Listening to Noise
Yogah cittavrttti nirodhah
“Yoga is the cessation of the movements in the consciousness.”
Yoga Sutra 1.2 translated by B.K.S. Iyengar
People often say to me, “I can’t meditate or do yoga because I can’t turn my brain off.” Which is true. You can’t turn your brain off. The nature of the brain is circuitry; neurons and synapses firing pulses through all that ineffable grey matter. The brain is an organ of mind and mind is always thinking, always moving. With respect to B.K.S. Iyengar, his translation of the second sutra troubles me.
Perhaps this is because I was first exposed to the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali from the non-dualist, Tantric perspective. In my training I was taught that cit or citta is supreme consciousness whose nature is spanda – a pulse, a movement, a flow. Nirodhah can be taken to mean direction rather than control or stoppage. So the translation I savor is:
Yoga is the practice of uniting and directing the body, mind, and heart with the flow of consciousness.
This feels like a more honest, attainable goal. It’s also the truth of my experience. Even in the deepest states of meditation, or the quiet moments of laser like focus, there is movement. My blood is pumping. Electrons are whizzing about in my cells. Consciousness is flowing. Mind is thinking. Life is a particle and a wave.
Much of the time my head, like yours, is like a city full of noise and frenetic busyness. What I’m after with yoga, meditation, prayer, laughter, community, is the slowing down of all that busyness. I’m seeking a long weekend out in the country among the slow and steady trees.
I think a tree is the embodiment of what I want my yoga to be: solid; clear in purpose and direction; full of scars and beauty; and always reaching up and out and into divinity.
When my brain starts to feel like a pinball machine, I approach this tree-like-place through various techniques of redirection: focusing on a task at hand; looking into the eyes of the person I’m talking to; drinking hot water; reading books; and oh yes – asana, meditation, and prayer.
My favorite meditation technique is listening to noise. Rather than trying not to hear the rush of cars on the street outside my window, or the jackhammers busting up the floor below the yoga room at the Y during renovations last fall, or the cell phone that rings during savasana, I listen. I sit in my seat and soften my ears. I relax the canals and cartilage and unclench my eardrums so I can hear the world around me. I seek the most distant, faint sound. I welcome the proximity of my cat’s wheezing.
It doesn’t take long for my body to unclench. Somehow, in the act of listening to noise, my thoughts become a whisper rather than a shout. They slow down to two or three at a time rather than a dozen. I can feel and see the breath in my body. My crazy, out of proportion innerverse becomes right sized.
The funny thing about silence is that it is so communicative. When Cole was an infant I was shocked at how much conversation passed between us before he could say a word. Volumes were written in his twinkling eyes and powder soft cooing.
The funny thing about silence is that it is an embrace rather than an absence. When I surgically remove the extraneous noise of music, tv, voices, I am left with the uncontrollable hum of the world. When I listen for what I can’t control its volume fades and I am held by the quiet song of love and the truest words of the Heart.
Next time you are stuck in the frenzy of thought, assaulted by over stimulation, feeling disconnected or frustrated in meditation, pause and practice the yoga of listening. Listen to the noise. Let it move you into silence. And feel the harmonic embrace of conscious life pulsing with movement.
Photo by Hal Gatewood on Unsplash
Blooming
“I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I’ve never let it stop me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.”
~ Georgia O’Keefe
When I look at the women I admire, they have all taken risks. There’s Lila, my first yoga teacher and mentor, who closed her studio, moved to Canada, and has gone back to school to study Chinese Medicine. There’s Melissa, my friend who took the daring leap and began writing her first novel. Another left a marriage. Another gave birth to her third boy.
My grandmother had six boys and divorced my grandfather when three of them were still young. My mother married my father; gave birth to me; and continues to risk the pain of separation by making friends no matter how many times she and dad move.
