Sense of Direction

Still Thinking About the F-Word: You Know the One–Family

2011-06-20T14:41:00.000-07:00

Yep, it's true. Three years after angsting over family and what it means, I'm still working it out. But I'm doing it over on my other blog!

New Post on My New Raw Food Obsession

2011-06-04T16:43:00.000-07:00

Follow me to the new post!

Thinking About Ego

2011-05-19T12:09:00.000-07:00

Today after class a conversation with a student led me to thinking about how ego attachment has such a strong impact on how efficiently and effectively I am able to exercise. I'll have to give that some more thought.

In the meantime, here's another blog entry for you, with yet another lesson from a student and an important reality check.

Aaand another!

2011-05-09T16:37:00.000-07:00

Posted in both places, take your pick! Body Love or Spicy Confessions

New Post Over There! (>>>points yonder)

2011-05-04T14:57:00.000-07:00

I am still working out how I want to use each of my blogs, how much overlap I want to give them. The original idea was to gradually phase this one out but, you know, I'm kind of attached to it, so I'm just not sure. It's sort of like a special note you get from someone or a comfortable shirt that's wearing out–what the heck do you do with it when it has lived its useful life but your nostalgia has taken up residence and refuses to leave?

Anyway. Sigh. There's a new post over in my new Yoga Blog: Modeling Meditation

And a similar post coming soon to my writing blog, but from a slightly different perspective. I'll keep you posted! (Yeah, I know. That was lame.)

Working with Reality

2011-04-22T20:17:00.000-07:00

I teach several yoga classes at a local gym. The classes are one hour long and they are all intended as all-level classes. As instructors we've been given certain limits about what we're allowed to teach.

A couple of weeks ago I had a new student approach me before class wondering if I would be the regular instructor. What exactly was I planning to teach? he wondered. We chatted a bit and he expressed his frustration with being unable to progress in his practice by taking classes at the gym. He wanted to do other poses–harder poses–but the teachers wouldn't teach them. Would I be willing, if I saw the same people showing up week after week, to progress the class? Could I maybe give him extra pointers?

I offered my sympathy and had a few suggestions of my own: Maybe he could take some extra classes outside the gym? Or if not classes, perhaps a workshop here and there or private lesson? If he knew the poses he could use extra knowledge from books or videos or online instruction to try some other things while in class. The problem, I explained, was that these classes are intended to be all-level. While I can certainly adapt my class to the people I see attending, I have been hired to do a particular job and I need to honor that.

Each suggestion I made he responded to in the negative. He didn't want to spend extra money on classes, his other gym had an instructor who was willing to teach more advanced poses, he didn't have enough knowledge on his own to experiment.

He was a nice enough guy but I was really struck by something in our conversation: his problem-solving was doomed to be unsuccessful because it was based on changing reality, rather than on working within real constraints. And I thought about how often I do that as well–rather than looking at an actual situation, I try to make the situation change around me and my desires. Problem-solving HAS to be based in reality or it's not problem-solving.

So, you know, this guy? He taught me a lot, it turns out.

copyright 2011 J. Autumn Needles

Sex and Social Science

2011-03-24T16:11:00.000-07:00

(Cross-posted to another blog, Spicy Confessions from an Alluring Yoga Temptress. You can probably expect a certain amount of overlap, silence and/or chaos for a while, while I try to get all my blogs in a row. So to speak. Bear with me. I'm sure it'll all be worth it.)

I just tried (and failed) to read Sex at Dawn by C. Ryan and C. Jetha. Back to the library it went! I failed not because I thought it was wrong or badly written, but because frankly I just lost interest. The question of how humans are programmed is just not all that interesting to me beyond a certain level, especially when I see so many sub-groups with agendas around the research. Sexual orientation is a choice? Choose differently! Sexual orientation is genetic? How about a pill or surgery to change it! Humans are born to be monogamous–look at the evidence! Whoops, change that; we’re actually born to be sexual sharers, creating social cohesion through sexual favors.

The research is important, yes, because understanding is a useful thing. But ultimately we’ve got these brains to contend with, these brains that actually allow us to think about and observe ourselves, and make choices beyond our biology. So it’s not that the research itself is a bad idea but what we often get up to with it, which is to make rules about right and wrong. We also have the bad habit of picking and choosing the pieces of the research that work for us, and leaving the rest of it out. So, for example, maybe I read Sex at Dawn and I love the fact that it looks like multiple relationships of both affection and sexuality are the thing for humans (Yay, I'm right! I win!), but frankly I’m not so hot about the idea that we might be better off sharing our sexuality with everyone in our social group, as well as sharing the child care (Oh, let's just forget about that part, shall we?). If I want to back up my own behavior, I’m going to have to be cautious in my reading. Ultimately though what I'm really interested in is choice, and I want to make my choices based on what I think is important.

Want to be monogamous? That’s fabulous! Who cares that humans aren’t built that way? It’s a great way to direct and focus your energy, and minimize your risks of sexually transmitted diseases. Is it challenging? Awesome! Disciplined effort is a great practice and a useful skill in all kinds of ways.

Want to have multiple relationships? Terrific! Living outside the social norms gives you permission to experiment and gives you perspective, and empathy, for the outsider. Do you struggle with it sometimes? Awesome! What a great way to confront your inner demons by sharing with others.

Want to lie or cheat in your relationships? Oh, not so fast! Want to make rules about everyone else’s behavior because they’re all doing it wrong? Whoa there! In a lot of ways I think that life is a big experiment where we are both the scientist and the subject, and how amazing is that that we get to play around with all these big ideas in this fascinating body we have! Really, that's what yoga is in a nutshell! But pulling other people in as puppets in our little play? Or trying to shore up our beliefs out of fear? That’s just not playing fair.

Yes, do the research. Yes, think about it. But ultimately we all have to figure out what truths we’re going to live by, in order to do well by ourselves and others.

copyright 2011 J. Autumn Needles

Making Up My Mind

2010-12-08T20:57:00.000-08:00

You know how it feels when there’s that one yoga pose that feels like it’s so close you can taste it, but you just can’t quite make it there? Maybe it’s a difficult pose that you’ve had as your goal for years, working up to it but never quite managing it completely. Or maybe it’s a pose you do every day in class, watching everyone else flop into it effortlessly while you continue to struggle. It just doesn’t seem fair, either that you’ve worked so hard for so long without making it to that final pose, or that a pose that seems like the most basic pose in the world just won’t work for you.

It’s easy to get fixated on the things that don’t come easily, that everyone else seems to do well, and then feel like a failure. When I talk with students I try not to use language that indicates one variation of a pose as being better than another, or harder than another, or more advanced than another. I don’t ever want people to feel like they’ve failed at anything, or that they are somehow less than anyone else, or that they can’t access the experience of yoga if they can’t get into a particular pose. But I suppose it is human nature to want what we don’t have and to believe that somehow there are landmarks we are supposed to achieve at certain times or fall behind the pack.

Recently I was having sex with someone and, as part of our play, he tried to insert his whole hand into me. Not shoving it in, but working me up to it gradually. However, when he reached the level of the last set of knuckles, I tensed up. I could feel my body working against him, trying to keep him out, and I finally had to say “enough, I can’t do it.”

I felt frustrated, but I also knew my body had had enough and simply wasn’t going to cooperate. The frustration comes because over and over I have reached the point of almost being able to take in a whole hand. And then right when I can feel that it’s close, and that one more push will do it, I just…can’t. I just can’t. This is something I have wanted to do, first just as curiosity, more recently with desire and intention. I have begun to believe that I am missing out on something and I want very much to experience it. I try not to let my desire get in the way of my connection with my partner, or in the way of the fun we have together. After our date I wrote him an email and in it I said, “I want this, but it’s like my body hasn’t completely made up its mind about it.”

When I wrote that I realized immediately the truth of it. My body hasn’t made up its mind. I have, but my body hasn’t, and my body definitely gets a vote on this decision. With that realization, something relaxed inside. This isn’t about me trying and failing, which is how I had been feeling. It’s that my body hasn’t fully committed to the idea.

I also immediately realized that I could use the same insight to think about yoga poses that feel out of reach. When there are poses I can’t do, it’s not that I have failed at them. My body simply hasn’t made up its mind to do it. All I can really do is keep my desire focused but playful, without force, and continue to keep my body in preparation for what I want to do with it. In the meantime, I can enjoy the things I am able to do, the things my body has made up its mind to do, and know that the final decision is not entirely up to me.

When I talk with my students I try to use the same type of verbiage, saying things like, “If your body doesn’t like this…” or “Check with your knee to see how it feels about this,” or “Your lower back gets the veto on this one.” My reasoning for using that language is that I don’t want my students thinking things like, “I can’t,” or feeling like they’ve failed somehow. If we can talk about the body as having its own intelligence, then we can be participants in more of a committee decision about the things we do or don’t do.

There are some pitfalls to thinking this way though. Frequently we manage to separate from the body only to make it into an enemy, somehow out to get us, or into a stupid imbecile, incapable of doing anything right. If instead we can imagine being part of a team tasked with accomplishing something we can simply see each piece of the team as having individual strengths and weaknesses. The accomplishment will need all of us working together, and if one isn’t ready, then we simply can’t go forward.

There are a couple of other key ideas around working toward these goals. One is to remember to have fun on the way there. My example of having sex is true for this. So I couldn’t get someone’s hand inside me—so what? I was having an incredible time with him and it would be idiotic for me to decide the entire experience was a failure due to that one thing. Same thing in a yoga class; no one can get through an entire class without doing anything well. I’ve never seen a student without strengths in various areas. I recently read a quote from a yoga student who had struggled with obesity but in yoga class was able to recognize “the magnificence of the body” which I thought was a lovely way to think about it. “The magnificence of the body.” Even the things a body can keep doing to sustain life and health when treated badly is miraculous; how much more so as part of a healthy well-oiled team.

If you can find a place to have fun or enjoy your situation, even around the places that are hard, even better. I recently read a lovely book about a guy’s yoga experience called Stretch by Neal Pollack. At one point he quotes Swami Sivananda: “There is no end of craving. Hence contentment alone is the best way to happiness. Therefore, acquire contentment.” And it seems to me this is still true. If you’ve ever achieved something you’ve wanted, has that made you stop wanting anything else? Craving and desire are part of the human condition. Frankly it seems to me that without them, we might as well follow the example of one of my relatives and just sit on the couch, smoke and do crossword puzzles until we dry up and die. We need desire to get us moving, but once we’re moving we need to figure out how to enjoy the movement without the goal. Because for one thing there’s always another goal out there. And for another thing, the achieving of the goal is a split second and then it’s gone. When my students get frustrated because they can’t touch their toes in a forward bend, I tell them, there’s nothing down on their toes except maybe dirt. The actual touching of the toes isn’t special enough to skip what it takes to get there correctly with good form.

Later in the book, the author quotes one of his teachers as saying, “Blessed are the stiff. The flexible are cursed. People are very disappointed when they get their chin to their shin. It’s all still breath and the spaces in between. There’s nothing else.” If we can get interested enough in the movement without the goal, treat our bodies like treasured allies that protect and defend us as we protect and defend them, and remember that goals only lead to other goals, then maybe we can have fun, loosen up and surprise ourselves by getting down to those toes after all.

copyright 2010 J. Autumn Needles

Why Isn't She Writing More?

2010-11-12T10:45:00.000-08:00

I began this blog as a place just for me, to give myself direction in my writing and a place to explore my thoughts out of my head and into some sort of forum. I never worried about trying to attract an audience and I never put that much of my own information up here to help people find me.

As I wrote more about my sense of direction, both in the very tangible "I get lost a lot" sense and in the "where am I going in life?" sense, and began to add in more of my thinking about yoga, the poses and the philosophy, I found myself feeling too constrained by my own self-imposed limitations here. A big part of my life is wrapped up in love and relationships and sex, and a lot of how I do that part of my life doesn't look very mainstream. I wrote this entry about my quandary.

That entry in turn sparked a book, Yogic Bliss and Sexual Healing.

The book brought together all the pieces of me in a way that was very satisfying, and once I had accomplished that, I felt unsatisfied with the idea of leaving out whole pieces of my life in my writing. However, I still had strong feelings that people should be allowed to access my thinking about yoga without having to get all sexy with me. And not just allowed, but encouraged if that's a particular boundary for you.

What to do, what to do? I wrung my hands. I wrote an occasional post. I wrote other, sexier posts for another private forum. But I still felt limited, and disturbed by the fact that there's so much I still want to talk about that I'm holding in reserve--about body image, about health, about fitness, about teaching, about group dynamics, about...well, all kinds of things.

So, here's what's going to happen: I have at least one more post for this blog that will show up shortly. I'm going to go back and reorganize the writing here to make it more user-friendly, so that it's not just for me. But I'm also going to be cannibalizing it over time as I create two new sites--one just for information about yoga, both the poses and the philosophy, upcoming classes and workshops, thoughts and ideas about fitness and general health, resources for both students and teachers, eventually (I hope!) video and links to helpful information, and one with all of that plus the sexy stuff and information about upcoming book readings and signings, as well as future writing projects. That way, you, the reader, can make an informed choice about how much is too much, and what is helpful and useful to you in your life, and I can stop worrying about it!

I will keep this site posted with information as I have it. Meanwhile, one more regular entry coming right up!

Finding the Joy

2010-09-13T16:48:00.000-07:00

I went to my sister's wedding this weekend. Before I go on I should clarify: When my father remarried, he and my step-mother eventually had 2 children of their own, both girls, the oldest 20 years younger than me. I always had mixed feelings watching them grow up. There is nothing I particularly regret about my own childhood but my father was generally somewhat remote as I was growing up. From the time in my life when I moved from Texas to Illinois, and in with him and my step-mother for high school, I primarily have memories of loneliness, of trying to be a part of a completely different social and cultural scene while rattling around in a large house with these two awfully busy workaholics who rarely seemed to be around. I had been comfortable with my mother and step-father and my brother. This was completely new, and hard. I knew I was loved by my father, but it felt more like the love for some sort of exotic pet whose habits and behaviors are unknown and perhaps a little intimidating. Love at a remove.

Later as my sisters grew up and I watched the ease with which they moved through life with 2 very present loving parents and a stable home I had mixed feelings. I felt resentment and sorrow watching the experience I had not had. At the same time, I was happy in my life and had no desire to go back and repeat anything differently. I was grateful to my parents for the childhood I had experienced, and simultaneously angry at them for not doing things differently. I was frustrated by my father's lack of awareness of my own experience since he obviously knew in intimate detail about the lives of his other two girls. But at a twenty year remove it seemed ridiculous for me to dwell on it any more. The girls themselves were delightful and I couldn't bring myself to dislike them.

My own path into adulthood has taken me in some strange directions, and parts of my life look very different from a "normal" life. Many of the things that are signifiers of adulthood in our culture, such as marriage and children, I have chosen not to do. In fact, marriage has not been an option for me legally at all. Because of this, weddings bring out a variety of emotions in me: anger, sadness, annoyance and fury together with the more usual celebratory emotions. Seeing a community come together in love and support for a new couple is heartening, but also devastating when you understand that they will never come together in that particular way for you. Feelings of jealousy arise and it is tempting to close off contact in order not to ride that particular wave of emotion.

I sat at this particular wedding and felt my eyes well up as I watched my sister walk down the aisle and her groom begin to cry with joy. I was so happy to see so much love there. During the ceremony I kept myself from twitching with rage as a very particular brand of Christianity stamped itself on the proceedings. "This is her day and it's her religion," I kept telling myself. "Behave." Listening to the toasts later I dug down so that I could hear and appreciate the heartfelt emotion, rather than focusing on the words that dismay me.

Finally, it was time for the dancing. My sister danced with her new husband, and then my father took the floor to dance with her. His face shone with joy and pride as he led her around the floor and my heart broke. "This will never be mine," I kept hearing. "I will never have this with my father."

I've been thinking lately about sympathetic joy, that ability to feel joy and pleasure for someone else's good fortune. It's called mudita in Sanskrit and is supposed to be the antidote for envy. What I realized as I watched my father and my sister dance is that an antidote doesn't necessarily make the the underlying feelings go away. I watched and I cried quietly for myself and at the same time I was so very glad to be a witness to their happiness, and so very glad that they had this experience with one another, that the presence of my sister allowed my father to have what he never could have had with me. Everything else in my heart moved over and made space for my happiness.

When the open dancing began, I got up on the floor and moved. I danced to everything. I learned a new line dance with the young people, jumped and twirled with a little 5-year-old girl, danced the merengue with our old housekeeper's husband, and when the floor cleared I looked across the room and saw my father standing alone. I walked over and reached out to him. "Would you like to dance with me, Daddy?" "Right now? To this?" "Yes, right now, to this." I took him out on the floor and danced with my father joyfully at my sister's wedding.

copyright 2010 J. Autumn Needles

Rites of Passage

2010-09-04T15:59:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine on a social site posted a quote recently that made her angry. It was something along the lines of defining four particular rites of passage required to become an adult. The four listed were: leaving home, becoming financially independent, getting married and having children. Her anger was due to the fact that not everyone is allowed to get married and not everyone is able to have children and she felt that having those requirements for adulthood left a large chunk of our population out of the loop. I agree with her and I have felt how ingrained those particular rites are in my own experience and how I am frequently judged for missing two of them.

However I've long since passed the stage of angry indignation and I can't seem to work up much of a head of steam over it any more. I recognize that people look for particular mileposts, not so much out of a desire to judge them or belittle them, but to find common ground on which to meet. It just doesn't seem like such a terrible thing to desire, even if some of that common ground is marked off limits to me.

I did have a couple of experiences recently though that got me thinking about how to mark off some new territory. Last weekend my partner and I went out to my car, turned it on and started off down the street. Almost immediately we noticed an odd thumping sound. I pulled over and she jumped out of the car to look. One of the front tires was completely flat. From there I could go on into the rest of the day's adventure in getting to my yoga class in time to teach it, getting home and taking care of the tire before all the shops closed for the weekend. And I do have a really good story about it that I've been telling everyone with great delight!

The story though isn't really the point. The point is that even in the midst of the stress of taking care of a flat tire, something in me was sitting up and taking notice because it was my very first flat tire in my whole life. That took it out of the category of annoying things that happen in life and put it into the special category of "Rites of Passage". Even while taking care of the situation I felt myself moving into a deeper understanding of what it is to be an adult and an owner of a car. It's something that connects me to other adults who own cars.

Then last night I made quinoa and I was able to rinse it easily because we finally bought a real sieve, one that a grown up would use, solid, made of metal with a fine mesh. And again I thought, I've made it now–I am a for real adult person with a sieve!

What I find interesting in both these cases is that they illustrate in some ways how I define adulthood to myself. You would think that a 43-year-old woman would feel her inherent grown-up-ness quite strongly, but, in fact, I still look for these signs of moving from one stage to another. For many people, these particular two events would have happened significantly earlier in life. Others may live out their entire lives without a real sieve and never feel anything amiss.

Sometimes it's tempting to look at the stages of life sort of like one of those video games where you do certain things, accomplish certain goals, and the music plays, you get points, and your character moves on to the next level. Life, though, is significantly more convoluted that that and the accomplishments of different stages may not be quite so simply defined. Where do you find your common ground and what are your particular rites of passage to get there? Maybe we can all find a little space to stand.

copyright 2010 J. Autumn Needles

The Physics of Facebook

2010-08-25T12:40:00.000-07:00

I joined Facebook not too long ago, under protest and sure that I would hate every part of it. There are parts of it I don’t appreciate. And I just close my eyes and stick my head in the sand when I see how carefully targeted the ads are that pop up in response to anything I write. (Goodbye, privacy!) One thing has surprised me though—the opportunity for grace and healing.

First I found a man I had befriended back in college during turbulent times for us both. We developed a friendship and became lovers all in 2 weeks, after which we never saw one another again. We tried to stay in touch but, as I said, it was turbulent times and things get misplaced when everything is moving. Over the years I would try occasionally to find him again with no success. I changed my name so I thought there was no chance he would ever find me. And then on Facebook there was a friend request from him and a short note. We reconnected, spoke on the phone and had that opportunity to say to one another, “You were important to me. It was only 2 weeks and we moved on but you were someone who meant something.”

Then came the high school ex-boyfriend, who broke up with me and with whom I broke up over and over. And over, over the years. When it finally ended it was bad as these things often are. But I always loved him deeply, thought of him with fondness and regret and never imagined there could be healing. Then came Facebook. And again the chance to say, “You were important to me. I’m sorry I made mistakes. I’m glad you’re well and happy and I still love you deeply.”

In both cases I just keep marveling… Twenty years and more it’s been and yet, here’s the healing, here’s the grace. And I feel so grateful. And that’s what they both have expressed to me as well, the gratitude for this chance to say what needed to be said. And the wonder that it has been provided to us after all this time.

I started thinking about how I will frequently tell students not to force a pose, but to allow breath and gravity to create it for them, with ease. The forces of nature are a given but we can choose to work with them, and in some cases to allow them to do a lot of the work for us. Frequently we are tempted to fight them at every turn, trying to do something we have envisioned despite them.

Time is one of those forces as well, and one that we often feel we have too little of and have to struggle against. Lately though with these moments of grace provided via electronic means I’ve been wondering if I can let go of the concept of time as an enemy and allow it to help me create my space in the world. With these two relationships, over the years I often felt that I needed to do something somehow to change things, and here all these years later the time itself has done the job. I find myself often frustrated by the things I’m not doing, or that I have stopped doing, because I feel like I don’t have the time. At the same time, I feel a sense of desperation, a feeling that I have to do something, ANYTHING, to change my circumstances. I’m not getting any younger, I think to myself, and I may lose the ability to do all these things I want to do.

That is very true, no doubt about that. And you really don’t know when and how things may change so it makes sense to seize the moment. But churning frantically through my little piece of time because I’m desperate to do something doesn’t seem to be effective in allowing me to seize anything. I'm like the panicked drowning person surrounded by rescuers, liferings and boats incapable of making use of any of them. So maybe instead I will try to allow myself a sense of spaciousness, remembering the grace that time has allowed me to access with these people, and remember that the 20 years past, while they have gone quickly, have also given me space for many opportunities and changes. There is no reason to believe I cannot also have that in the 20 years to come if I am willing to work with the time and allow it to help create me, my pose in the world.

Good Pain, Bad Pain

2010-07-03T13:38:00.000-07:00

Back when I got my group fitness certification, I wrote a blog entry talking a little bit about the first two questions we supposedly ask ourselves when doing (or teaching) an exercise: 1) What is the purpose? and 2) Am I doing that effectively? I was struck at the time by how relevant these 2 questions became for me over time in looking at things I was doing in life, rather than just in my exercise. This morning I taught a yoga class and found myself considering the next two questions in the list and again generalizing them out: 3) Are there any safety concerns? and 4) Can I maintain proper alignment and form for the duration?

