Resistance and Easier Said Than Done

Something that's challenging about Buddhist philosophy is that many of the words don't really mean what they seem to mean because they are used in different ways from the way we use them normally. So we tend to misinterpret them and resist the lessons that they offer. Resist is one of those words. Detach is another. Those are but a few.

Recently I read something that said that suffering equals pain times resistance. It was an interesting article, but it didn't really do much for me at the time. I just kind of filed it away. Today in restorative yoga her intention was self study. Yin yoga is always about letting go and letting gravity take over. It's about giving in. Letting time and gravity do the work.

Recently I wrote about letting things be instead of letting go because sometimes trying to let go is doing work itself. It is effort and letting go is about no effort. All of those things are resistance. The teacher today talked about what is holding us back from letting go. I don't remember if she used the word resistance, but it hit me. She talked about sometimes our body is holding us back. Sometimes our thoughts hold us back and today with our self study we should try to figure out what was holding us back from giving in to the poses.

It made me think about the idea of suffering equals pain times resistance and the Buddhist idea that suffering is optional and suffering comes from attachment. We can't always get rid of the pain, but we can get rid of our resistance to the pain which creates the suffering. Here's where the misinterpretation of words comes in.

Detachment doesn't mean to be cold and unfeeling. It means figuring out how to work through it. How are we resisting. Denial and being cold and unfeeling is actual resisting and creates suffering. So feeling the pain is not resisting and allows us to move through and suffering can dissipate eventually. Denial and forced detachment is lying to yourself and is actually more attached. I love irony and paradox!

The thought of the phrase "easier said than done", Khris's hated phrase, wandered through my head as well. I thought about it as a way of resisting pain before it happens and therefore creating suffering in the sense that people don't try things because of fear of pain or fear of failure. They are avoiding pain. But they are suffering nonetheless because they really want the results of the ideas that are "easier said than done", but they are afraid of the work or of the pain that they perceive will come along with it.

I'm not an easier said than done person, but my resistance sometimes comes in the form of the idea that people don't understand me. I fear my feelings will be hurt because people don't get my choices. So I don't open up or share things. I don't ask for help. I fear being judged.

So what's the lesson from this equation? When we feel like we are suffering, can we examine where the pain is and ask ourselves how or where we are resisting the pain. The pain may not go away, but maybe we can find ways to stop resisting and help the suffering go away.

Fatigue

I read a Tweet the other day by a random stranger replying to a person who had posted about her ways of dealing with Fibro flares. The Tweet said that Fibromyalgia isn't real. It's a mental health issue. That's a common feeling among the public and even among medical professionals. Somehow people think it's all in our heads. I didn't want to be diagnosed with Fibromyalgia for that very reason. I wanted to have Lupus or something that actually has a test that says I have it.

But as with many other things in life, I can't worry about what other people think or what other people do or do not understand about me. I know what's real and what I experience. Khris said we can't let labels define us. And I don't.

For a long time I thought I had to accept my condition to move on with it. Now I try not to talk about it or use the label very often so it doesn't define me. But sometimes it comes and slaps me in the face.

I was in yoga today and I just couldn't do it. I had to roll up my mat after about 10 minutes into class and go home. I just couldn't do it. I got in the car and cried and went home.

Training has completely changed the way I experience the pain. My pain levels have decreased in ways I never imagined possible. I go out and exercise and go to yoga almost every day of the week. I'm so much happier.

Something that is harder to address and so hard to explain and so hard for people to understand is the fatigue. It's not just being tired. It's being ridiculously tired. All. The. Time. I never feel rested. Never. Ever. And then when it builds up, I can't take it anymore.

I don't have another thing in me. I don't want to move. I don't want to talk. I have to cry. My fatigue is like I'm a cellphone always on 15% right before the battery saver. I never ever get to the higher battery levels. I'm always running on the low levels.

And then sometimes I'm on the 0% and need to be on the charger for quite a while. Even after a night of sleep, I wake up at about 30% and as soon as I get ready for the day I'm at 15% again. The times when my battery turns completely off sometimes catch me off guard. I think I have a little left and all of a sudden. Boom. Gone.

