  But I remember the first time back in child's pose after a knee injury had kept me out of it for a year: I was in tears with relief, and with the happiness of being reunited with an old friend I was afraid I'd never meet again.

3. Our teacher had us repeat affirmations (in our minds) during some of the long holds.  For example, during triangle pose, "energy and joy fill my body cells; joy descends to me".  Not often enough to be annoying.  But occasionally, to give the mind something productive to do instead of resisting the posture.  After the first "ha, right", I could feel the affirmation's intention softening my effort and resistance.

If I have one niggling concern about the way we practice yoga, it's that we yogis can sometimes take it all awfully seriously.  I don't know what the Sanskrit is for "head stuck up own ass pose" is (baddha siras paschimotanasana?), but it's a risk we run.  So I've been thinking recently about who's good at lightening up and just having fun with it.

1. Yoga teacher and author Erich Schiffmann.  When asked what music he plays during his own practice, he listed Led Zeppelin and Neil Young, in addition to the usual standards like Krishna Das.
2. Yoga teacher David Romanelli, author of "Yeah Dave's Guide to Livin' the Moment: Getting to Ecstasy Through Wine, Chocolate and Your iPod Playlist".
3. Ogden the Inappropriate Yoga Guy

What have you noticed in yoga class?