Today in class we were working on variations of Pigeon, including this version of One-legged King Pigeon. If you've read my earlier entries you know that Pigeon was much loathed by me for many years, and this variation is one that I still tend to avoid, partly out of fear and the memories of struggle it brings up, and partly because I have some tendinitis in my knees and this pose can create problems for me in my knees. This morning was a little questionable for me but I went ahead with it and, as I struggled to find the balance between working through the pose and staying safe, I watched my students struggle as well.

I remember all the times in various classes trying to learn to read this particular fine line, the difference between good pain, the struggle with something difficult that teaches you and your body something, and bad pain, when something is pushed too far and there's damage. It is hard enough to learn it simply as an aspect of the physical body when the struggle doesn't always feel good and the payoff seems too remote to be worthwhile and it's easy to give up, or, on the other hand, when we swallow the "no pain, no gain" philosophy hook, line and sinker and push ourselves on auto-pilot past any hope of real learning into injury.

But beyond that I followed my own line of thinking again out past the realm of physical exercise and into other parts of my life, difficult situations I've been in or relationships in crisis. My own reflex in those situations is to immediately withdraw, but then I usually second guess myself because I have this built-in belief that suffering is automatically good for the soul somehow and that if I stick it out, it will make me a better person. So I stay and I keep trying to make myself learn something, dammit!

This morning as I talked my students through the poses, offering suggestions for adaptations and occasionally suggested jettisoning the pose altogether in favor of something else, I realized that my internal questions about safety need to become part of how I approach all situations, and that sticking with something is not always the better part of valor. Sometimes suffering is part of life and it does help us grow if we can stay with it, and allow ourselves to work past it.
Other times we're better off letting it go and moving on to something else. As I frequently tell my students, if your knees are unhappy, they get the veto! If your lower back doesn't like something, your lower back wins! Those are pains that are not pains to work through. Tight hamstrings are one thing; damage to a joint something else entirely.

Likewise in life–if I am in a situation that is difficult and causing me pain, I need to ask myself if there are any safety concerns, not just physically, but emotionally: Am I putting myself in an unsafe situation where I might cause myself harm? Is the pain something that will build me up and make me stronger, or am I weakening myself somewhere fragile and important, where I will never recover? And can I hold my form and alignment for the duration, or, in other words, can I hold myself true to myself regardless of the emotional undercurrents or social eddies that may be pulling me out of shape or off course? Or will I be better to remove myself from the fray, perhaps to build my strength and knowledge so that the next time I try I will be able to say yes to the situation that tests me? Like learning to listen on the intuitive level to the body, learning the difference between good pain and bad pain in this larger context is difficult as well and there's no simple way to make it clear. But again, maybe just asking the questions over and over and paying attention to what comes from them will allow awareness to develop, creating balance over time.

copyright 2010 J. Autumn Needles

Published!!

2010-06-24T13:42:00.000-07:00

Soon there will be a real post again! And it's likely that this blog as a whole is going to get a little makeover. Right now though I am very happy to announce that the book that ate all of my writing brain for the bulk of the year thus far has been published by Fanny Press, and is now available through them or through Amazon.com directly, either as a paperback or electronic book.

The book is called Yogic Bliss and Sexual Healing and grew out of my understanding and practice of yoga philosophy, together with my fascination with the physical body and how we live in it and make peace with it, and with my observations of sexuality, both how we express and develop it as well as how it is changed and damaged by the world around us and our own beliefs about how things ought to be. The process of writing it was both terrifying, because I felt exposed and vulnerable allowing myself to be seen so clearly in my writing, and exhilarating, because these were ideas that have been trapped in my head for years that I've wanted to share and have a conversation about for all of that time.

Enjoy the book and I'll be back to the blog soon!

A Perfect Day

2010-04-27T21:38:00.000-07:00

Okay, so the book is finished. *wild cheering ensues* Yes, of course, I'll let you know where you can find it when it's published which should be very soon. Writing it was an interesting exercise in letting go of perfection, first in the writing itself, just to get words out of my head and into the computer in enough volume to make a book, and then in the editing, letting go of the idea that if I just got the commas right and rearranged the sentences just so it would become the best book ever in the history of the universe, and then in the cover design and blurb, figuring out how much input was just enough input to let the artist do her work. The concept of perfection is daunting and limiting and hard to let go of.

But now it's finished. Which frees up all kinds of time for me and I can go back to a more normal routine. Yesterday I was manic: teaching, cooking, cleaning, doing doing doing...I was full of purpose! Today I slept late and couldn't seem to manage handling much more than an extra cup of tea on my to do list. I'm always annoyed with myself when that happens. Why can't I figure out how to dole out my energy evenly over time? I talked with my mother this morning and she assured me that she hasn't figured it out and she has 20 years on me. So maybe I'll never learn it?

Talking with my mother lately has been interesting. I'm aging, you see, in very clear ways these days and as I've come into middle age my mother suddenly has become more of a peer. At the same time, my step-father has been sliding into dementia, picking up speed on his way down. As my mother and I share more and more of our everyday lives with one another, I see her struggling to cope with this new challenge, forming her days around trying to alternately accommodate then manipulate him just in order to make it through each moment, wishing that if he can't go back to what he was that he could just, you know, go. Go peacefully, go before she has to hate him for taking away her life and her freedom. And I've been realizing that I actually have to grow up, grow up in a different kind of way this time, take on a new role with my parents, and it's a real struggle. I don't want to have to be that kind of grown up.

I've been talking it over with my partner who is older than I am and whose mother is farther along that line and whose father has died already, and she has told me about having to become the bad guy, to take the pressure off the parent who just simply doesn't have the internal resources any more to do it all and make the hard choices.

And it's all so surprising to me. Which is in itself surprising, you know? I mean, this is what happens, right? We've all seen the progression before and read about it and seen it in movies. It shouldn't be a surprise. But I'm finding as I come into each new life stage that the things you think you know about what will be, you just don't really know. Or more accurately, you just don't know the way it is inside the experience as it's happening. It feels surprising when you arrive, even when you feel like you could write the book about it before you ever get there.

So I had the conversation with my mother and my partner came home for lunch from a really, really bad day and in the middle of my crying for all of the surprise I feel, we come to one another and touch each other simply, knowing we need to get on and go about our day.

And I teach 3 classes, none of which I look forward to teaching and each of which brings me joy and the memory again that moving my body in the midst of, well, anything really is a good thing, and I am surprised again by that fact which I learn each time, every time I move, every time I teach and connect with students, every time I practice. And then in the midst of the third class of the evening when I'm tired and ready to sleep instead of doing yoga, when my mind is blank trying to come up with what to share with my students, and every class lately is becoming one long hot flash so I move through class wet and red-faced, sweat dripping off my eyelashes and puddling on my mat. Right then on this very not very perfect day, suddenly everything falls away, even while I know I am still there in all of it, I am moving, I am sweating, I am breathing and I am invincible! I am perfect. I am perfectly held, perfectly balanced, no limits to my possibility. I know this very certainly and in this moment it is truth. And I am so very grateful for my perfect day in my perfect body with my perfect life.

copyright 2010 J. Autumn Needles

Impulse Control

2010-01-11T20:49:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking lately about that little space between "I want" and the action to achieve that want. Generally, it's helpful to expand that space enough to think a little. The action becomes more conscious, the decision to act is more thoughtful. But sometimes when the space between the two becomes too large, we lose the opportunity for action. Losing the opportunity can work to our advantage if it was, say, an opportunity to eat a large piece of pie and we're trying to control our sugar intake. But there are other times, and other opportunities, we don't want to lose.

I haven't written here for a while, not because I don't want to or because I've had nothing to say, but because I have another writing project, a book, to work on. When I feel an impulse to write, I try to direct it in that way, rather than bringing it here. Sometimes that works just fine. Other times I find that while I may resist the urge to write here, the urge never actually gets successfully redirected, and instead I just sit and twitch, or read, or browse the internet.

There have been some other drops into my consciousness causing me to think about this idea of impulse control and how it works, or doesn't sometimes. For one thing, we're still in January, the time of resolution. Much of my teaching these days takes place in a gym so I have now fully experienced the swell of people filled with resolve showing up to work and sweat, determined to do whatever it is they've decided must be done this year. Willpower, something I don't really believe in, is thrown around a lot this time of year.

In a rather different direction, there is Haiti and the tragedy there. Whenever something large and catastrophic like that happens, I begin to think about a different kind of impulse, an impulse to help, to pitch in.

The interesting thing is that sometimes I find I get so caught up in controlling my own impulses, and in my head I'm talking about the "bad" ones, and I get so successful at it, that I don't differentiate and begin to control the "good" impulses as well. When I work to control my impulses, that is not the result I'm looking for. But somehow my mind builds the habit of restraint, avoidance, and simply applies it to all situations. I think that's really the trouble with habits in general, they become tapes we just run without thought.

That in turn brought me around to giving a little more thought to two of the eight limbs of yogic philosophy, the yamas and the niyamas. I've talked about a few of them individually in this blog, but to be honest I never really looked that closely at the concepts behind them as grouped in this way, two separate things. In my mind I tend to put them all together. And really, look at what they're called! Don't they just cry out to be grouped together? They sound like the name of a band. But the yamas are specifically restraints, things we strive not to do, while the niyamas are practices in right-thinking, things we strive to do. When we build in a restraint, we need to teach ourselves to do something else, to practice building good qualities.

When I have an impulse towards one of these right actions, or perhaps I should call them skillful actions, it can still be useful to pause for thought before moving, but not in the sense of resisting the flow of what wants to happen through me. Which takes me back to my writing example. There may be times when it is more important just that the writing happen somewhere, because sometimes when I try to control it, I restrain it altogether. A new thing for me to learn and practice.

And now that I've practiced doing here, rather than not doing, I am off to do elsewhere. Skillful action, not inaction.

copyright 2010 J. Autumn Needles

Making the Best of Things

2009-11-10T22:04:00.000-08:00

Some time ago I wrote an entry about how nifty people are because we have this incredible ability to take a bad situation and find something of value there. But no attribute is purely one-sided and I've been thinking lately about the flip side of this one. Unfortunately, our use of pure grit and wishful thinking to just make things work out is sometimes too successful and we find ourselves trapped in a cell of our own design somewhere we really don't want to be. The energy we need to just make the best of things is often less than the energy we need to change for the better. So, like the good little animals we are, we make the choice that requires less of us, and in the process we do ourselves damage.

I recently had a cold that took a tediously long time to resolve. I kept working during that time and just slogged through the days. While I was very aware of the feeling of my body working its way through the virus, underlying that I had a strong sense of general well-being and health. And, although I kept working while sick (don't try this at home, kids!), my body just felt strong and vibrant and I didn't feel too stressed out about the work. This experience was in stark contrast to how I felt when I used to get sick at my last job, where my body felt badly used and every virus made me feel beaten down. I point out the difference because I wasn't really unhappy at my last job, and, if I hadn't injured myself badly at one point, I might still be there today. In a job that I drifted into without any particular direction, a job that physically exhausted me to the point where I changed my other habits to accommodate my exhaustion, a job that didn't speak to me or challenge me, a job doing something I frankly thought was a waste, a job where I would come back from one vacation only to begin the countdown to the next one. Why did I stay there so long? I could give you a hundred reasons, but they all boil down to: It's where I was and I needed to find a way not just to be comfortable with it, but also to incorporate it fully into my own story, to make peace with being there, to care about it.

What is difficult is that it always seems so clear in hindsight, that choice we ought to have made long ago. I had a yoga instructor who would occasionally raise his hands to the sky, "Seventeen years!!" he'd cry, referring to his 17 years as a celibate monk. "Why?" he'd ask. I am thinking of this now because I just had another birthday which was the occasion of looking at the joy that is my life today, the places I would like to go with my life in the future that I am working towards, and at the same time looking back and asking that same question. "Why? Why on earth did I waste so much time?"

Yes, I know what you're thinking. You're getting all yogic on me and thinking about how we have to live in the now, and our pasts are what created us, blah blah blah. Whatever. And all kidding aside, I get that. I do. (Mostly.) But I think where I'm going with this is, how do we make the time that we waste less? When we fall into that trap of making the best of things, how do we know when we're doing it right? And how do we know when we're just trying to make our story end a little better by editing it a little?

When I was a kid, I thought that every book was somehow sacred. If I began reading a book, in order to show respect to the author and his or her work and experience, I had to finish it. It didn't really matter if I liked it or thought it was good, my duty was clear. Finish the damn book. I was well into adulthood before I broke that habit. I think as we get older we get less tolerant of wasting time. Or at least of wasting time with something that isn't fun or of value.

Lately in order to help figure this out for myself I've been just beginning to use a new tool that came from an odd place. A few weeks ago I decided to take the test to become a certified group fitness instructor. The process I went through will have to be saved for another day's tale, but one little piece of the information jumped out and made its way into my psyche in a way that I don't think was intended. In creating an appropriate class we were taught to ask 5 questions about the exercises we choose. The first question is, "What is the purpose of this exercise?" At first I wasn't very interested in the question, or in any of the others for that matter. In yoga, as far as I'm concerned, the purpose of the exercise is just to get all the parts of ourselves focused in one place and time so that we can really pay attention carefully. For this class, we were talking about purposes that involved specific muscles and bones and heart rates and body fat percentage–it just wasn't all that interesting to me. But I kept finding the question resonating around my brain. "What is the purpose of this exercise?" And I realized that using that question might be a good way to begin weeding out those things that simply aren't functional in my life, but that I have been making the best of anyway. The second question: "Is it doing that effectively?" Huh. Well, that's actually a really good question. Because if it's not, then why am I here?

I don't have any kind of final wisdom on the matter. I am sure that 10 years from now there will still be things I look back on and think, "Why oh why did I waste that time?" But I think being more mindful of asking those questions at the outset and really paying attention to the answers might help make that wasted time less.

copyright 2009 J. Autumn Needles

Packing the 10 Essentials

2009-09-28T09:48:00.000-07:00

My last blog entry got me thinking, so if the warmth of hospitality is one of the essential human elements I'd like to have for my own and take with me on the trip, what are the other nine, to continue the metaphor? I'm not sure (and you know I'll be trying to figure it out), but I have some thoughts about my next desired element on the list.

When I was a child I was smart but not kind; as a result, I valued intelligence over kindness, probably because I wanted to be loved for what I was. As an adult, I am still smart, but I hope I have acquired kindness, so now I value kindness over intelligence, perhaps still because I want to be loved for what I have become. I am still the child I was; I can see the same traits I was born with in myself today. But I want to know that I can grow layers, get larger, be better, move outwards.

In reading another woman's recent blog entry describing the bumbling and arrogant attempts by a man to impress her, I could hear and understand her angry and disgusted perspective on the story even as beneath it I could hear another possible variation, one where a lonely man in his attempt to connect with a beautiful and desirable young woman blows himself up, makes himself more than what he is. If you hear that story, you have to wonder (I have to wonder) is this such a terrible thing, worthy of disdain? What I always come back to is that the only thing I can possibly learn from observing someone else's behavior and actions doesn't have anything to do with them and their motivations and inner life, but rather with myself and my own choices. Who do I want to be? And I believe I want to be someone who gives people the benefit of the doubt. And even if someone is really and truly a complete and irredeemable asshole, what does that actually have to do with me and my life, except for me to know that I don't want to be one? I don't know that person's story, but if I want to give myself some room to move in my own story I need to allow it for him as well.

I have spent a lot of time and energy in my life making pronouncements for myself, that then become my rules to live by. I am this, I am not that, I like this, I don't like that. I have decided that in my personal practice I will try this: Instead of saying "I do not like cucumbers," to say instead, "Any time I have tried them, I have not liked cucumbers." This does not necessarily indicate a willingness on my part to go forth from now on eating cucumbers and loving them. However, I realize that I frequently don't leave myself any room around the edges of these pronouncements about myself to, I don't know, move a little. My method is completely appropriate for a science lab: I have observed this behavior/preference/whatever in response to this stimulus in the past and therefore can predict it happening again in the future. It sounds reasonable. But I know from my own experience that I have learned and changed–my behavior, my preferences, my interests, my desires.

I suspect cucumbers will not make an appearance on my table, but who knows what may?

copyright 2009 J. Autumn Needles

Where were we going again?

2009-09-02T17:05:00.001-07:00

I caught up with my father by phone today and got reports on how some of my younger relatives are doing in their lives. You know how we all have those funny little habits of speech? Well, I lost count of how many times the word "successful" was used by him, followed by a description of the work being done by the person in question. I wonder if I am described the same way in other phone conversations with these other relatives, despite the meandering path of my career such as it is. Is "successful" a circle that includes me?

Several years ago I had an odd realization. I have always wondered why, despite being serious of heart and disciplined in my focus, I never really have much of a direction at all. There's no inner compass telling me where to go next. Then I sat down one day and really tried to boil down the essence of what I value into some kind of statement of purpose. I came up with these:

I want to dance beautifully.
I want to love and be loved deeply.
I want to know god.

Um. Okay. Not a lot to work with in terms of, you know, an actual goal. And I don't think it would really go over that well in that spot on your resume where you talk about how much you want to work as part of a team. But this week I did realize that there are places in my life where I have reached a destination of sorts, something strongly intended by me and striven for.

I am a naturally shy person, an introvert. As a child I would have told you I didn't like people much; as an adult what I know is that I like them just fine, I'm just scared of them. I learned early on that it would ease my passage through this world to develop some social skills and I have labored mightily to accomplish this. What I originally did for my own survival I continued to do out of love, realizing that the fear I felt was felt by others as well and that I could help ease their passage, too. I was volunteering last week, picking out new people at a club and wandering over to introduce myself, answer questions, offer warmth and guidance. One man thanked me and said I had the gift of hospitality. Aah! My destination! Because I don't have that gift. But I have felt it in others, valued it and recognized its worth, and chosen to make mine by hard work what some have been born to.

Another compliment came my way this week, and again it was in an area that is not natural to me. As I collected and held close to me these acknowledgments, I realized that this is where I measure my success. I think about hiking and the 10 essentials you are supposed to have with you everywhere you go, no matter how long the intended hike, how many people accompany you, how perfect the weather. I believe my inner compass is less focused on where I am going and what to do when I get there, and instead points me towards the person I want to be as I travel and the tools I need for the journey. If I hone my 10 essentials, it won't matter any more what else I have or don't have, where I've been, where I might go, where I can't go; I am making myself my destination and I want the journey to be joyous and satisfying, successful for everyone making the trip.

copyright 2009 J. Autumn Needles

First, Do No Harm

2009-08-10T07:42:00.000-07:00

There are some things I just don't talk about much. Religion and spirituality fall into that category. I write about some of my beliefs here, where I am an anonymous author with an anonymous audience, but with friends and family, I don't bring it up much. I have a variety of reasons for that: I think it's personal; having grown up in Bible-belt Christianity, I am protective of my own brand of spirituality, and not interested in a battle over belief; I also believe that it is important to be respectful of other beliefs, so I keep mine to myself where I think it belongs.

At the same time, I struggle with that line of respect, both in the realm of religion and in all those other delicate human matters. Yoga is part of my spirituality; the moral and ethical tenets are part of my practice. I've spoken of many of them here in this blog, but never of ahimsa, non-harming. Ahimsa is the first of the yamas, the ethical constraints. It feels like an easy one to get a handle on, so it's often used as an example, and I have heard it so frequently that I remember it easily, where sometimes I have to struggle to come up with the others on the list. By drawing a line of respect, I am trying not to do harm to others. It makes sense to me to do this. But is there a point where I draw that line in too close, boxing myself in so that I am doing harm to myself by denying myself? Or allowing others to do harm to me by not speaking up? There is no tradition in yoga of turning the other cheek, so there is no reason for me to expose myself to harm from others as I quietly respect them. I also wonder whether by drawing that line I am in fact separating myself from them, creating an us and a them, out of fear of what their response might be. Am I fooling myself thinking that I am respecting "them", protecting "them" from harm done by me, when in fact I am making a little safe space for me, so as not to be harmed myself? How often have we said, "Well, I didn't want to tell you, because I knew you'd be upset." Who is being protected there?

And how do we define harm anyway? Where and when do we begin to do harm? Does it only count if it's intentional? Can it be balanced out by good acts? I had a friend in college with a melodramatic turn of mind (or, I don't know, maybe we all had that back then). She believed that by our very existence we were doing harm, and that we were morally obligated to remove ourselves from life. We had this conversation over iced coffee in her dorm room and I never had the sense that she planned to follow through on this noble goal. But she's right in a sense; we all do harm in all kinds of ways, large and small, recognized and unrecognized. If we see that in ourselves there is every possibility that we will live in a kind of paralysis, unable to take a step for fear of the harm we might do.

For me, there is no easy way to wrap this up and answer my own questions, but I have a few thoughts that help to show me the way. In yoga there is a concept of samskara, or mental grooves, ruts that have been worn in our thinking and in our doing. Yesterday, I boiled some eggs. One cracked and spilled out some of the white; the water boiled over and left a huge mess on the stove and the burner. I cleaned up what I could at the time, but the burner was hot so I left that for later. Later, I had forgotten about it so I put some water on to boil. The nasty smell in the house reminded me of the mess, and now the burner's hot again so I still can't clean it. Still later, my partner and I had a whole discussion about it as we were putting water on to boil again. I told her what I had done, we talked about avoiding that burner, I moved another pot out of the way so I could use a different burner, she walked out of the room and I stopped paying attention. In that moment, I slid into habit, putting the kettle back on that same nasty burner. It only took a split second of inattention for me to lose my focus and my intention.

I think the tenets of yoga are really about helping us keep the focus, to stay attentive, and not about right and wrong answers. If we accept that we are equally so small a part of the whole as to be insignificant, and at the same time so expansive that we contain everything there is, then we have both no power at all to do harm or to be harmed and at the same time all the power there is.

I have a tattoo on my shoulder of a fan with butterflies and a lacewing flying out. I rarely talk about the symbolism of the design and what it means to me; to most people, it's just a pretty thing. When I was a child, I felt a connection bordering on the absurd with people, with objects, with animals, and particularly with insects. I had a hard time separating myself. I would rage and cry when my friends killed ants, I created little bug hospitals with sugar water for bees who had strayed too far and bits of cloth for dying moths, and no insect could be killed in the house if I had anything to say about it. I felt a particular connection with lacewings. Gradually, I learned to separate myself, to harden myself, but as an adult I look back with nostalgia for my better impulses. My tattoo is a reminder to me to care, to keep caring. I can't know what my life or my actions will mean to anyone. All I can do is live the life, send out my actions into the unknown, but with care. T.S. Eliot wrote, "For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business." The trying is where we have to live.

copyright 2009 J. Autumn Needles

There Goes the Sun

2009-06-23T11:13:00.000-07:00

I don't really have time for this post. I am busy with other things. But this post has to do with Solstice so writing it now is timely. Sometimes, the time determines itself regardless of what you have planned for it.