Every day the #AmyPohler’sSmartGirls Instagram feed posts profiles of women and girls, dead and alive, celebrating their achievements. I am struck by the grainy, black and white photos of feminists, and chemists, and painters who look so staid and strangled in their Victorian portraits; whose outer worlds must have been littered with barriers; and whose interior lives must have been on fire. I am in awe of young girls and teenagers — the new generation of scientists, activists, artists — blazing their own paths in the brambles of this difficult world.
Anais Nin famously wrote, “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Which feels so appropriate this Spring. Looking back, many of what I consider to be the big risks of my life took place during this season of blooming. I got married in the Spring. Cole was born in the Spring. I ended my marriage in the Spring. I told my high school boyfriend, “I like you more than I should,” in the Spring. I wrote the bulk of my novel in the Spring.
I started teaching yoga in the Spring. Today is the eleventh anniversary of the moment I stepped onto the mat as a teacher for the first time and promptly forgot everything I planned to say. For the next ninety, excruciating minutes I said nothing more eloquent than, “Inhale, right foot forward. Exhale, left heel to the floor.”
Each risk, no matter how small, felt BIG. Each time I felt the courage and fear I imagine daffodils must experience when they peak out of the ground at the end of February and wonder if this is the year they will be killed by frost. But even if they don’t blossom one year, they try again the next. And the next, and the next, and the next.
Perhaps this is what it means to live in the Spring. To muster all of the energy stored up in the dark of Winter and step out into unstable temperatures with the fierce hope that you can be the lovely thing you know you are. To push up through the earth and bare one’s face to the unforgiving sun because it is time to take a risk and bloom.
Traveling with Jesus and Persephone
When I was pregnant with Cole I imagined how powerful I would feel when I gave birth. I pictured myself heavy with the strength of a goddess. I was not prepared for the emotional reality of that companion.
I may have looked like I was handling the process well, breathing through each contraction and the like, but inside I was drowning. Every insecurity, every anxiety, every desire to quit leaked from their carefully constructed compartments. I bit my lips so I wouldn’t ask for an epidural. I prayed there would be a reason for a c-section so I wouldn’t have to do this.
In the transformation stage the cervix dilates from 7 to 10 centimeters. This is the hardest phase. The waves are so intense it feels like being racked from the inside, and the only way out is through. Through the pain. Down the dark tunnel with Persephone traveling to Hades in the underworld. This is followed by the Ring of Fire in which the baby uses the body like a matchbox, like Persephone crossing the river Phlegethon.
Then the baby arrives. And it’s brilliant. Until the midwife presses on your abdomen to deliver the placenta, and it feels like knives stabbing your already wrenched body.
A friend recently gave birth to her third child. The labor happened so quickly she did not have time for the epidural she had with her previous children. “It was powerful,” she said. “Like the crucifixion.”
Which is what I wrote in my journal when Cole was less than a day old.
I never understood the crucifixion because I was caught up in the idea that it was transactional. Something went wrong in God’s good world and someone would have to shed blood to make God ok with it all again.
After labor I started to understand on a visceral level that the crucifixion is not transactional. It is transformational. With every breath Jesus teaches us how to live a transformed life. He models the difficult and freeing path of love. He embodies the pain of betrayal, violence, and descent; and what happens on the other side.
This week is Holy Week. The Episcopal Church engages the Passion of Christ with The Paschal Triduum which consists of three liturgies: Maundy Thursday marks the last supper; Good Friday moves through the crucifixion; and the Great Vigil of Easter celebrated on Saturday night rings in the Feast of the Resurrection.*
We all traverse the path of descent in our own ways. Childbirth is one. There are others. We lose friends, parents, children, pieces of ourselves. We get lost in relationships and in our own minds. We suffer violence or accidents or illness. We brush up against mortality.
The trick is to keep going. To walk through the underworld like Persephone. To endure the Passion like Jesus, knowing that a new life awaits.
