Still Thinking About the F-Word: You Know the One–Family

Yep, it's true. Three years after angsting over family and what it means, I'm still working it out. But I'm doing it over on my other blog!

New Post on My New Raw Food Obsession

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Thinking About Ego

Today after class a conversation with a student led me to thinking about how ego attachment has such a strong impact on how efficiently and effectively I am able to exercise.  I'll have to give that some more thought.

In the meantime, here's another blog entry for you, with yet another lesson from a student and an important reality check.

Aaand another!

Posted in both places, take your pick!  Body Love or Spicy Confessions

New Post Over There! (>>>points yonder)

I am still working out how I want to use each of my blogs, how much overlap I want to give them.  The original idea was to gradually phase this one out but, you know, I'm kind of attached to it, so I'm just not sure. It's sort of like a special note you get from someone or a comfortable shirt that's wearing out–what the heck do you do with it when it has lived its useful life but your nostalgia has taken up residence and refuses to leave?

Anyway.  Sigh. There's a new post over in my new Yoga Blog: Modeling Meditation

And a similar post coming soon to my writing blog, but from a slightly different perspective.  I'll keep you posted! (Yeah, I know. That was lame.)

Working with Reality

I teach several yoga classes at a local gym.  The classes are one hour long and they are all intended as all-level classes.  As instructors we've been given certain limits about what we're allowed to teach.

A couple of weeks ago I had a new student approach me before class wondering if I would be the regular instructor.  What exactly was I planning to teach? he wondered.  We chatted a bit and he expressed his frustration with being unable to progress in his practice by taking classes at the gym.  He wanted to do other poses–harder poses–but the teachers wouldn't teach them.  Would I be willing, if I saw the same people showing up week after week, to progress the class? Could I maybe give him extra pointers?

I offered my sympathy and had a few suggestions of my own:  Maybe he could take some extra classes outside the gym? Or if not classes, perhaps a workshop here and there or private lesson? If he knew the poses he could use extra knowledge from books or videos or online instruction to try some other things while in class.  The problem, I explained, was that these classes are intended to be all-level.  While I can certainly adapt my class to the people I see attending, I have been hired to do a particular job and I need to honor that.

Each suggestion I made he responded to in the negative. He didn't want to spend extra money on classes, his other gym had an instructor who was willing to teach more advanced poses, he didn't have enough knowledge on his own to experiment.

He was a nice enough guy but I was really struck by something in our conversation: his problem-solving was doomed to be unsuccessful because it was based on changing reality, rather than on working within real constraints. And I thought about how often I do that as well–rather than looking at an actual situation, I try to make the situation change around me and my desires. Problem-solving HAS to be based in reality or it's not problem-solving.

So, you know, this guy? He taught me a lot, it turns out.

copyright 2011 J. Autumn Needles

Sex and Social Science

(Cross-posted to another blog, Spicy Confessions from an Alluring Yoga Temptress.  You can probably expect a certain amount of overlap, silence and/or chaos for a while, while I try to get all my blogs in a row.  So to speak.  Bear with me.  I'm sure it'll all be worth it.)

I just tried (and failed) to read Sex at Dawn by C. Ryan and C. Jetha.  Back to the library it went!  I failed not because I thought it was wrong or badly written, but because frankly I just lost interest.  The question of how humans are programmed is just not all that interesting to me beyond a certain level, especially when I see so many sub-groups with agendas around the research.  Sexual orientation is a choice?  Choose differently!  Sexual orientation is genetic?  How about a pill or surgery to change it!  Humans are born to be monogamous–look at the evidence!  Whoops, change that; we’re actually born to be sexual sharers, creating social cohesion through sexual favors.

The research is important, yes, because understanding is a useful thing.  But ultimately we’ve got these brains to contend with, these brains that actually allow us to think about and observe ourselves, and make choices beyond our biology.  So it’s not that the research itself is a bad idea but what we often get up to with it, which is to make rules about right and wrong.  We also have the bad habit of picking and choosing the pieces of the research that work for us, and leaving the rest of it out.  So, for example, maybe I read Sex at Dawn and I love the fact that it looks like multiple relationships of both affection and sexuality are the thing for humans (Yay, I'm right!  I win!), but frankly I’m not so hot about the idea that we might be better off sharing our sexuality with everyone in our social group, as well as sharing the child care (Oh, let's just forget about that part, shall we?).  If I want to back up my own behavior, I’m going to have to be cautious in my reading.  Ultimately though what I'm really interested in is choice, and I want to make my choices based on what I think is important.

Want to be monogamous?  That’s fabulous!  Who cares that humans aren’t built that way?  It’s a great way to direct and focus your energy, and minimize your risks of sexually transmitted diseases.  Is it challenging?  Awesome!  Disciplined effort is a great practice and a useful skill in all kinds of ways.

Want to have multiple relationships?  Terrific!  Living outside the social norms gives you permission to experiment and gives you perspective, and empathy, for the outsider. Do you struggle with it sometimes?  Awesome!  What a great way to confront your inner demons by sharing with others.