Time has been on my mind lately. I took a walk on Solstice to let myself feel what Solstice is out there. What's happening around me on the day that both celebrates the strength of the sun, while seeing it into its decline?

Oddly (or not) I've been very aware of my own strength lately while seeing ahead to my own decline. I feel physically/mentally/emotionally better and stronger and more full of juice than ever before in my life. At the same time, I have never before been so aware of my age and of the passage of time, feeling a kind of frantic need to pack in as much as possible all at once. The heightened awareness has been kind of annoying to me actually and I suspect maybe to my friends and loved ones as well. (No need to chime in! Really!)

As I walked I realized suddenly that not only is the planet in Solstice, but I am in my own Solstice as well. That realization brought me quite a bit of peace. The sun comes up and the sun goes down, but oh, we enjoy it so much when it's at its height! There's no point in worrying about the fall because we know it will come but it's not here yet. Solstice is what it is, for me, for the sun, for the planet. We don't get a do over for the springtime, and the fall will come when it comes.

I found another happy note in my ponderings on the seasons: My name is Autumn for a reason. As much as I fear the end of summer, I have an inkling the best is yet to come. But for now, I will revel in the sunshine.

copyright 2009 J. Autumn Needles

Honoring the Ancestors

2009-05-02T21:02:00.000-07:00

Today I got together with 2 dear friends and celebrated Beltane, or May Day, together. We were a little low energy and it was raining so we changed our original plans a little. Indoors instead of outdoors, short and sweet. Because we were all so low in energy we decided it would be a nice addition to give each other the May Day gift of telling one another what we appreciate about each other. We are very different women who came together by chance, but over the years we have formed one of those bonds that you always hope will be a part of your life, a friendship where anything goes, where we can always speak the truth to one another. They each let me know that what they most appreciate about me is my direct communication, my willingness to be open about my life and my feelings, come what may, and that by doing that I have let them in on a perspective they did not realize existed.

They echoed what several folks told me at my teacher training. ***WARNING: Now I should warn anyone under the age of 18 that our culture takes a dim view of the combination of sex and truthfulness, and I plan to talk about both here. So, if you're under 18 you should go do something else, not read this, and let us grownups keep our fantasies that we can control your experience as children. Thanks.*** One of the items I packed for my month in Costa Rica was my vibrator. When my partner realized I was taking it along she asked, "What will you say if they search your luggage and find it?" "I'll tell them I'm going to be away from home with no sex for a month! I've got to have something to entertain myself with." During the course of that month, sex was a big topic of conversation and I was very open about my own arrangements, that I had brought my vibrator and was unwilling to go without masturbating for a month, that I had more than one relationship, that pain and power were part of my sexual identity. Near the end of the month one woman made a point of pulling me aside to tell me she was both surprised and appreciative of my honesty, because it opened her mind to a different perspective.

I am humbled when I hear that because I know that I still have so far to go in becoming completely open, completely honest. The kudos to me for what I have done so far just continue to remind me that I have so much more to do in becoming transparent. And this is the difficulty for me-how to become transparent, to allow people to see me completely, while being respectful, doing no harm to others, giving people space to draw away from what may frighten them.

Two nights before our May Day celebration, my sweetie and I watched Milk...finally. Honestly, I had avoided the movie a little because I knew how it ended and I did not want to mourn the loss again. But in watching it, I mostly found myself remembering my early days of coming out as a lesbian, and my discovery of my community, the history of those who had become my people. My ancestors. I thought about the changes my partner and I have seen; 19 years ago we couldn't hold hands on the street without fear unless we were in the gay part of town. Now we do it almost without thought. And it is because of people who had the courage to allow themselves to be seen.

When you begin to come out, you realize that the archetypal coming out story is a myth in some ways, because it's always spoken of in the singular as though you do it once and you are done. The truth is you do it almost constantly, over and over again. After a while it gets exhausting and you just want to go live your life and forget about it.

Lately I have been seeing little reminders all around me though about why it is important to keep doing it. Our culture seems to have a strong desire to put everything and everyone into one big easily defined box. When that happens, there is a pervading feeling that anyone who falls out of the box deserves whatever bad thing happens to them, and that it only happens to a few fringe people anyway, so why should we care? And for the ones who know they don't live in the box it can be terrifying and lonely.

Now I have no interest at all in writing details about my sex life here. Despite the warning above, this is not a "Dear Diary, last night I had such a great time..." kind of blog. The stories are true and personal, but not private, and while they probably tell you a lot about what I think and feel and believe as a human being, they don't tell you much about how I live my mundane everyday life. But part of what I think and feel and believe as a human being has a great deal to do with my sexuality and I don't want to erase that from my writing, presenting the sanitized Disney version of my life. Any child who has read "The Little Mermaid" and then watched the Disney version has the right to fury over the betrayal of truth. We keep trying to force everything into the box, especially for the kids, because we want them to believe that somehow all the confusions of youth smooth out and fall easily into line as we grow up, and everyone has a happy ending.

We also have methods in place to reinforce the box, to prop up the illusion of sameness. Every time I go to the doctor and check the box "single" I erase myself a little. It is a lie and there is no place for the truth of the web of relationships I live and love in on the form. I can explain and protest all I want, but the form remains implacable and unchanged, recording my life on paper as something it is not.

That experience makes me even more aware of the accomplishments of the people who came before me. My family values family ties and family history strongly, and my mother has often exhorted me to remember and honor them in making my life choices. I don't think she realizes that when she says that I tend to think not as much of my blood relations who made my physical existence possible, but of the people I discovered along the way written down in history, who lived their lives so honestly and visibly that they managed to be recorded that way for me to find and follow. Somehow they managed to check the box "other" to show me and others a way out of the box. To let us know that we can live and breathe there and be happy.

I began writing this post many months ago and, at the time, I thought it was connected with the yogic principle of satya, truthfulness. After watching Milk, I returned to my writing with the feeling that I was actually writing about ishvara pranidhana, surrender to the Lord. The Lord in yoga is understood as a pure divine awareness, as Stephen Cope puts it in The Wisdom of Yoga "...the Witness behind the Witness." Cope understands the concept of the Lord as being almost a gravitational force that draws us in, and in yoga we work to align ourselves with it, the idea being that we can't resist gravity anyway so if we can be aware of it and align with it, we can let go of resistance.

I think initially it can be confusing, all this talk of resistance and surrender in connection with real life. Because aren't I being resistant by being so stubborn and contrary about forcing the truth of my life out into the sight of others? And can't I surrender by just being quiet and going along with the status quo? The problem with that is that it is not the Box we need to surrender to, but the Lord. The Box is something that is constantly created and shored up by fearful people trying to control, understand and quantify something too big to control, understand and quantify. People like Harvey Milk understood that we need to surrender to the truth of our own lives, live them out in the open and transparently, understanding and accepting that there will be consequences we can't control, but that surrendering to that larger force behind us requires this of us. We can become the ancestors, showing a way out of despair for those who can't find the right box to check, until finally we can all understand that there is no box.

You thought I was going to talk about sex, didn't you? I am. There is no separate box for sex. I am always talking about it, because it is always in my life. Not dirty, not secret, not scary, not separate. Just life.

copyright 2009 J. Autumn Needles

Take Me For Granted

2009-03-31T07:37:00.000-07:00

I have a confession to make. I'm not a crafts-y person. When I was little my great-grandmothers taught me how to cut out pieces for quilts, and I even did a little piecework of my own. A very little. I always got frustrated because inevitably I would lose track of which side the seam needed to be on. Teaching me how to knit resulted in a knot of yarn. Crocheting with my grandmother was more successful: I wound up with 8 inches of afghan to keep me warm on cold nights. My mother decided one year it was time for me to learn how to use the sewing machine so we went together, picked out the pattern and material, and I made a shirt. A whole shirt this time certainly but it wasn't a pleasant experience.

Nevertheless, my partner and I decided that it would be good to learn (again!) how to knit, and to knit with friends. Last night found us, needles in hand, working away. (I showed off my one knitting accomplishment: a whole sweater! Granted, it took me a year, living in a cold flat in Scotland, in the company of my flatmates who were also knitting, without the distraction of a tv or a computer, but it is a sweater!) Every time I pick up one of these womanly tasks, I feel that thread through time linking me back to my experiences with the women of my family. A girl growing up in Texas is expected to learn certain skills, even if she learns them badly, and I had multiple generations of women conspiring to teach me.

Earlier this weekend my aunt had called and left a message on my voicemail. She was glad to hear that I was planning to make a trip to Texas soon because my grandmother is in the last stages of kidney failure and will likely need to go on dialysis soon. I called and spoke with her in person later. She mentioned that my great aunt and uncle are trying to sell their home so they can move into an assisted living facility in Georgia, closer to their kids. She laughed talking about the garage sale they had, trying to clear out the clutter of decades, and how they were stubborn and immovable on their prices. I felt saddened by all the news but hardly devastated. None of this comes as a surprise. We are all aging; things are changing. We had a cat once who died of kidney failure; as deaths go, this is not a terrible one for my grandmother to face. We are all always in the process of losing one another.

We knitted last night and it came back to me quickly, as did the boredom of the task. Luckily I had good company and we laughed and talked together for a good couple of hours. As I worked, though, I would hear occasionally resonating through my mind, "My grandmother is dying." I thought of the generations of family I have lost already, my first great-grand dying when I was in fourth grade. I remember my second death in fifth grade as well because I finally had a year of perfect attendance, except for the day I missed for the funeral of my great-grandmother. My grandmother, my great aunt and uncle, they are the last of this generation for me, the threads of my experience unraveling behind me, coming a little closer to my own undoing from the pattern.

This morning the alarm came hard and brittle, jolting me into my day. As I ate breakfast I found myself weeping into my GrapeNuts, thinking of the woman who held me as a baby and who has loved me for 42 years for nothing more spectacular than my existence on the planet. I have felt frustrated before by this unconditional love, wanting to be loved for what I have made of myself since birth, feeling unseen and unrecognized for the things that I value beyond my mere existence. But I begin now to feel the value of these people who are woven so closely into my reality that I don't question them, I can struggle and flail all I want, go away and come back, and they are still just there; I can take them for granted.

I hope there are people in my life to whom I have given this gift, that I have knit my stitches straight and true in my attachments so that I can be relied upon, wound myself fully into my life to be taken for granted as part of the fabric of the whole. The stitching together of people is impermanent and fragile. It never lasts and it is also the only thing worth doing.

copyright 2009 J. Autumn Needles

A Valentine to Strangers

2009-02-10T10:29:00.000-08:00

Strangers get a bad rap in general. As children, we are taught to fear and avoid them. I'm not sure how we are supposed to ever meet people, make friends and establish relationships if we don't ever talk to strangers, but that is not a question we are supposed to ask. And who are these strangers anyway? Well, I think maybe they are us.

I have been thinking about an entry about encounters with strangers for a long time now. And then just this week, I have been seeing lots of commentary on a particular social network about love, how to define it, how important it is in a relationship, how to rank relationships by priority...basically, how to use intangibles to set up some kind of ratings system for the people in your life. In thinking about all of that, together with my earlier thoughts about strangers, I realized that strangers have been pretty damn important in my life and I have never sent even one of them a valentine!

So here's to the strangers:

To the three separate people who gave me rides back to where I was staying when I was new to Seattle and had forgotten how to get back there. To the woman who picked me up at a bus stop when it was vile and stormy out. To the couple who picked me up on the highway in Texas when my brother's car had broken down, drove me to a gas station to pick up oil, and then drove me back. To the man in Athens, who, when I had left my hotel, wandered out into the market and gotten hopelessly lost and terrified, took me out for espresso, got (and paid for!) a cab, and, by way of 20 questions in halting English, found my hotel for me again. To anyone else who has given me rides, friendly company and good-natured searching when I've been wandering lost and alone in some strange city, with no idea where I am. According to our cultural mythology, all of these events should have ended badly. Every time I've been in this situation it has been terrifying. And every time I have been delivered safely to my door.

To the man who saw my partner crying in the cookie section at the grocery store after we had had a particularly challenging Thanksgiving with her family; instead of turning away, he said, "This holiday can be tough, can't it?" and we all laughed together. To the mother of the rape survivor I had worked with, who, after her daughter died, got in touch with me and wrote me a thank you note I still have, closing with the words, "...when you can no longer do this work, know that you have done your work well." To the fellow student who told me, "Don't ever stop writing! You have something important to say." To all of the authors who have written books that have fed me, supported me, lifted me, engaged me, kept me company with their words. To everyone who has chosen to speak their love and kindness into my life rather than keep silent.

To the bus driver who knew me by sight and knew I was always running from work to catch her bus. She would roll slowly to the next intersection and look up the hill for me; if she saw me, she'd wait. To the man who gave me a daffodil my very first day in Seattle. To the boy who talked with me at a party, came home with me, had sex with me and slept in my bed before sneaking out early in the morning to get out before my parents arrived. I know–one night stands, especially sneaky ones, are supposed to be bad and I should be ashamed of it. But earlier that night, I had been crying, after a summer of crying, and crawling around on the floor in the kitchen, searching for a sharp knife to do damage to myself, when the phone rang with a friend's invitation to this particular party. The invitation and the party, with their reminder that life was still available to me, and the boy, with his interest and enthusiasm, broke my depression and let me begin to climb back into my life. To everyone who has given me a gift out of the blue of exactly what I needed that moment.

Strangers bear witness to each moment in our lives, and, by their choices, can nurture and support us. It seems that my primary relationship is the one I have with the strangers in my life. So, thank you. I love you. Happy Valentine's Day!

copyright 2009 J. Autumn Needles

On Becoming Strong and Flexible

2009-01-20T12:31:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about travel lately. Nope, this post isn't about yoga despite the title. Instead, a very random and brief conversation together with a lovely book have me thinking about getting back out on the road and getting actually in reality lost, instead of just wandering in my own head lost. The conversation was truly brief and random, but the book is worth mentioning. It is Adventures in a Mud Hut:An Innocent Anthropologist Abroad by Nigel Barley. A book I found by following the bread crumb trail of other books, it is exactly what it advertises. I cackled, snorted and hooted as I read, recalling many of my own absolute worst travel experiences.

My strongest memory is also my most recent, involving my trip to Costa Rica for yoga teacher training. (Okay, so there's a little yoga in the post.) Once I made the decision to go, I did very little of my own research about travel in Costa Rica, focusing instead on the finances, setting things up at home to be gone for a month, figuring out how to pack for several daily yoga classes in a hot and humid climate, and trusted to the travel agent recommended by the school. We did lots of emailing back and forth which led me to the understanding that English was not a comfortable language for her, and Spanish, despite the early efforts of Sesame Street and 3 Spanish lessons in 5th grade, was certainly not a comfortable language for me. Due to time and money constraints I decided to do the entire trip to Nosara as one single Herculean effort, with no breaks. I flew from Seattle to Miami, a long flight in itself, and landed there to find the entire airport under construction, with no signs anywhere indicating where to go, left security, came back through security, and hiked what felt like the same distance I had just flown, carrying 50 pounds of yoga clothes and a mat, to find my next departure gate, which then changed, sending me hiking off again with a fervent promise to myself to check my luggage next time. On that first flight my bottle of water had leaked all over my travel documents, fading my careful print-outs of contact information and addresses. I spent a good chunk of the flight in the bathroom, blotting papers with paper towels, trying to salvage anything I could. I was completely exhausted and I hadn't left the States yet.

On arrival in San Jose, the capitol of Costa Rica, I went through customs and out where I had been directed by my travel agent to meet my driver. My flight was a couple of hours late and I was worried about this next connection. Out in the heat, I searched the crowd for a sign with my name on it. Up and down I went, the whole length of the concourse searching every piece of cardboard held aloft. My name wasn't there. A strange man approached me and asked me if he could help. I explained the situation and he helped me look for my name. I didn't have the phone number for the car company or for the travel agent, but he used his cell phone to track down the agent and spoke briefly with her in Spanish. When he got off the phone, he explained that she didn't know where my driver was and I was on my own for transportation. By an interesting coincidence, he himself was a professional driver and with a little schedule finagling would be able to take me to Nosara. (I know what you're thinking, but, shhhh...just wait and we can talk about that later.)

I've forgotten now, a couple of years later, exactly how long I had been awake by this time. One of my flights was a red eye, I had a delay and a layover, and now I was looking at a 5-6 hour drive to the coast. I went with the stranger to his car after he had a couple more conversations on his cell phone. He didn't speak much English and I spoke no Spanish. I tried hard to stay awake and make conversation; he tried hard to entertain me with information about the countryside. He offered to stop for dinner but we both laughed at the thought, realizing at the same time that I'd just snooze on the table. He warned me that once we were on the peninsula the roads weren't paved and we might have to leave his car and rent a jeep. The thought of any more delays made me want to weep, so I just refused to think about it. As it turned out, we didn't need a jeep, but once we were on those roads I had no trouble at all staying awake, bouncing from pothole to pothole.

We finally reached Nosara and the hotel that would be my home for the next month. He gave me his card and told me to call him if I needed anything. I gave him his fee and half again for a tip and all of my gratitude. It was late at night, I had been up for more than 24 hours with nothing to eat but cashews and graham crackers. I checked in at the front desk, was shown to my room and opened the door on...a roomful of ants. Big ones, little ones, red ones, black ones. All over the room. I was too tired to have whooping hysterics so I just sat on the bed and cried. I wanted nothing more than to run back out and find my stranger, tell him to "take me back, take me back! I just want to go home. Please just take me home." Instead, I cried. I called my partner using the hotel phone and damn the expense. And I went to sleep.

Why would anyone travel? Here's a postcard from the rest of that trip, one particular memory of many: It's night and I've spent sunset alone at the beach. You can't call what I've been doing "swimming", it's more like making love with the ocean, playfully. It's warm and pouring rain. I'm padding home in my pink flip flops, splashed with mud up to my thighs, in just my bathing suit and multi-colored sarong, room key tied to one corner and a flashlight in my hand. The fireflies aren't out tonight; it's raining too hard. When a bike or car goes by, the driver and I wave to one another, or call out " 'noches!" When I get back to my room, I'll shower, shake out my bedding to check for scorpions (my roommate and I have a ritual for this, calling out, "Scorpion! O-oh, scorpion!") and set my alarm for 5 AM for my early morning yoga class. Sometime tomorrow I will go to the local ice cream stand, peruse all of the flavors for the day and get what I always get, one scoop of coffee and one scoop of chocolate chip.

Have I ever known a feeling like this? Do I even have the vocabulary for it? I can only make snapshots with my words. The pictures would show the kindness of strangers, on which I have often depended without regret. The quick response to my own intuition. The little gifts to myself, the contentment in my own skin. And finally the proof of my own indomitability. I do not need to become strong and flexible; I am strong and flexible, and here is the proof for myself. Travel is an easy way to prove it to myself, over and over again.

I don't think travel is necessary though to find the proof. Sometimes the tests find us. But sometimes we have to go looking for them. Remember the fairy tales, the ones with the impossible task to complete by morning? Our hero's despair in the face of it? But then he or she begins, and help comes. Inertia can be hard to overcome. I know because I love nothing more than to just be left alone to sit and read. I would sit and read my life away given half a chance. But if I do that then I can't believe in myself, and I need to believe in myself. If life doesn't give me an impossible task, then I have to give it to myself, somehow, find the adventure I can have, the monster I can slay, so I can know myself. More importantly, so I can trust myself, and trust that help will come in the form of the stranger, in the form of my own willingness to stay put until my impossible task becomes just, well, my life and I'm just living it, triumphantly.

copyright 2009 J. Autumn Needles

Staying Awake

2009-01-12T13:42:00.000-08:00

I sat with my sweetie a few months back watching Young @ Heart, a lovely documentary about a choir of oldsters who sing modern music, and realized–I don't have the slightest idea what I'll want to do when I grow up.

This is shocking news to me since I am a big planner. (You might refer to my earlier post about list-making in case you doubt me.) I have little plans for the day, the week, the month, bigger plans for the future. A 5 year plan, a 10 year plan, a plan for retirement. But while watching that movie, I had the thought for the first time: I'm doing an awful lot of planning for a person I haven't met yet. A total stranger, who might not appreciate my input, thanks very much. I imagine her at 75 saying back to me now, "I know how much you've scrimped and saved and planned so that I can go on a world cruise, but I'm really much too busy with my accordion quartet to take the time now. Sorry."

I think about when I turned 38 or so and suddenly realized that my 22-year-old self had made a decision for me that I was still living by. She was well intentioned but kind of a tight ass frankly, and she swore off alcohol, not because she had a problem with it, but because her rare encounters with it had convinced her that it simply was not worth the time and money. So for the next 16 years my knee jerk response to any offer was, "No thanks. I don't drink." That is fine, except that I had not given it any thought at all for 16 years. I had no idea whether I still felt that way or not. At 38, was I still someone who doesn't drink? As it turns out, I am, for the most part, but now I enjoy a very occasional girly drink, and about once every 10 years or so I like to go a little wild with friends for about 2 weeks. My 22-year-old self would not have guessed that about me, nor would she have given me space for it. Her opinions were a lot more, well, clearly defined, let's say, than mine are.

As I said, I am a planner, but I am also a planner who has frequently had the experience of plans gone astray. Once, during my travels, I met a woman in Austria who was also traveling. We hit it off, but I was going to Italy next and she was off to Germany. We agreed to meet in southern France on a particular day about a week later and travel a little together. (Just for everyone's information, I am talking about a time before cell phones.) I got on a train for Florence, I thought, but I arrived the next morning in Venice. I have written about this before. I was frustrated and angry and not sure what to do. I had a specific timeline to work with and I was in the wrong place! There was no way to force this situation to fit my plans so I had to be creative. I had to be flexible.

I cannot plan for every possible eventuality. And I cannot predict every choice I will make. I think I know myself and the shape of my life, the direction I want to go. I keep getting these little hints though that my life is actually the space between breaths. I need to stay awake for the breathing, so that I can enjoy this one breath right now, appreciate it and be ready. Be ready for the shift that happens inside that says, not that way, this way now. Be ready for the obstacle that shows up outside that says, not this way, that way now. Be ready for the lost luggage, the broken dish, the winning ticket, the surprise vacation, the broken arm, the long-lost relative, the new love, the change of heart, the move across country, the flooded basement, and maybe even be ready to take up the accordion when I grow up.

copyright 2009 J. Autumn Needles

Santosha, or Why the hell won't it stop snowing?

