Lifestyle choices

A Life’s Purpose


What if what I am supposed to be doing is exactly what I am doing?

I ask only because I read a blog entry of a friend who is searching for her direction in life. Or redirection. We can never assume, after all, that where we are, what we are doing or who we surround ourselves with is permanent.

Life is about change – at its core – not about permanence.

I was a teacher for twenty years. When I left, I can count on one hand the number of minutes it took for someone to ask,

“So what are you going to do now?”

As if emigrating to Canada, remarrying and focusing on my writing/blogging in addition to giving the stay at home mom thing a full-time go for the first time in the five years I’d been a mother wasn’t enough.

What are you going to do with your life?

So that it’s meaningful – in the eyes of the world – is the question behind that question.

But what if, maybe, I am doing what I am meant to do?

Given that nothing is permanent, and I can reasonably expect the circumstances of my life to change over the course of time, why couldn’t what I am doing … right now … be what I am meant to do? Right now.

And isn’t that enough?

Writing for blogs, studying yoga with an eye towards teaching a few classes – maybe having a studio one day – isn’t nothing. Though I recognize that like “having it all” or “having enough” it is an eye of the beholder thing.

Does anyone’s eye matter but mine in the assessment of what makes my life meaningful or gauging what I should be doing with my life?

I think not.

And a life’s “purpose” is more than what one does in terms of culture’s obsession with the idea of work and career (which, frankly, is the measuring stick in our Western world to an unhealthily large degree).

What if, what you are doing right now and where you are is “it”?

For now.

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.

Patanjali Says …


Yoga grounds itself in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras.

Sutra (get your mind out of the gutter) means “rule” or summary or a listing of “doctrinal summaries”. More simply put, they are teachings. Literally translated it means  “a thread or line that holds things together”.

The Yoga Sutras are the basis from which yoga emerges.

Part of my training includes studying, pondering, trying to make sense of Patanjali’s sutras.

Who was Patanjali? He’s the guy who, thousands of years ago, wrote down everything a person needed to know in order to reach the goal known as Yoga.

No one really knows who he is. In his workshop, Michael Stone told us that Patanjali was mythologized even – half man/half serpent. Scholars, however, are of the opinion that he really existed.

The second sutra, according to Sri Swami Satchidananda – whose translation I am reading, actually sums up the end goal, and means to it, of yoga.

YOGAS CITTA VRTTI NIRODHAH

The restraint of the modifications of the mind-stuff is Yoga.

Huh?

It’s deceptive in its simplicity.

“If you can control the rising of the mind into ripples, you will experience yoga.”

Yoga is union.

So, if the mind can be hushed and thoughts tamed so they are not running off with the slightest distraction, you have achieved yoga.

Yoga is not the physical practice – the “asanas” or poses. That is a simplification of itself. Asanas are practiced to help a person still the mind by learning to focus on breath through movement.

It’s another way to learn meditation.

Bet those Bikram people feel all foolish now seeing how it’s not an Eastern Jane Fonda way to yoga butt.

It’s deceptively simple though because – in case you’ve never tried – reigning in thoughts isn’t easy. Try it. Take a few moments and silence the parade of thoughts stampeding through your mind. Or, just try to herd one thought in a single direction and see if it doesn’t get away from you. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

(musical interlude for the lazy)

Not so easy, is it?

It takes no time at all for the mind to wander off to the day ahead or the troubles of yesterday or off into a daydream or lament or idle speculation about why I am boring you with my yoga training again.

Our minds are programmed to modify. It’s perfectly natural for thoughts to meander. Sometimes it’s a good thing. But just as often, it isn’t.

The modifications or “vrittis” are named by Patanjali, the man-serpent.

Right-knowledge, misconception, imagination, sleep and memory.

They are neither good nor bad except for – as Shakespeare would put it later in Horatio’s mouth – thinking makes it so.

There is no good or bad in the world because they are labels only and projections of human interpretation – figments of our mind-stuff so to speak.

The world itself is nothing more than a projection, a shared one sometimes, but it makes sense when a person stops to consider how differently a group of people can view a common event or idea.

Kat, my training instructor, asked us to come up with two examples – good and bad – for each of the vrittis and write about them.

Ah, you think, this is why she is torturing us with her Eastern mumbo-jumbo.

Partly.

I have to admit that I am a bit stumped.

Right-knowledge is that which is a universal truth. But are there truths that everyone agrees on really? Human beings pay lip-service to truth more than they actually practice most of them.

Killing for example. The killing of humans is bad. Except if they have killed or if the killing takes place during war and they are on the winning side or in instances of self-defense or if a person chooses to kill his/herself unless they aren’t terminally ill and it’s okay for police officers and white people who need land and resources from browner people. Just to name a few exceptions to that “truth”.

All humans are created equal. Except, it doesn’t say that. It says “men” and thus begins the “excepting”.

Misconceptions are the “eye of the beholder” thing that gets most of us into trouble. It’s the projection of our perception onto others, events, universal truths. Its the way we read into everything regardless of the actual depth.

Imagination are the fanciful thoughts that lead us into trouble or inspiration depending.

Sleep is either in feast or famine and nearly always we control that.

Memory. Ah, memories. Faulty and more prone to misconception than our real time dealings, in my opinion.

I’d be curious – and most grateful – to know your opinions on the vrittis. How can they be both good and bad? Positive force or negative?

Examples would be appreciated.