The Truth About It

[Right about that time, this song was popularized by Three Dog Night.]

Your first yoga teacher - maybe it's like your first love:  wonderful.  George came to our small town and brought us yoga to candlelight and such music as an ethereal recording of the Panamian nose flute, and this was the early 70s. It was part of the revolution, which was good, but not all good.

One of his pieces of wisdom comes back to me often.  He would say, as we lay there at the end imitating corpses, "It feels good to relax."  And boy, it did.  George was flawless.  But there was one thing I still disagree with him on; now and then he'd murmur, almost as if talking to himself, "It's all good."  My life wasn't.  It was highly unsatisfactory.  In fact, the years to follow that first yoga class would be the most painful of my life.  Mania and depression almost killed me.  Sometimes I realize how lucky I was to live through it, and I suspect it's true, that God, the universe, tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.

I can disagree with George's positivism today from a more respectable position, since I am 70 now, officially old. So  I've been thinking about this question of how it all is for many years, more diligently than I thought about (or practiced) down dog.  Now I have Zen to back me up, I believe, when I say, It's not all good.  The Buddha's first teaching was that life is difficult, unsatisfactory.  But it's not all bad; a lot of it is beautiful, fun, interesting, or at least feels good.  What it is, it all just is.

It is. 

I must admit, that looks like a bald statement, and one that hardly needs saying.  I mean, obviously, it is.  But I myself have spent a great deal of energy in my life trying to escape or control it.  From not accepting it to hating it.  At the moment I'm working to cultivate equanimity; it's been a theatrical year with some really bad depression. If equanimity came naturally, we wouldn't have to cultivate it.

But to be calmly accepting of reality is not natural; what's natural is desire and aversion, greed and hatred, and don't forget delusion.  Maybe one of those delusions is that if we wear only organic cotton and eat vegan and practice a chronic smile, it will all feel good.  Or maybe that's a another desire, and a natural desire, too.  We are equipped to feel pain and pleasure, hunger and satisfaction.  Pain hurts - it is unnatural to like it, and generally good to avoid it.  But sometimes it just is. Life is still worth celebrating.  Sometimes.

What Zen Meditation is Not

Just as yoga (yoking with the divine) is not Stretch-'n-Bend, meditation is not a stress relief technique.  What's wrong with that?  And hasn't Jon Kabat-Zinn brought meditation to the masses?  Let me start with the second question.  My answer is, I just don't know.  Lots of people have read his books and taken classes.  Years ago Tom and I took a class in healthy eating that incorporated teaching an 18-minute meditation carefully styled to have nothing to do with spirit, ethics, growth or self-knowledge.  It claimed benefits proven by science, and used a body scan picked up perhaps from the vipassana tradition.  We already had a practice.  Otherwise, I'd be surprised if anyone there began and stayed with a daily practice.  Because meditation as stress relief just doesn't work.  (And, as Seung Sahn said, "Meditation is boring.")

That takes me to my first question, What's wrong with teaching it that way? (and isn't it better than no meditation at all?)  Well, take stress.  It is in fact not imposed on us from without, but imposed from within by our reactivity to external events, and by our lifestyle choices and bad habits.  (If you want to think about the stress caused by a bad habit, look up the effect of a cigarette on your body.)  If you choose to live hectic 16-hour days, frequent long evenings drinking with friends, competitive work full of striving and resentment, eating on the run, all that, yes, 18 minutes of meditation, actually sitting still may keep you from having a myocardial infarction at 36.  The sense of being relieved of stress for a few moments is pleasurable.  That's why a great many people, like me, first take up yoga:  one day a week, an hour of peace and quiet, full relaxation, maybe to be followed by a good night's sleep.

I loved that first yoga class, so many years ago, but it didn't save me from the awfully overstressed life I found myself in (to speak of karma).  My teacher had a deep practice, and imparted as much to us of the purpose and meaning of yoga as he could.  I tried to take up the visualization he taught for us, and the guru devotion, but . . . what? I didn't enjoy it - it seemed to get me down.  I had no one to help me see that being forced up against my problems could be a positive thing.

That, you could say, is the purpose of Zen, to make us aware of what we are doing and how it affects us and the world.  To bring us up against reality. That includes the reality that a sssself-centered life, in search of external solutions like pleasure and distraction and romantic love and fame and money and even stress relief - that life does not bring happiness. 