2008-12-24T10:19:00.000-08:00

I had all these great plans about how my surgery and recovery were going to work out. I would teach all the way up until the morning before, wrap up all my other tasks, get lots of love and energy from friends. I knew who would be with me before and after, and I imagined my recovery in loving detail: Myself, maybe slightly uncomfortable and with limited mobility but handling it gracefully and coming back remarkably quickly to my old self; unlimited time to connect with the people I loved with no obligations; and of course I had the post-surgery list of mostly gentle tasks which I would take on, one by one, no rush but completing them easily. Ease was really the word I would have used pre-surgery to describe what I had planned for myself, and I saw myself wafting through these two weeks like a gentle breeze. Kind of makes you want to run right out and have some surgery yourself, doesn't it?

The reality came with the snow. I had not been imagining my surgery in loving detail; in fact, I felt anxious about it, and so I had the opportunity to sit with that for a while. (Don't you just love how many opportunities we have in life for growth and learning?) I realized after a while that my anxiety stemmed not from a fear of death, which is what I had assumed, but from a fear of pain, a fear of being afraid, a fear of the changes that might come all unexpected and unplanned. So really it was a fear of life I guess. And then it started snowing.

I would love to say that the snow messed everything up, but the truth is that the snow messed with my head. My fears became more specifically focused: My surgery would be delayed (it wasn't), we'd be trapped at the hospital (we weren't), I wouldn't be able to fulfill my pre-surgery obligations (I did), etc. The surgery went as planned and I went home and slept. And it kept snowing.

One of my fascinations with human beings is that we can hold so much contradiction, every noun (person, place or thing), every verb (action, doing, being) is surrounded by a complicated tangle of beliefs and emotions. (Remember diagramming sentences and teasing out those snarls of adverbs and adjectives, phrases and clauses, into tidy pruned branches?) But unlike the sentences in a novel, human beings are stories telling themselves while being told and everything keeps changing.

When I worked in sexual assault, people would often ask, "Isn't that really depressing?" The truth is that while it gives you an odd lens through which to view the world, it also gave me an opportunity for which I was truly grateful. Over and over again I got to be with people who had had this horrible thing happen to them (noun and verb), and accompany them on their journey to create something around it. The interesting thing is that people mostly create beauty.

After my surgery, my primary partner went back to work, my secondary sweetie went back to her town two hours away, and it kept snowing. My post-surgery plans were completely destroyed by the snow and I was trapped at home alone. And in my desire to create something beautiful out of something difficult, I settled in to enjoy the snow. Because I am a good yogini, I chanted and meditated and sent healing energy to myself. I completed all of the tasks on my list, I worked on my upcoming workshops and finished the essay I was working on. I had nothing but sympathy for the friends and loved ones who were themselves trapped by the weather while trying to figure out their own plans for getting to and from work and the upcoming holidays. I knitted them all sweaters. I painted the house, re-organized my files, backed up everything on the computer.

Ha! Okay, actually what I did while realizing that my plans had been changed for me, and that I needed to adapt, was to throw a big fit and get angry at everyone and sulk. And since I can't manipulate the snow, I threw everything I had into manipulating the people in my life into DOING WHAT I WANT THEM TO DO ANYWAY, DAMMIT!

Oh look! It's...another opportunity! I am generally very aware of when I am being manipulative. It usually has to do with being slightly dishonest about what I am feeling in the moment. And it's all about teasing out that tangle around my noun/verb and picking out what I choose to display. The day before yesterday I was having my tantrum, feeling forgotten by my friends, full of loneliness and self-pity and the unfairness of it all. By yesterday morning I was in recovery mode, figuring out what to do next and how to take care of myself. By afternoon I had had my first visitor and was content. My partner was home from work and I was enjoying her company. I had my first outing post-surgery. What I was feeling during those 24 hours was all sorts of things; what I was thinking during those 24 hours covered a huge territory. So what would I pick out of that mess to tell you, had you asked me how I was?

I have a perverse fascination with the social networking sites. Many of them have that feature where you can put in what you're doing right now and how you feel about it. I notice about myself that I often don't want to tell people what I'm feeling right now in that feature. I observe what I feel, but then I think about it. Am I feeling private? Do I want sympathy? Do I want laughter? And frequently I am holding on to the past, displaying for people what I DID feel, rather than what I DO feel, because I want them to respond to that.

It snowed again this morning. My partner is back to work and I am back to being trapped alone at home. But a shift has happened. I recently finished reading My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor, Ph.D. As a neuroanatomist who has suffered a stroke and recovered, she has an interesting way of thinking about that process. In the book she talks about the choices we make to run specific brain circuitry. She makes the point that very little of what happens there is out of our control (90 seconds worth per reaction, according to her) and that the rest of it is ours to determine. And she talks about choosing to run the circuitry for joy, rather than that for fear or pain or anger, because it's a better way to live. When I read that, I immediately thought, hey, she's talking about yoga! In yoga we talk about the fact that we already live in bliss and that we can access it at any time. We talk about the patterns of our minds and how we tend to run the same patterns over and over again, and that becomes our practice, to establish and run different patterns by choice. One pattern that we can choose to run is santosha, contentment or making peace with what is.

It is tempting to imagine that santosha looks like that paragraph up there of what I would have liked my response to have been to my situation. If only I were a better person, not so petty and mean and manipulative. Last night I had a reminder of what I think santosha actually looks like when I talked with a friend on the phone. I was so happy to hear from her, and, when I heard her sincere sorrow and sympathy for my situation, something in me relaxed. She talked about the snow and how simply getting to and from work day in and day out has taken every scrap of energy she has, and how upset she is at all her plans for the holidays going awry, but then she went on, "This is going to sound weird, Autumn, but yesterday as I was struggling with driving to work, completely exhausted, I was just so in awe. I mean, I could barely keep my eyes on the road. Everything was just so beautiful."

It isn't that the bad things don't happen. It isn't that we somehow erase them from our consciousness. As I shift from what I wanted this time to be into what it is, I feel, I feel, I feel–I feel hamstrung and helpless in the face of the weather; even as I look for a change in the weather report, I feel so grateful that I don't need to get anywhere right now. I feel frustrated that the concerned attention from friends I wanted will become coffee dates to catch up on the news; even as I feel cheated by fate, I feel glad to recognize that my normal routine will return. I feel anxious to return my body to where it was and worried about teaching again; even as I mope about everything I can't do, I feel pleased and powerful at my ability to return to my practice, adapted to my current needs. I feel sad that I won't get to have my boyfriend come take care of me; even as I cling to the idea that it might still be possible, time is moving and when the snow melts I think I will be well enough not to want to lie around and be cared for. I mourn as I let go of the idea that this is an important connection I'm losing, but even in my disappointment, there is the new thought that maybe that won't be so bad; that in fact, I'm kind of tired of being in recovery and it might be nice not to be an invalid when I finally get to see him. I feel annoyed at friends who disappeared, and disappointed in myself for my small-mindedness. And I feel filled with wonder at how many people surprised me with their support, and I remind myself that sometimes love comes when you're looking the other way. I keep having this gleeful thought that I am really learning something right now, about how you just have to put out as much kindness and love and generosity as you possibly can to whomever is around you at the moment, and trust that while it may not come back from them specifically, it will come back. And the odd thing is that I recognize that this is something I really need to learn, that I need to understand, because it does not come easily to me, so I also feel grateful to have this opportunity brought to me. So even silly, limited, mean-spirited me, even I have made a beautiful bonsai out of the thing given me, the noun/verb not of my choosing.

I went to visit my friend Kellie in Ohio a month before her death. We both knew this would be the last visit. I sat on her bed and she told me she had been hoarding painkillers, just in case. But "I'm not ready yet," she said. She was paralyzed by this time from the armpits down, had been through two rounds of chemotherapy and many surgeries, and she lay in bed looking out one tiny window. The view from the window didn't look like anything special to me; I looked out and just saw the small tree put in for landscaping. Kellie looked past me through the window and her face opened like the sky. "It's still so good," she said. "You know? It's still so good." Let it snow, I guess. Santosha.

copyright 2008 J. Autumn Needles

Home for the Holidays

2008-11-26T22:40:00.000-08:00

This time of year has turned me quiet and confused as usual, remembering connections to people who are no longer with me, and maneuvering through the web of connections that do still exist, new and old, trying to find my place. I was having tea with a friend the other day and she said to me something like, “You are family, you know.” Oh no. It’s…the f-word. The word that feels so cozy, like we know it. Of course it feels that way; after all, it lives in the word “familiar”, just as we’ve all lived in our sense of family all our lives. But what the hell is it?

When I was little what I remember about family holidays was a complicated dance through the homes of extended family with multiple turkey dinners. My family was full of odd branches where divorce had happened; instead of cutting off the limb, it had sent off shoots to grow larger and stranger, in funny unexpected directions. My hometown was full of cousins of all flavors, along with the more garden variety relatives, and somehow we had to spend time with everyone. I never thought it was strange; it was just how holidays and families were. As I got a little older and my own personal connections became more important to me, I began to have more of an opinion about how I wanted to spend these times. I particularly remember being around 11 or 12 years old: I had a huge crush on a boy at church and our family had been invited to a party at his parents’ house on the same day we were obligated to go to one set of great grandparents with that particular branch of relatives. One young cousin had received a science kit complete with dissectible frog that day. I can still feel the ambivalence of wanting so badly to be somewhere else, with someone else, that I could barely stay put inside my skin, and at the same time feeling the pleasure of taking my cousin on a tour through the frog, her wonder of discovery and my satisfaction in teaching her.

At those times, I have such a strong sense of these skin and bones as holding in something else, something other. I am a container and what I hold is large and mysterious, terrifying sometimes and not always pretty but worth exploring.

Later at college and into my adult life, things became simpler. I lived far away from family so I made a family of friends. I was glad to leave behind the complications of kin. My friends and I celebrated together and each group of friends felt like a group that would stay connected forever. Until each one stopped being connected.

Then I met my partner. Her family lived close but they didn’t speak to us. My family was still far away so everything was simple again. My partner and I were family, and for holidays we invited stray friends home for dinner.

Later still I met another woman and with her we became a family of three, venturing into a whole new territory with the belief that love is big enough to hold more than two. When I used the word family with her though she reacted like an animal in a trap, panicked, hostile, trying to chew her leg off to get free. I was offended at the time, but I have a certain sympathy with her now after a few more years of experiencing polyamory and the complications it brings to family ties.

This Thanksgiving my partner and I celebrated alone, enjoying the luxury of time together, cooking and eating and watching movies and just being together. But I also felt an echo of that ambivalence that I first felt so many years ago. My chosen family is larger now and local, so where are the complications I remember from my childhood of the multiple homes with the multiple turkeys? Trying to fit in everyone and finding the compromise that doesn’t quite work? Family it seems to me is partly about that feeling that grows out of obligation, that feeling of being here because I have to, even if I don’t really want to, teaching the young cousin when I want to be off flirting.

At the same time, being the obligation is uncomfortable. The young cousin had no sense of herself as obligation because I was family; therefore, I was there with her. She wasn’t aware of being chosen. But in friendship and with polyamory, we do choose, and we know we are choosing and being chosen. And we want to keep being chosen. I don’t want you here because you have to be here; I want to know that you want to be here. And I’m terrified that you might stop wanting to be here. There comes a time in a relationship where I become the frog on the tray. Peel my skin away and what will you find? Will you see only the complicated workings, throw your hands up in dismay at ever trying to figure it all out and walk away? After all, I don’t have to look far to see someone easier, fresher, sexier than I am. Or will you feel that wonder of discovery that holds you even though it’s complicated, and maybe not always much fun? Why are you choosing me? And will you keep choosing me? Family, I think, might have something to do with that choice.

Here we are in family holiday season and I am approaching a surgery. Not a major surgery, but my first since I was 12. My mother has offered to fly out to be with me, but I have chosen to have my family of partners and friends with me. And I am scared. Is that web of connections a safety net or a trap? If I make use of it will it change everything? My temptation when I feel unsure is to make myself small, cut all the ties and drop away.

I wrote a piece for a class where I used the phrase, “…I needed to feel admirable.” A woman in class asked if what I really meant was, “…I needed to feel admired.” I love being admired, but the truth is that what I always want to know is whether I am worthy of admiration, worthy of being loved. I am loved, I have been loved, I will be loved. I am comfortable with that conjugation of the verb and I feel the truth of it. Those are the strings of my web. I wish I could say that I am always so secure in myself that while I am being loved I also know I am worthy of it, but the truth is I need reassurance to tell me that it is okay for me to be there, in that web, to pull the threads when I need help and know that I’m not strangling someone’s freedom, to feel comfortable letting the thread go and know that the attachment is still there even as it’s reeling away from me, to know that I am allowed to be loved even when I am prickly and complicated and exposed. To know that I can accept love and care from this chosen family, even if they have mixed feelings about the obligation, because there is something of worth they can receive only from me. To know that they will be there for me, that I can trust the web of love to hold me safe.

copyright 2008 J. Autumn Needles

What to do, what to do...

2008-11-10T15:22:00.000-08:00

I have this exercise I do every morning (most mornings, anyway) where I sit down and write three pages freehand. Anyone familiar with The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron will recognize the exercise at once, but for those who aren't, this isn't a diary, it's not capital A art, it's just a brain dump...blah, blah, blah basically to just get it all out. I don't keep the pages for long once I've written them; they may hang around for several months and then I recycle them. For that reason, I have no desire to fill up a pretty, expensive journal with these jottings; I try to use scraps, random left over paper, paper already printed on one side, that kind of thing. I've done a lot of scrounging through the house to find paper to use and recently I found a stack of old college notebooks. Being the frugal sort, I had ripped out all my class notes and recycled them (I can't imagine I'll need my notes from Stage Lighting or Neurophysiology from 20 years ago any time soon,) but I couldn't bring myself to throw away the leftover blank pages. And look! It's paid off because now I can use them for my morning pages!

One morning as I was opening my notebook to begin writing, the pages fell open to the very last page and there was a 20-year-old list of things to do left over from college. I am a big fan of to do lists. I write them all the time, and, when I am anxious about something, I write them in a frenzy, adding everything I can possibly imagine needing to do for the next several years. I remember reading somewhere that a to do list can make you feel capable and productive because you can write a list that goes, "Wake up, Brush teeth, Write novel" and feel really good about yourself because you have accomplished two out of three. And we all know that ain't bad. This particular list made me laugh because, out of 18 items, I had crossed off two–laundry and Dance History reading. I laughed partly because those are always two of my favorite things to cross off lists–laundry and reading; laundry because it does not take much effort to gather clothes, throw them in the washer and go do something else for half an hour, but gosh you end up with nice fresh clothes. And reading because reading is easy for me no matter what the topic is. I imagine I probably did them both at the same time, spending a pleasant couple of hours on a Saturday morning. I also laughed ruefully imagining the young woman I was then, stressed out and trying to be healthy (weights, find out pool hours), take care of social obligations (write to parents, Jenna's present), do my homework (Dance History reading, unit write-ups, write seminar paper, Phys Psych lab write-ups, Phys Psych research and rough draft, dance journal), get an on campus job (call about non-print resource center), take care of everyday life (laundry, clean, driver's license) and figure out what to do after I graduate (Career Development Office, letters and forms.*)(*Yes, these were the real items off that 20-year-old list.) Clearly I failed miserably (16 items to go...), yet twenty years later here I am, still alive and functioning, healthy and happy despite not having crossed off those other 16 items. But I still make those same lists, with items that feel urgent now, and they still don't all get done. Twenty years from now will I find one of these and wonder why I bothered?

I was thinking about these things today as I washed dishes because my partner had the day off work and was home with me. I did not have the day off work, but I work at home. Sometimes this creates a little problem. Today I was feeling an anxiety that I recognize, one that is common to me and that I have fought with for all of these years. I know that I have to work and I have to earn an income and this is important. I also know that I have to take advantage of the time I have with the people I love, that time with them is a gift I will never get back, and this is important as well.

What does this have to do with a sense of direction, with getting lost? Only this: I use my to do lists to direct myself, to build a path, but where exactly am I trying to arrive? Thinking about college I remember a particular day in the fall, my first year. My house had organized an apple-picking expedition but I had a long list of things to do. My friends talked me out of my tree with gentle voices and no direct eye contact, lulling me out the door and into the car where it was too late for me to turn back. We picked bags and bags of apples, all kinds of apples. There was no hope of us ever eating all the apples we picked but we couldn't stop. The air was crisp and the trees were beautiful. We brought our apples home, jealously guarding our bags and bags of apples from each other, and the kitchen staff let us make caramel apples in the kitchen. We ate apples until we were sick of them.

And I was relaxed and happy, enjoying my friends, and full of apples and full of my very own self. I don't have the slightest idea what I needed to do, and didn't do, that day. But I remember the apples and the air and the leaves and the friends. I know through my life there have been other times when I have chosen the apples. And times when I have chosen the list. The lists may keep me honest but the apples bring me joy.

I have to remember that the lists are my way to pretend I have some say in my life, some control over what happens, and the direction I take. Once the list is written though I can't let it march me around like a drill sergeant, putting me through my paces. Because I don't think I've ever had "Go pick apples and cherish your friends" written on any list, except on the one in my heart.

copyright 2008 J. Autumn Needles

Satya Revisited

2008-10-01T21:18:00.000-07:00

Back again, walking in circles. I defined satya as non-lying in my last post, in alignment with the other yamas, or restraints, in yoga, most of which are "a-something", with the prefix "a-" meaning "not". You'll notice satya does not begin with "a-". A more accurate portrayal of satya might be "being" or "being with what is" as in maybe more of an ability to sit with truth.

And I'm definitely sitting with it right now in a very uncomfortable way. I recently read a book (and I apologize to the author because I forgot to write down the reference) which said, "To live a life that is yours, you must be willing to be imperfect and humble, lost and fuzzy often." But we want– I want–a good story, a story that ends well so sometimes it's more comfortable to give it just a little poke.

When I am truly lost, I notice in myself a tendency to spin the story even as it's happening. Am I brave in the face of the unknown? Is this the story of the kindness of strangers? Am I facing the whims of a hostile universe? Do I want sympathy or admiration? Usually though what I am really feeling at the time is stuck and frightened and kind of annoyed at myself that here I am again. Can I not just get this right?

I feel similarly when I get lost in my own life. Can I not just get this right? I think that there is where I run into trouble, because I don't really know what I mean by "getting it right"; I only know that it is not this thing that I happen to be doing now. And at that point the difficulty is to just sit with it. Satya.

It makes me itchy. Can I accept the fact that getting it right might mean being here with this feeling that it is not quite right? I'll think about it. In the meantime I remember. I do the things that I know do me good even though I'm not sure I trust them right now. I had the experience recently of having a health issue come up that made me fear my own practice. I avoided my mat to avoid the possibility of having my body let me down. Finally I knew that my practice needed me to show up for it. I stepped onto my mat and I began. As I moved from pose to pose, feeling the strength and grace of my body, I remembered that this is also truth, satya, that I can trust my body. I remembered that breathing is good.

I am imperfect and humble, lost and fuzzy often. It is the willingness to be these things that I seek, and which I lack. So I will sit with them and be itchy until the willingness arrives.

copyright 2008 J. Autumn Needles

Do You Trust Me?

2008-09-13T10:39:00.000-07:00

If you've ever done any kind of improvisation–acting or dancing or music–you know that the gap between being told to "just dance" or "just sing", and being told "Here is the structure, here are the confines: now dance" is a Grand Canyon of significance. If you haven't done any improvisation, you might guess that the choice with more freedom is the easier of the two. In fact, having confines makes improvisation much easier. I titled this blog with that in mind, setting up my own confines in order to make my writing easier. I am allowed, by my own rules, to be rather free in my interpretation of what my blog is about, but I do have to stop and think, with each entry, does this actually meet my intention?

As possible entries arise, and as I censor them, I come back over and over again to the concept of satya, non-lying, one of the five yamas, or moral restraints, in yoga practice. Each time I censor myself, am I doing it truly because it doesn't fit my theme? Or am I trying to hide a truth from this unknown audience of mine?

My thoughts in writing are mirroring my thoughts in life lately. When I censor myself, why am I censoring myself? What are my motivations? When I write, I don't particularly want you to know much about me beyond what I write. I tell myself that it's because I am writing not to define myself more clearly, not to show where "me" stops and "not me" begins, but to define for myself where "me" and "you" connect. I don't want to write something that will fracture that fragile union. I think about my past work in sexual assault, where it was so important to quickly identify and strengthen the places where I could connect with my client; the work was not about me and who I was and my preferences and my experience, it was about supporting and strengthening this other person. Too much information brought the possibility of a disconnect.

That all sounds good and reasonable but I find I need to look a little deeper. When I was a kid, my idol was Mr. Spock on Star Trek. I have him to thank for the fact that I can raise one eyebrow in a quizzical stare. Because he was only half-Vulcan (the other half was Human, for those who grew up in a cave and somehow missed this show), he had to struggle for the emotional control that came naturally to other Vulcans. I admired him for his constant battle, and I could easily understand why it was important for him to succeed, because it was important to me, too. I knew that my life would be better, easier, if I could find that same self-control. He had defined his parameters, and I would, too. If I could control the information about me and my emotional state, and contain my responses to them, I knew that I could control my life and make it safe.

I find now after many years and a lot of practice that I always can come up with really good, really reasonable reasons for not speaking the truth. I am especially good at not speaking the truth without actually coming out and lying about anything. The skill has served me well in the past, but as my life begins to integrate into a greater whole, I'm not sure it serves me at all now, and I'm less and less sure about all of those really good reasons.

A couple of years ago I joined an online business networking site and as I've become more active in it lately, I've noticed a slight feeling of discomfort. I couldn't quite catch sight of it until just this week, when I suddenly joined several other networking sites and the feeling became powerful enough to overwhelm me. Remember that feeling of walking into the cafeteria of a new school? You walk in with your tray and look at the lines of tables: kids are sitting, kids are talking, calling out to one another, running to get a napkin and fork, joking with one another...I changed schools a lot growing up so the memory is still a powerful trigger today. I want you to know me. I want to be safe. Two dueling impulses. I want you to know me. I want to be safe. It's tempting to think that by presenting only chosen pieces of myself, I can have both. Our culture teaches this well; we have to put our best foot forward, present a professional image, and society will accept and protect us in return. But I can't really blame the culture–I think I'm pretty good at creating my own lines around my behavior and my appearance. When I withhold truth, I am really trying to control the actions and responses of the people around me. I have a belief about what would happen if I did not do this, and I respond in fear, feeling small, feeling vulnerable. I am making my world safe. I am defining it. I am making it a little easier for myself to know how to move, to improvise.

