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

Making the Best of Things

Some time ago I wrote an entry about how nifty people are because we have this incredible ability to take a bad situation and find something of value there. But no attribute is purely one-sided and I've been thinking lately about the flip side of this one. Unfortunately, our use of pure grit and wishful thinking to just make things work out is sometimes too successful and we find ourselves trapped in a cell of our own design somewhere we really don't want to be. The energy we need to just make the best of things is often less than the energy we need to change for the better. So, like the good little animals we are, we make the choice that requires less of us, and in the process we do ourselves damage.

I recently had a cold that took a tediously long time to resolve. I kept working during that time and just slogged through the days. While I was very aware of the feeling of my body working its way through the virus, underlying that I had a strong sense of general well-being and health. And, although I kept working while sick (don't try this at home, kids!), my body just felt strong and vibrant and I didn't feel too stressed out about the work. This experience was in stark contrast to how I felt when I used to get sick at my last job, where my body felt badly used and every virus made me feel beaten down. I point out the difference because I wasn't really unhappy at my last job, and, if I hadn't injured myself badly at one point, I might still be there today. In a job that I drifted into without any particular direction, a job that physically exhausted me to the point where I changed my other habits to accommodate my exhaustion, a job that didn't speak to me or challenge me, a job doing something I frankly thought was a waste, a job where I would come back from one vacation only to begin the countdown to the next one. Why did I stay there so long? I could give you a hundred reasons, but they all boil down to: It's where I was and I needed to find a way not just to be comfortable with it, but also to incorporate it fully into my own story, to make peace with being there, to care about it.

What is difficult is that it always seems so clear in hindsight, that choice we ought to have made long ago. I had a yoga instructor who would occasionally raise his hands to the sky, "Seventeen years!!" he'd cry, referring to his 17 years as a celibate monk. "Why?" he'd ask. I am thinking of this now because I just had another birthday which was the occasion of looking at the joy that is my life today, the places I would like to go with my life in the future that I am working towards, and at the same time looking back and asking that same question. "Why? Why on earth did I waste so much time?"

Yes, I know what you're thinking. You're getting all yogic on me and thinking about how we have to live in the now, and our pasts are what created us, blah blah blah. Whatever. And all kidding aside, I get that. I do. (Mostly.) But I think where I'm going with this is, how do we make the time that we waste less? When we fall into that trap of making the best of things, how do we know when we're doing it right? And how do we know when we're just trying to make our story end a little better by editing it a little?

When I was a kid, I thought that every book was somehow sacred. If I began reading a book, in order to show respect to the author and his or her work and experience, I had to finish it. It didn't really matter if I liked it or thought it was good, my duty was clear. Finish the damn book. I was well into adulthood before I broke that habit. I think as we get older we get less tolerant of wasting time. Or at least of wasting time with something that isn't fun or of value.

Lately in order to help figure this out for myself I've been just beginning to use a new tool that came from an odd place. A few weeks ago I decided to take the test to become a certified group fitness instructor. The process I went through will have to be saved for another day's tale, but one little piece of the information jumped out and made its way into my psyche in a way that I don't think was intended. In creating an appropriate class we were taught to ask 5 questions about the exercises we choose. The first question is, "What is the purpose of this exercise?" At first I wasn't very interested in the question, or in any of the others for that matter. In yoga, as far as I'm concerned, the purpose of the exercise is just to get all the parts of ourselves focused in one place and time so that we can really pay attention carefully. For this class, we were talking about purposes that involved specific muscles and bones and heart rates and body fat percentage–it just wasn't all that interesting to me. But I kept finding the question resonating around my brain. "What is the purpose of this exercise?" And I realized that using that question might be a good way to begin weeding out those things that simply aren't functional in my life, but that I have been making the best of anyway. The second question: "Is it doing that effectively?" Huh. Well, that's actually a really good question. Because if it's not, then why am I here?

I don't have any kind of final wisdom on the matter. I am sure that 10 years from now there will still be things I look back on and think, "Why oh why did I waste that time?" But I think being more mindful of asking those questions at the outset and really paying attention to the answers might help make that wasted time less.

copyright 2009 J. Autumn Needles

Packing the 10 Essentials

My last blog entry got me thinking, so if the warmth of hospitality is one of the essential human elements I'd like to have for my own and take with me on the trip, what are the other nine, to continue the metaphor? I'm not sure (and you know I'll be trying to figure it out), but I have some thoughts about my next desired element on the list.

