Old School

Today was a day of light and shadows, warm enough for a bike ride and a nice day to rake up the last of the leaves from the yard.

Leaf blowers have taken over the world.  Some days during the fall they whine incessantly throughout the neighborhood.  I don't like them.  They seem  a noisy, polluting waste of energy.

The scratch of a rake, on the other hand, takes me back through the autumns of my life, to my first memories of raking huge piles of elm leaves in Kansas, which we happily jumped into and ran through.

Perhaps a leaf blower would be faster - there must be some reason people use them.  But I'll leave the blowing of leaves to the real wind.  I'll stick to the rake.  A simple tool - springy tines of metal fanning out from the end of a long wood pole - that sends vibrations up into my hands as it presses into the earth, dragging up the leaves and pushing them ahead, toward the growing pile.   A tool that lets me work out in the day, still hearing the sounds around me - the birds, dogs, people walking by, cars passing on the street behind, and yes - even the sound of the damn leaf blower whining away in the distance!

Song of the Sycamore

There's a huge, spreading sycamore tree on the route I usually walk to work.  The trunks rise high into the sky and spread branches out that extend completely over the street.  By now, most trees are bare of leaves.  There are some oak trees that hold onto their leaves longer, but until today, I'd never noticed that the sycamores do too.

The air this morning was crisp, the sky blue.  A very pleasant late autumn morning, with a slight breeze.  As I walked up the street, I heard a sound - not quite rustling, not quite tinkling.  The blend of hundreds of distinct vibrations, blending into a chorus coming from above.  I looked up, and could see the leaves, brown against the blue sky, moving back and forth in the breeze, each a little instrument making its morning music.

I stopped and listened for a while.  At that moment, it seemed as beautiful and interesting as any music I could imagine.  I marveled at the thought that this huge, old tree, standing tall year after year, spreading shade in summer, was also a unique musical instrument, waiting for the fall breeze to bring it to life.

Gratitude

Today is Thanksgiving Day.  An annual holiday that calls out gratitude for special attention.  But life can't really be lived by being thankful one day a year.  Gratitude is a constant practice, or it is really not there at all.  It isn't something that can be applied in a thin coating.  You can't be a little bit grateful.  Gratitude must run deep to the core of how you relate to life.

I do have a special practice for the day.  During meditation, I express gratitude to members of my family, close friends, and teachers. One by one, whether still living or having passed away, I name and thank them.  I'm always surprised at how long the list is.  I have a lot to be grateful for.

Double Skunked

As a kid growing up in the midwest, if you went hunting or fishing and came back empty handed, you were "skunked."

Now, we knew what skunks were, and were also familiar with really being "skunked," - being, or more likely, having your dog get - sprayed by a skunk.

I can only speculate that the connection between the two uses of the word - being sprayed with an awful smelling and hard to remove musk, and failing to bring home the bacon - is that both were very undesirable things.

Today is the day before Thanksgiving, and we had a snow storm.  The snow didn't stick, but it was falling fast and thick around mid-day.   I'm guessing that explains why no one showed up for the noon yoga class that I was subbing for another teacher.  At least I prefer that explanation to the thought that they knew I was teaching and stayed home.

Then, in the evening I drove up to The Happy Yogi to teach my regular Wednesday class.  You guessed it - skunked again.

I didn't really mind.  I had a little time to work on my own and catch up on some journaling - and then got to come home for an earlier dinner.  So perhaps "skunked" isn't quite the right word - but I like it, so I'm going to adopt it, give it a new definition: "to go to teach a yoga class and have no students show up."

Today I was double skunked!

Deer Encounter

I hadn't seen the neighborhood deer for a week or so.  Each morning as I begin my walk to work, I wonder if I'll see them.  Today, as I crossed Dale Drive and headed up the path through a wooded area, I saw a couple of deer crossing the path.  Then a third.  Though the morning was quite light already, they seemed little perturbed by me, edging off the path as I approached, watching, but not seeming particularly fearful.  When i got beside them, perhaps 10 or 12 feet away, I stopped.  For a bit, it almost seemed as if they were waiting for me to beckon them over, perhaps to give them a good scratch behind the ears, or under the chin.  Then the closest one jumped, and bounded a few yards away.  As I turned to walk up the path, I saw a fourth, right behind me on the other side.  Perhaps their tolerance of me was because I'd wandered into the middle of their herd, and they didn't want to leave until the straggler had made it past me.  

