In the Beginning

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