Death

Patanjali Said What?


Yesterday during yoga training, we spent a bit of time going over the take home exam and receiving our individual teaching lessons for the in class exam.

It’s doable.

For the teaching portion, I am to instruct Adho Mukha Savasana or Downward Facing Dog. my personal nemesis. Down Dog is one of the most basic of poses and it’s one that I am still finding my self in. Every new teacher, workshop or training session shines light on Down Dog. It’s like “the pose that can do anything” because it is always the same yet different every day.

I am also presenting a sutra. Cat assigns each of us one or a short set of sutras and asks us to present/teach it to the rest of the group. Mine is 2.16 – The pain that has not come is avoidable.

And I thought? Seriously?

Because I am sort of – okay – completely – of the theory that we have destinies. Our life paths are not necessarily carved in stone as we are free to embrace or reject experiences, lessons and universal directions, but for the most part, “pain” is as “life” is. We are mortal and therefore subject to all that entails.

You know “bad things happen to good people (and bad people and people of morally ambiguous natures too).

But as I thought about it last evening – and you know me, that’s about all I thought about because I am as bad as a dog with a new chewie when it comes to things like this – I realized I was looking at pain as though it was a condition of certain experiences rather than a choice, an add-on.

Pain is an “a la carte”.

And suddenly, like the revelation of the widening of my sacrum in down dog, I think I got it. It’s about attachment or non-attachment. I can experience without attaching pain. I can detach my experiences from pain when it tries to add itself to the order.

Most obvious example is death. Losing someone is sad but sad is not painful. It’s just sad. I can experience the sadness without attaching pain to it. It’s simply sadness. I feel it for as long as I need to … and I let it.

Acknowledge. Move on.

That’s what an asana practice is preparing me to do. That’s why we chant, practice pranayama and meditate. To gain the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual strength to let go, detach, life from pain.

The suffering does not make you stronger. Letting go makes you stronger. Feeling the sadness without allowing pain to muscle in, distract and take over is the point. Pain is a choice.

Even on a physical level, a person can detach from pain with the strength of the mind alone.

But pain is still there. It doesn’t go away. It’s just our perception and/or experience of it that makes all the difference.

I think. Maybe.

Gotta get ready for training. Happy Sunday. Namaste.

Patanjali Says it All


Yoga training typically culminates on a late Sunday afternoon with the Sutras. We’ve hit chapter two, which is the meat of the mental practice – because yoga is all about reaching the interior whether it be the muscles and organs or the thoughts and emotions.

We spent a great deal of time on teaching beginners, so Patanjali got shorted. Thirty-five minutes is inadequate to the task of fleshing tapas.

Tapas?

Tapas is all about the pain and the letting it go. Emphasis on “letting it go”.

Patanjali insists that we are only anchored to the physical world through the pesky inconvenience of having bodies. Bodies that are not us.  The true “me” of me is not my body at all. Therefore, all experience happens to the body and what “I” should be doing is experiencing, acknowledging and then letting it go.

Everything. Good, bad, meh and bloody awful. Feel it. Know it. Wave goodbye.

“Nothing is permanent,” Cat, our instructor, pointed out.

True. It’s our attachment to the idea that good things should have no end and bad things are unfair (I’m overly simplifying) that leads us into the mud and mires us there.

I just listened.

Not because I have no thoughts or concrete experiences to share, but because I know that this is one of those deceptively simple ideas that become nightmarishly difficult when reality envelopes a person.

“Our reactions are choices,” another woman chimed in.

Essentially, we can shape our lives through letting go or just acknowledging that all experiences are finite.

And here the conversation veered into the anecdotal experiences that, I think, aren’t helpful.

A fellow student was in a serious accident and was told by her doctors that she would never regain the use of her arm. She told us that had she listened to the doctors, she would indeed have no function, but she chose to ignore them and rehabbed herself to the point where she is now able to use her arm – not 100% – but no one could tell by simply looking at her that she has difficulties.

I hate these analogies. They are exceptions and they lead others to believe that we are all destined to be exceptions when we aren’t.

We are the rule. Sometimes reality is what it is. No exceptions.

This doesn’t preclude trying to be an exception but it does mean that more often than not, one will have to accept that they are the rule and then – let it go.

“We can change our reality,” Cat said.

But we can’t. Reality is. Sometimes all we can choose is our reactions and how to live within the reality. There are some realities that can’t be let go. They can only be managed.

Managed isn’t the best term, I’ll admit, but there are experiences that stick even though we have let them go.

Will is dead. I have a dead first husband. Not much I can do with that. Very little to work with. Certainly can’t change it.

But I can acknowledge it and let it go, knowing that its effect on me is permanent and that “letting go” might have to be revisited periodically throughout my life.

Same holds true for my classmate. If she had not been able to regain the use of her arm, she would still have had to let the experience go and live within the parameters of her altered reality.

I don’t know if Patanjali addresses this later on, but letting go is a process and it can take years or a lifetime. The choice – I believe – is the attempt to let go in the first place or to cling and not bother.

The Hand of God


So the daughter and I are bonding over The Ten Commandments.