When I was a child I was smart but not kind; as a result, I valued intelligence over kindness, probably because I wanted to be loved for what I was. As an adult, I am still smart, but I hope I have acquired kindness, so now I value kindness over intelligence, perhaps still because I want to be loved for what I have become. I am still the child I was; I can see the same traits I was born with in myself today. But I want to know that I can grow layers, get larger, be better, move outwards.

In reading another woman's recent blog entry describing the bumbling and arrogant attempts by a man to impress her, I could hear and understand her angry and disgusted perspective on the story even as beneath it I could hear another possible variation, one where a lonely man in his attempt to connect with a beautiful and desirable young woman blows himself up, makes himself more than what he is. If you hear that story, you have to wonder (I have to wonder) is this such a terrible thing, worthy of disdain? What I always come back to is that the only thing I can possibly learn from observing someone else's behavior and actions doesn't have anything to do with them and their motivations and inner life, but rather with myself and my own choices. Who do I want to be? And I believe I want to be someone who gives people the benefit of the doubt. And even if someone is really and truly a complete and irredeemable asshole, what does that actually have to do with me and my life, except for me to know that I don't want to be one? I don't know that person's story, but if I want to give myself some room to move in my own story I need to allow it for him as well.

I have spent a lot of time and energy in my life making pronouncements for myself, that then become my rules to live by. I am this, I am not that, I like this, I don't like that. I have decided that in my personal practice I will try this: Instead of saying "I do not like cucumbers," to say instead, "Any time I have tried them, I have not liked cucumbers." This does not necessarily indicate a willingness on my part to go forth from now on eating cucumbers and loving them. However, I realize that I frequently don't leave myself any room around the edges of these pronouncements about myself to, I don't know, move a little. My method is completely appropriate for a science lab: I have observed this behavior/preference/whatever in response to this stimulus in the past and therefore can predict it happening again in the future. It sounds reasonable. But I know from my own experience that I have learned and changed–my behavior, my preferences, my interests, my desires.

I suspect cucumbers will not make an appearance on my table, but who knows what may?

copyright 2009 J. Autumn Needles

Where were we going again?

I caught up with my father by phone today and got reports on how some of my younger relatives are doing in their lives. You know how we all have those funny little habits of speech? Well, I lost count of how many times the word "successful" was used by him, followed by a description of the work being done by the person in question. I wonder if I am described the same way in other phone conversations with these other relatives, despite the meandering path of my career such as it is. Is "successful" a circle that includes me?

Several years ago I had an odd realization. I have always wondered why, despite being serious of heart and disciplined in my focus, I never really have much of a direction at all. There's no inner compass telling me where to go next. Then I sat down one day and really tried to boil down the essence of what I value into some kind of statement of purpose. I came up with these:

I want to dance beautifully.
I want to love and be loved deeply.
I want to know god.

Um. Okay. Not a lot to work with in terms of, you know, an actual goal. And I don't think it would really go over that well in that spot on your resume where you talk about how much you want to work as part of a team. But this week I did realize that there are places in my life where I have reached a destination of sorts, something strongly intended by me and striven for.

I am a naturally shy person, an introvert. As a child I would have told you I didn't like people much; as an adult what I know is that I like them just fine, I'm just scared of them. I learned early on that it would ease my passage through this world to develop some social skills and I have labored mightily to accomplish this. What I originally did for my own survival I continued to do out of love, realizing that the fear I felt was felt by others as well and that I could help ease their passage, too. I was volunteering last week, picking out new people at a club and wandering over to introduce myself, answer questions, offer warmth and guidance. One man thanked me and said I had the gift of hospitality. Aah! My destination! Because I don't have that gift. But I have felt it in others, valued it and recognized its worth, and chosen to make mine by hard work what some have been born to.

Another compliment came my way this week, and again it was in an area that is not natural to me. As I collected and held close to me these acknowledgments, I realized that this is where I measure my success. I think about hiking and the 10 essentials you are supposed to have with you everywhere you go, no matter how long the intended hike, how many people accompany you, how perfect the weather. I believe my inner compass is less focused on where I am going and what to do when I get there, and instead points me towards the person I want to be as I travel and the tools I need for the journey. If I hone my 10 essentials, it won't matter any more what else I have or don't have, where I've been, where I might go, where I can't go; I am making myself my destination and I want the journey to be joyous and satisfying, successful for everyone making the trip.

copyright 2009 J. Autumn Needles