March 17, 2009

Early this morning, the dark sky was translucent before the sunrise; it was clear and at peace, except for the moon. Wild and vibrant, it dominated the skies. But now, as the sun continues to rise, the moon becomes distant, a subtle detail, blending in with miles of clouds. 

Today, the sky is so clear, I watched the shadow of my own plane take off from the runway. Such a simple experience, yet so humbling. Too often we forget to stop and smell the roses, to appreciate the little things that we are fortunate enough to encounter. 

March 17, 2009 (cont.)

Something else I was thinking about…

Airports always remind me of my last relationship, a long-distance relationship that lasted over a year. I think about how emotional I used to be, how much it hurt and how often I cried when we had to say goodbye. And now, I feel nothing. How is that possible? How can one go from feeling so strongly for someone to… nothing? How can raw emotion like that just disappear? 

I often wonder if airports will always remind me of him. Even when I’m 40, 50 years old, and even if it is just for one moment, even if I forget his name, I wonder if he will still cross my mind. 

Love is so funny, isn’t it?

March 24, 2009

Isn’t it strange that your most loved and cherished writing utensils are most often found, borrowed or stolen? Maybe it’s just me, but there is nothing like finding an abandoned pen and taking it in. Like the pen I’m currently using – a leftover from a meeting, my new best friend. I can’t get enough of it and I am still trying to figure out how someone could possibly forget a pen like this. Any pen I purchase after this one simply will not compare. This pen and I found each other. Fate… even if it is only a pen.

I tried to pick people apart at the library today as I read through Part IV of the Discourse on Method, which, I might add, is actually growing on me. And when I say growing on me, I mean that I am able to get through Descartes’ argument without wanting to pull my hair out. Anyway, there was a boy sitting by himself in the corner of the room, drink in hand, reading. If he wasn’t drinking straight coffee with a shit ton of Splenda and Half&Half, he was downing something extra sweet, something with caramel and chocolate. He really threw me for a loop, however, when he pulled out a can of Diet Pepsi after he finished his first drink. Of all soda, I never would have predicted him to be a Diet Pepsi drinker. 

The girl at the table next to him was typing away on her (new) Macbook, an extra-large drink in hand. It had to have been some sort of tea, either Earl Gray or Chamomile, because a girl as rail-thin as her would never drink anything with too much sugar or caffeine. 

Does this game subject me to stereotyping?

I had a bit of a revelation tonight. Lately I have been so down on myself, mostly about petty things that are out of my control anyway. I invest so much time and energy into those things that are detrimental to my own well being and consequently, I feel exceptionally worse. So in the spirit of Lent, I have decided to give up all of the petty things currently tormenting me and instead, investing all of my time and energy in all things that make a positive difference in my life. Is that legit enough for Lent?

“Why do we practice yoga?” he asked again. “Is it so we can become a little bendier than our neighbors? Or is there perhaps some higher purpose?” 

Yoga, in Sanskrit, can be translated as “Union.” It originally comes from the root word yuj, which means “to yoke,” to attach yourself to a task at hand with ox-like discipline. And the task at hand in yoga is to find union- between mind and body, between the individual and her God, between our thoughts and the source of our thoughts, between teacher and student, and even between ourselves and our sometimes hard-to-bend neighbors. In the West, we’ve mainly come to know Yoga through its now-famous pretzel-like exercies for the body, but this is only Hatha Yoga, one limb of the philosoy. The ancients developed these physical stretches not for personal fitness, but to loosen up their muscles and minds in order to prepare them for meditation. It is difficult to sit in stillness for many hours, after all, if your hip is aching, keeping you from contemplating your intrinsic divinity becasue you are too busy contemplating, “wow…my hip really aches.”

But Yoga can also mean trying to find God through meditation, through scholarly study, through the practice of silence, through devotional service, or through mantra- the repetition of sacred words in Sanskrit. While some of these practices tend to look rather Hindu in their derivation, Yoga is not synonymous with Hinduism, nor are all Hindus Yogis. True Yoga neither competes with nor precludes any other religion. You may use your Yoga- your disciplined practices of sacred union- to get closer to Krishna, Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha or Yahweh. During my time at the Ashram, I met devotees who identified themselves as practicing Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus and even Muslims. I have met others who would rather not talk about their religious affiliation at all, for which, in this contentious world, you can hardly blame them.

The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which I’m going to over-simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment. Different schools of thought over the centuries have found different explanations for man’s apparently inherently flawed state. Taoists call it imbalance, Buddhism calls it ignorance, Islam blames our misery on rebellion against God, and the Judeo-Christian tradition attributes all our suffering to original sin. Freudians say that unhappiness is the inevitable result of the clash between our natural drives and civilization’s needs. (As my friend Deborah the psychologist explains it: “Desire is the design flaw.”) The Yogis, however, say that human discontentment is a simple case of mistaken identity. We’re miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentments and morality. We wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature. We have failed to recognize our deeper divine character. We don’t realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme Self who is eternally at peace. That supreme Self is our true identity, universal and divine. Before you realize this truth, say the Yogis, you will always be in despair, a notion nicely expressed in this exasperated line from the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus: “You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not.” 

Yoga is the effort to experience one’s divinity personally and then to hold on to that experience forever. Yoga is about self-mastery and teh dedicated effort to haul your attention away from your endless brooding over the past and your nonstop worrying about the future so that you can seek, instead, a place of eternal presence from which you may regard yourself and your surroundings with poise. Only from that point of even-mindedness will the true nature of the world (and yourself) be revealed to you. True Yogis, from their seat of equipoise, see all this world as an equal manifestation of God’s creative energy- men, women, children, turnips, bedbugs, coral: it’s all God is disguise. But the Yogis believe  a human life is a very special opportunity, because only in a human form and only with a human mind can God-realization ever occur. The turnips, the bedbugs, the coral- they never get a chance to find out who they really are. But we do have that chance. 

“Our whole business therefore in this life,” wrote Saint Augustine, rather Yogically, “is to restore to health the eye of the heart whereby God may be seen.” 

-eat.pray.love, pages 121-123