Clearly, they didn't see me as much of a threat, and I'm glad for that.  

Beyond Habit

As useful as habits are, even better is to move beyond habit.  This doesn't mean that habits are somehow banished - they are far too useful in helping us navigate life.  Moving beyond habit is to maintain a degree of awareness so that we recognize when we are acting from habit, and can choose, if we wish, to act differently.

Perhaps this will be a one time change that gives a better result than our habitual reaction, and we will settle back into a habit that, over all, serves us well.  Or, perhaps our choice will lead to development of a different, improved habit.  It all depends.  The essential thing is that we have awareness - that we know when we are acting from habit, and that we choose to do that, or choose to make a change.

Use the habits that serve you well.  Develop new, and better habits.  Be aware, and choose a different, non-habitual action when warranted.  Move beyond habit.

Old Habits, New Habits

We are, indeed, creatures of habit.  We learn a way of doing something, and so long as it works well enough, we repeat it, again and again, until it is deeply seated.  We can carry out much of life out of habit - getting up, getting dressed, eating, going to work, and on and on.   Habits are very useful.  They help us function, to get by, without having to figure everything out anew.

But we want habits to serve us, not define us.  When a habit is "just the way we are," even if it isn't leading to the best results or is impacting us, or others, in a negative way, it's time to revisit and rethink how we want to be, and learn a new habit.

I once read what seemed to be wise advice, that the way to get rid of a habit that was no longer serving us, was not to put energy into stopping the habit, but rather to replace it with a better habit.  The more deeply a habit is embedded, the more difficult it is to end.  But we can bypass the resistance to change by simply focusing on the positive change of building a new habit.  The old one may occasionally reappear, but if simply acknowledged without judgement, its power will diminish as the new habit takes hold.

Healthy Movement

Bodies are vastly different, from person to person.  At the extremes, they range from stiff and tight with little range of motion, to hypermobility - a body that will move beyond the safe range of motion for its joints.   Sometimes a body has little movement in some areas, and much movement in others.  

Healthy movement is a little movement in a lot of areas.  When we move, if there's stiffness or restriction in one place, a place with more mobility will compensate.  If it moves too far, an injury may occur.  

I have hypermobile thumbs.  The joints can move in a way that looks exactly like the photo here in the Wikipedia entry.  I rarely move them that way now, but did quite a lot when I was young and it was interesting to say "Hey, look what my thumbs can do!"

Flexibility is valued in yoga.  Increasing flexibility is high on the list of reasons that people are interested in yoga - myself included, when I started.  More flexibility lets a yogi "do" more poses, get into prettier shapes.  And yet it is the more flexible people, rather than the stronger, stiffer ones, who are most apt to be injured, because they can push past the limits of what the body's structure can support.

I'm very interested in how to teach mixed classes so that the people who can benefit from increasing their range of motion can find more space and openness, while those with too much mobility stay safely back from the edge, and build more strength to support their body.  How do I do that, teaching the same pose to a group?  I think the answer is aiming both groups toward the middle, in terms of the shape of the pose.  Some will feel stretch and lengthening, and others will feel muscle engagement and holding back.  Both will be getting what they need.

Rush of the Seasons

Here it is, almost Thanksgiving.  We've had some autumn to winter crossover weather, one night the temperature dropped below 20 degrees, and almost all the trees are bare now.  But it doesn't seem that summer was all that long ago.

I notice that the days are short now, and the sun low on the horizon.  And then I think that it's only a month until the winter solstice, and the days will begin lengthening again.  It seems like I'm only recognizing the onset of a new season when it is 2/3 over.

We had a warmer day today, and then another cold front moved through in early evening, dropping the temperature into the mid 30s.  My walk home started out feeling a bit raw, but as I walked I began to notice the crisp cleanness of the air, the bright stars in black space, patterns of light and shadow, and I began to relish the briskness of the cold air on my skin.

Rush, rush, go the days.  And the seasons.  And life.  Enjoy it all.

Possibility

I recently learned of the work of psychologist Ellen Langer.  This article gives an overview.  There's a lot of interesting things, but the following quote caught my attention:

"Langer believes that the more we adhere to labels and categories, the less open we are to possibility."

