Making Up My Mind

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?

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

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

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

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.

copyright 2010 J. Autumn Needles

Good Pain, Bad Pain

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!!

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

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

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