So back to satya: is this truth? And I think about the path of our country right now. There are those who want us to believe that we live in an unsafe world. What if our world is already safe? What if we are safe? How would that change us if we could really know it? How would that change me? I am safe. I will show myself to you. Practice it with me now. Let's just dance together.

copyright 2008 J. Autumn Needles

Truth in Numbers

2008-08-13T16:01:00.000-07:00

I have another post sitting in draft mode on the concept of satya in yoga–truthfulness, or rather not lying. But I'm struggling with it the way I think we often struggle with truth. How much is too much? How much is necessary? How much is kind? Does the truth I need to tell match the truth you're ready to hear from me? And what is truth anyway? That post will sit a little longer while I puzzle it out.

But thinking about truth got me thinking about reality, and thinking about reality always makes me think of number lines. I exchanged rings with my life partner, finally, after our 15th year, and on the inside of mine I have engraved a number line. People who have looked carefully at it always ask what the numbers are for–maybe the number of years together? A measurement of my finger size? When I tell them it's a number line they're blank. "Oh I see," they say, not really seeing at all.

When I was 15 years old I fell in love with a number line. I was in bed, it was summer in Texas, and I was thinking about numbers and how they fit together. Suddenly, a thought came to me, the way these thoughts will, fully formed and thrilling, flinging me out of bed and to a pencil and piece of paper. I drew a number line and numbered it 0 to 10. Yes, it was really true, this thought I had! And I needed to share it: "Mother! Mother, look at this... How many points are there between 0 and 10? An infinite number. And how many points are between 0 and 1? An infinite number. And between .5 and .55? An infinite number! In fact, there are infinite numbers of infinities!" She didn't care. And neither did anyone else that summer. But I was in love! I drew my number line for anyone who came within 3 feet of me. I couldn't sleep at night thinking about it. All I wanted to do all summer was moon over my number line.

When I got back to school in the fall, the first thing I did was run to my geometry teacher, who has featured in my blog before. He was the first person I talked to who understood my crush and pointed me to various books on the subject. (As a side note, later as an adult it was great fun to come across the problem of multiple infinities listed in a book about the 7 greatest unsolved mathematical problems.)

Fast forward to 3 years ago, when my partner and I decided to exchange rings. We had discussed it many times in the years we had been together, but I always balked at the idea of anything that smacked of marriage in any form for all kinds of reasons. I didn't want people to look at a ring and make any kind of assumption that they understood my situation. It was really the concept of the number line that changed my mind. We all think we understand number lines: they're so dull we let small children use them for basic math, adding and subtracting. In fact, don't tell the children but number lines are subversive. We don't really understand them at all. Not only do they hold every number imaginable (and even the imaginary ones!) but they also are not really lines at all. They are home to infinities nesting inside one another, a stranger reality than we can possibly imagine, but a truer reality than we are able to see.

We humans need this, I guess. A construct that allows us to look reality in the face without seeing it. So someone may see my ring and assume they know me or my situation, but I know the ring is a construct, a representation of what I believe, what I value, what I desire, and the truth of my relationship can't be seen in the ring. The number line is to remind me of that if I start to feel constrained. But the ring, the construct, can maybe give a glimpse occasionally of how much bigger we really are than we think we are, how much more of the infinite we already contain and share with one another. And it can remind us to at least try, every now and then, to look behind look within look beneath look through the construct of self, of mind, of body. What nests inside? What looks back at you? What are we really?

copyright 2008 J. Autumn Needles

Wandering Alone in the Woods

2008-07-23T13:41:00.000-07:00

I had the odd experience not too long ago of watching myself walk into a room. The off-centered feel of it reminded me a little of an exhibit that's up at our local museum. At this exhibit, you walk up stairs and there, on one landing to either side of you, is what looks like a random collection of tall wooden slats standing propped in cement holders and painted with colors and vague tree-ish shapes. You could walk right through it and continue up the stairs. You could wander through the slats looking at them more closely. Or maybe something could catch your eye, a movement a flicker of something up to the left there. When you look to see what's caught your attention, you see yourself wandering through a forest. Through a clever placement of cameras, the artist has created the illusion that you are off having an adventure you don't know anything about in some forest primeval. It takes you by surprise, when you see it, if you see it.

That feeling of stepping through the looking glass is very much how I felt at this cocktail party, chatting and laughing with family and strangers, looking up to see 2 young women walking towards us, and one of them was me. Only of course she wasn't; she was (and is) a close relative, more than 20 years younger than me and taller when I looked more closely. I hadn't seen her for years, and the last time she was still a child. We could all see the obvious similarities back then (red curly hair is hard to miss) but she was too much younger for us to see that she was actually going to become me.

My first feeling was envy, a strong stab of it, looking at this beautiful vibrant young woman striding confidently towards us, smiling. Almost as though she was me, but the improved version, what I wish I could have been then. Self-pity was bitter in my throat; why couldn't I have been strong and confident and happy when I was 18?

Over the course of the next several days my feelings went through a transformation. First, I realized that in many ways I was strong and confident and happy then; it's just that I was also a lot of other things, too: scared, insecure, exhausted, a perfectionist and therefore hard on myself, uncertain what the future might hold. And I was really really good at hiding all of those things from the people around me and projecting only strength and confidence. Maybe, I thought in a flash of insight, maybe she isn't as strong and confident as she looks either. Maybe she doesn't know how beautiful she is. And that might mean I was beautiful then, too, and just didn't know it.

I worked hard then at letting her know what a shining star she is. I can't send a message in a bottle back to myself in time, but I thought at least I can give her something to carry with her into her future. Probably what it means to her now is that she has some kooky relatives. But that doesn't really matter.

What matters is something I discovered in my thirties returning to ballet after many years away. I loved the dance as a child and it was home to me, until I began looking in the mirror and seeing something that only existed in comparison with something else. It became not the joy of barriers melted away, but a slamming up against lots of walls built up out of nowhere, an isolation, so I left it. When I went back, I found the joy of it again, the connection, and realized that I had built my own walls. Instead of looking in the mirror and at the women around me and seeing myself reflected, and the strength and beauty of all of us together, I saw only what I was up against. Any strength and beauty I saw automatically became not mine, separate from me, only desired. But I wasn't seeing truth.

And when I first looked at my young relative, the irony is that I saw myself, but a self that was not mine, a self that I didn't believe in, a self I couldn't live up to, a self that I wanted to have for my own and I had to protect myself against it. When I was able to soften and let that self back in, I could give her an offer of love and acceptance for who she is. Somehow I think that the message in a bottle may have made it back there after all. Maybe now it will get a little easier to glance up at a stranger, and see myself looking back, not a trick of a camera or of genetics, but truth.

copyright 2008 J. Autumn Needles

Crossing the Line

2008-07-02T10:34:00.000-07:00

Have you felt that line before? That line where nothing has changed, the exact same things are going on, but suddenly everything is different because it matters to you?

Backing up...I didn't intend to write this today. I have a whole long list of things to do and writing in my blog isn't on it. But I've been thinking so hard on this I just have to spit it out of my brain and onto paper, a piece of half-chewed gum, to get it out of my way for something else. Because I felt that line last week and now it's tripping me up. Something I thought I could step over, designating the difference between point a and point b somehow got bigger and bulkier and three-dimensional on me, not, apparently, a line at all.

You've felt it too, haven't you? There you are with someone or a group of someones, or maybe just by yourself, and you're doing something, or maybe you're not, and if you had a little soundtrack in your brain it would go something like this, "This is nice, I like this, I'm happy, this feels good." Then it's like something sits up and listens in, ears perked, "Ohhhh, you know what? I DO like this! This IS nice! Wow, I AM happy! And oh gosh this DOES feel really good. REALLY good..." And does that something then snuggle in all content and pleased with life? No it does not. It panics. "I want this to continue. What if it stops? What if it doesn't stop? What does this mean, that I like this? Is this okay that I feel like this? Hey, who gets to decide that anyway? Why wouldn't it be okay? But what does it mean? And what if it never happens again? It has to happen again. But what if I get hurt? And what if I get what I want? And what do I want? What does it mean that I want something I didn't know I wanted? What will this change? I don't want change."

This has been my soundtrack all weekend. I'm a little tired. The inner witness has been chiming in periodically as well, "Isn't that interesting that now that you care, now that it matters, you've become attached to outcome? I wonder if there would be a way to care deeply, to have it matter terribly, and still release attachment? Can you desire this and be clear about your desire, and truly feel just fine no matter how things turn out?" All of this internal conversation reminded me of a book I had read a couple of years ago called Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life by Mark Epstein. He says in the beginning of chapter 3, "...desire forces us into a place where our usual modes of relating are upended, where success can only be found when...we risk making fools of ourselves. This seems to be one of desire's primary functions: to keep us off balance, in between, on the verge, or just out of reach." I want I want I want seems to go hand in hand with I'm scared I'm scared I'm scared.

It would be nice don't you think to let go of them both? Desire and fear right out the window; then we can all just be placid and satisfied. Unfortunately, it seems that I want I want I want and I'm scared I'm scared I'm scared also have a couple of important friends: I love I love I love and I live I live I live.

So I guess I'm just going to sit here on this line between point a and point b, off balance, in between, on the verge, and rest here a little. Because I DO love and I DO live and I DO want. And I AM scared. From Mark Epstein-"Touching desire, meeting and gratifying another's desire, lets us know God." God and me, we're just going to sit here a little. Get to know each other.

copyright 2008 J. Autumn Needles

Joy and Pleasure

2008-06-04T17:09:00.000-07:00

Somehow in trying to figure out what to write next I was thinking about stuff that makes me happy. I was reading over old morning pages for the last several months and was amazed again to see how emotions just flow over and through everything and are so powerful but change so quickly. It's like that old joke about the weather-don't like it? Just wait a minute. But often the things that really tweak my mental state into joy are little and silly. Here's a little list:

Wind

The hand dryer in the bathroom at our local grocery store. I swear I always go to the bathroom there only because I adore this dryer. When you put your hands under it, it blows mach force air at you so your skin does that funny rubbery thing and they dry fast!! Whoo.

Homemade chocolate chip cookies. There are some in the kitchen right now. Often they make me happy, then they make me a little ill.

Frogs

The memory of skinny dipping in Walden Pond after a Grateful Dead concert with my roommate and 3 strangers who were giving us a ride home to Boston.

A card I bought myself that sings "I've got the power..." when I open it.

Doing something well and being admired for it.

Odd bits of sensory memory of good sex that float up out of nowhere to take my breath away at the oddest times.

The cold plunge at the women's spa. It's freezing, it has a waterfall, I always feel exuberant and full of life after it. Plus I love watching the faces of the women in the hot tub as I stand for many minutes at a time letting the frigid water beat on my head and shoulders in complete bliss.

Flannel sheets on naked skin on those first cold nights of fall.

My little sandals that are yellow and orange and red with a big flower on the top.

The commercial that's out right now for the lottery with penguins and chickens hang gliding.

Friends who send emails just to say hi.

A big fat new book, much looked forward to, a cup of tea and a morning to myself.

Yummy life. Eat it up.

Just Us Chickens

2008-05-20T16:08:00.001-07:00

I've been thinking a lot lately about what to write next, coming up with themes and letting them go, and just not really being struck by anything in particular. The irony of beginning a blog with the theme of getting lost and then promptly NOT getting lost very much at all has not been lost on me. It has made me think about it though, this piece of me that has been very much a part of my identity for so long that I had forgotten to question it, to see if, really, it still fit me. Oh, I still have no sense of direction; take me in a building, run me around a little and let me back out, I'll have no idea where I am. We have so many natural landmarks here that I'm pretty full of myself, throwing around north and south with the best of them. But I've still gotten lost to the point of tears when someone's given me directions to "just take that exit past the chevron station..." and it just hasn't been that simple.

What I have noticed though is that I've just been here for so long that I know this place, in a way I've never known any other place in my life. I never realized that when you're 18 years old 5 years spent in a single place seems quite long; when you're over 40 and just now noticing that you've lived that same 18 years rooted in one city, you start to think that maybe it was only reasonable to get lost so often when you never stayed put.

And I think when it comes to feeling rooted and learning my way around, I'm a slow learner. My brain was wired for other kinds of knowing, but feeling a sense of belonging, a sense of place comes slow to me. With that comes an almost endless searching for community, an obsessive need to "find" it and make it mine somehow, always questioning what it actually consists of. But today I was doing the dishes and looking out at the chickens and got a little glimmer of something.

Yes, we have chickens in the city. We used to have three, but Nancy died, leaving Bess and George behind. We got them when they were tiny chicks, picked out for their beauty and their egg laying abilities and they grew up with each other and with us. It's been interesting to us to watch their little community develop and realize that they have a whole complicated social structure all their own. They have different voices and different calls they use for different purposes. One call is a warning call for a predator, specifically a cat. When they're out in the yard and we hear that call, we know to go running to the defense of the flock.

Yesterday we had them back in the coop and were out working on the side of the house when we had a little visitor. Specifically, a little orange striped visitor, a local cat who is adorable and sweet and friendly....and whom we've had to chase out of the backyard when he's gone after the chickens. But the chickens were safe and the gate was closed so we were playing with and petting the cat. The chickens were going nuts, calling and flaring their neck feathers, spreading their wings, making themselves bigger. We couldn't figure it out; we'd call to them, we went out to the yard to try and calm them, but they were having none of it. We finally figured it out when we saw one chicken seeming to watch the cat's movement and realized she could see him through a hole in the gate. (The visual cortex of a bird, you have to remember, is much more powerful than our own.) Even then though, they were safe in the coop and they know that; we've seen that they understand the difference between being out and vulnerable, as opposed to inside and safe. A little more thinking and detective work on our part and we got it–we are part of their flock! They were warning us and trying to protect us. We're kind of stupid sometimes but eventually we figure it out.

It's a cute story, and we were touched by their concern, but is there really any deeper meaning there? Honestly, I don't really know. But I do know that I like the fact that I live here in this place with the companions who occupy the space around me, and I know that when push comes to shove I've got my flock behind me. They've got my back and sometimes that's enough.

copyright 2008 J. Autumn Needles

Magic Carpet Ride

2008-02-27T22:21:00.000-08:00

Well, that's the first thing that came to mind anyway when thinking about this particular topic. I have a feeling this post might be a little brief and free-wheeling...

So I was thinking about life. Now that's a shocker. But really, I was, and what I was thinking was that in some ways it's like taking a yoga class. No, no...stay with me here. What I was thinking is that you come to class and step on your mat and class begins and you really can't leave. I mean, well, obviously, you can, unless someone has locked you in, but the thing is, mostly people don't leave. There you are, on your mat and whatever happens, whatever comes, you just stay. And maybe you do all the poses as illustrated by the instructor, or maybe you make adaptations, or maybe you just say, "Not today, thanks!" and hang out in child's pose to wait out whatever's going on. Often the class will contain poses that are challenging in some way, either physically or emotionally (being bored counts as a challenge!), and there will be poses you don't like much, and poses you like a lot, and maybe there will be your very favorite pose ever and you're so happy to be able to do it! The point is you're there for all of it; you have your reactions, whatever they are, but you're still there on your mat.

And it seems to me that we're born, and then we're just here, and a bunch of stuff happens and we react to it, and we adapt to it, sometimes we flow with it, sometimes we fight it, and sometimes we sit it out, but we're still there in the room on the mat. All of that other stuff is just stuff happening-inside, outside, all around-but our presence in the room is unchanging, until the class is over. We are responsible for whatever we do on the mat, but we can let go of everything else. The mat, the floor, the earth beneath us, the air in the room or in the outdoors, the breath of the other people there with us, it all contains us and supports us so we don't have to do that part. And we have no control over what poses the teacher will teach, or what the other students may do, so we don't have to worry about that either. And we've shown up already by being born, so really we just have to ride, and leave when it's over.

copyright 2008 J. Autumn Needles

Hey, whose path is this anyway?

2008-02-11T14:05:00.000-08:00

It occurred to me to wonder, as I wander on and off this path I'm on, getting lost and finding my way back, whose path is this really? And is it marked, or am I wandering around in a featureless space with little animator goggles on that are creating some kind of reality for me? Kind of like the 21st century version of Plato's cave?

What brought this up for me was a question from a yoga student: She felt that there's some kind of ideal out there for each pose, and isn't that what we're trying to reach? She has a dance background, like me, and comes from that concept of trying to get to that one exact perfectly correct and beautiful placement. I have a couple of issues with that: One is, it was exactly that kind of noble goal that brought me to an entirely unhealthy way of being in my body, treating it like a prisoner of war that was holding out on me, and two is, I think of yoga practice as kind of a special science experiment where objective curiosity and observation is crucial, and having too much goal in there skews the results.

So I was thinking about all this later, and thinking about how often we easily slip into wanting someone else's ideal life. Kind of like that ideal map of a pose, there's also an ideal map of a life out there somewhere and that's the one we want for ourselves. I remember talking with my neuroscience professor once either close to or right after graduation and feeling almost sick with envy. Her life just seemed so damn easy in so many ways because she had a very singular focus, and because of that focus her career path was laid out in a nicely marked straight line for her. She had never strayed from it and she was entirely happy. I, on the other hand, felt like I was scattered all over everything and every step I took was taking me down some kind of Dr. Seussian trail, in no particular direction at all.

Now, twenty years later I look back and there's still no straight line back there behind me, but I've had a really fun life. I love my life and I love my body–the way they are. They still both take me by surprise sometimes and I like that. Don't get me wrong–I still sometimes yearn for something more, something clear, something easy, something perfect. I do think there's probably an ideal out there for everything, something we're striving for, but I think it's unique to us individually. So there is no perfect essence of Triangle Pose; how could essence of Triangle ever take into consideration my own beauty, my own unique quality? There is only the perfect Triangle Pose for me today, right now, this second and it's the very pose I'm doing. And my path is uniquely my own, correct only for me, and I fill it the best way I can.

copyright 2008 J. Autumn Needles

Map of the World

2007-12-27T11:54:00.000-08:00

When I was in college, we had a tradition of senior will night, a time close to the end of the year when all the seniors in the house would will their belongings to underclasswomen. As a sophomore, I was willed a map of Europe by one senior who had spent her junior year abroad in Switzerland. She knew that I was headed for Scotland the following year for my junior year abroad so she left me her map. She had had her map up on her wall all year with stick pins in it for all the places she had been on her year abroad, so when I received it, it still had her pinholes in it marking her journeys. I was tremendously touched by her gift and reassured by it; it was a tangible symbol of the possibility of making this venture for myself, and returning from it with new stories and new experiences, and maybe some pinholes of my own to add to her map.

I had a soft spot for maps anyway, being a bear with very little directional sense (see blog title). Maps for me were a secret weapon and I believed there was magic in all the little blue river lines, crinkly mountains, different-sized dots for different-sized cities. Whenever I had to drive anywhere, I would listen politely to the directions given me, then go directly to my map and plan out my own route in great detail. When I did make my journey to Scotland for the year, and from there out into the rest of western Europe, I tried to get a map of every place I went. Those became my tokens of success.

Recently a much younger friend was moaning about how she wished she could just stop everything and just figure things out. If she could only have some time to figure things out. I had been listening, I confess, with some irritation, hearing a lot of "oh, poor me", but when she said that I had a little flash of compassion that trailed along with my own memories of feeling exactly that way, oh about 20 years ago. Having that sense that somehow, if I could just stop long enough to plan things out, I could create my own map to make my life clear from this point forward. There would be no more confusion, or feeling like events were somehow overtaking me, or that I had only limited control over my direction. No, I would have a map! Something I could actually hold and refer to that would have little lines and labels on it helping me find my way. I would never feel lost again.

It was only as time went on, and I just kept living my life and finding my way without the map, making pinholes for new experiences and labels for places I didn't want to visit again, and somehow, without ever actually being able to stop everything to figure it all out, figuring most of it out anyway, that I realized that that's how it actually works for everyone. Now all these years later I wouldn't want to stop my life and get off for a while. Even when things are hard I know I carry my own map to get me through. And mostly, I know I have found the place I want to call home, and the places I want to keep exploring, the people to share it with, and I don't really need to stop everything because I know I have what I need. I also know now that I have the resources available to me to cope with whatever comes, even if it turns everything upside down.

Listening to my friend though, I wished I could somehow will her my old map with all my pinholes, to show her that she will find her way and that everything will be all right even if she can't find a way to stop the world. She will find her way like we all do, creating her own map and her own set of directions.

copyright 2007 J. Autumn Needles

After Long Silence

2007-12-25T20:04:00.000-08:00

Lots of times I sat down to write in the last 2 months and found I had nothing really to say at the moment. Good thing I'm not writing on deadline! I'm still not sure what I have to say right now as this year ends. Actually as I sit here and think about it, silence seems appropriate as we come to the end of this year's deep dark and begin the climb into the light of the sun.

We're heading into what our country names the new year, and yet other people give that honor to other times. For myself, I've always found the descent into darkness at Samhain (Halloween) to be a more appropriate time to shed the old and prepare for the new. But one thing that has always struck me about pagan reckonings of time (and frustrated my Scorpio desire for something with borders) is that every season and every celebration is not so much about itself captured in a moment, but about the transition happening at that time. Always moving from something to something else. Even as you grasp at something to celebrate and honor, it's already gone, moving to the next thing.

Tis the season of shoulds. Yes, at this time of year we move directly from the shoulds of Christmas into the shoulds of New Year. Now is when we set our compass (and our course) for the future and yet it strikes me as a particularly bad time to do this. Swept up in a storm of everything we ought to do, everything we have to do, everything we really should do, how can we possibly get our bearings and find true North? Maybe using the guilt of everything we didn't do? I don't think so.

So maybe it really is time for silence. A walk in the cold to listen. What gift does this particular shift of season have for you? What gift do you need to bring into the light of the new sun? Where will this year take you? Let it speak to you.

copyright 2007 J. Autumn Needles

FREE Summer Yoga in the Park for Everyone

2007-10-22T12:22:00.000-07:00

That's what my little sandwich board sign says and three days a week during the summer I pick up my sign at a little store and carry it across the street and into a little public park overlooking the water. The park is at the north end of a very famous public market and many tourists make their way through the market then into the park to take in the view and take a few pictures of the water and Mount Rainier if they're lucky. Local people spend time there, too, although typically they are local people that the city would prefer that tourists not have to encounter: men sleeping on benches, people making quick exchanges while glancing furtively around, a woman singing to herself while she staggers around the park in too large pants kicking garbage cans.