Yes, THE Ten Commandments as re-imagined  by the ever so full of his own self Cecil B. de Mille and enacted with too much gravitas by a Charlton Heston to campy effect and scene chewed with relish by Yul Brynner. Who does not love some Yul?

We were in Fargo on Easter Saturday and neither Rob nor I were up for a youth infected dip in the postage stamp pool, so we talked Dee into a “movie night” and she discovered one of my Easter rituals from days of yore – watching The Ten Commandments.

I had forgotten just how bad a film it is. Notable now for the healthy figures of its leading ladies and for the fact that Yul and Charlton were looking mighty fine, Dee was enthralled. It had everything. Princesses. Injustice. Fabulous locales and just enough religious detail to set her near-pagan mind a-tingle with the need to “know more about it”.

As it is an ungodly long flick, she only got to watch up to the part where Moses is banished to the desert. Frankly, the movie goes steadily downhill from this point. Once Seti dies and Rameses are bit players, it sinks under the weight of Heston’s attempts to make Moses a regal authority when in fact, Moses had to be poked, prodded and continually ego-stroked by God to get him to do anything.

And the fact that Brynner and Heston are mostly clothed from here on certainly doesn’t help either.

Moses is a pretty lame hero. Arron, his brother the rabbi, performed most of the plague tricks and Moses whined and doubted – a lot. I think it was the whining rather than the doubting that kept him out of the promised land in spite of what Sister told us in school.

Which brings up a curious point. Why are God’s Old Testament prophets so often cowardly and whingeing? God could have chosen Joshua. Joshua was an Old Testament warrior type. He would have latched onto Pharoah’s ankle and gnawed the guy’s foot off if God commanded it, but Moses was always questioning and moaning, “Why, Lord?”

When we got back home, Dee was still going on and on about the movie, so I stopped at the library after yoga one day and picked it up for her.

It’s three hours and 39 mins long and that is not counting from Judaism sprang the true religion that eventually begat the wonder that is democracy in the United States the greatest place on earth speech that de Mille gives before the film that prompted Dee to say,

“Just go to the menu and pick scene selection, Mom.”

As we watched the first night – and this was after a long day of training – I was reminded of all the times I must have watched this growing up because I easily recognized the bits that had been edited out for commercials when it ran on television. Usually it was Yul who got his lines cut, which is a shame because he is a hoot.

Last night we watched part two which is the boring “let my people go”. Heston is quite impressive with that one line. Unfortunately they gave him a lot of other things to angst about too that really slow the movie down and his Elvira hair distracted.

After boring us with Moses’s time in exile, it surprises me that de Mille skipped most of the plagues, but he’d chewed up over two hours by the time Moses sees the burning bush and returns to Egypt and there was still Passover and a sea to part. The music swells in awesomely in the sea sequence. Still makes me tingle a bit.

Anyway, the last plague is – of course – death to the first-born of Egypt which the Hebrews ride out in their blood stained mud huts – which in retrospect is appropriate because their God is murdering innocents in their name, so smearing them with blood fits.

The superbly cheesy effect of the smoky hand of God, green and wispy, slithering across the moonlight sky before snaking to earth prompted me to think,

“Aw fuck, I forgot about the whole hand of God killing children thing.”

Dee was horrified.

“Why does God want to kill the little boy?”

Pharoah’s son –  if you know the story skip this – is of course smited by the hand of God to teach Pharoah a lesson. A lot of innocent children bite it in the Old Testament because God was, apparently, still working on his personal enlightenment. Perhaps he should have been paying more attention to the Asians because I believe they were busy coming up with what would the be basis for the Sutras and Buddhism. Although, if they had been God’s chosen, the concept of enlightenment might not have ever been discovered by humans at all.

When I was Dee’s age, I knew the story of Moses. The idea that God killed for no other reason than to teach lessons the hard way was not foreign to me and I was Catholic enough to accept this rather bloody-minded view that it was okay because it was God.

Dee has been deliberately distanced from Christianity in general. When Will died, I allowed her to believe in heaven and angels but I kept her ignorant of the hell and damnation component. Two reasons for that. First being that if she is going to believe in God in some fashion or other, I want her to do so without the fear factor. Too many people are religious for no other reason than they are afraid not to be and this, in my opinion, is the root cause of poor Christians. Second, there is no good reason to scare the crap out of children to promote blind obedience to any creed. That kind of nonsense is why Catholic priests were able to get away with abusing children and why Catholic schools were hotbeds of physical and emotional abuse as well.

“Baby, if there is a God, do you think he would kill little children?” I asked her.

“No,” she replied wide-eyed and very serious.

“Moses is a made up story. Churches used to tell horrible stories like this to scare people into believing and being good,” I said – and that’s about as age-appropriate simple as it gets.

“Why?”

“A very good question,” I said. “But I don’t know the answer.”

“God is a good person,” she assured me. “And Daddy Will and Grandpa live with him in heaven and do good things too.”

Seriously, can you wish more for your child than believing this?

But, naturally, the green glowing hand of God came back to slap me about a half hour after I’d put Dee in bed.

“Mom?’ came a plaintive wail from upstairs which I followed and discovered a wide-awake worried child at its tail.

“Can’t sleep?”

“It’s that hand of God,” she said.

Dang-it hand of God. Curse Cecil B. De Mille.