I've started doing more restorative/yin yoga to try to add some slower more meditative movement to my workouts. I need to get back to reading, but my eyes are so tired, I have a hard time.

I need to try to make a more consistent sleep schedule this fall once the KBuddah gym opens and start to read and go to bed and get up at the same time and make a shower/bed time routine.

Summer is not over yet. During the last weeks of summer, I will enjoy the pool and other summertime activities and figure out some ways to work on consistency and helping my fatigue as best as I can. I'm looking forward to the gym and the yoga studio this fall and winter.

I don't really know what people mean when they say Fibro is a mental health issue, but I'm not going to entertain that. I'm just going to work with my own experience and my own coaches and healers.

Balance Comes From Roots

Balance is a great word and something people strive for in many ways. 

Yoga and training have given me completely new ways to look at the word balance Yoga and training really do give you lessons to take outside of the gym an off the mat! There are so many things that apply to life from the physical practice.

When we think of balance, we usually think of it visually like a teeter totter or a juggler. Keeping things balanced. It seems like it's tough because we look at the things that are up in the air instead of at the juggler.

Or we focus on going from one side of the teeter totter to the other as it keeps going up and down and up and down and trying to add to each side making it stay flat.

When you are training or doing balance poses in yoga, you realize that balance comes from the stable leg or the standing leg, not the one that's moving around doing all the fancy stuff. If the stable leg or arm isn't grounded and rooted, balance has no chance.

When you do tree pose, it's the standing leg that is the important one. When it is grounded and rooted, then you can move your arms into prayer position or above your head or do whatever variation you want that will make the pose look pretty. As soon as you start focusing on your arms, you will lose your balance. You have to focus on your leg and your toes and your gaze.

Maybe this can help with the idea of balance in life. If we have strong roots, the other stuff won't matter as much. So rather than focusing on going back and forth from work to fun to exercise to hobbies to whatever else is important and trying to gain balance that way, which is frantic and like running from one side of the teeter totter to the other and expecting it to be flat eventually if we add the right amounts of each on each side, we can focus on making sure we have the most important things holding us up and then all of the extras can be there whenever we want.

Save the teeter totter for the playground. It's not fun when it's flat anyway!

The important stuff to us should be in the standing leg, it shouldn't be the balls in the air. I know I mixed the metaphor, but I hope it made sense.

Sometimes Let it Be comes before Letting it Go

I've received that message multiple times this week. I read that idea somewhere a few weeks ago and I have had the universe reiterate it to me in the last few days. This morning the teacher even played Let it Be by the Beatles during Shivasana after yoga sculpt class!

So many times we get the message from ourselves or from others that we just need to let things go. We want to move on in our lives and we think we have to let things go in order to do that. We think we need closure.

Meditation seems to be about letting go of our worries and that seems to be the hard part. We think we can't meditate because we can't let go of our thoughts. But sometimes, it's better to just let things be than let them go. When we just let them be, we can move on before we let them go.

Sometimes we aren't ready to let go. Sometimes in trying to let go, we do too much work. We make more problems. We add, rather than subtract.

I learned this from my body in restorative yoga last night. In restorative yoga, you find the pose and then you sit with it for several minutes. You are supposed to let go and surrender and then let time and gravity to the work. You are not supposed to do any work.

But when you try to let go, you are doing work. So I remembered the idea of let it be. I just let my body be, even if it didn't feel like it was letting go. Even if it felt a little strained in places. I just let it be. Then I let time and gravity do its thing. If I kept trying to let go, I would be fidgeting or thinking too much. I'd be doing work. I decided not to do that. My body let go when it was ready. In some poses, it was never ready. Time didn't have enough time. But that's okay. In some poses, it really let go.