This idea immediately struck me as true.  Why label myself as middle aged, a fisheries biologist, a yoga teacher, a musician, or any other thing?  I'm just me.  I am a certain number of years old, I have a degree in fisheries science,  I teach yoga, and I play several different instruments.  But I am not defined by those things, they are simply a part of my experience and how I have expressed my life so far.  They don't limit the possibilities of what I may do next.

No Sooner Than...

Just a day after I accused my mind of running amok while unattended at night, I woke in the wee hours to find that it was musing about a wonderful idea for a yoga practice about gratitude.

I'm teaching a couple of classes the day after Thanksgiving, subbing for a really wonderful teacher.  I had thought of the general idea of a special practice on the theme of gratitude, but hadn't come up with a good idea of how to approach it.

So while I was sleeping, my brain did something useful after all, and came up with a nice idea, for an individual affirmation of gratitude, within a structure that I think is true to yoga:

I am grateful for breath,
  and the energy of life it brings.
I am grateful for [something specific to me],
  I am grateful for life.

I'll use this throughout a very focused practice requiring careful attention to the breath, using it to lead movement into, and alignment of, the poses.

I could use some more good ideas, so I'll hope the helpful mind shows up again tonight.

This is Your Brain, on Sleep!

You'd think the brain could use a good night's rest to do something useful, like solve a problem, sort out what's important from what's not, or even just chill out.

Instead the brain, if mine is at all representative, takes the opportunity to go a little crazy.  Throw everything into the pot, stir it around a few times, and then show the movie in a slight fast forward on the screen of my mind, so that I wake up to a chaotic swirl of thoughts and images.

I've noticed my mind wakes up without a good sense of time.  Asleep, it seems to think that everything needs to happen at once.  So my first waking job is to come back to the sense of time, priority and sequence.  Things take time, and not everything can, or should, happen at once.

I was thinking of what a mess it would be if time wasn't there as a canvas to spread life out on.  Imagine what a beautiful symphony would sound like if all the notes from all the instruments were played at once.  It would be nothing but a roar, a dense and very loud block of sound - likely indistinguishable from any other work given similar treatment.  Time provides a ground to spread out the sounds upon, so they can be noticed and juxtaposed in particular relationships that we experience as unique, beautiful and profound.

Thinking about that gave me a different perspective on my life.  Much time is spent on little things - buttoning a shirt, tying a shoe, brushing teeth, feeding the pets.  If I enjoy and appreciate them, these are the beautiful little notes I string together to make the composition for the day.  If I ignore them, take them for granted, I miss a great opportunity to experience life at its fullest.  If I get caught up in rushing to do everything at once - hurrying on to the next thing before finishing the one before me, I make my life a cacophony of meaningless noise.

Unwinding

After a very busy weekend, I'm spending this evening relaxing, unwinding.  In navigating through the frenzy, it helps greatly to stay in the present - to stay focused on what is happening now - and to be aware of what it feels like to be pulled away from the present and to have the tools - such as conscious awareness of breath - to come back.

The sounds around me are the regular tick of a clock across the room, the hum of the drier running downstairs, a different hum from far off machinery someplace outside, and the wet-tire sound from cars going past now and then.  Listening to sounds is a good technique to relax and draw inward, a good way to unwind.

Slowly Spinning

Last Tuesday, I sat down at the computer in the early afternoon and noticed a band of light, perhaps a half inch wide, on my right wrist, from the sun coming at a sharp angle through the window.  Before my attention wandered, I noticed the strip narrowing ever so slightly.  My mind, so easily takes the day for granted, when in fact the sun, and the angle of its light, is always moving.  In much less time than I would have expected, the band of light grew thinner, and then vanished.

This afternoon I watched the sun set, off to the southwest over the buildings of Tyson's Corner, Virginia.  Deep, golden red, and casting it's color onto scattered clouds, it slowly sank below the horizon, finally blinking out in gap between two tall buildings.

Tonight is cold, and as often happens, clear.  As I walked home a little after 9 pm, I scanned the sky.   Cassiopeia was overhead, and to the east a bit, I saw a blurry area that I thought might be the Pleiades.  But that would mean Orion should be in the vicinity, and I couldn't see it.  A half block more, and I spied the three points of light in the belt of the great constellation, which, still laying on its side, was rising above the eastern horizon.