This is where I brought my yoga for 2 months this summer. I love teaching yoga and I have to admit that part of what I love is the part where I get to stand up in the front of the class and be the teacher. I don't think this is a bad thing, but I do think it's possibly a dangerous thing. The possibility exists of loving the role to the exclusion of what's being taught and who is there to learn. Teaching in the park stripped me right back down to basics.

I brought my little sign with me and set it up. Then I'd fuss a little with the tape and the business cards and my belongings, the placement of the sign. Eventually I'd run out of little distracting things to do and there it would be, the requirement that I just begin. And so I would begin, grounding through my feet, connecting through the top of my head with the sky, forming a circle of energy around myself. But not too tight a circle! "Come Join Me!" says my sign and "Come join me!" must be the message I send out into the park. This can't be my turtle self doing my yoga practice safely in my shell; no, this has to be my soft and fragile human self at play, broadcasting my message out into the world, "I'm all alone and I am vulnerable out here but it's so beautiful and so good to be alive here. You will be safe if you join me. I will be safe if you join me. Together we will no longer be alone."

Then I breathe: Breathing in I raise my arms up, breathing out I bring palms together and draw them down my center. As I breathe, my mental chatter of fear, fear, fear clatters itself to a close and I begin to feel the air around me, hear the laughing and the seagulls, see the water responding to whatever the weather is today. I think I could just breathe for an hour here in this park and I would be the better for it.

Some days I do my whole practice, people come and they go, some talk to me, some take my picture, but mostly I remain alone. I am sad that I've been left alone for the hour and my energy slows but I am still safe and I am okay. Nothing bad has happened. Most days though the miracle happens. Someone stops and wants to join me. The woman on a short trip to Seattle who extends her visit and misses her plane and joins me twice in the park. The man who has been on a fishing boat for many months, but the boat has broken down and he might not have a job and he might not get paid and he doesn't have a place to live but he'd like to do some Sun Salutations with me. The Latino worker who spends his mornings standing on a corner waiting for some construction firm to pick him up and give him work and doesn't really know anything about yoga but it looks like it would be helpful. He comes again and says not only did the yoga make him feel better but it must have brought him luck–he got a job! The Black homeless woman who joins in behind me, so quietly that I don't realize she's there until I turn around. The big guy from Philly who's heard about this yoga stuff and wants to get a little more flexible...could I just lead him through a little? The man who brings me a green peach and sings for an hour to me and my student; he even takes requests for our background music. The little man from Iran in his suit and his dress shoes with the most radiant smile I've ever seen. Still smiling, he tells me how very very sad he is, that his wife is ill and he just wanders the city with no one to talk with because he doesn't speak much English. The floaty woman who drifted into Seattle for a month and the current she caught happened to bring her to this park this morning, and isn't it an interesting coincidence that she's been looking for outdoor meditative movement opportunities? The couple from Pennsylvania who don't join me, but who come over at the end of my session to thank me for my work and tell me that they wish they had something similar back home. I can hope that what they felt was my desire to offer this practice and this teaching as a gift to the city I love and the people who populate it.

Little connections, brief encounters, and every one of them so very important. Not allowed to hide under the title of teacher, my being cries out, "Is anyone out there? Am I alone here? I don't want to be lost and falling into nothing!" These moments call back to me, "We are all alone and we are all falling into nothing but we are here together and together we are large and spacious and there is nowhere for us to fall and no way to get lost. Be calm. You are safe." We are safe together.

copyright 2007 J. Autumn Needles

Mind/Body Battle

2007-09-26T12:31:00.000-07:00

I had a good chat this morning with a guy down in the park where I teach an outdoor yoga class. I had noticed him–note to anyone doing an outdoor practice: it's always good to stay aware of your surroundings!–with his coffee and cigarette, standing at the overlook watching the water. He approached me when I sat on a bench, told me he did yoga for about 4 months and it had really made a change in him for the better, then he went overseas with the military for several years, and when he returned, he just kind of went crazy wanting all the stuff he hadn't had for so long–beer and cigarettes and tv. He talked with regret about how unhappy his body is now with the choices he's making and how he's trying to figure out how to change.

We did an interesting exercise back at my yoga teacher training. Yoga works with the idea that each of us incorporates 5 koshas, or bodies. There's the physical body, the mental/emotional body, the breath/energy body, the witness body and the bliss body. They're all present all the time, and because of that we are all already living in bliss, but a lot of times we don't realize it. Thus, the yoga practice to help us become aware of it. In this exercise we split into groups of 4; in each group one person became the physical body, one the mind, one the prana or energy, and one the witness.

So often in our culture some part of ourselves becomes the enemy, the bad one. So, we have the bad body–too fat, too flabby, too weak, too wobbly, too pale, too wimpy, too skinny, too misshapen, too hairy, too....well, you get it, you probably have your own litany. Or we have the bad mind–too up and down, too all over the place, too unfocused, too obsessive, too emotional, too stupid, too...yeah, okay, you get that one, too. Worst case, we've got both: bad body bad mind. Both of them have to be overcome, whipped into shape. Often our workouts are punishments, the critical trainer in our heads on patrol for any mistake. Our meals are overlaid with do's and don't's that have nothing to do with pleasure. Our minds have to be constantly monitored or they just drift off into la-la land. Every emotional reaction has to be rated. (One of my personal alter egos is someone I've named "Stop That!" because that's all she ever says in my head. She tries to censor not words and actions but every thought.)

Back to the exercise... In my group I was the body so I showed up first, quickly followed by Prana. Prana and I had a great time together, just roaming, exploring, no thinking, no judgment, no analysis, no real direction or purpose, just the physical acts of moving, breathing, sensing, resting. Then mind showed up. Now I have to admit, despite enjoying the use of my mind in my life, I tend to think of it as something that has to be overcome, that's in the way. I'm not sure I even realized I had this belief until we did the exercise. Oh, I knew I had lots of body issues, but my beliefs about the mind were buried a little deeper. But you know, when Mind showed up things certainly got more complicated and more tiring, but Mind was also fun! He was curious and witty and interesting to talk to and intriguingly complicated. Who knew? In our little exercise, things weren't so great when the 3 of us worked at cross purposes, but when we were all in tune with each other, it was fantastic!

Back to guy in the park... Seems to me that this is really how it's supposed to work for us. Here's this guy, and his body isn't happy, it doesn't feel good with what he's doing to it, and in his mind he's recognized it and has a sense of the direction he needs to go. As far as I can see, he's in great shape! His body and his mind are in agreement; if he can witness that, and really see it for what it is, and allow his energy to follow that line he will transform himself by being present for this moment. If he drops into bad body (I'm too fat, my ribs hurt, I'm out of shape) or bad mind (I can't believe how stupid I was to allow this to happen, I know smoking's bad for me, what's wrong with me?) he'll be delayed in his desire. Body and mind just are what they are; it's our beliefs and our stories about our bodies and our minds that delay us.

copyright 2007 J. Autumn Needles

Opportunities

2007-09-18T16:52:00.000-07:00

I had a wonderful geometry teacher in high school. He would dress up in crazy costumes, and sing little math ditties for us, and though I loved math already, I loved it more that year. We were tested or quizzed every Thursday but they were never called tests. No, Mr. Rhoades always called them opportunities.

Earlier this week I was thinking that I needed to write another entry, and probably this time on getting lost, rather than yoga or meditation. I took myself back to a couple of times that I was lost and walked myself back through the experience.

The first memory was of being in Venice. I was in Venice kind of by mistake, having gotten on the wrong train car; the train split sometime in the night and here I was in Venice. I had intended to get there sometime but had planned to spend a little time. Instead, I now had to make the choice to either spend only one day in Venice, then board another train, or do something different and watch my later travel plans unravel. Since I was planning to meet up with another traveller in a particular place at a particular time one week from now, with no way to contact her and change our plans (these were the days before cell phones), I decided to make a short visit to Venice.

I wandered happily through the little streets and alleys, over bridges and around corners, map in hand. I found everything I wanted to see and then needed to make my way back to the station as the fog rolled in and dusk came over the city. As I began to pick my way back to the train, I realized that the map was of no use; many street names and bridges were missing and soon I was hopelessly lost. Finally, as I started to panic, I found the station–almost 3 hours early for my train but too afraid to venture back out again and risk losing myself in the mist.

My second memory is from much later in life. I had taken a bus to an area somewhat familiar to me for a meeting. I found the building and the meeting, we met, we finished, and I strode out the door into the night with my head full of what we had talked about and eager to catch the bus and get home. Unfortunately, it was a different door from the one I had walked in, and on a different side of the building. When I strode out into the night, I strode out in the wrong direction. A few blocks later, I began to wonder what was going on because the area wasn't looking familiar to me. I wasn't exactly sure what had gone wrong, so instead of immediately going back in the direction I had come from, I turned a corner and walked a little in that direction. That wasn't right either and, now worried because it was dark and I didn't want to miss my bus and there was no one to ask because it was a residential neighborhood, I finally managed to work my way back to the building, figure out what had happened, and retrace my steps along the correct route and find the bus stop.

In both cases, what I was really struck by as I ruefully relived the experiences, was the tremendous flow and sequence of emotions that ran through me each time in quick succession. In Venice I was annoyed at myself for being on the wrong train, then accepting, good-humored and decisive, then pleased and relaxed, curious and engrossed, then complacent followed quickly by anxious, confused and worried, a little frightened, then thrilled and relieved when I found the station, but then kind of irked that I had to wait so long and discouraged, and finally just plain bored. After my meeting, I was feeling competent and absorbed, then anxious and confused, a little frightened again and annoyed with myself, relieved when I found the building again and ashamed this time of my incompetence, and finally just very happy to be on the bus on the way home.

And now I'm right back to yoga again. Well, you knew it had to happen. Part of yoga practice is self-study, and I realized that getting lost had provided me with many opportunities for that practice. Because in each case, nothing was really happening, nothing was really changing, but my mental and emotional state was in constant, chaotic flux based on how I was perceiving my experience. I can't even really look back at those memories and label them as "good" or "bad" because I can see that they are just experiences, value-neutral, just stuff that happened, stuff I did, choices I made, and not even terribly interesting as story material. Except that the memories are strong. Probably because I remember them for what they were: opportunities.

copyright 2007 J. Autumn Needles

Stretching your Legs

2007-08-28T16:34:00.000-07:00

The other day in one of my classes I got that inevitable question: "So, what exactly is the purpose of Downward-Facing Dog? What does it do?" Probably the best answer to the question is, beats me...what's it do for you? Not many students appreciate a teacher being smart ass, even when that answer is perfectly true.

I knew that wasn't the desired response though so I gave it my best, describing how Dog was at once a power pose, requiring strength throughout the body, that it focused attention on both arms and legs bearing weight, that it was an inversion, with the head lower than the heart, and a forward bend, and in a way a back bend as well, and that it worked to stretch the whole back of the body, and that it could serve as a point of reference during practice by returning to it again and again to observe any changes.

Mostly what she gathered from that is that it's good for stretching out the backs of the legs. Which it is. But actually if what you want to do is stretch your legs there are better, easier ways to do it. Dog gives you too much at once to think about for it to be the most effective leg stretcher out there.

What I actually think about Dog, and any other pose for that matter, is that it provides a context within which to view your own death. You can stretch your legs at any gym or any street corner before you begin your jog. But the secret of Dog is that stretching your legs doesn't really matter at all because we're all going to die. With or without tight hamstrings it's going to happen. Stretching your legs at a gym obscures the reality of your death. You can tell yourself that you're making healthier choices by stretching and therefore will live longer and therefore don't really need to think about death at all. Death is something that happens to other people.

Stretching your legs in a yoga class or practice though eventually will lead you to observe the reality of your own death. Because it draws you in to observe the reality of your physical existence with all of its possibilities and all its limitations; observing the tidal movement of the breath and recognizing that eventually the tide flows out for good. Why else would we practice Corpse Pose at the end of class except to practice for our future? We die at the end of every class, only to return again to breathing and movement, return to life and the opportunity to live the life we choose to live. We get to practice dying so that we can live fresh, because we don't get the opportunity to practice life. We choose and we move and we breathe...and we live. Maybe with loose hamstrings this time.

copyright 2007 J. Autumn Needles

Summer Reading

2007-08-12T18:02:00.000-07:00

I know summer's almost gone, but I don't have a lot to say at the moment. On the other hand, this year I've read many books which have had a great deal to say, and which have been both informative and transformative. So, I thought I'd share. Here are a few of my favorite, most recent, and most unforgettable reads:

Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness by Sharon Salzberg
Meditations from the Mat: Daily Reflections on the Path of Yoga by Rolf Gates and Katrina Kenison
How to Want What You Have: Discovering the Magic and Grandeur of Ordinary Existence by Timothy Miller
Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder
Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally by Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon
The Wisdom of Yoga: A Seeker's Guide to Extraordinary Living by Stephen Cope
Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life by Marshall Rosenberg

Other than maybe too much of a fondness for long subtitles (a trend?), these books are gems and well worth a read. This is absolutely NOT a comprehensive list; only a list of books I've read very recently that have struck my fancy and found their way into my permanent library-quite a rare distinction. Are other lists forthcoming? Maybe. In the meantime check these out.

Effort and Surrender

2007-07-30T13:31:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I know...I'm obsessing a little over this topic. ENOUGH ALREADY!!! But...I think it's worth a little obsession. I keep thinking I'm going to create a yoga class with this title. That's really what happens in a class after all, the effort of doing the poses followed by the surrender of Savasana. I'm not sure though that the lines are that clear cut.

I was thinking about this topic for this particular entry and already thinking about how it relates to willpower, and some misconceptions I think most of us share about what that means. And then I got lost.

No big surprise, given the name of this blog, but I haven't actually written much lately about getting lost because it hasn't happened to me for a while. Apparently, if you live some place for 17 years and spend lots of that time walking and taking the bus all over, eventually you're simply guaranteed to acquire some sense of direction. But if you're like me, you are still quite capable, thank you very much, of getting hopelessly lost.

Here's the story: I went to teach a lesson in a part of town where I've a)lived for many years, b)worked for many years, c)wandered and socialized and hung out and gone to events for many years, and (here's the best part) at a home where I've been three (3!!!) different times recently. I couldn't find it. And what was interesting about it was that I was in complete denial that this was even possible, so in my head I was having a little conversation that went like this, "This can't be happening. But it is. But it can't be. But it is. But it can't be..." and so on. And then as I realized that it was indeed happening and that I was now late for my lesson I added in a little refrain, "I'm an idiot," to the rest of my litany. (Isn't that interesting? I now have a hate mantra, as in the Peril of Pigeon Pose, and an idiot mantra.) Eventually though I had to realize that the chatter going on in my head was not even vaguely useful, tune it out, surrender to the ridiculous situation and call the woman I was going to meet.

And I think that's exactly what happens with what we call willpower. Often people use the term "mind over matter", but I think the truth of it is body over mind. It's that initial umph to dive down deeper underneath the mind's chatter to access the body wisdom of a situation. So I think about days when swimming was part of my after work routine. I would leave work feeling tired and just wanting to get home and park myself in front of the tv with a nice cup of tea. In my head, this is what was playing, "I'm really tired, really REALLY tired, I don't want to swim, my suit is wet already and I don't want to put it on, it takes too long, I'll get home too late, I don't want to swim, if I go home I can exercise in front of the tv, that would be just as good..." and on and on. In my body what was happening was this: I leave work and turn my body in the direction of the pool, I walk down the street until I get to the pool, I walk inside and pay the fee, I go in the locker room and change clothes, I shower, I get in the pool...and suddenly my mind has shut off its litany because I'm here already, I'm swimming in the clean cool water, slicing up and down the lanes, enjoying the pleasure of moving my body. My body knows that this is what I need and my mind doesn't get a vote.

I've read that discipline in yoga equals feet on mat or butt on meditation cushion and I think there's a wisdom there for any venture. All you need is that tiny push of effort to dive under the mind and the body's momentum will carry you if you're willing to surrender to it. Doing the poses themselves isn't the effort; that tiny little push to arrive is.

I had a yoga teacher who taught us how to do what he called "whine-asana". It's a very important yoga pose and it goes something like this: Plant your feet hip's width apart. Turn your palms out and inhale your arms up to reach up overhead. Then recite, "I don't want to do yoga! It's too hard! I'm too tired. I don't like this!" Tone of voice is very important–make sure you draw out the syllables and get them nice and whiny! You can bend your knees and bounce a little to really emphasize the whine. Try it sometime when you hear some negative self-talk going on in your head. Put it out there out loud on the breath with the body engaged. Give yourself some love and empathy but don't take yourself too seriously. Life is ridiculous and grand and aren't we lucky to be here?

copyright 2007 J. Autumn Needles

Don't Abandon Ship

2007-07-24T22:24:00.000-07:00

I've been pondering those darn yoga sutras again lately. Oh, and what might those be, you ask? Good question! Written long, long ago and commonly attributed to Patanjali, they are some pithy Sanskrit phrases that basically lay it all out there: What is that yoga stuff anyway? (Sounds better in Sanskrit.)

The tiny, tiny bit that's written about the physical part of yoga says, in a nutshell, that the posture should be steady and comfortable. Huh. Not something people often attribute to yoga pretzel poses. Another way to interpret it is to abide with what is.

I've been thinking about that in connection with my obsession with surrender. Surrender is one of those big trigger concepts for me, something that feels really juicy and important, so I work with the concept a lot. One of the ways I like to work with it is to try and tease it away from other concepts that can feel similar sometimes but which take me to a whole different, and not so helpful, landscape. Abandon is one of those other concepts.

There are times when the two feel quite similar. When you throw yourself into something with abandon, isn't that the same as surrendering? I think there's a little edge there, a tiny separation, because I think that releasing yourself into whatever may come for me denotes that there's a part of me that has remained behind. Abandoned ship, so to speak. And, it has finally occurred to me, that I have BIG abandonment issues, so how can it possibly be a good thing for me to stand on the brink, hurl myself over the edge and wave goodbye? This is way bigger than wandering off in the wrong direction with all parts accounted for; this is getting really LOST.

For myself, I see this most clearly in relationships (of course). You know that feeling...you're crazy about someone, and there's something that feels good, maybe a little risky, but what the heck, what's life all about anyway? So you release yourself to go there (yesyesyes...ABANDON!), and then, oops! Bad idea and now you're hurting, so now there's yet ANOTHER part of yourself beating up on the first part. Now, you're telling yourself you're an idiot. And the big YOU (please refer back to prior discussions on the inner witness!) says oh boy, I'm out of here and walks away. Arrrgh!!! Abandonment!!!

Here's the tough part; this is where surrender comes in. What happens if the inner witness hangs around and does what it does best–witness without judgment and with curiosity and compassion? In other words, you now surrender to the whole experience and ride it out with all hands on deck. No one gets left behind or thrown to the wolves and we ride through the storm together. Abide with what is, and find a way to be steady and comfortable on the way.

copyright 2007 J. Autumn Needles

What do you want?

2007-07-06T15:35:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid we went to a local shoe store that had a real retired fire truck inside. The shoe store was only kids' shoes and the fire truck was for our entertainment while we waited for our siblings to finish fitting or for our mothers to finish paying. We all coveted that fire truck and we all believed that the best possible place to play was in the driver's seat holding the wheel.

In all of our trips to that store over the years I don't ever remember sitting in that seat. Oh, I loved that fire engine, but I'm not sure if I ever really touched it. I remember being up close and looking at it and longing for it–it was BIG, it was RED, it was BEAUTIFUL– but I don't know if I ever actually played on it.

I haven't thought about that truck in years, but I have been thinking recently about desire and poof! the truck appeared in my memory, still BIG and RED and BEAUTIFUL. Sigh. I also remember doing a photo shoot in high school with some firefighters and their truck. Honestly, I don't think I cared one way or the other about the firefighters, but their truck!! Well... I think for me doing that photo shoot fulfilled a long held desire for the truck of my childhood and for the opportunity I lost back then.

My last post was about keeping a promise to myself; this one is about desire denied. Not denied by outside forces: no, that truck was there in that store specifically to be played on by children. I denied myself. And when I consider the reasons I can come up with all kinds of things: there were too many other kids, I didn't really want to anyway, I was too old and mature for that, we didn't really have time, I'd do it another time. But I think the truth was, I was scared of the unknown and, even at that age, I had developed the belief that desire was bad and that having it was wrong and speaking it was even worse.

What do you want? What is your desire? Speak it at least to yourself, climb up on that truck and ride off in the direction of the blaze.

copyright 2007 J. Autumn Needles

Rewards

2007-06-19T10:33:00.000-07:00

I had one of those great ideas the other day. You know the kind, where in the cool of the evening hours when you're winding down for the day, you suddenly have this trickle of a thought of something that would be a really excellent thing to do on a daily basis involving early mornings and a lot of discipline. And the best part about it from your perspective in the evening is that it wouldn't start until tomorrow. So you have this great opportunity to feel all glowing with health and noble intentions but you don't have to actually do anything about it yet.

The tricky part comes the next morning when you just can't quite make it out of bed so now you feel bad about yourself. But that's not what this post is about. This post is about what happens when you DO get out of bed the next morning and follow through with your great idea.

Last week I had the great idea of getting up early, walking the mile down a bluff close to my house to the beach, and doing my yoga practice there to start my day. So I did and you know it really is a great way to start the day. On my second day of practice as I was walking to the beach I heard a big thump next to me, like something big had fallen out of a tree nearby. I started to walk over to investigate and suddenly only a couple of feet away from me an eagle swooped down out of the sky to scoop up the fish he had dropped (thus, the thump) and then flew away, pursued by a flock of hungry crows. I walked further down the beach to a nice sandy spot where 3 great blue herons kept me company during my practice. In honor of my bird companions for the day I practiced Heron and Eagle poses. I would have done Crow but wasn't sure I could balance on my hands in sand.

I don't go down there every single morning. For one thing, I can't do a really complete yoga practice in sand. And for another, I don't really want to always get up that early. But the times that I go I am rewarded greatly by a feeling of physical well-being, by a connection with the larger world, by the peacefulness of sand and sea, by the company of great beings who share the world with us. And most of all, by the knowledge that I have kept my promise to myself, made in my intention in the cool of evening.

Reward yourself. Keep a promise to yourself.

copyright 2007 J. Autumn Needles

You are a Superhero...Yes you are!

