The Spiritual Principles

Four years ago, I started writing a book about the spiritual principles and practices that had crystalized for me over my 10+ years of studying and teaching.

Re-reading the principles today was painful in a life-affirming way. They are so true I feel them in my bones; truth aching all the way to the marrow:

Existence is cyclical. We have been through this before, and we will go through it again. This knowledge is both heavy and freeing.

As I watch the shock and disruption of WNC, I remember hazy bits and pieces of my own disasters. There are great clouds over my memories of Katrina — the wisdom of a brain that does not set down memories of things that would only hurt me later. Except for a few things that are seared in my brain like a branding: the rejection, revulsion, devastation scarred as if by hot steel.

But because I still carry those marks, because they now identify me for as long as I carry this body, I can be proof for someone else: You will make it. You will survive. It might feel like you can’t, or don’t want to — I know, because: me too.

And the cyclical nature of time means that it feels like it’s happening again, to me, right now. As if no time has passed I am kidnapped by the viceral memories of the smells, the sorrow, the insanity.

But then the Paradox rises up. I do no trust a spiritual teaching that does not emphasize paradox. Because I am strangely jealous of the folks in Swannanoa and Asheville and Black Mountain and Lake Lure right now. I am aching for their loss as much as I ache to be back there: the crystal clear knowing of what matters and how much doesn’t. The brotherhood of loss, and the family and connection and understanding of everyone else out there, knee-deep in the muck.

I cannot explain to you the feeling of fulfillment that comes from working together to rebuild something after a loss like this. Of knowing you are one of many, who are being pushed to their limits, learning everything they didn’t know about themselves yet. We do not see who we are until we are tested, and this kind of devastation is a litmus that everyone passes.

And that takes me to another key principle: You already have everything you need. It’s been here the whole time.

Every experience, every friendship, every ritual, every earwig, every dirty joke — you have everthing you need, right now, to get where you’re going. Our spiritual paths are not about finding or becoming someone new. They are about revealing who’s been here all the time.

Giving us the fortitude to sit with what is. To accept reality, just as it is, and to sit with it. To hold an entire world of devastation and hope in our hearts. And to do that, we don’t need more — we let go of more. We make more space. We drop the things that are unnecessary, over and over, breath by breath.

Pain and suffering are essential. There is no way out of this life without deep, heart-wrenching, gut slashing pain. Whether you are experiencing the wrenching yourself, or feeling it because of the pain of others near or far.

Pain is our call to awakening. Nothing less. If we were always comfortable, we would never go searching for meaning, or for something else that mattered.

And watching pain in others is so unbearable for most of us that we are compelled to do something about it. The number of people in the wake of Helene, and now in preparation for Milton, who are sacrificing their own hard-earned cash, disrupting their own lives, and are doing anything and everything they can to reduce the suffering of folks they will likely never meet… this is what pain and suffering do.

They draw us to each other.

It is the ultimate of paradoxes — the thing we want the least magnetizes us to what we need the most.

We need each other. That is the most important principle to me so far: You cannot go it alone.

We want to believe we are fiercely independent. We praise the lone wolf who can survive in the forest with a bowie knife, compass, and some chewing gum.

But we were not made to go alone. Isolation is a form of torture because our brains and nervous systems are wired to each other. Sometimes I think, “There’s only one of us.”

This is why when people say to me, after lamenting how sad or overwhelmed or angry they are at the state of the world, that “this isn’t my disaster,” I remind them: yes it is. Yes, It is your tragedy. Yes, it is your pain. Yes, it is your suffering and hunger and fear and confusion and numbness.

You are feeling the truth that we are all connected to each other. We only exist for each other.

Do not shy away from your pain right now — because it is a call to connection. It is a balm that only community can give.

We’ve done it before, and we’ll do it again, and it’s happening in the past, and the present, and the future all in this one breath: And I’m right here, with you, the whole time.

My Potato Story

I come from a family of artists. 

My grandmother was a poet. My (other) grandfather was a vaudeville performer and the he wrote scripts and produced in Hollywood. 

Mom and Dad met working at Arena Stage in the 1970s — at the height of American Regional Theatre. He was a producer and designer, and she was a stage manager. 

He gave Raul Julia his first professional acting job, and she toured to Broadway with Raisin — the musical version of Raisin in the Sun — among other things, before they found their way to New Orleans. (It’s a long story for another day.)

My mother’s sisters are both artists — one was a dancer and actress on Broadway, and the other was a visual artist.

