Call It Magic

Yesterday I was reminded of the magic of yoga. It’s been over a decade since I first stepped onto the mat, and still I can forget the impact of this simple practice.

It was early evening, and I was in a pretty good funk. It had been raining all day and I felt trapped in my house. I was alone–par for the course during the pandemic–and thinking about how much I wanted a partner in my life. Longing for a partner made me feel lonely, and my attention naturally turned to my ex. As I remembered sweet moments with him, I felt a wave of grief for that lost relationship. My memories also triggered some hurt and disappointment, and I thought about calling a friend for some comfort. But that reminded me that a dear friend had recently expressed that she thought I had let her down, and I was anxious because I felt out of connection with her. Since we hadn’t talked yet, I found myself imagining the different directions that this difficult conversation could go.

I sat on my couch, tangled in all of these thoughts and feeling unhappy and stressed. I wondered how soon I could crawl into bed, pull the covers to my chin, and escape into sleep.

I glanced at the clock. It was only 7–much too early to attempt sleep. I remembered a yin yoga class that I liked started in fifteen minutes, so I opened my laptop to register. When the schedule loaded I saw there was a substitute listed for my favorite teacher. Ugh!! I snapped the screen down in frustration. But I knew from experience that yoga would somehow help me out of my funk, so I registered and started setting up my props.

The class began and my sour mood continued. I was rolling with the substitute teacher, but her microphone kept cutting out and I struggled to hear her instructions. I added that frustration to the running list in my mind…COVID, never ending rain, my ex, my friend, this yoga class. And yet I continued to follow along with the poses, beginning to breathe with the teacher’s cues.

In yin classes postures are often held for a few minutes to provide slow, steady stress to our connective tissues. As the poses became more challenging, I started to feel stronger sensations in my body. I needed to focus on these in order to position my body in that sweet spot somewhere between pushing myself too hard (and fighting through discomfort for the remainder of the hold) and not challenging myself enough (and missing out on the full benefit of the pose).

We finished a particularly intense hip opener and rested on our bellies for several breaths. I settled onto the mat, released a loud exhale and felt the support of the ground below me. I noticed that the list of stresses was no longer on repeat and–released from the weight of all of those thoughts and feelings–my body was relaxed. I felt peaceful. And then I remembered: this is the magic of yoga! This is the power of being present to the moment instead of trapped in the tangle of thoughts in my mind.

You see, our minds are always thinking. It’s sort of their thing. And while sometimes our minds think about useful things, like how we need to stop at the red light up ahead, all too often they think about all sorts of things that aren’t actually happening. They think about the things that we wish we’d done differently. The things that other people said to us. The things we said to other people. The things that we are scared may or may not happen to us or to the people we care about. And when our minds are attending to these past events or future worries, they take us away from the present moment. I am no longer sitting rather comfortably on my couch–albeit alone–while it rains outside. Instead I’m in the middle of an (imaginary!) argument with my friend and feeling anxious about it.

It’s an incredible challenge to not get carried away by our thoughts like this. Yet the more we are able to recognize that we have been caught up in our thoughts, the more we strengthen our ability to come back to the moment at hand. Yoga helps us build this muscle memory.

In yoga, we actively practice bringing our attention to our bodies in the moment. We may practice this dozens of times in a single class. As my mind starts to compose a grocery list, the teacher asks me to notice where the weight is centered in my feet. And I drop the list and turn my attention to the soles of my feet. As I start missing the way my ex-boyfriend tucked my hair behind my ear, the teacher cues to ground into my left hip while continuing to extend through my fingertips. And I feel what it is like to root and reach. As I start to worry that I might lose a dear friendship, the teacher asks me to inhale into my right side and I feel my ribcage expand.

Over and over again in yoga, I practice turning away from my mind’s distracting chatter and bringing my awareness back to my body. My attention can’t be in both places at once, so if I am present to the moment then I won’t become tangled in thoughts about the things that have already happened or that haven’t even happened yet. I won’t become stuck in the morass of feelings that these thoughts provoke. I won’t spend the precious moments of my life in a moody funk induced by recreating the past or worrying about the future.

When my attention is centered on my body, I am awake to what I am experiencing now, in this moment. I am alive. I am sitting alone on the couch, listening to the raindrops tap dance on my windows.  

This is a life changing practice. You might even call it magic.

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If you’re interested in learning more about the practice of bringing your attention back to your body, check out this podcast by meditation teacher Tara Brach.

Awakening Our Body's Awareness - Part 1 - Mindful awareness of our bodies is a portal to full aliveness, wisdom and love. These two classes will explore the trance that takes us away from our body, the pathways home, ways of working with pain, and the gifts of an embodied presence (a favorite from the archives).

When No One Was Looking

Yoga is frequently heralded as a modern day cure for whatever ails you. While I am generally suspicious of superlative statements like this, in my experience yoga has been an exceptionally beneficial physical and mental exercise. It has helped me gain strength, reduce back pain, and recover from emotional injuries. Yet recently I discovered that my years of practice are partly to blame for neck and shoulder pain I am experiencing. How did that happen?

My physical therapist tells me that it is very common for people to struggle with neck and shoulder pain, and it often stems from how we sit at our computers–shoulders hunched forward, chins tucked. Most people are in PT to learn how to improve their posture by drawing their shoulders back, broadening their chests, and extending their spines. Despite the fact that I also work at a computer all day long, I have the opposite problem. My upper spine is straighter than average, and with less curvature certain muscles in my back and neck are predisposed to being overworked.

When I started attending yoga classes a decade ago, I often heard instructions to "draw your shoulders down and back” and "extend your spine" to find a more upright posture. These movements were easy to feel in my body and before long I had unconsciously developed a habit of regularly making these adjustments, even when they weren't cued. While that is healthy movement to practice, there is equal–and for me, more important–work to be done in the opposite direction. Without placing my attention on how I was moving daily in my practice, I was unintentionally creating muscle imbalances.