There is one pose that is a real wonder. It is a most uncomfortable pose for restorative yoga. Your arm is outstretched. Your shoulder is against the floor. Your body is twisted and your foot is on the floor across your back. Time and gravity does its thing and although it's not relaxing in the least during the pose, when you come out of it, somehow you feel the most relaxed you've felt in your entire life.

I need to remember this. When there are things I need to let go, I can't force myself to let them go. I can't rush time and gravity. I need to let them be. They will go when it's time. I can let them be and move right through them. I don't need to wait for them to be gone in order to move on. I don't always need closure. I can live with loose ends. I can be uncomfortable. I know how.

Stay woke, Peppermint Patty!

My yoga teachers over the years seem to always pay attention to me. Maybe they have the gift of making all their students feel special, but I really do think I get seen in class along with other woke yogis.

I am having fun using that slang term, but it works in this context in many ways. I was talking to Khris after training today about yoga and training and form and listening. He mentioned namaste and energy and he said my yoga teachers feel that.

He said they feel my energy and that I'm  listening. As soon as they see and feel that I'm there to participate and receive, they give back. When they see that someone isn't listening or really wanting to get it, they give back the same energy.

That really hit me. He said yoga teachers in particular, in addition to trainers, give really detailed and specific audio cues to talk students through form and movement in order to get them to pay attention to really subtle things that make big differences in the poses and helping with safety and results.

The teachers can tell who is serious about their practice by who makes the effort to listen to those cues and attempt to make those adjustments. Those are the people who get their energy.

This was very interesting to me. I've seen so many students in yoga classes who, no matter how many times a teacher will say hips forward, will still turn. Or who will compromise their form so they can touch their toes and look cooler or feel like they are keeping up with the others, even when the teacher says just touch your shins if you're back can't stay straight. And I wonder why the teachers don't help them more. But it makes sense now. The teachers see they aren't listening.

This made me think of my own teaching. So many teachers focused so much on the students who didn't care at the expense of the students who really paid attention. I wasn't one of those.

So many teachers used to brag about not letting students sleep in class. I let them sleep. I wasn't going to spend my energy on kids who weren't ready to learn.

I would of course talk to them after class and let them know I was there to support them and help them when they were ready, but I wasn't going to hold up the lessons to keep giving energy to them when I had kids who were into the activity. I rewarded the kids who were into it.

That's what my yoga teachers and my trainer do. They give back more energy to the ones who give the energy to them.

So Peppermint Patty, you have a lot of support waiting for you when you wake up and are ready to listen and give your beautiful energy to the people around you! Stay woke!

Training Anniversary

This is my second action anniversary of the year. As I said in my first action anniversary post, I'm not a big anniversary or celebration person, but I am going to reflect a little bit. My first action anniversary was deciding to lose weight in general. I decided I was going to do it and I decided to address eating and not worry about exercise at that time.

I had done it the other way around so many times and I was in too much pain and too tired at the time to even try it with exercise. I was rebelling. But I was also very committed and very nonchalant at the same time.

I knew it was going to happen and I knew it was going to take time and I didn't care. I wasn't in any kind of competitive mode and I wasn't going to allow myself to get frustrated. I was in the perfect frame of mind. This wasn't going to be a short-term project.

I was in the right frame of mind, but my mind could never have imagined the places that my frame of mind was going to allow me to go. I was seeking to be happier. I was making my environment very minimalist to allow me to keep it neat and clean without getting overwhelmed or overtired. (Little did I know that eventually I would have to get rid of all of my clothes, not just to organize and get rid of old things and things that didn't serve me anymore, but because nothing fit me.)

I was feeling happy about having lost 40 pounds last summer and I was ready to get moving and exercise and do some yoga. I didn't think I would do anything strenuous. I wanted to get out of the house. I wanted to have some fun. I wanted to feel a little better.

If you've read any of my blog you know that I met my trainer that way. It was a fluke. I showed up to Blast Fitness, which I had joined online months earlier because it was cheap and they offered some classes, including yoga.

I had gone to the yoga studio, which I loved, but it was expensive. I figured if I could get a few classes at the cheap gym, I could stretch out the ones at the studio. And maybe they'd have a step class or some other class I'd like at the cheap gym.