We’re creative people. I come by it honestly. We sing in four part harmony when we have family reunions. It’s like that.

Why Do Yoga Every Damn Day

I’ll be honest, I didn’t intend to become a yoga teacher. I enrolled in teacher training very selfishly because I loved yoga, and I wanted to do more of it, and more deeply. I had no interest in sharing that with any of you, thank you very much.

Then, much to my surprise, it turns out that nothing makes me happier than teaching yoga.

I teach yoga because it changed me. It changed my body, but it also changed my perspective, my worldview, my understanding of myself, my concept of God, and my general opinion of wearing tights in public. With very, very few exceptions, my yoga practice has vastly changed my life for the better.

Now, let me clear: I don’t believe that I can change you, your perspective, or your worldview. In fact, I try to live and work under the assumption that I can’t do any of those things. But I do feel a great privilege of sharing the practice that has been shared with me, exploring and explaining it in a way that I hope is useful to you.

Because I do believe that yoga will change you.

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In January 2014 — after I quit my “real” job — I knew I needed structure so I signed up for an Iyengar Yoga Intensive at Yoga Bywater. All my favorite yoga friends raved about Heide, her teaching, and the practice. They also warned me how much it sucked. How much they hated waking up that early, and how hard it was.

I’ve come to believe that often the best things are also the worst things – so that seemingly mixed endorsement was exactly what I needed to be sold.

For nearly eight months, I woke up to practice from 7:30-9:30 am, five days a week. Ten hours a week of yoga changed my body, and quickly. I knelt with wooden wedges pushed into my knee creases, did backbends over wooden blocks, through metal folding chairs, and in ropes tied to a wall. I did handstands every single morning. I held downward facing dog for five straight minutes (eventually). I did 153,000 leg lifts. I did most of it without complaining, griping, or whining. Mostly.

The level of precision required in Iyengar practice is immense and impressive. After ten years of vinyasa yoga, and two years of teaching, I thought I knew some things about my body and alignment. In those eight months, my alignment was fine tuned — it was like before I was only spinning the Big Radio Dial to get into the general vicinity. Now I was spinning the Little Dial, getting clearer and clearer and clearer.

“My right hip is tight,” became “My anterior inner left groin is restricted, my posterior inner right groin is stuck, my right sacrum pulls to the left, and my piriformis is hypertonic.”  I can differentiate between the heads of all three hamstrings, and know which one is being pulled by my hyper-lordotic pelvis, and which one makes my knee hurt. I became acutely aware of which ribs were moving and which weren’t. I can now feel exactly where my 7th rib pulls away from my spine. My body awareness skyrocketed.

I learned the first four lines of the yoga sutras by heart. I chanted the invocation to Patanjali. I began to understand the value of this text by putting it into practice in my body.

But perhaps most important? Where I used to think I didn’t even enough “will power,” I now know my tendency is to work so hard that I injure myself. I never think what I’m doing is enough. I’m a show-off. And I hate how I look when I walk.

I learned that a teacher who sees me every morning learns what I can see about myself – and what I can’t see. She lovingly reminds me that “you think you’re doing it, but you’re not doing it.” She’s my accountability. She’s a balanced view of my practice. She shows me when to work harder and when to ease up.

And the difference between how she sees me and how I see myself is a direct measure of how much I still have to learn.

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A year ago, I started offering the same kind of short-form, intense practice in my own bhakti-infused vinyasa style. And I discovered how magical it is to watch people change in such a short period of time. To push people harder than they think they can be pushed, and also to empower them go easier on themselves. I do my best to see people lovingly yet honestly, and share what I see.

I cannot change you and I cannot make you see about yourself what you don’t see yet. But I can share what I see, lovingly and honestly. I can be a witness to your transformation. Sometimes, when I’m lucky, I can offer useful feedback that will enable you to change yourself. And I will always learn from you, I will always be inspired when you show up every morning at 6:30am, and I will always be grateful that you let me share the beauty of this privilege of teaching you. Every. Single. Morning.

If you have questions about practicing this way, send me an email.  Or bite the bullet and try it. We start Monday, January 4th at 6:30am.

I dare you.

 

Does Practice Matter?

“You get good at what you show up for.”

My teacher Mitchel shared this with us in my teacher training, and it has stuck in my craw ever since. It’s not just my craw – I’ve shared it with my students, and my friend Tracey Duncan even wrote a great post about it.

It’s a gem almost so obvious that it hides in plain sight: you get good at what you show up for. So if you want to get good at something, show up for it. Again and again.

