Letting Go

October 31, 2011

I have been thinking a lot about the practice of letting go.

The support of the positive – as if there were two electrical charges at work.

Letting go of that which does not serve your goal.

That’s complicated, isn’t it.

What goal at what time? When does determination switch over into holding on?

It helps me to reframe the idea that the things I want to do that make me feel bad are simply standing in my way. Lets me not fight with the wanting them quite so much.

I get confused about detachment though.

I wonder if we in the west are really capable – our whole society entrenched, as it were, in attachment and desire.

I believe in holding on.

I believe in ambition.

Furthermore – fruitcakechild that I was, I saw a lot of the practice of letting go. I think there is a way that, in the hands of the Western practitioner, the ideal of detachment can become sublimation in an instant.

Truth, right. That’s the goal. In the personal practice what I am finding is the relationship of listening to the body – what it has to say. What the difference between what it needs and what the momentary desire of the bad habit is, furthermore.

I learned this first from the poet Marie Howe. She teaches, listen to the poem. It sounds ridiculous at first – but when you begin to practice trust and understanding deepen and grow. The poem will tell you what it needs.

In a way it feels antithetical. As if maybe following the whim of the moment could make it harder to work toward a clear progression. At the same time it feels suddenly as if the path forward is made up of so many very small choices…

I love the way that language often holds its own antithesis... 

Letting go -- as in to release the habit of something -- a person -- a glass of wine -- violent television...  
Letting go -- as in falling deeply into something -- letting go of fear and resistance in order to experience and be present...

Letting -- As in to allow
Go -- As in to move forward

My Voice

October 27

Chanting and I, we go way back…

I learned to chant when I was – somewhere around 5, I suppose. Fruit cake that I am.

It was summer with my father – I remember he wore only white cotton and black china flat shoes – he cooked completely vegan – and he meditated for what seemed like an eternity every day… and he taught me how to chant.

Om Mani Padri Om.

Om – the sound the spirit – the beginning and end of the universe…

Om is the jewel in the lotus of the heart.

Isn’t that beautiful? Inside my body there is a beautiful pure white lotus flower, inside the flower there is a shining clear jewel, inside the jewel resides the spirit of the universe…

total fruitcake land, I’m telling you.

Still, the faith that former alter boy taught me in those formidable years has fared me very well in my life.

Both of my parents used to listen to Gregorian chants – which, if you haven’t heard them, are truly astounding. The voices of the monks resounds and fills the space and the caverns of the psyche…

In high School I learned about Artemisia Gentleschi – her science and her art and her mystical chants…

Later, someone very close to me also went deep into Indian religion… and he asked me to do with him a chanting class. A woman (I don’t know what her station was – teacher, indeed…) came to his little apartment in the East Village – where he used to collect crack vials on the street… she came and she taught me the body mechanics of chanting. She gave me a mantra I don’t remember – I told her I had my own, but she said I should never say “OM” – that it was believed too sacred to speak.

Lately it has bothering me that so many teachers will ask you to chant but won’t tell you what you are chanting. I think it is cavalier. I think if we are not connected to the language we are disconnected from connection with others…

I like the way at the beginning of a yoga class which asks students to chant the voices waiver and clash… how at the end of the class – of two hours of practicing communally – the voices flow together and build into one sound.

Yesterday I tried chanting OM in my living room.

Amazing how such a simple – and known – exercise could bring up so many feelings of self consciousness, fear, self flagellation… I could barely hear myself. I could barely force the sound out of my mouth and throat. Couldn’t feel it in my chest or my head at all.

As a writer, I have practiced voice for a long time – practiced and studied and come to know and trust… But my physical voice is always a struggle. I speak quietly. I grow quiet. I used to fantasize about being mute.

Strength

October 25, 2011

I think I expect that entry and existence will be greeted with the same energy. But today they are different…

Funny, yesterday I was a little dreading Sweet Teacher... her warm ups are so hard. Sometimes they feel like torture -- and I almost didn't go. Of course, what I was expecting was the opposite from what came. She even forgot to have us introduce ourselves -- just dive in and rub your partners shoulders... it felt so good on Monday morning. Such a gift of an approach. 

My approach to headstand was so comfortable today – from quiet strength of the core – no wall, no waiver.

But I feel weak. Balance is difficult. Upside down is difficult. A little better than yesterday -- but the same feeling. I only stayed maybe a minute or a  half a minute twice… I didn’t force anything… I listened to someone for several hours this weekend who said, “don’t bully your breath – don’t bully the pose…”

I think I think about building to strength… like a staircase…

but that’s not right, it occurs to me today…

Strength is as fluid as a day, if we listen. It comes and goes.

I think that what is inside is independent from my knowledge. From what I think it should be like today…

It feels so much stronger to notice the weakness than to try to prove to myself that I am strong...

My backbends...

October 24

A funny thing happened to me, on the way off my mat…

Sweet Teacher said to me, as I was lying in happy baby pose/ dead bug pose (which for those of you who don’t know, finds a practitioner on her back with her legs squat open and her feet in her hands – completely open)… Sweet Teacher says to me, “That was one hell of a wheel!”

It was a very strange moment.