The practice of Zen, sitting still watching your breath, watching what comes into your mind and letting it go, refusing to move even to scratch your head - it has its blissful moments.  I have heard Pema Chodron say that meditation begins in bliss and ends in bliss, but first you have to go through hell.  Doing it with the purpose of being with yourself is, I have found, ultimately relaxing.  The quieter mental state leads me to make the small decisions that ease my life.  Right now, that is that it's time to get ready for bed.  So, goodnight.
[image:  the "nodding onion" we planted this year, growing gracefully in the hottest, dryest spot.]

Born to Mosey

I see there's a book very popular among runners (people who choose to run when there's nothing chasing them) called, what else, Born to Run. A great title, and it suggested to me the title for my own autobiography, which I intend to write when nothing is chasing me. "Born to Mosey."

Mosey is an archaic word, but I will stick with it because it's the first word that came to my mind, and sticking with it is much easier than getting down Roget's Thesaurus, which I actually own in book form. That right there should tell you that mosey is an apt word for someone of my age. It is an interesting word that connotes my humble heritage. But I don't want to deviate into looking up the word's etymology and hopelessly lose track of my inspiration, I want to explain myself. Not as an apology, just - clarification.

This is a world, this world I was born into way last century, that does not mosey. Americans run, they strive, they stretch, they reach, they gain, they multitask, they dream impossible dreams. They believe in dreaming impossible dreams, which has given rise to multiple huge industries that help people either dream that way or recover from dreaming that way: personal trainers, life coaches, therapists of every description, gurus, expensive running shoes . . . as you see, the list is endless. Nevertheless, some of us, many of us actually, just aren't suited for that.

If you look at the animal kingdom, it is very hard to justify this running thing. What mature predator gallops about at full speed when there is no prey? None, unless they hear the can-opener in the kitchen, and after all, catfood is a sort of prey that's been pre-conditioned to make life easier.

TV has given us a false impression of the animal kingdom. The fact is, in the state of Nature, lions lay around in the sun until they get hungry, and they would never get up if someone else would serve them. Elephants just stand there occasionally whisking their pathetic little tails, unless someone gives them some paints. Monkeys spend a great deal of time picking fleas off one another, an activity I suppose is akin to going to the beauty parlor or going on the Jerry Springer show. But they don't run.

It was very difficult for a pale, artistic type to grow up in this culture, which was like this even before feminism told women that we could compete (a form of running) in the "real" world with men, both in sports and at work. Still, I got along okay until seventh grade, when we were put without our consent into gym class, complete with starched white one-piece uniforms like truncated sleeveless jump suits. There we were expected to perform hard things that involved a lot of hasty moving about and sweating. This was great for a handful of naturally athletic girls who went on to become cheerleaders or high divers, but some of us just liked to read, and you couldn't get excused for that. I thought then and still do that getting out of breath isn't right, somehow.

The sport that naturally appealed to me in adulthood was yoga. I liked best the prone poses, the ones you do on the floor, especially shavasana, or corpse pose, which I do not say in order to be screamingly funny. It's the truth. I was willing to go through the rest to get to those last long, slow minutes when somebody told me to Relax.

Another thing I tried during my Middle Years was Tai Chi. This was a reach for me, because you were supposed to keep moving through a series of poses that were not posted on a blackboard (okay, white board) for us readers. It should not surprise anyone that my favorite thing about Tai Chi was the pose my teacher called Wu Wei, I think it was, which involved just standing doing nothing at all. Not even intending to move. My teacher claimed that all action had to proceed for this complete non-action. But I was always just getting into it when he started us moving.

Today, I watch more active people from my comfortable seat at a kitchen window that looks out on the street. Runners, power walkers, just plain walkers briskly walking, feeling their pulse, consulting their watch, talking on their cellphones, accomplishing something. None of them seem to be enjoying themselves the way their dogs do. Dogs, now, laugh when they're out for a run. It's fun they would say, and dogs like to have fun all the time, which is why they are dogs and we are the Master Race.

What do you really want from life?