The universe is always in motion, ever changing, even if sometimes our minds want to strip that complexity away for an illusion of constancy.

November 13, 2014, Observations

Early morning, after the change back to standard time.  The moon is overhead, with Jupiter near by.  Orion is well off to the west, reminding me how late it is in the fall, and how few times I had good viewing this fall.  Perhaps mostly weather conditions, or perhaps my schedule just didn't have me up and out at the right times, but I feel that I've missed something.

A few blocks from home, in a shaded spot on the street, under a big spreading oak, a shape moves out from the east side.  Mind notices, processes, concludes - way too big for a dog or a fox, must be a deer.  Different somehow, a buck, perhaps?  Yes, I think so.  There's another one following.  That looks like a buck too.  I'm pretty close, they see me, do they know what I am?  Wait.  Should I keep walking?  Will they feel threatened?  Would they run, or perhaps be aggressive?  OK.  They're moving on across to the other side, eyeing me, but not too concerned.  Guess it's OK to walk by.

Evening.  Cloudy, cold, and drizzly.  I'm not really prepared for that, but just barely have enough layers.  If it doesn't rain harder, I'll be alright.  Dark, cold, wet, what does that remind me of?  Oh, 30 years living in Juneau - I can handle this.

I'm Grateful for Thich Nhat Hanh

Word today that the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist master, Thich Nhat Hanh, is gravely ill, is worthy of reflection.  He has worked tirelessly for peace, for longer than I have been alive, .  He has influenced millions of people through his writings.  I first became interested in meditation from reading one of his books, and so I, like many others, owe him a great debt of gratitude.  His has been a life well lived, a giant contribution to humanity.  And yet, his life, like all of ours, will come to an end.  Let me, in some small way, be worthy of the gift he has given.

Body-Mind-World

It was cold overnight last night, but warmed up past the forecast today, reaching 70.  It was a lovely day to work outside, raking up the leaves from the yard and piling them along the edge of the street.

Looking back at the blog from a year ago, I found that this same time last year had also been nice, and I had spent some time sitting down by the creek. - link to last year's post

The seasons repeat, and there are certain things that will always happen in fall.  The trees will turn color, the leaves fall.  Nights will get colder until one night water freezes.  There will be a beautiful, warm day now and then that awakens utter joy at being alive and able to experience it.

But within the cycles and overall patterns, each day, each moment, is unique.  And through it all moves my life - not in a cycle, but in an arc.  Every day I'm the same person, but I'm changed, in both body and mind.  Or perhaps, I should say body-mind, because I increasingly realize they are not separate, but are two aspects of a single thing, me.  And I am not separate from the world - I am a connected part of it.

A Minor Crash

Saturday was a busy day catching up on a month's worth of mail and a variety of other chores.  Sunday was an extra-packed yoga day.  After the 8:30 am two hour class Pam and I usually attend, we came home for a late breakfast.  Soon after I headed back over to attend an early afternoon class that I may be teaching after the first of the year, then had a photo shoot - one of a dozen or so "models" for the next brochure - and then ran downstairs to teach my Sunday afternoon class.

I came home and helped finish preparing supper.  Afterwards, I sat down to read and soon felt very drowsy.  After trying to stay awake and read, I eventually gave in and laid down on the floor for a while.  I never felt that I had fallen asleep, but when I finally did get up it was almost 10 o'clock.

I knew, heading into the fall, that was burning the candle at both ends, to some degree.  The steady expansion in my yoga teaching has finally reached the point where I'm thinking hard about how what is a sustainable level for me.

My little Sunday evening crash is another reminder that I do have limits, after all.

Creekside Perspective

I walked down to the creek this afternoon on this sunny fall day, with blue sky and colorful leaves scattered around, some remaining on the trees.  In the bare branches, I could see the nests of squirrels and birds, hidden all summer amidst thousands of leaves, but now exposed.

Several crows perched high in a tulip poplar near the creek.  I walked across the log that dams the creek near the playground, and sat on my usual rock, but facing upstream this time.  There are two pedestrian bridges, one over the main creek and the other over a small tributary.  Their gentle arc over the water made a lovely scene.

