The red sun, reflected on the square, of the TV...

I'm back to work as an urban planner, exactly one year after I took redundancy from my previous job. I'm grateful, of course, especially given the area I am now in charge of assessing planning applications is ridiculously beautiful, with some of the most stunning English landscape I have ever seen. I even have a favourite view from  my car on my commute into work, the morning light radiates gold off a vast wheat field viewed from the brow of a hill, off the A429 toward Stratford. However living in Coventry I sometimes forget that nature is everywhere.  Living in the city you have just to listen a little harder sometimes. I knew I'd find some haikus which reverberate with how I'm feeling right now...

Instead of foxes howling, or waterfalls, there's a car-roaring up the street, or the drone of  a refrigerator ... part of the life in which we are living.

             The red sun
              reflected in the square
                of the TV.

        Neons flash red & green.
April rains on still street.  Man
   Nods.  Red lights blink, blink.

                        After April rain
                        -in puddles of oil
                        city rainbows

        The whole block flooded.
        Men hauling pumps & hoses;
        children, plastic boats.

                        A great freight truck
                                        lit up like a town
                        through the dark stony desert.
(www.haikuworld.org)


So as sure as nature is found in the city, human nature leaves traces, samskaras if you like and cuts tracks in nature. Haiku can express not only nature, but human nature too. The name for  this kind of haiku is "senryu". Putting human nature in the foreground and nature in the background, everyone can see something of universal human nature in themselves or the world around.

The places that scare you...

I'm home…. Just in case you didn't know.. Keeping a low profile though... (mind you, pretty unsuccessfully) as it's damn hard to live in the UK, without a job, with your parent at the age of 35, without feeling somewhat uneasy…

Feel like this man in a box
Courtesy of www.experiencelife.com

Living in the same situation in India, however, is completely different, you're surrounded by like-minded people, you don't stand out as the 'odd' one, everyone's given up their jobs, the 'normal life' in search of something... you have no society telling you you're different, that you have to live in a certain way, earn a certain amount of money, 'settle down' (I hate that word 'settle' - I would be damn happy if the word 'settle' never had to be part of the vocabulary of my life.) The uncertainty of India is liberating,   you just know you're going to be OK there..but back here I feel the uncertainty…very...smothering. Anxiety, hovering around the edges, waiting for its chance to take hold...trying desperately not to let it.. My mother would kill me…

I went away to explore the places that scare me….I did this through my yoga practice and by living with uncertainty, so why now is it so hard to keep this perspective?

Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche used to say 'Live your life as an experiment'. Life is ever changing, we have no control over what happens around us or to our bodies, but if we live our lives as a controlled experiment, keeping your mula bandha on, or with complete awareness of our true-immovable self, whilst the variables around you are changing, you can observe the external changes without affecting the internal, pure you. But I'm still finding it hard. Clearly I have a low tolerance for discomfort. 

The complete acceptance of ourselves as we are is called maitri….a simple, direct relationship with the way we are. There are four qualities of maitri; steadfastness, clear seeing, experiencing our emotional distress and attention to the present moment. These qualities can be cultivated when we meditate, when we are mindful and relate to difficult situations in our daily lives. I'm not meditating per se at the moment, but this doesn't stop me from trying to cultivate these four precepts during my daily ashtanga practice. The practice, well it pure and simply reflects you as you are that day. The practice is my mula bandha at the moment, that immovable place where I can check I'm still functioning properly, check that I'm not letting anxiety take hold, but at the same time keep pushing and testing my boundaries, moving towards the places that scare me, but where I know I have control….well, at least for the moment…

Mula bandha….who knew it worked on so many levels….

Where are those places in your practice that scare you? Jumping into Bhujapidasana? Into tittibhasana? Breathing in kapo? Jumping into bakasana? Out of it? Do you take each of these postures as the perfect opportunity to take yourself to the edge? To the places which scare you? Do you ask yourself why you don't jump into bhujapidasana? Have you ever even tried it? If the answer is 'no' then, well, you should…the postures are there to test you, to reflect your mindset…they're there for a reason, not just to make the practice look cool! (They do though, don't they?…which is exactly why you should be practicing this stuff!) They are there to take you beyond your self-imposed limits...

So I'm standing here at this present moment, completely groundless… but knowing that everything is constantly changing, that I have to hang on in there and go a little bit further with the irritation of uncertainty, of not being given any satisfaction and whilst I'm not liking it at present, like a zen koan, accept that life is neither form, nor emptiness, but a beautiful groundless answer. 

Enthusiasmos and getting stuck...

Feels like I haven't posted about my practice in ages despite it going through constant changes. The fact is I'd been sick for 3 weeks solid and my energy reserves were getting dangerously low. The last two days I've felt like a different person, full of prana.

In class today Vijay told me after a painful upavistha konasana where I thought my adductors would tear apart (we are working on opening my hips), that I should still do a jump back (not step back - oh no!) .....but with enthusiasm... as without enthusiasm I would not be looking forward to the next posture. When Vijay mentioned enthusiasm I immediately thought of a line in 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'.