[The Tao by Kazuaki Tanahashi]
I got to wondering recently just where the path that brought me out of unhappiness began. It was interesting to remember that I had begun to examine my life before everything went wrong; I must have been already feeling the tremors. What I don't recall is just where or why I bought the little paperback - How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life, by Alan Lakein. In 1974 it had just come out in paperback.

Leafing through it now, I remember studying the entire book with the same intensity I had brought to academics. There was a lot of important encouragement in this early entry to the self-help program. But what I remember best is doing the exercises in Chapter 5, "What Do You Really Want from Life?" which combined free writing with analysis. Hours of this work eventually got me to my three top priorities at that time. The one I remember was number one, "Learn to relax." It surprised me, actually, though at the time I was on a medication for severe gastric problems.

Almost immediately after I wrote my priorities down on an index card, a friend mentioned to me that there was a yoga class in town. Why did that interest me? That path goes back farther than my recollection. But it did interest me, tapping a dormant spiritual desire even as it was an action I could take toward that priority, and I signed up.

I wish I could find that teacher and tell him how much that winter meant to me. His name was George, Winston or Wilson I think, and he traveled from Columbus to Lancaster once a week to offer this class to a fanatically devoted handful of students in a dark classroom at the branch campus. This was well before yoga and meditation became popularized and watered-down.

I am not at all athletic, and was not a natural yoga student. Since then I have had one of the dozen teachers I tried smirk at my efforts, another totally ignore those of us who couldn't approach a pose, and another push me into a pose in a way that set up a lingering tendonitis. But George, my first teacher, was in yoga heart and soul, as a spiritual practice, and brought plentiful compassion to the work. He had a sort of radiance. It took me 25 years to find another teacher with his qualities.

At the end of each class, we did slow prone stretches and twists, my favorite part. I still do them sometimes, lying on my study rug with the door shut, so Sherlock doesn't attack me. And after each stretch I hear George's mantra, "It feels good to relax."

I did try at least once to do some poses at home, and sit in meditation, as George gently encouraged us to do. And, at his private urging, I attended a weekend retreat with a famous swami, chanted, sat, watched with curiosity the holy man's disciples. Someone made pottery amulets on orange strings for all the participants, and the swami blessed them individually before he put them around our necks. It was part of the later sadness of my life that I found mine broken. It was more than a thing to me, and I wasn't willing to glue it back together. I'm pretty sure I finally threw the pieces away.

All that drifted down the stream. But it remained true that I'd taken those actions: sitting down with myself, thinking about what I needed, taking the yoga class. And before that, there must have been something that drove me to believe happiness was available, and a tendency to persist at looking for the way. Years after I had moved and lost track of George, I kept locking my office door at lunchtime and doing the guided meditations I learned under him. The way you do, I thought they weren't working.

Encounters with foxes

"You must be very patient," replied the fox. "First you will sit down at a little distance from me-- like that-- in the grass. I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings. But you will sit a little closer to me, every day..."

One September when we were at Grailville on retreat, there was a young fox wandering the grounds. It was clearly orphaned, and was relatively comfortable with people at a distance, though they couldn't lure it into a carrier to take it to the vet and get shots. One sunny afternoon, it was fooling around in the big yard in front of the meditation hall when we came out. I sat down on the grass about 20 feet from it and slowly did my yoga, feeling very companionable, thinking affectionately about the fox who is tamed in The Little Prince. The fox didn't mind me at all. Yoga was probably the most natural thing it ever saw a human do.

This morning I was reading Robert Aitken's commentary on a Zen koan called "Pai-chang's Fox," and came to a charming anecdote of an encounter he had with a fox. Since we also have foxes in the ravine now, and have seen one standing beside the road, I can't resist posting this.

When I was living in LaCrescenta, California . . . on weekends I used to walk up a dirt road into the national forest. One day I came upon a fox - or a fox came upon me - where the road bent around a little ridge. She had come trotting down from above, and I appeared from below. We both stopped and looked at each other. At that moment the wind came up and blew a large piece of newspaper around and around on the road in a miniature cyclone. The fox jumped on this piece of paper and looked at me with a merry look in her eye. Then she stepped off the newspaper and it began to blow around again. She jumped on the paper again and looked at me, just as though she were inviting me to laugh at her great game. Suddenly conditions changed, and she ran back up the road. This encounter was truly an experience of grace.