Soggy leaves are piled up on rocks and gravel bars in the stream.  The sun is low in the sky - it's just a month and a half from the year's shortest day.  It's chilly, and the people coming by are dressed in jackets and hats.  The playground is empty.

I notice the sound of water rushing over the dam behind me, and that I can barely make out the sound of water rushing over a small fall and rapids upstream from me.   But by moving just a little - bringing my head forward perhaps a foot, I could make the sounds nearly balance.

Air is so amazing in it's ability to carry minute vibrations to my ears, like those just made by a leaf sliding down a streamside rock and falling into the creek, even while it moves, fluidly and unseen, all around me.

Upstream, water leaves a glassy-surfaced pool and runs quickly through a rocky area, creating streams of bubbles that ride the main current channels into the pool below.  Reflections of cars on the parkway flash across the water upstream of the bridge.

After a while more, I rose, and crossed back over the log to head home.  The crows are gone.  Two families have just arrived at the playground.

Autumn Observations

Looking back at the blog post from a year ago - Friday, November 8, 2013 - I found that my observations about the season apply very well to now:

Though every day that passes brings change, the fall seems to bring more intensity in the change. Much is happening - noticeably shortening days, the changing colors of foliage, the trees shedding their leaves, the large temperature swings, cold nights.  The hour shift when daylight savings time is replaced by standard time is especially jarring.  Of a sudden, it is getting dark right after work.

I have a panoramic view from my office window, out to the south over Rock Creek Park and the neighborhoods of Northwest Washington.  To the east, I can see the Capitol, the Washington Monument, and the shimmer of the Potomac beyond.  To the west, the buildings of Bethesda rise above the tree tops, and farther away, and somewhat to the south, is Tysons Corner, Virginia.  On a clear day I can see to the Blue Ridge.

Yesterday, which was a cloudy day with light rain from time to time, I was treated to a spectacular display of fog and diffused light in the afternoon as the storm began to break.  Sunlight streamed through the clouds, and the air was thick, filling each little valley with fog that silhouetted the bare branched trees on each hill.  The light shifted constantly, growing bright and then fading as I watched.

This morning the scene was entirely different.  Beneath the blue morning sky, a layer of clouds sailed briskly along from west to east.  The rising sun angled in below the clouds, kissing the tops of the trees with their autumn colored leaves, and reflecting brightly off white painted buildings and glass windowed office buildings.  About noon, the sun was up enough to the south that it began streaming in through the window, and I had to close the blinds.   When I left the building at lunchtime, I discovered that the wind pushing the clouds along was sailing along at ground level as well, and quite brisk.

Ahh, invigorating autumn!

Naming Names

All my life I have struggled with remembering peoples' names when first introduced.  I would hear the name, but not retain it.   Then, knowing that I had "known" the name, I'd be embarrassed to ask for it again.

Teaching yoga has put me in contact with new faces and names on a regular basis, and I want to remember the names, because I understand how important it is to people.  At first, with my mind occupied thinking about the class to come, what I was planning to teach and concerned whether I would remember it, I had a few classes where the names failed to stick.

Gradually, though, I refined my methods.  The most useful thing is for me to repeat the name in my mind a few times, associating it with the image of the person.  Writing the names down helps too.  I'm getting better and better at it, and my new expectation that I will remember the names seems to help as well.

I taught two classes tonight - one my regular Wednesday class, the other as a sub for a teacher who wasn't feeling well - and I remembered all the names.  I was also able to greet several people who had come for the first time last week by name this week, which surprised some of them, and I think goes a long way toward establishing that I care who they are and value their participation in the class.

The Futility of Avoiding Imagined Outcomes

I've written before about my natural aversion to conflict.  But I think what's really going on is different.  I deal pretty well with conflict when I'm faced with it.  My problem is that I imagine there will be conflict, and then tell stories to myself about how it will unfold, and then second guess taking the actions that I imagine will lead to the conflict.

Such a thing came up today.  I had decided to reassign one of my division's people to a new supervisor.  I was fully confident that this was a good move for the division and for the employee.  And, I imagined that the current supervisor would be upset at the move.  Because of my assumption about how they would react, I spent some time over the past couple of days running my imagined dialog and their reaction, and my response to this imagined reaction, over in my mind.

Not nearly to the extent that I would have a few years ago, but still enough to be distracting and make me think about what I was doing.