"The Greeks called it 'enthousiasmos', the root of 'enthusiasm', which literally means 'filled with theos', or God, or Quality." A person filled with enthusiasm doesn't sit around dissipating and stewing about things. He's at the front of the train of his own awareness, watching to see what's up the next track and meeting it when it comes. Enthusiasm occurs when one is quiet long enough to see and hear and feel the real universe, not just one's own stale opinions about it.

You have to care about your practice. It is important to try to practice with care as it is closely tied to quality. And as we know, things made without quality, frankly suck. "A person who sees quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who's bound to have some characteristics of quality." "Quality is the Buddha. Quality is scientific reality. Quality is the goal of Art."

The practice should be carried out with as little effort as possible and without desire. If you become restless, speed up, if you become winded slow down. You practice in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion, then when you're no longer thinking ahead, each posture, each vinyasa, isn't just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. You begin to notice things as they are. "To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top." So I've been told... I need to put more quality into my practice, every little detail is important. Vijay's very strict, but very wise.

So about getting stuck. I am so close to being able to jump back like they do in the films, that I can almost touch it...But I get stuck. I get stuck right at the point where I need to bend my elbows and shoot the legs back. I'm even hovering there arms straight, knees pulled in to chest, feet off the floor and Vijay's shouting 'bend your elbows! bend your elbows!' and I'm just there stuck mid-air willing my elbows to bend but for some reason the message from the brain is not getting to the arms...some kind of short circuit. 

The fact is I've not been bending my elbows for so long that it's a habit that is going to be hard to break. What I need to do is it in lolasana and practice bending my elbows so at some point along the line, like at about the 61st time of bending them, the new pattern will begin to ingrain itself into my muscle memory. Basically if something isn't working in your practice, preventing you from doing something, something needs to change. It may even be the smallest thing, like moving your foot 1 centimetre to the left. Mind you, it's easy to say all this, it's harder to do it. 

"Quality is not static, its dynamic. And when you really understand dynamic reality you never get stuck. It has its forms but the forms are capable of change."

Quality is something you can develop, it's not just intuition, not just an unexplainable 'skill' or 'talent'. It's the direct result of contact with the basic reality, which dualistic reason has tended to conceal. You can gain quality by simply practicing...enthusiastically!

Going all the way

The following notes are transcribed from a audio talk by Peter Levitt for Centre of Gravity. I fell in love with this short talk. It means so much to me. Makes so much sense. I wanted to share it.

Zen spirit is about not letting things push you off your path. Meeting ‘it’ whatever it is all the way. It really doesn’t matter what you feel, you do it anyway. ‘Intimately’ means all the way. ‘Completely’ means all the way. You’ll soon relaise that your personal life is not very interesting after all. You may be entranced by it but soon you’ll realize that you haven’t done anything with your life, then you’ll have to do something else, and do it all the way.

A lot of times the problems that we have in our lives are caused only by our refusal to go all the way, they are not caused by anything else, they are not caused by any conditions that come at us, they only come when we refuse to meet those conditions all the way. A lot of the time we say ‘I can’t do that’ or ‘that’s not convenient’, what we’re really saying is, ‘I don’t really want to live 100%, I don’t really want to be here completely, I want a vacation from my life’ – a zen spirit doesn’t have a lot of room for that. Because we do it once, then we do it two times, then we do it three times, then it becomes our habit, then it becomes our way of life then we’re at 90 years old and say ‘what was that?’ Instead of having engaged every single moment that we can. So we turn delusion into enlightenment by going all the way. We turn hindrances into opportunities, by going all the way. Its about going 100% completely. Its about not ‘buying’ our story but recognizing the preciousness of every single moment in our lives. And when something does come, like a 4million pound bear or something like that, its faster, its bigger, its stronger, its smarter, its wilder and we are not going to get away from it. The only thing that can be done according to zen spirit is to wrap our arms around that bear and hold on, completely, until we become one with that bear, and that is going all the way too. And sometimes that bear is pretty tough. But when you think about we don’t really have much of a choice. When I think about where the obstacles and where the hindrances come from, by and large they come from our own refusal to engage with our life. Not from any other place.

When we say ‘I will, completely’, something happens inside of us, we become alive. The parts of use that have been dead wake up. And our aspiration to wake up wakes up, and waking up wakes up, if we go all the way through. We don’t have to be specialist human beings to do that. We actually have all the equipment already, right here, and its our nature to do it, its our nature to be alive. If you look at yourself and ask honestly, is any of me dead? You’ll find the answer’s no. None of you is dead, all of you is alive, but some of you is sleeping. Show me a dead part of you. You won’t find it. It’s not based on the usual type of personal willpower that we do this, there’s something about catching what the true spirit of our practice is, that takes care of it. So it’s not like you're in a battle against life and your going to win, that’s the wrong understanding. You give yourself away completely to the spirit and the spirit therefore gives you completely to yourself.

You've gone all the way.