As I thought about how my lack of attention on the mat had contributed to physical injury, I began to wonder about other areas of my life. Where else was being on autopilot causing me injury? How often did I unknowingly establish a habit without directly examining what is best for me? It wasn't hard to find examples. Like maintaining that one-sided friendship year after year. Or holding onto a job even though it doesn’t utilize the talents I am most passionate about. Or what about snacking during every waking hour of the day?

Each of these situations requires my attention so I can clearly identify what I need. Maybe I need to end the friendship or maybe I need to set firm boundaries to protect my time and energy. Maybe at work I can take on additional responsibilities in the areas of my strengths, or maybe I need to find a different position that feeds my passion. And I definitely need to stop putting things in my mouth all day long. That one should be a no-brainer!

Life is busy, we move fast, and it’s easy to unknowingly fall into routines that don’t benefit us. If we take time to examine what we are doing and what we actually need, we can start making intentional choices instead of letting our habits choose for us. We can better align how we live with how we desire to live. It is often uncomfortable work, because we are confronted with changes we need to make in our lives. Yet the result is less self-injury and more self-love. 

Come Up For Air

A few weeks ago I had an incredible opportunity to travel to Mexico with a conservation organization. I was drawn to the trip because it included whale watching in an area where gray whales frequently stop as they migrate up the coast. I had been whale watching once before in Oregon. Though I saw just one at a distance, I can easily remember how excited I was to see the spout shooting skyward.

So you can probably imagine the pure joy I felt when I saw my first gray whale spy hop from the ocean a mere fifty feet away, or the awe I felt when a whale surfaced alongside the boat and curled right underneath us, swimming so shallowly that I could see the barnacles clinging to its skin. The whales were beautiful, and for moments at a time my attention was captured by my senses–the sights, the sounds, the smells. Watching them I felt a humble mix of wonder, love, and camaraderie.

On my last day in Mexico, we were driving through a seemingly endless desert when I saw a small group of cows ahead. They were lying on the edge of the road, forcing the driver to perform an evasive maneuver. I was surprised and delighted to see these cows, and in my excitement I made some unintelligible exclamation (as I sometimes do). The guide turned around in his seat to look at me and laughed. He said, “You’re more excited about seeing cows than whales!” I laughed, too, because as I thought about his comment, he sort of had a point.

My daydreams about this trip had been saturated by my desire to see whales. What we saw or did the rest of the time didn’t really matter to me, so long as I had an experience with a whale. Yet the entire trip provided moments just as worthy of my rapt attention, like watching the sunrise over the mountains from the roof of the hotel or the sandpipers scurrying away from the waves on little stick legs that looked much too delicate for their bodies. If I had only paid attention to my number one priority, thinking that the rest wasn’t as important, I would have missed out on so many beautiful moments. I would have missed out on those sleepy cows, which I can honestly remember as vividly as the whales in all their majesty.

Yet how often do I do this in day-to-day life, so set on accomplishing one task that I miss out on the moments along the way? So determined to learn a song on the guitar that I don’t feel the way the sound cocoons me each time I play a note. So focused on willing my dog to poop before I leave for the day that I don’t notice the daffodils are starting to bloom. So fixated on getting dinner in the oven that I don’t notice the bright colors of the vegetables I am chopping.

Our rush to cross the finish line prevents us from experiencing where we are right now with focused attention. Instead one moment blurs into the next and the next until we accomplish the thing we set out to do, feeling a brief happiness in our achievement before setting our sights on a new destination and starting over. If we can slow down and give our attention to the entire journey, as if each moment matters, we can more fully experience our lives.

This might be easier to practice while on vacation in Mexico than at my office or the grocery store, but I’m still going to try. The number of moments in my life won’t change, but I’ll be present in more of them.

If You Build It, They Will Come

Where you place your attention is where you will go. This is a thought that keeps surfacing in the philosophy discussions I'm a part of on Friday nights at yoga school. It has come up in conversations relating to two traditional texts that we are reading, the Bhagavad Gita and The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. As we are surrounded by unlimited distractions, this sentiment is possibly even more relevant today because so many things are constantly competing for our attention.

If this is a true statement–as I believe it is–it gives us a lot of power to make change in our life. In fact it tells us exactly what we need to do to make change happen: focus our attention on where we want to go. When we give our attention to something, we spend time more thinking about that thing and doing that thing. It begins to be more present in our life, which in turn makes us think about it more. It seems like a pretty obvious cycle, right?

This principle is already at work in our lives, but we may only notice it when we intentionally decide where we want to go. For example, let's say you want to make healthier choices about what you eat. You start putting more thought into the foods you are consuming, examining nutrition labels and browsing health blogs. You might start to collect recipes that incorporate whole foods or join a CSA. It's likely you will talk about your progress with others and share what you are learning on your Facebook feed. Consciously directing your attention to healthy food choices allows you to make decisions in line with that goal.

However, this same cascade also works when we aren't paying attention to where we are directing our attention. And for many of us, this is what's happening most of the time. If you spend a lot of time with a friend who likes to gossip and put people down, you are giving those behaviors your attention. You might find yourself participating in the same behaviors even though they aren't in line with your values. If you have a crush on a coworker and start to fantasize about what that relationship could be like, you might make excuses to spend more time with that person, despite having a deep love for your partner at home.

I have realized that where I place my attention is incredibly important. We give life to the things that we think about, so it is best to use care and discernment to decide what those things are. Explicitly thinking about this every day is helping me to create new patterns of behavior and taking me in the direction that I want to go: more kindness, more honesty, more authenticity, more love. Where are you going?