I went to work this morning, with a meeting scheduled to discuss the issue.  It had occurred to me that I was responsible for my decision, and it wasn't my place to be responsible for the supervisor's reaction, but I still carried a little bit of anticipatory anxiety into the meeting.

I stated my intention clearly and without apology, and the reaction I got was, 'that makes sense, I'm OK with it.'

So, the conflict that I imagined was only that - and whatever time and energy I spent preparing for it was for naught.  I know that conflict will occur - perhaps the reaction would have been negative - but I learned that the place for me to invest my energy is in making choices that I truly believe in, and accepting that the other affected parties are responsible for their reaction.  I do not make their choices, and there is no point in my thinking that I know what they will be.

The Meaning of Happiness

I recently read an article from The Atlantic that contrasted happiness with finding meaning in life.  The article, citing some psychological studies, equates being in the present with a kind of shallow, selfish happiness; and said that people who spent more time thinking about the future or about past struggles found more meaning.

This is not my personal experience.  I have found much deeper meaning through the practice of living in the present, and the thinking that I do about the past and the future is much more open, compassionate, and honest.

The article also described happy people as 'takers,' their happiness coming from getting what they want and having no worries or struggles.  People who found meaning in life, on the other hand, were 'givers.'

Again, this is not my personal experience.  I have always been happier giving, being helpful, being useful.  Perhaps the problem is with the premise - that happiness and meaningfulness are somehow opposites.  

On Presence

Presence is having your attention on what is happening now - what your are experiencing now.  Being present opens up the door to a richer experience of life - awareness of even a little more of the seemingly infinite world around us that, for the most part, we ignore.

I know I'm present if I'm enjoying little things, and seeing, smelling, tasting and touching things as if they were new.  I know I'm not present when I'm doing something, and before it is finished, my mind is thinking about the next thing to do, or the one after that.

After lunch today, I was washing dishes.  When I scrubbed soap over the surface of a curved, glass, skillet lid, the foamy bubbles coalesced into beautiful swirly patterns.  I spent a few minutes, far more than needed to clean the lid, wiping the bubbles this way and that, and enjoying the resulting patterns.  If I had tried to paint a lovely pattern, I couldn't have done as well.  Was it silly to enjoy it just because it was soap bubbles on a pan lid?  The present me says no.  It was completely engrossing and fulfilling to a mind in the present.

After I started this post, Pam called to ask if I would help fold laundry.  It is one of those tasks sometimes described as mindless, as if it is something of a necessary waste of time.  Instead, it's an opportunity to notice and enjoy the smell of clean clothes, the texture of each piece, still slightly warm, all fluffed up from tumble drying.  I didn't need to keep thinking about this partly written post.  It was here, waiting for me.  Far better to be present for the laundry folding, and then be present to write, rather than being absent for both with my mind who knows where.

Gravity

The trees are losing their leaves quickly now.  The lawn is covered with leaves, and the gutters are full.  When each leaf lets loose, it has a few seconds of freedom as it floats, twirls, flutters, or tumbles to the ground.  There is no escaping the pull of gravity.

Gravity is always there, pulling us towards, roughly, the center of the earth.  Much of the energy we expend is to move against that force, and to balance in the force field.  We are so well constructed that we can go for days, even weeks and months, with no loss of balance, no sense of danger.  But lose that balance, and gravity has you lying on the ground so quickly you're not aware of how it happened.

There are many ways that gravity can kill us.  It can bring a tree limb, or a whole tree, crashing down.  It can bring a loose rock tumbling over a cliff to strike us, or sweep an avalanche of snow around us.  Slip on a patch of ice, and gravity can pull you down with such force that the blow to your head is fatal.

But without gravity, we wouldn't exist.  There'd be nothing to hold the earth together, no stabilizing, unifying force to hold the water in the oceans, cause the rain to fall, or hug the atmosphere to the earth, with its oxygen that we need.

We're part of it, too.  Gravity is an attractive force between matter.  Our mass has a tiny gravitational force, as does everything in the universe.  It's not something other than us.  It's in us, around us, through us.  Gravity binds us to everything.  It never give up, and eventually, when we lose our ability to gather energy and use it for our movement, gravity will pull us down, one last time, like a falling leaf.