First off – I adore this woman. I feel like even after only a few months she has changed my life forever – given it more grace and more understanding and more push and more gentleness…

Praise is lovely, when it comes from someone you trust and love.

Praise is so awful. It makes me self-conscious. Last year I started forcing myself to say “thank you” to praise. And just saying that has helped me understand the nature of acceptance – of accepting other people’s appreciation – other people’s energy and kindness… So many of us are so good at accepting our faults…

So I said thank you. I felt self-conscious. I wondered what on earth I looked like up in wheel pose… you never see yourself practice – like sex, I suppose – so there is no relational scale…

But this was not quite that. There was another strangeness to the idea of the praise. I suppose it comes from which pose it was, really. When she said nice job as she twisted me into a very painful bind minutes earlier – or helped me get my feet over my head, which proved difficult today, I heard encouragement and gratitude for courage…

But my wheel… my back bends. I struggle to build the muscles around enough to support the suppleness therein… My back craves a deep, high bend – and when a practice doesn’t include it, I long for the stretch… the natural nature of the way my very own back wants to extend…

So when she noticed, it felt so otherly I was hard pressed to answer…

It has nothing to do with me. There is no connection with pride in this practice. It comes of the body – a body I struggle to accept and to love… Good morning, sweet body.

We have these gifts, yes. They are given to us. We encourage or we don’t – the flight to which we are capable.

Maybe today it is to try to understand the gifts – the movements – the way we hold our strength and appreciate the strength. Love for the bravery and love for the ease. Thank you, back – for allowing me to bend and shift – for holding me straight through the change of the seasons…

The Tree

October 21

Strength grows – like a child, right in front of me while I feel so weak...

Core knowledge – the feeling of form – an understanding of endurance of allowance of courage. The hold of the severed begins… before trust, before understanding, before the fall is in the past.

It is fall. The colors and the leaves – they don’t need to be told…

hold… let go… face the sun.

Open Heart

October 20

A smattering of voices come to me this morning as I think about practice.

Just after I wrote the last entry, the therapist asked if I had ever used the Metta prayer. Funny how that works. She asked if I had tried saying it for parts of myself… I said I had been saying it for my heart – “what does that mean?” she said… of course, she didn’t mean to say, you have two terminal degrees in writing, you should know better than to use a word like heart.

Maybe I meant specifically the part that has always been vulnerable. The child-raw – the accepting – the needing -- the part we reach open to the sky.

The part that has been tied to something that is not tied to me.

A friend said he’d been reading. That friend had a heart attack not terribly long ago. Dearest Jon, may your heart be healthy… and Elizabeth. The hearts I have most worried about in my life – for their proximity to air. Heart opening. Open heart. When Elizabeth had surgery I sobbed…

I have been thinking a lot about what it takes to move something into the past. Scalpels and broken beliefs… I suppose they are the falls. Sweet teacher always says to embrace fall – to push yourself until you fall…

But there is a place too, where we can become cavalier – where we can not respect ourselves or our own fragility…

On Tortola once, when I was about 17, there was a tremendous storm. I love Caribbean storms.  The force – the way everything stops – the sound and the nature.

But that year the sea took two German tourists. They were walking on the rocks. No one felt all that bad for them – no one knew them – it was just so stupid.

Pose until you fall – but make sure your risk is in check.

There is a thing about poets – the history of women poets who look like me – and the craziness thereof – Plath and her unhealed beauty and brilliance…

A friend said to me once “can’t you play with that edge… see how close to crazy you can get and write from there…” I know the force of this ocean. He is a tourist.

I guess I am thinking about all the different ways to fall. Isn’t that all we do – test limitations…

But there is no question when they are exceeded. When a living thing has been cut into.

Toward Well Healed

October 17

What does it mean to change your life? What does it mean to put into place decisions and well thought out ideas?

I have been thinking about this as I play with times and amounts and poses and self in this new practice of mine…

I’ve heard it takes three months to change a habit. I have heard it takes 18 times to do something and make it your own.

I teach from a project by Robert Pinsky often – the favorite poems project. http://www.favoritepoem.org/videos.html

In one video a young Haitian photographer discusses why he love’s Sylvia Plath’s “Nick and the Candle Stick.” I love his reading because he’s passionate and brave and sometimes seems wrong to me – but that is the beauty of poetry reading…

I am also always caught on and intrigued by his description of Plath – as being from a “well healed existence…”

This is fascinating to me. Well, first, the idea that Plath was anywhere near well or healed… but isn’t in there also the concept that life is born in a way that requires healing…

this feels right to me… and I am intrigued in part because of Plath’s lack of such healing. I think a lot about what it means to come from her type of background… my type of background…

I went to a meditation retreat once – it was about love and kindness – co-taught by a former Tibetan Monk and a Jewish New York author.

We are all healing.

We learned the “Meta Prayer” – a prayer for love and kindness – I still say it most days, five years or so later. You say the prayer for the peace of people easy and close to you and people far away from you too… the scope and the shift allow for the perspective of the world to change.

There are monks in the mountains saying these prayers for all of us every day.

Can you feel it?

But lately I’ve been saying it for my heart. May my heart be safe. May my heart live in ease.

The beginning, perhaps, on the path to well healed…