Want to lie or cheat in your relationships?  Oh, not so fast!  Want to make rules about everyone else’s behavior because they’re all doing it wrong?  Whoa there!  In a lot of ways I think that life is a big experiment where we are both the scientist and the subject, and how amazing is that that we get to play around with all these big ideas in this fascinating body we have!  Really, that's what yoga is in a nutshell!  But pulling other people in as puppets in our little play?  Or trying to shore up our beliefs out of fear?  That’s just not playing fair.

Yes, do the research.  Yes, think about it.  But ultimately we all have to figure out what truths we’re going to live by, in order to do well by ourselves and others.

copyright 2011 J. Autumn Needles

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

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

First, Do No Harm

There are some things I just don't talk about much. Religion and spirituality fall into that category. I write about some of my beliefs here, where I am an anonymous author with an anonymous audience, but with friends and family, I don't bring it up much. I have a variety of reasons for that: I think it's personal; having grown up in Bible-belt Christianity, I am protective of my own brand of spirituality, and not interested in a battle over belief; I also believe that it is important to be respectful of other beliefs, so I keep mine to myself where I think it belongs.

At the same time, I struggle with that line of respect, both in the realm of religion and in all those other delicate human matters. Yoga is part of my spirituality; the moral and ethical tenets are part of my practice. I've spoken of many of them here in this blog, but never of ahimsa, non-harming. Ahimsa is the first of the yamas, the ethical constraints. It feels like an easy one to get a handle on, so it's often used as an example, and I have heard it so frequently that I remember it easily, where sometimes I have to struggle to come up with the others on the list. By drawing a line of respect, I am trying not to do harm to others. It makes sense to me to do this. But is there a point where I draw that line in too close, boxing myself in so that I am doing harm to myself by denying myself? Or allowing others to do harm to me by not speaking up? There is no tradition in yoga of turning the other cheek, so there is no reason for me to expose myself to harm from others as I quietly respect them. I also wonder whether by drawing that line I am in fact separating myself from them, creating an us and a them, out of fear of what their response might be. Am I fooling myself thinking that I am respecting "them", protecting "them" from harm done by me, when in fact I am making a little safe space for me, so as not to be harmed myself? How often have we said, "Well, I didn't want to tell you, because I knew you'd be upset." Who is being protected there?

And how do we define harm anyway? Where and when do we begin to do harm? Does it only count if it's intentional? Can it be balanced out by good acts? I had a friend in college with a melodramatic turn of mind (or, I don't know, maybe we all had that back then). She believed that by our very existence we were doing harm, and that we were morally obligated to remove ourselves from life. We had this conversation over iced coffee in her dorm room and I never had the sense that she planned to follow through on this noble goal. But she's right in a sense; we all do harm in all kinds of ways, large and small, recognized and unrecognized. If we see that in ourselves there is every possibility that we will live in a kind of paralysis, unable to take a step for fear of the harm we might do.

For me, there is no easy way to wrap this up and answer my own questions, but I have a few thoughts that help to show me the way. In yoga there is a concept of samskara, or mental grooves, ruts that have been worn in our thinking and in our doing. Yesterday, I boiled some eggs. One cracked and spilled out some of the white; the water boiled over and left a huge mess on the stove and the burner. I cleaned up what I could at the time, but the burner was hot so I left that for later. Later, I had forgotten about it so I put some water on to boil. The nasty smell in the house reminded me of the mess, and now the burner's hot again so I still can't clean it. Still later, my partner and I had a whole discussion about it as we were putting water on to boil again. I told her what I had done, we talked about avoiding that burner, I moved another pot out of the way so I could use a different burner, she walked out of the room and I stopped paying attention. In that moment, I slid into habit, putting the kettle back on that same nasty burner. It only took a split second of inattention for me to lose my focus and my intention.

I think the tenets of yoga are really about helping us keep the focus, to stay attentive, and not about right and wrong answers. If we accept that we are equally so small a part of the whole as to be insignificant, and at the same time so expansive that we contain everything there is, then we have both no power at all to do harm or to be harmed and at the same time all the power there is.

I have a tattoo on my shoulder of a fan with butterflies and a lacewing flying out. I rarely talk about the symbolism of the design and what it means to me; to most people, it's just a pretty thing. When I was a child, I felt a connection bordering on the absurd with people, with objects, with animals, and particularly with insects. I had a hard time separating myself. I would rage and cry when my friends killed ants, I created little bug hospitals with sugar water for bees who had strayed too far and bits of cloth for dying moths, and no insect could be killed in the house if I had anything to say about it. I felt a particular connection with lacewings. Gradually, I learned to separate myself, to harden myself, but as an adult I look back with nostalgia for my better impulses. My tattoo is a reminder to me to care, to keep caring. I can't know what my life or my actions will mean to anyone. All I can do is live the life, send out my actions into the unknown, but with care. T.S. Eliot wrote, "For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business." The trying is where we have to live.

copyright 2009 J. Autumn Needles