Yoga Training III
It’s the last weekend of the yoga teacher training: yesterday we talked about the business of yoga and marketing oneself; today and tomorrow we teach our public class as a group. My portion is the backbends at the end of the standing series and before final cooldowns.
Consistently doing the meditation and physical exercises of yoga over the last several months has been good for my nerves and health. But (and this is understood to be a consequence of practicing yoga) other goals seem less important when compared to attaining some state of meditative absorbtion (samādhi) and thereby sharpening my independence (kaivalyam) from the world. So I’ve been feeling less of a nervous drive to do projects, and I’m less attached to their outcomes. This is because everything is temporary and will pass into oblivion.
I’ve been thinking a lot about dying soon and suddenly. Not that I want to die: it’s just the possibility that’s been bothering me. If I died now, what would I leave behind? What would remain? It’s the unfinished projects of the previous post that’re haunting me, but the dialectic is that my writing is only good when I’m feeling like writing. And there’s nothing more depressing than when words won’t come.
But besides being morbid, thinking of death has been helpful in moderating my expectations for the future. When I catch myself fantisizing about possible futures, things that could be, what it would be like if…, I imagine the opposite: and what if I, or someone I love and am building a future around and for, died suddenly? It could happen: people have accidents, or diseases. And, honestly, the result is soothing: it takes me back to the present.
It’s not like it used to be. When I was little, ten or thereabouts, I would lie awake at night and fantasize. Above my head as I lay in bed there was a window that looked over a path of paving stones that ran between our house and the neighbors’. My bedroom was on the second story (by the American reckoning, so the first story for Europeans), and I would lie awake at night imagining jumping out of the window and falling onto the pavers below. I knew that it probably wouldn’t kill me to fall from that height, and so much the better: hopefully I would be horribly injured, maybe paralyzed, and I would be debilitated. I imagined the kind of chair I would have to use to move around, and how I would be the center of attention and an object of great compassion. I would make myself cry from the pity I felt for myself in these fantasies where everyone finally noticed me and cared about me and was nice to me.
There’s a lot to say about this, and I’ll never get it all out. This was about the time my step-father was coming onto the scene, and my mother was beginning her therapy practice, and I was getting older and more independent. My father had his new wife and life and was mostly out of the picture by then. I wanted to be the center of everyone’s attention, and I wanted people to fawn over me and recognize me for my talent (a vicious desire I still feel). I wanted them to care about me most of all.
Growing up is realizing you’re just one more person in the mass of humans churning on the earth. We’re the Shadoks, no matter how much we want to pretend we’re the Gibis. I got off the bus yesterday at Van Ness and Market and, standing among the crowd waiting for the light to change, I felt at home huddling with the people on their ways to wherever they were going.
That’s all yoga, I suppose: understanding oneself as just a particle in the greater ongoing process of humanity, of life at large, unfolding itself on this planet, and acting from this perspective while keeping sight of one’s own particularity, of one’s own thisness, without confusing that thisness with the actual self (asmitā). It’s a hard tightrope to walk, observing yourself from the outside, as it were, but it’s better than lying awake at night making oneself cry from self-pitying fantasies.