Perhaps the more painful realization is what we’re getting good at through repetition. For me, it’s watching Nurse Jackie and hitting snooze on my alarm 5 times every morning. But it’s also showing up to teach, voraciously researching music for practice, and studying the human body.

The hardest part about this is showing up — instead of being partially present, or half-invested, to commit yourself totally to one task. In our society this is almost impossible. Phone notifications, emails, texts binging, constant noise of TV or radio in the background — how could you be fully present with any one thing for even five minutes? It seems almost superhuman!

Showing up asks us for humility. It asks us to come to a task – whether it’s washing the dishes or sitting for meditation – with an open mind. It asks us to participate fully and receive all the information that we’re being given. To show up, we have to see our strengths and weaknesses with equal attention. We have to release our expectation of what might happen, surrender our demands of a particular task. Two days ago, you ran three miles effortlessly? Today, just one will be a slog and a struggle.

Showing up requires we surrender our evaluation, because we’ll never fully understand why balance comes so easily one day and is elusive the next. In fact, trying to “figure it out” is just another distraction — our sneaky brain’s way of short circuiting the power of focus.

Animals are great teachers of showing up. My dog Bodhi and my cats are fully committed to everything they do. Watch a dog focused on a squirrel — this is the guidepost for practice — total commitment, dedication, focus; the rest of the world fades away. In thousands of walks, my dog has never once caught a squirrel. But every time he sees one, he is just as committed, just as dedicated, just as focused. He doesn’t lose hope. He doesn’t lose sight of what he’s after. He’s simply showing up to get that damn squirrel.

I aspire to show up that way, even though it’s incredibly scary. All my notifications and distractions are there because I’m afraid I might miss something: the perfect text from the guy I like, the next big media disaster about a gun rampage, a storm coming. I am reinforcing my constant fear that I might miss something, and somehow be left out, left behind, or left for dead. I’m afraid I’ll be left.

I undermine my practice by questioning, constantly, “Do I really want to get good at this?” or “Does it matter?” I saw a great meme the other day: the greatest question every artist asks himself is not “will they like it” or “will they understand” but instead “Does it matter?”

Does practice matter?

In the end, what we practice is irrelevant [sidenote: pick something you like]. What we’re really practicing is showing up. Committing ourselves to something or someone, dedicating ourselves to something bigger, and staying focused even when the going gets tough or it seems hopeless. To keep at it, keep moving, even when it’s uncomfortable or frustrating, disappointing or even painful. To stay in a relationship even when we’re terrified. To keep writing even when we think the novel is shit. Keep working, keep practicing. Keep showing up.

What we learn is that the JOY is in the practice. The fulfillment is in the commitment. We wake up in our focus. We transform in our attention. We show up.

Everyday Gods and Goddesses

Things are a little crazy down here in New Orleans.

We are hosting one of the biggest parties in the U.S. just a week before Mardi Gras, the other biggest party in the U.S.  Everything is a little out of control.  And now the tourists are coming.

And this party is here to watch two teams of grown men aggress each other for three hours over an oblong ball, which is also crazy.  It doesn’t even bounce.  And there are so many rules!  I have to admit, I’ve become quite the Saints fan in the past 10 years, and I know the difference between a flea flicker and play-action, but really?  Really?

And on top of that, our society idolizes these men.  It worships them.  They become role models for upper-classes and poor kids alike.  Their physical prowess is amazing, certainly. Their training and dedication is inspirational.  But god-like?

How often have we seen these players fall and fail and be human? Their humanity has expressed itself in scope from Michael Vick’s tremendous ethical lapse to our dear Steve Gleason who suffers with ALS.  We put these athletes on pedestals, leaving them that much further to fall.  It’s a delicate business.

So we must be cautious who we honor, worship, and devote our lives to.  (Mom will hate that sentence-ending preposition.) We must be thoughtful.  Here’s the thing: we can idolize anyone.  We get to choose in whom we put that faith. (Welcome, mom.) (She’s a grammar goddess, y’all.)  We can bequeath any person superhuman powers if we believe what they do is MORE than we think humans can do.  What if you decided to put that faith in yourself?

Just for today: how do you idolize yourself? What do you do that’s MORE than humans do? How can you live your life in devotion to yourself? What’s your superhuman power?

If it’s surviving traffic and crowds and patience, you’re in luck.  Because I think these next couple weeks are gonna be crazy.

Mantra:  Om Nama Shivaya

We honor Shiva, and the divine power inside us that transforms and transcends.

Playlist forthcoming.