2007-06-10T16:41:00.000-07:00

One of the most helpful exercises I've ever done for a class was to write a story about myself as a superhero. Once you get over giggling about what color tights you might wear, or blushing over your superhero name, you can find a sense of expansion and play in this exercise. And no cheating! You have to actually write the story, not just sort of think about it!

What is interesting about it is that you take characteristics you already have, or characteristics you almost have and would like to make more of, and then make them larger than life–heroic, in fact. Here's a tiny excerpt from my story, as I walk the streets of the city as the Queen of Calm:

In the station, she quiets herself and unfolds a piece of her, opening out into a quiet grotto, dark with moss and dappled light. She allows the people around her to come in, bring their anxieties and release them into the quiet dark before moving on into the day. And everywhere she goes she tells people the stories of their beauty. A story of weakness becomes a story of strength in her eyes, a story of fear in her becomes a story of courage. A story of loss becomes a story of spaciousness, a story of pain becomes a story of comfort. She walks in beauty and beauty is what she sees.

So what exactly does this accomplish? I know that my story allowed me to be tender towards myself, and to see myself in a different light as a noble figure in my own story. It became part of the dream I have of how I want to live my life and how I want people to experience me. It has become part of my work ethic and of how I like to teach. And it gives me inspiration and shows me what my life can be, how I can be satisfied at the end of the day and feel renewed in my purpose.

So...what's your story?

copyright 2007 J. Autumn Needles

In the Beginning

2007-05-25T19:27:00.000-07:00

Beginner's mind is a term that is often thrown around yoga/meditation/Buddhist circles and I've been thinking about it a lot lately in relation to what I've been writing here. For all the years that I've taken yoga classes, and despite the fact that I now teach it, I always took beginning yoga classes. I never really had a goal around yoga; I just liked how it made me feel. One year my teacher asked me why I wasn't signing up for the more advanced classes. She said she thought I'd fit in fine with them and encouraged me to move up. I signed up for two sessions and hated them. All of a sudden yoga wasn't giving me that special feeling I associated with it; it was making me feel yucky. Handstand without support? No thank you...it just made me feel bad that I couldn't do it. I went right back to beginning classes after that. I had realized that I didn't want to do my yoga practice to work my way through levels, or to please or impress anyone else. The levels, I saw, were an illusion and a distraction. I was happy to be a beginner forever.

My teacher's training actually carried me into a different level of ability just because of the sheer volume of hours spent doing it. This time, my beginner's mind manifested as an ability to play and have fun with the poses. The ability to do them wasn't the point; the point was the sheer joy in trying. However, I did notice that my emotional state went up and down, up and down, just like always. My improved ability really didn't substantially change my feeling about myself or my body. My self was still there, just as it had been in the beginning.

If that's the case, then why bother? Now I think that beginner's mind is something that you can learn to carry with you into any situation, and doing yoga helps me learn how to do that. Traveling alone helped me do that, too. In both cases I have the opportunity to watch my thoughts and emotions rise and fall, every time it's new, each ecstatic rise, each depressing drop–it always feels important! If I ride that wave too completely I can lose my sense of direction. But if I hold the waves in my beginner's mind, I can feel that my true being, filled with curiosity and wonder, is a still point. Every wave is new, but it has echoes of past waves, and I know there will be more waves in the future. I can be really interested in the waves but my real self is re-created whole and complete in every moment, full of every possibility, safe from any storm. I know that I'm not actually going anywhere at all: I AM everywhere.

copyright 2007 J. Autumn Needles

Letting go, Starting over

2007-05-17T09:26:00.000-07:00

This weekend I was putting the finishing touches on a gift for the young son of a close friend who died about a year and a half ago. I thought my grieving for her was pretty much done, but, as I worked, I found myself weeping. And since I was hormonal and thus prone to excess, I allowed my grief to extend out and encompass EVERYONE I've ever lost. At first, I was focused on those I've lost to death, then I realized I was also grieving for people I've lost in other ways but who are still around, still breathing and living their lives, some of them in fairly close proximity to me. Letting go is clearly something I need to work on right now.

In recent months Buddha's Five Remembrances have been popping up in various ways for me, and after this weekend I thought, well, maybe I need to take a look at those. The Five Remembrances are basically: 1)Getting old is my nature and can't be escaped, 2)Getting sick is my nature and can't be escaped, 3)Dying is my nature and can't be escaped, 4)Change and loss in those I love and care for is the nature of things and can't be escaped, and 5)I have only my actions to stand on. So this morning I meditated on that for a while before moving on to my lovingkindness meditation. And the words of a teacher came to me in meditation, "If you find your mind wandering, bring it back lovingly and know that this is the heart of meditation–the practice of letting go and starting over."

I've heard that a hundred times (maybe more but my mind was wandering at the time so I don't remember) but this was the first time I really heard it, and realized that yoga and meditation are actually a way of consciously practicing being alive. Of course, we ARE being alive in every moment, but by rehearsing for it, we can get better at doing it in real life. In every breath we let go of the old air and start over with a new breath. With every step we let go of the earth beneath us and reach through the unknown to find it again.

It's almost impossible to stay that focused for very long on such tiny endings and beginnings, but we have them on a grander scale as well. From pre-school to my last year of high school, I attended 8 different schools and learned a lot about letting go and starting over, and got pretty good at it. My track record isn't so great when it comes to letting go of people and relationships; once you're in my life I want you there FOREVER. Sort of like the Hotel California... In running my own business, I've discovered that I have to be very nimble on my feet to be ready to let go of something that isn't working and start over with something else. My partner and I had one summer when we got to experience lots of letting go when raw sewage spewed over everything in our basement; suddenly, the question of whether to let something go became a lot clearer. Practice, practice, practice...

The other thing that I realized is that you can't have much of a gap between letting go and starting over in meditation. When your mind wanders, you bring it back. If you spend time beating yourself up over wandering, guess what? You're wandering again and you have to bring it back and start over. If you start thinking about why your mind wandered in the first place, you're wandering again and you have to bring it back and start over. If you start thinking about how much better you're going to be at this tomorrow, you're wandering again and you have to bring it back and start over. Now this can sound like some kind of crazy-making version of hell, but the miracle part of this process is realizing that you actually have an infinite number of chances to start over. Nothing you've done before and nothing you're going to do later takes that away from you. Those opportunities are always there and they never go away. In life as in meditation. You know how to let go and start over; you've done it already so many times, if you're breathing, you're an expert. Every moment is your opportunity to do it again.

So, when I think of my dead friend, I breathe in, I breathe out, I miss her, I remember her, I let her go and I start over with my living in the next moment.

copyright 2007 J. Autumn Needles

Where is the Edge of Possibility?

2007-05-02T20:50:00.000-07:00

I have a little card I got from a co-worker years ago. It says, "It is not the easy or convenient life for which I seek, but the life lived to the edge of all my possibility." Not sure who wrote it but the card is up on my mantle now. It makes me kind of nervous.

I remember when I first got it I thought, wow, what a great thought...and yet, do I really want to live life to the edge of all my possibility? That sounds kinda hard. And maybe like a lot of work. And an easy and convenient life sounds really...well, nice.

I've kept the card for all these years, and, for all these years, it's always made me nervous. Sort of like it's looking at me, expectantly. And I always look back at it and say, no way, not yet anyway. I find it kind of interesting that I've actually kept the thing, given how uncomfortable I am with it.

I remember when I graduated from college I basically spent all my time when I wasn't working holed up in my apartment reading voraciously. All those books that I craved during school but didn't have time for because I was too busy reading the required books and writing papers and doing projects and angsting with my friends. I felt a little guilty but frankly that's all I wanted to do. I felt resentful when something from outside intruded into my little nest and took me away from my reading. It took me a while (umm, years really) to feel like I had read my fill and was willing to give up some of my reading time for other pleasures. Honestly, at the time, given a choice between reading and sex, reading would win hands down.

When I think about that time now, it seems to me that it was a reasonable reaction to the transition from childhood to adulthood. The childhood had its own fairly large set of pressures and stresses and really seemed to involve a lot of effort. And I think that I just wanted to take a little vacation from working so hard for so long. I don't think it was such a terrible thing; after all, I managed to work 2 jobs, pay the rent, cook food, clean up after myself and all that stuff.

Once past that stage, I led a very active and rewarding and interesting adult life. To many people I know it has looked adventurous. But I've always had this awareness that I still wasn't really filling up all the space available to me; I wasn't living to the edge of all my possibility. It's been a very happy life and I have no complaints, but I do think there's more there to be squeezed out. And in a way I've been living an extension of that earlier time.

I turned 40 last fall, and just lately as we've approached, and then passed, Beltaine I keep looking at that damn card, and it's like there's a voice in my head saying, "now". Of course, I'm freaking out a little bit but I also finally feel ready. And I think yes, that's right; everything has to be in its own proper time and that is different for everyone. It's beginning to make sense to me that finding your way into your full self really is a journey, complete with struggle and beautiful sights and surprises and meeting people and little vacations from the work of finding the next place to go until you're ready to go on.

I often use the concept with my students of arriving for practice, acknowledging that there may be aspects of yourself that simply can't arrive at the beginning, but leaving a door open for them when they do show up. When they show up, there's no shame or blame in the late arrival. I think similarly different parts of us are always showing up for our lives and then leaving again. So maybe the edge of possibility is the space that happens within when our whole self really does arrive.

copyright 2007 J. Autumn Needles

Power Yoga

2007-04-19T09:03:00.000-07:00

"Can you add some more challenging poses into the class?" This was a request from one of my private classes, a mixed level group that met for an hour weekly, with a primary goal of stretching and restoration after a busy work day.

Now, this is always an interesting question for me for many reasons, but what I've been focused on this week is, what makes a challenging pose? Obviously (or maybe not?) we're talking about yoga poses here. And I guess what I find so interesting about the question is that we all think we know what that means–after all, how else do you determine if you're in yoga level 1, 2, or 3? And how else would I know what they were asking for?–but is it really possible to answer that question in a general way?

On a purely physical level, most people are predisposed, either by body type and natural talents or by other activities they do, to ease in some poses and challenge in others in a way that can't be generalized. On a different level, many people find savasana, corpse pose, challenging because they find it hard to be still, relax and let go of their thoughts.

But there's also something else going on here. Nowhere is it more true than in a yoga class that you are creating your own experience and then observing yourself in that experience. It can be argued that that's really the whole point of yoga. You are giving yourself something to do which engages you completely–body, mind, emotions, breath and energy–in order to allow your inner witness to observe the truth of your being. So, if a class isn't challenging, what does that actually mean? Are you engaging everything you can in each pose? Do you want something physically difficult given to you so that the work of the pose quiets your mind? What would you need to give yourself permission to challenge yourself? Does the challenge need to come from outside yourself?

There's also a question of how you approach the pose. If Tadasana, the mountain, is just like standing at the bus stop thinking about what you'll have for lunch then it won't engage you. However, there are thousands of potential focal points in Tadasana if you look for them. This is true for every pose...including standing at the bus stop!

Some poses will awaken an emotional response unrelated to the physical difficulty of the pose. A pose which feels restful and soothing to one person, will feel stressful and difficult to another. A challenging pose can feel frustrating or hilarious depending on what it awakens in you. For me, Pigeon used to be a horribly stressful pose even though I knew many people who found it deeply relaxing. On the other hand, I can't even come close to Tortoise, but I've often used it as a focus pose for my practice because it's entertaining for me to struggle with it. In one situation, the struggle is stressful; in the other, the struggle is funny–the only real difference is how I'm perceiving it.

Maybe a challenging practice would be to do only easy poses, but do them fully. Or maybe it would be to do only difficult poses, but release attachment to outcome. Maybe it would be to dare to come into class and do only Savasana for the whole class, while everyone around you is bending and twisting. Maybe it would be to just breathe.

In my dream, this is what Power Yoga would be. Not a fast-paced aerobic workout, but a place to claim and explore your own power, and your own experience to create exactly as you need it to be.

copyright 2007 J. Autumn Needles

Are we there yet?

2007-04-17T14:39:00.000-07:00

Something the other day sent me down memory road, visiting times I've been badly lost, and thinking about what it means to define myself in those terms. It's hard to pick just one time when I felt lost, alone and frightened. It's happened so many times...

There was the time when I had just moved to Edinburgh as a new University student. I took a tour of the college campus, chatted on the tour with a couple of new buddies, and, when they decided to bow out of the tour to stop at a pub, I went with them. We had a quick bite together, they went off their way and I went mine. Only, which way was mine? I had no idea and no map.

Or the time I wandered happily in Venice, finding my way easily through the little alleys and canals until it was time to head back to the train station. Now it was dark, the fog settled in, and the map that had seemed quaint because it was so badly wrong now led me completely astray.

Or the time I took a tai chi class in the depths of winter in Massachusetts. The class was a bus ride away and it was easy enough to get there coming from in town. But class ended in the darkness of night, I wasn't yet a savvy bus rider and didn't really know the schedule or where I had to stand to catch the bus. I had a few nights of either watching my bus glide right past me (because I stood in the wrong place) or missing it entirely and being faced with the decision of either standing out in the snow for an hour or so and hoping for the best or trying to find my way home in the dark and cold.

Or the many, many times I've walked into a building from one direction, walked out in another without realizing it, and have strode off confidently in completely the wrong direction, realizing it only when I'm hopelessly lost, or so off track as to be almost the same thing.

Sometimes I wasn't alone, like the time a friend's father was driving me home from her house and I just blanked on what street we were supposed to take. After half an hour of driving around, he took me back to my friend's house to call my parents and ask directions. Then I didn't feel so much frightened as stupid.

But still frightened a little because I knew even as a child this failing of mine didn't seem to bode well for my ability to survive. For a while, out of fear, I tried to reclaim my weakness as a strength. I boasted of being able to be lost within a block of my house, and challenged anyone to get a solid set of directions out of me. I actually worked at having less of a sense of direction.

Over time, I've learned two things: One, getting lost has never killed me, and it has always felt worse than it actually is. The thing is, whether you're lost or not the only thing to do is the next thing...and then the next thing...and then the next thing, and unless you're dead there's always a next thing to do. If you're lost, you just tend to have bad feelings about it. And two, everyone gets lost. And if you've been lost, truly or metaphorically, you now have the experience which allows you compassion towards all those who are lost.

I recently read a description of what it's like to walk a labyrinth (a labyrinth being a maze with only one path in and out, so there's no getting lost). The author described the feeling of seeing the center in sight as she walked along, then suddenly feeling the path turn under her and send her back out away from the center. In order to keep her equanimity she had to drop her focus on getting to the center and just walk the path as it was laid out. And, of course, she eventually found herself in the center anyway. Alive, in ourselves, in our bodies, present in the moment and walking the path–how can we ever be lost?

copyright 2007 J. Autumn Needles

Does the Inner Witness Ever Take a Vacation?

2007-04-05T20:42:00.000-07:00

I've been wondering about this lately, mostly in sort of half-joking, half-desperate emails to friends. Here's the deal: During my time in Costa Rica for my yoga teacher training, I focused really strongly on awakening the inner witness consciousness, that part of the self which simply observes with benevolent curiosity and who brings attentiveness and awareness to every activity. Do you see what I'm getting at here? Read that line again:"...brings attentiveness and awareness to every activity."

Here's a little example from my day. I know that sugar is bad for me, and not bad for me in that sense that everyone says, oh yes, sugar's so bad for me but doesn't really mean it, but bad for me in the sense that my body really struggles with it in a truly bad for me way. And I mostly steer clear of it for that reason. But today I took a long walk with not enough food in me, got home and thought, wow, I'd really like some cookies. Not only did my inner witness attend to the issue, but she had actually FORESEEN this very dilemma. So, here's my inner witness observing me objectively, with compassion, wondering how I'm going to respond.

I responded by eating the cookies. And the funny part is that when I do something idiotic like that (oh...I'm sorry! No judgment...) I can feel the "so there!" inherent in the action, like I'm thumbing my nose at the inner witness. Which is truly idiotic because I also know beyond any shadow of a doubt that my inner witness is only my deepest, truest self speaking to me of my real desires, which exist down under all the needy "I want I want I want" kind of desires.

This is a fairly tiny, unimportant example but it is really interesting in my every day life to see how often what I want–because it's fun, because I just don't want to think, because I want people to like me, because I want to fit in, because I want to feel free, because I think it's what I ought to do, because I'm scared, because fill in the blank–runs up against what this deepest, truest voice is telling me. What I want runs up against what my SELF wants for me. And what my SELF wants for me is for me to be true to my nature, surrender to the sacred being within me.

And the irony is that it's not hard to surrender because the right choices for me feel right. What's hard is to struggle against that voice and make the choice that isn't in alignment with my true self. So why on earth do I struggle?

And meanwhile my inner witness just keeps watching and waiting and loving me....Isn't that interesting?

copyright 2007 J. Autumn Needles

Meditation Revisited

2007-03-28T11:09:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd use the space this time around, not to tell a story, but to talk a little more about meditation. My meditation practice continues to be a really interesting exploration for me. If you remember my last post about it (Watch the Monkeys), you know it was hugely challenging to add meditation to my regular practice. Since I know it is also a difficult practice for many other folks, I thought I'd give some ideas of what has helped me keep it going.

Watching your breath or using the "So-Hum" mantra are common ways suggested to start practicing. However, I actually found watching my breath gave me way too much time to sit and think between breaths, and then I would find myself changing my breathing rhythm to give me more time to think. Bad news for meditation. And for some reason, "so-hum" just doesn't work for me. I did find that the mantra "om namah shivaya" worked better for me, or just saying to myself, "breathe in....breathe out".

So far though my favorite methods don't use mantra or breathing. One old stand-by for me was to clearly visualize a particular scene–for me it is a red flag against a blue sky. I allow myself to see it really clearly, and I can usually even hear the metal connectors clanking against the flagpole, feel the wind on my face, and smell the dry dusty air. If I wandered, I would say to myself the words "red flag, blue sky" and pop back to my scene. When I use this method, I can feel myself instantly drop and relax.

Another method that works well for me is to listen very carefully, just open to any sounds around me, not labeling them, but just allowing them to move through me. For some reason, opening my hearing shuts down my thinking.

And last is a method that I thought sounded odd when I read about it. In this method, I simply smile from my whole physical being. When I use this method, I literally imagine the skin on my body smiling, all my organs smiling, everything smiling out at the world. Strangely enough, I easily drop into a meditative state and this particular method brings me a great deal of happiness. Go figure.

If you struggle with meditation, don't give up on it. It is profoundly rewarding.

Being a C Student

2007-03-13T14:11:00.000-07:00

The very first day of my yoga teacher training, our lead instructor explained to us how the course was set up: how many hours of each type of class were required to meet National Yoga Alliance guidelines and how many hours of each type of class our training actually had. The course was designed with extra hours in it so that if we got sick or if something else came up, we had a little wiggle room and could still meet the requirements. Additionally, though, he suggested that maybe we should consider as our goal for the course being C students, that maybe we didn't really need to give 100% to the course but scale it down a bit and see what that looked like to study yoga seriously but still have a balanced life and enjoy the beach a little. Basically, he said, we should see what it's like to play hooky just a little and learn about yoga that way, too.

I was intrigued by the suggestion and my brain was spinning as I left class. How many classes exactly would I need to miss to be a C student? Did skipping a class count if I didn't go to the beach? What if I stayed home and worked on my sample lesson plan? Could I still be a C student in that case? And were some classes weighted heavier than others, so should I be careful about which ones I missed? It took me a while but I eventually realized that I was trying to get an A in being a C student.

The other night I was having a conversation with a friend about making changes in our lives, about what it takes to change. We both agreed that one of the odd requirements for change seems to be a softening and an acceptance, an ease, with our current condition. So, trying really hard often works against the change, while relaxing into the present moment allows us to move.

In one of my previous jobs, I worked with a child with a particular behavior we were trying to squelch. I tried everything, the parents tried everything, his therapists tried everything and nothing worked. So I started taking data on his behavior, its antecedents, my responses and the results. As I watched myself from this more objective vantage point, I realized that actually I wasn't trying everything. I had a very small list of responses that I would run through with ever greater levels of frustration before giving up in despair. Once I just stopped and looked at the situation I could immediately see new options that had never occurred to me. The behavior was gone within 2 weeks.

We put such high value on working for results, on trying. I think sometimes all of our trying is focused all in the wrong direction and we can't quite understand why we're not getting anywhere. Have you heard the analogy of life being like a river and we work so hard to cling to a rock in the middle? We think we're making progress, we think we're staying afloat. After all, we're working so damn hard, we MUST be getting somewhere, right? But if we just let go, the river will take us anywhere we need to go.

copyright 2007 J. Autumn Needles

Not Getting Lost

2007-03-06T20:17:00.000-08:00

I think of myself as someone who's absolutely hopeless with direction and orientation when left to my own devices. And yet I've been thinking back lately to a different sort of person than I remember being. This is a story I've often told for its comic effect, and I tell it well, but it's a story with deep roots and wide branches.

When I was in first grade I left class to go to the bathroom. Now this in itself was HUGE. I was horribly shy and humiliated by having to admit to bodily functions. My solution to this problem was to just hold it all day. However, on this particular day I left class and went to the bathroom. When I returned, the class was gone–the teacher, the students–everyone! Just gone. As an adult I can think of many ways to approach this problem: go looking for them, ask the principal, sit down and cry...all very reasonable choices. However, another aspect to my personality as a child was an inability to admit to not knowing something. This was not ego; this was fear. I believed that I inhabited a world of people who all somehow knew everything about everything. And everyone had this amazing knowledge except me. Now, I knew I was smart. Don't get me wrong. But it seemed to me that everyone somehow mysteriously held all this information that was required to get by in the world and I was missing something. I was defective. I thought I needed to hide this truth about myself so that I would look like everyone else. And eventually I figured that since I was a smart girl I'd learn everything I was missing by observation and deduction and in the meantime I just needed to fake it and look the part. No one would ever have to know my secret.

Given my beliefs and my rules for living, my choice was crystal clear. I left school and walked home.

Home was about 5 blocks away from school and both my parents worked. I really didn't have a clear picture of the magnitude of this decision until much later in life when I worked with first graders and saw how tiny they were. At the time, my only concerns were getting in trouble and having people find out my secret. I was absolutely sick with worry over this. I had no idea that it was actually the teacher and the school administration who could get in trouble for this. I found out later that the class had just gone next door to another classroom to watch a film and the teacher had forgotten about me.

Like I said I usually tell this as a funny anecdote about my childhood. But when I think about it, I'm filled with sorrow for the little girl who was so frightened, who allowed her fear to determine everything about her, and yet whose inner strength and courage shone through despite that and who, by succumbing to one fear, overcame another and found her way home.

copyright 2007 J. Autumn Needles

But I love you dammit!