After separating from my ex-husband I decided to gift myself with a ring I had wanted for more than a decade: a small painting of a Magnolia blossom encircled by gold and set atop a silver band.** Magnolia’s represent femininity and perseverance. I found it waiting in my mailbox when I returned from the Easter Vigil. I unwrapped the brown paper and lifted the lid of the jewelry box with all the excitement of a child on Christmas morning.
But it wasn’t Christmas. It was Easter. Cole was asleep in his bed. Persephone and Jesus returned from the underworld, and I was reborn.
Happy Easter Blessings,
Melinda
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
*If you’ve never been to an Easter Vigil, I invite you to join me this Saturday at 8pm at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cary.
Death Meditation Part Two: The Risk of Love
When I was in middle school I was obsessed with the One Last Wish book series by Lurlene McDaniel. With such dubious titles as Let Him Live, and Sixteen and Dying, they were basically romance novels except with terminal illness. Even at ten I was exhausted by life and harbored a secret longing to be really sick so there would be a reason for how poorly I felt. Every time I got a bruise on the playground (which was most of the time, I bruise like a peach), I was convinced I had cancer. But then the bruise would fade and other than fatigue, bloody noses, and migraines, I’d be just fine.
Except I wasn’t.
The thing about chronic illness is that it can bump you up against, if not your own mortality, your values.
A day or so after deciding to take on death meditation as a Lenten discipline, I heard an interview on NPR with Kate Bowler. Kate is a professor at Duke Divinity who is roughly my age, has a toddler, and wrote a book called Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved which chronicles the diagnosis and treatment of her terminal colon cancer. It’s funny and poignant and sad. She’s still undergoing treatment, and in addition to writing, hosts the Everything Happens Podcast. Ever the romantic, I listened to the episode, “Costly Love” first, in which she interviews Lucy Kalanithi, wife of Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon who wrote the stunning memoir When Breath Becomes Air. Paul died from cancer before completing the book, and Lucy finished the manuscript. I wept for the last twenty pages.
The intriguing thing about my experience with death meditation thus far is that has been so lighthearted. Far from the somber, dour, difficult task I was expecting, I simply feel bolstered.
And wrong.
Most of my experience with death has been tangential. Meditating on death amidst my pristine, white privilege of safety and good health feels like a betrayal of friends who’ve endured big losses, and of strangers who live with day to day violence. But, these are my circumstances and I follow where I’m led.
Spurred by the questions raised in Everything Happens for a Reason and When Breath Becomes Air, I asked myself, “What would I do if I knew I had one day left to live?” Answer: I would take Cole to the Life and Science Museum in Durham and ride the train with him for as long as he wants. And when he’s sick of it, I’d do whatever else he wants to do. If I knew I had just one day, I would spend it all with him. But I don’t know that. And I can’t spend all day every day doing whatever Cole wants. It’s not practical, healthy, or possible.
What I can do, what we can all do, is choose to live the moments we live with purpose and intention. Living with purpose involves the risk of hope that somewhere, somehow, someway, life has meaning. In When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi writes that as humans we are meaning makers, and most of that meaning comes from our relationships. After his diagnosis, he and Lucy talk about having a child.
Lucy says, “Wouldn’t having a child make your death so much harder?”
Paul replies, “Wouldn’t it be great if it did?”
Lucy gave birth to their daughter eight months before Paul died.
As sappy and outrageous as the One Last Wish books of my youth were, they, like the cancer memoirs of today, include the risk and cost of love. I pray that when I take the time to look into Cole’s eyes, when I organize my calendar, when I take up a challenge, when I rest, when I am with my community, that I am worthy of their pages.
In meditating on how to spend my days in harmony with my deeper aspirations and values I have decided to shift the blog to every other week, or possibly twice a month. I need the space in my schedule to breathe and to create room for other writing projects. I also want to make sure you are getting top quality work. You’ll hear from me again during Holy Week.
Thank you for holding this space, your space, and for bringing meaning and purpose to my life.
Love,
Melinda
Photo © Melinda Thomas
The HouseHolder's Path 