2007-02-14T16:48:00.000-08:00

I thought it was appropriate on Valentine's Day to talk about love. When I was growing up I was very suspicious of those 3 little words: I love you. I knew even as a child that there was something else going on there. The words almost never seemed to be a spontaneous outpouring of love and affection and I never used them myself. I didn't want to have anything to do with them until I had some sense of what they actually meant. Because what I heard was "I love you...(expectant pause...don't you understand what that MEANS?? You're supposed to love me back.)" or "(I really can't believe how stupid and selfish you're being but) I love you (anyway I guess because it's what I'm supposed to do.)" or "I love you (but I'm going to sigh now and be a martyr because you're not turning out to be who I wanted you to be.)" It rarely sounded like, "I love you (because you are such a fabulous over the top incredible person that really who wouldn't love you just for being you?)"

Even as I got older and got some experience at falling in love, I didn't feel like it was a terribly practical emotion. And I had to empathize with the folks who sent me the mixed messages of my youth once I had a few of my own under my belt. Here are some of my own personal favorites that I trot out periodically: "I love you (you asshole! You can't do this to me!)" and "I love you. (Don't you dare leave!)" and "I love you (and I need reassurance that you're still here.)" oh and here's a good one "I love you (even though you're being really shitty, because I am a better person than you are.)"

Even with all that craziness, I still do have a sense of a deep and abiding love that I am connected to, and that connects me to all of these other people, somewhere deeper than these frantic emotional blips on the screen. But how to find that part and express it clearly? You know how Air Supply (oh, come on, admit it...you LOVE these guys too!!) sings about being Lost in Love? Well, sometimes I feel like it's more like the love gets lost underneath all these other things that seem to come along for the ride.

But recently my journey has taken me to some interesting stops along this particular ride. I had begun taking meditative walks at the turning of the seasons, opening to the energy of the earth and sun and sky at the times of solar holidays. On one of my walks on Samhain, I had a sense of something saying to me, "Nothing is required of you." And I kept waiting for the "except....", as in "except to be loving", "except to be nice to people", "except to go organize your basement", or something along those lines. But nothing else came except my own thought...does that mean that I am enough? Exactly as I am?

Around that same time, I had an assignment to write some sort of affirmation. I was very focused on human limitation at that time because a friend of mine was dying so I was trying to find something endless and infinitely large to hold on to. And this is what I wrote: I am created of divine love and my capacity for joy is endless. And you know I actually believe the damn thing.

I just read a book called Lovingkindness by Sharon Salzberg and began adding meditation on this Buddhist principle to my other thoughts on love. And I realized two things (well, three if you count the fact that my basement really DOES need to be organized): One was that I believe that the universe wants me here, that it has organized all its energy and its molecules to make space for me, and that it rejoices in my presence, and two was that almost always when we say "I love you" it's bound to be more about the "I" than the "you", simply from the construction of the sentence (subject/verb/object). But when I thought about the people whom I love, but with whom I have these very human difficulties, I realized that I also believe the universe rejoices in their presence, too, and that the world is better off with them here, and that regardless of what happens between us, I'm really glad they're here, on this earth, in this life. It doesn't get rid of the difficulties of "I love you" but it's good to know.

copyright 2007 J. Autumn Needles

Gem City

2007-02-12T12:55:00.000-08:00

Gem City is the beautiful name of the third chakra, located in the region of the solar plexus. This is the seat of personal power, where the self comes into its own. I am particularly attached to the name of this chakra because it brings up an image for me of many facets, polished and gleaming, turning to reveal its different aspects at different times, and all of them shining out like my own personal sun.

When I was younger it used to confuse me that people would form very strong impressions of me that all seemed quite true and yet were conflicting. My grandmother would say, "You are just so stubborn. Even when you were a baby, people would come up to you and smile and baby talk at you and you would just fix them with a glare. You were always very definite about what you liked and didn't like." A friend would say, "You're so easygoing. Everything that comes up you just say okay and follow along." In high school I was a bookish stressed out workaholic, while my college buddies couldn't believe how mellow I was about exams. To a co-worker at one point in my life I was the "Queen of Calm". I particularly enjoyed that one because I never really FELT all that calm, and especially in that particular work context, so it was a revelation to me that I came across that way. At that same workplace, another co-worker made me a pin that says "Gentle Spirit" because to her that's what I was. A lover later saw the pin and couldn't stop laughing; she thought the pin should say "fiery vortex of passion and fury". I didn't think it was that funny myself.

I've always thought of myself as a patient person, having spent a huge amount of time in my life waiting for buses, trains, and subways, and coping with plans and schedules gone astray, but when I described myself as patient to my partner, she thought I was out of my mind. "Patient? Really???," she said.

And maybe she's right. But so am I, and so is everyone else. What I finally understood is that I contain all of that within me and there is no contradiction. Contradiction is what we see when we look through human eyes. But I am formed of the universe and there is star stuff in me. I contain both chaos and order and all the possibilities. The more I look within the more facets I can find and polish and show to the world. It's all just more evidence that we don't actually live in a binary either/or world but in a we've got it all both/and world, where contradiction lives and is held sweetly by continuity. You can never get lost in Gem City.

copyright 2007 J. Autumn Needles

Get on the bus

2007-02-06T11:29:00.000-08:00

I've never really trusted buses. Not in comparison to other forms of mass transit. Some history: I've never actually owned a car so I probably have a little more experience than most with various forms of transportation. And since Seattle is a bus town, that's been my favored mode of getting around for 17 years.

But back to my trust issue. My theory is that trains and trolleys and subways are on tracks or lines or in tunnels and therefore can be trusted to get from point A to point B as anticipated. But buses? They have no such restrictions and are subject to the call of the open road. I know they have signs on the front and schedules and such, but the point is they have the POTENTIAL to go astray. You never really know. You can't be sure. And that makes me a little nuts.

And the thing is, you could really just put this all down to paranoia except that it's happened to me. Bus drivers do get lost or re-routed occasionally, or maybe they forgot to put the express sign up. I've even had the experience of being absolutely certain that I saw a particular route number on the front of a bus, and then looked up from a 20-minute absorption in my book to find that I'm nowhere recognizable to me. And the little printed maps aren't always meaningful. Once in Edinburgh, my flatmate and I studied a particular bus route to get out to the airport to reclaim our luggage that had gone astray a couple of days earlier. The map seemed clear enough, but, once on the bus, we spent an hour doing a scenic tour of Edinburgh without ever getting anywhere near the airport and finally landed right back where we started in front of our flat. There was nothing to be done but disembark, eat a tuna sandwich and re-group.

But over the years I've made a kind of peace with buses and their vagaries. I figure I never really quite know where I'm going either so we've got something in common. We can work together on this. And I've developed a certain amount of skill in accommodating all of the different possibilities inherent in riding buses. It's like we've both got this idea of where we might be going and when we'll get there but we're flexible about it. And in an odd way after spending so much time on them, they have become a second home for me. Something that fits me and is comfortable and feels safe.

One very early morning I caught a bus on a very foggy day. The fog sat all around us down to the ground, enclosing us in a bus-shaped space, and I had this sense of a sequence of bus-shaped spaces opening and closing as we moved through them in the fog. Each one existing as a clear place for us to be and yet not clearly seen from the space before. And I thought about how each of us exists as a long, flesh-colored worm through time, from birth to death. And I had the sense of all the me's who came before the me right in this moment, and of all the me's who come in the moments after the me right now. And I have this sense of all of us together, all of us me's, holding the space open for the me right now, holding it in the very shape of me, cheering me on to BE me right now, having had my place in the line of the future and on my way to the line in my past. And the thing is, despite this sense of a line of self extending out before and after, I don't have the feeling of being on tracks. I'm more like a bus, with a sign on the front and a schedule, but with the POTENTIAL to go astray. You just never know. But right now, here I am.

copyright 2007 J. Autumn Needles

True Story

2007-01-24T11:08:00.000-08:00

What I realize as I write these posts is that I am really telling the same story over and over again. It's me trying to remind myself of something, something important. Here is the story again.

I have a memory of being in Austria. I approached my travel abroad in very characteristic fashion. I read, I researched, I packed carefully, and I knew before I went what my experience would be because I had it planned. I used Let's Go Europe (1987) as my bible for travel. I would tear out the sections on the countries I would visit and figure out what to see. I took my Austria section with me to Salzburg.

Now, if I think very carefully back to that time and work at it, I can remember visiting lots of beautiful old buildings with my Austria section in hand and a map. I would follow the directions in my guide put together with the map and find myself at some building somewhere. I was never quite sure that I was really and truly where I thought I was, because all of the buildings were old and beautiful and they all kind of looked the same. I didn't speak the language and I couldn't afford to take a tour in English and I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to get IN to the buildings. Were they closed for the day? Was I at the wrong place? I kept feeling like something was supposed to be happening. I was supposed to be having a revelatory experience and instead I was wandering aimlessly looking at pretty buildings and wondering what on earth they were for. I even splurged on a piece of torte that the city was famous for and it was dry and nasty.

This is what I remember if I work at it: aimlessness, frustration, confusion, self-criticism, disappointment.

This is what I remember if I don't work at it: magic, beauty, wonder, belonging.

When I let my memory drift back to that time, here is the story that comes to me: I walked one day down a street. I can't remember what I was trying to find, but what I saw was an old beautiful building with several big trees in front. The trees had something in them, something shining and colorful, so I went closer to have a look. The trees were filled with chimes and bells and streamers tied into the branches, and, when the wind blew, the trees would ring out and the streamers would flutter. The building was open and people were going in and out so I went in, too. I walked in and it was some sort of children's fair/fundraiser for something. I wandered through and saw craft booths for kids to make masks or crowns, cardboard mazes to go through, bake sales. I went to a bake sale table and bought a bag of what I thought were shortbread cookies. It turned out that they were lemon and I hate lemon. But I munched on them anyway and wandered and listened to people talking in a language I didn't know. And then I walked out into a beautiful day, eating my lemon cookies and listening to the trees chime and ring out into the air.

I always smile when I think of Salzburg. Which story is true?

copyright 2007 J. Autumn Needles

The Perils of Pigeon Pose

2007-01-23T19:28:00.000-08:00

I had a defining moment during my yoga teacher training. Well, really I had a few. But one stands out because it was a moment that began at the beginning of my training and extended out to the end of the month. I went to our very first early morning yoga class at the very beginning of training. We swept through a multitude of poses in a very vigorous vinyasa, or flow, sequence over the course of 2 hours. At one point we landed in Pigeon pose.

I had done Pigeon before, but only when forced to in class. I never practiced it at home. Why? I absolutely despised the pose. And now here I am, the first day of my new life as a yoga teacher, and we're doing Pigeon. Hate it, hate it, hate it. I'm on my mat. I'm really hot and sweaty. I have no props. And I'm doing Pigeon. Only that's really overstating the matter because what's actually happening is that my body is clenched up, quivering and shaking and sweating, hovering OUT of Pigeon pose, because I have very tight, inflexible hips and I can't actually DO Pigeon pose.

That day I began what I came to call my hate mantra. It went something like this, "I hate this pose. I hate this pose. I hate this class. I hate this teacher. I hate everyone here. I hate this pose. I especially hate YOU, girly in the cute little top who just drops right into Pigeon. I hate this pose." And so on. Whew! It was always such a relief to get out of it and move on to balance poses, which I CAN do.

The whole first week we did Pigeon in class and every day I did my hate mantra and I shook and sweated and cursed and hovered OUT of the pose. My hate mantra became more complex as the training continued. We were taught to allow our inner witness to watch our practice, with curiosity and benevolence and no judgment. So I added a few lines to my mantra. Now it sounded like this, "I hate this pose. I hate this pose. Isn't that interesting how much I hate this pose? I hate this pose. Why do I hate this pose? Because I can't do this pose, because my hips are too tight, and I can't do this pose. Isn't that interesting that I can't do this pose? I still hate little girly in the cute top. Isn't that interesting? I hate this pose." And like that.

One day, my hate mantra took an interesting turn. "I hate this pose. I hate this pose. Isn't that interesting? I hate this pose. I'm scared of this pose." Well. Isn't THAT interesting? Now I've got fear in there with the hate. And I'm actually really curious-why am I scared of this pose? It's a pose on the floor so I'm not going to fall. There's very little risk of injury with this pose, especially when I'm holding myself up so far out of it. I'm hooked because I really want to know the answer.

The next day in class we didn't do Pigeon. We were always allowed time at the end of class to do our own series of poses and I felt a little nudge. I actually wanted to do Pigeon. But I held firm; I didn't allow myself to do it. This was a pose that I hated and couldn't want to do, so I didn't do it. But the next day we still didn't do Pigeon in class. The nudge happened again. My curiosity won out and I did it myself at the end of class. And I continued my hate mantra, and I shook, and I sweated, and I cursed. And I watched myself and listened. "I hate this pose. I can't do this pose, because my hips are tight, and that's why I don't do this pose and maybe if I did this pose, I'd be able to do this pose."

That was it, the source of the fear. I realized that I had a certain picture of myself, a belief about myself, and part of that belief was that I was not a flexible person. That, in fact, I was a person with very tight hips. I had been doing yoga and dance for many, many years and yet I was not a flexible person despite all that. And I didn't want to let go of that because it was part of my identity, it was part of my belief system. If I became a person able to do Pigeon, I would have to let go of that piece of my identity and be a new person. A person I didn't know.

The next day in class when I did Pigeon something changed. My mind had opened and my body could no longer hold itself out of the pose, and phffft! I collapsed into Pigeon pose. And I lay on the mat in Pigeon pose and I cried and cried.

And now I'm learning how to be a flexible person with wide open hips.

copyright 2007 J. Autumn Needles

Surrender Dorothy!

2007-01-16T16:18:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking a lot about surrender lately. Surrender seems to be a recurring theme in my life. And, after all, getting lost does involve surrendering to the unknown and I've had lots of experience at that.

But lately what's been popping up for me in my life is the idea of creating your own reality through intention and positive thinking. It's showing up everywhere, and frankly I'm getting a little tired of it. I do believe in it to a certain extent and I'll probably even write a little on that possibility at a later date. But what about the possibility of surrendering to the reality that's already out there? What would it be like to just ride that wave?

In yoga there exists the idea of flowing evenly back and forth between will and surrender. You approach each moment intentionally, then you surrender to what the moment brings. And part of that philosophy is that will and intention are not actually goal-oriented which is a challenging idea for a lot of us.

A new friend was recently talking about how she feels when she reaches a certain state of bliss on her mountain bike. She talked about getting into that groove where she no longer thinks or calculates, she has no connection to past or future; she is simply riding in the moment, responding perfectly to each event which appears in her moment simply by being present with it.

I've had experience with that feeling she's describing. It's almost a feeling of the personality submerging into a larger field. I've often described myself as a chameleon because there are times that I feel like a field of potential energy shifting to take the form that is required of me. I have been asked if this makes me somehow less myself, or if it makes me a fake or a liar somehow. But what I feel when this happens is that it is the most perfect expression of what I truly am. You've heard the saying "We are spiritual beings having a human experience"? Well, I think maybe what we are is an energy field having a physical experience. And that, as in physics, our own observation of ourselves is creating the physical experience that we have; in other words, the moment we observe ourselves we drop from a state of potential, of possibility, of probability into a state of actuality.

Oh crap. There we are right back at creating our own reality. But...are we willful or are we willing in our approach? If we observe with attachment or judgment we've already limited our possibilities. But if we surrender as we observe, what might we be allowed to see without the limits of human thought?

copyright 2007 J. Autumn Needles

Watch the monkeys

2007-01-03T15:00:00.000-08:00

I teach yoga and you'd think that as a yoga teacher winding my legs up in lotus and sitting in silent meditation would come easily by now. I've been doing yoga for 28 years as well as doing lots of other things that require discipline, focus and a quiet mind. But....that's always the worst part of a yoga class for me. You know that part. You get to class, roll out your mat, do a couple of quiet stretches on your own while everyone else is arriving. Then the teacher begins. "Just sit quietly and bring your awareness to your breath. Notice how your breathing is, naturally, without trying to change anything. And now, turn your awareness to the rest of your body. If you notice any areas of tension, send your breath there and just sit quietly with it. Maybe an intention for your practice today comes into your mind." YEARGH!!!! By this time I'm trying to climb out of my skin. I would do anything to get out of just sitting and being quiet. And my intention for practice right at this very moment is simple: ESCAPE!

Even at my yoga teacher training the silent seated meditation didn't get any easier. The first day that we focused on meditation in class, we were sent off to the edges of the room to sit silently away from each other. I use the word "room" loosely because my training happened in Costa Rica and our yoga studio was a thatched roof held up with posts and no walls. I went off to the edge of the room facing out into the jungle. I sat cross-legged, closed my eyes, and began my mantra, "So" with the inhale, "Hum" with the exhale. And it goes something like this, "So....Hum....So....my back really hurts....Hum....okay, inhale....exhale....I'm bored....So...my back hurts...does it count as meditation if I wiggle a little....God, I hate this...okay, picture the mantra...So....ugh, this is awful....So....Hum...don't get on the train....So....my thoughts are like little boats floating by...Hum...what do I need to do today...I wonder what the beach is like right now..." and so on.

We saw monkeys every day we were in Costa Rica and often up in the very trees nearby. That day I could hear the sounds of a troop of monkeys coming towards us, until finally it seemed that they were in the trees right next to us. A dilemma! Do I continue my seated meditation and be disciplined about my intention, or do I watch the monkeys? Hoo boy, that's a tough one. Finally I thought, I'm in Costa Rica for heaven's sake....I'm going to watch the fucking monkeys! I opened my eyes and spent the rest of my time in that class sitting quietly with quiet thoughts focusing all of my attention on the monkeys and enjoying their show.

The next time we had a meditation class I skipped it and went to the beach.

Fast forward to just a couple of months ago. I'm feeling stagnant in my own practice and disappointed and tired in my efforts to get set up as a full time yoga teacher. I decide that the best way to approach my difficult feelings is to face one of my challenges head on; I decide to spend at least 10 minutes daily in seated meditation. No cheating either. My rules for myself are: sitting, not lying down; sitting, not moving; and sitting first, not after a really nice yoga workout to calm me.

At first, I could think only of escape and I would keep sneaking peeks at the clock to see if I was done yet. With practice, I began to see glimpses of where a continued intentional practice could take me. I would drop down out of myself and find myself floating and gently held by light and love. Or I would have a sense of sitting with thousands of other people, including another version of myself, all of us sitting quietly with each other. Or I would truly see the words from my thoughts forming droplets and falling into the sea and disappearing, and I could watch all of this with interest and curiosity.

And, I found myself pulling out of my rut and finding fresh energy. I had lunch during that time with a fellow yoga teacher, one with many more years of experience teaching, and we talked about our experiences with meditation. She laughed when I told her the monkey story, but was also surprised and moved by it. She talked about how she will often, with her students and with herself in practice, talk about being a curious mammal, a curious monkey. That we often judge ourselves for our quick and curious minds that are constantly moving, but that this is our very nature and part of our beauty.

When we meditate, we ARE watching the monkeys; watching them with interest and curiosity and benevolence; watching them in deep quiet so we won't scare them away, and not trying to make them be anything but what they are, not lizards or trees, but monkeys. Raucous miraculous monkeys.

copyright 2007 J. Autumn Needles

Finding Home

2006-12-26T12:55:00.000-08:00

I was sitting on a train making its way from Paris to Geneva. This was the 2nd leg of my first journey ever by myself. I had just turned 21. Paris had felt triumphant to me. After all, I had put myself on a train in Edinburgh with only my backpack and had managed to arrive successfully in Paris. Not only had I made it to Paris, but I had survived for 3 days! I had found a youth hostel, peered at Paris from the lofty heights of Notre Dame, made an attempt to scale the Eiffel Tower (the elevator broke!), gorged myself on museums, eaten crepes sold by street vendors, rendezvoused with friends from the States for one lovely day of familiarity....and now for reasons that seemed unclear to me, I was throwing myself back into the unknown.

I felt sad and alone and very foreign on the train. It had become very clear to me that day that my triumph in Paris was an illusion and that I truly had no idea what I was doing and no business traveling as I was. I didn't understand kilometers yet, I couldn't read the train schedules, I couldn't speak the language and I was obviously too young and stupid to know better. I had presented myself at the train station that morning to buy a ticket to Geneva. Mysteriously, there was nothing anywhere that indicated that any trains ever went to Geneva, or, in fact, to anywhere at all but northern France, Holland or Belgium. After wandering for what felt like hours, I found an English speaker and asked. I was at the wrong station! It had never occurred to me that a city might have more than one train station. My day was shot; I had planned to buy the ticket, spend a leisurely day at the Louvre, then head out. Now I shot across town, bought the ticket, and tried to walk back to the Louvre. Unfortunately, my sense of scale was all off and, though I made it within viewing distance of the museum, I had to turn back or risk missing my train. I felt like everyone I passed on the street, everyone in the train station, everyone on the train, knew what an idiot I was. Everyone had a place to be or a place to go, a place to belong, but me. I was uprooted, a minor piece of driftwood floating through these well-anchored lives.

As the light faded and we trundled off into evening, these thoughts grew stronger. I was no longer the independent young woman who had learned to wiggle her thumb at the Metro ticket seller and yell out, "en simple." I was alone, I was afraid, I was going somewhere I had never been before.

The woman across from me asked did I speak English? was I an American? She asked a few more questions and must have seen the loneliness in me because she leaned down and dug through her bag. "Here. I have extra and now I find I don't need them." She handed me an apple and a pear. I bit into the apple. "You know, this train stops in Zurich for an hour. They have, em, Christmas lights? Very beautiful lights over the main street. You should go and see them." I thanked her and nodded and drifted back into my litany of self abuse. When the train pulled into Zurich, I had no intention of going to see those lights. But my feet picked me up and took me off the train before I could stop myself.

I drifted out of the station and into fairyland. It was dark and snowy. There were white lights strung like a fountain of pure, bright droplets cascading up and down the road. People were out shopping, bustling through the streets.

And here I was drifting, still with no place here, no roots, but I felt my spirit rise with the wonder of the unknown adventure. My fear and my loneliness nestled together into a core wrapped over with joy.

"Look," those lights said to me, "look at us. See what the people here have done. For you, this is the unknown. But these people live here, they've created comfort here. And you could choose this comfort, too, no matter where you go. Because it's only the first step that's unknown and then you're there and you belong. If you choose to you can stay and be comforted and comfortable, or you can continue into the next unknown and carry your comfort with you."

I went back to the train, ate my pear, and rode on to Geneva.

copyright 2006 J. Autumn Needles