Well, I showed up one day at the beginning of August with my yoga mat and there was a sign on the door that said the yoga teacher quit unexpectedly. So I sat down at the desk to get my ID card for the future and they brought Khris over for a free personal training assessment.

Oh shit was my first thought. I do no want a personal trainer. I can't afford it. I don't want it. I don't want someone telling me what to do or telling me that everything I do is wrong. Crap.

Well, he talked to me and he was attentive to my muscular knots and did some stretching and found every knot in my body. Mostly he talked to me and there was just something about him that told me that I needed to do something that I don't ordinarily do. I needed to do this. I said, sign me up. I knew it would give me a structure for the next 2 months.

It was twice a week and at that time, I did just those 2 days and I rested the remainder of the week. It's hard to remember now, but I was still in a lot of pain. I still wore gym shoes with orthotics because my heels and my arches were so bad. I remember crying at home from emotional releases from the muscles. I remember being worn out from just 2 days a week.

I also remember at some point that I just didn't feel the same pain in my muscles anymore. I don't remember when, but at some point I felt confident enough in my feet to buy Nike gym shoes instead of orthotic gym shoes. I had been getting cortisone injections in my heels at least twice a year for a long time because I could barely walk on my feet. At times it felt like I was walking on crushed glass and my calves were so tight from the arches that my steps were like a grandma.

I remember getting up from doing sit-ups or exercises on the floor and I could get up! It used to take me at least a minute to get up from the floor. Sometimes I would need to use a table or a chair for help. Sometimes I had to have people help me. My students used to help me up from my chair sometimes.

I could go on about how it used to be, but let's get to how it is now! I'm still tired. I still have some pain. (Oh, my back! )
But.....

I feel skinny! I feel like I can wear jeans and a t-shirt and not look like a blob!!! I can take a shower and not cry! I love yoga again! I can exercise 5-7 days a week! I can get up off the floor easily! I love eating good food! I never have digestive problems! My muscles never radiate aches the way they used to like a Fibro person would understand. The pain is deep under there; if I push, my muscles hurt underneath, but I don't ache all the time!!

I love to exercise! I am happy! I know how to rest so I can kick ass and feel good enough to kick ass again.

To Khris:

Thank you for helping me to see a better me than I knew was here. You have a special gift. You know how to challenge and push and still be compassionate and kind. You knew how to read me and knew what I needed. You were always genuinely happy for me when I expressed my gratitude and my emotion about how much you've changed my life. Thank you for being my cheerleader, my friend, my hero and my trainer.

I look forward to creating new intentions as we start another year together and I can't wait to see what magic and surprises await!

Mandalas and Detachment

The word mandala has shown up twice in the past few days so I figured it has to have some significance beyond even where it showed up. I saw an article about how cities are fractal mandalas when you look at them. Then in yesterday's yoga class the teacher said she was using the mandala this week during all of her classes so the transitions would be a little different than usual.

She talked about how the mandala was essentially a circle and that it was considered perfect because of how things were equidistant from the midpoint and all that. And how we are complete and perfect as we are. Her mantra is that practice makes progress; we are already perfect.

Our transitions brought us in circles around our mat or we rolled in circles on our body and we ended the practice where we started, making a circle. She also talked about the Buddhist monks who make sand mandalas and how they spend hours and hours creating beautiful mandalas just to have them swept away by the wind once they are finished.

That the mandalas themselves may have been blown away in the wind, but the intention, the beauty that was created would never be gone. And that was how it is on our mats. We spend time and intention in our poses. They don't last, but the intention and what was created doesn't disappear because it's over.

It's a good lesson about impermanence and that impermanence is not to be mourned. When we understand impermanence, it makes the present moment all the more precious.

Another interesting coincidence is that it's National Coloring Book Day on Twitter. Mandalas are popular in adult coloring books now. A connection I thought of is that the circle is the same in all of them, but the insides are different and have twists and turns and curves and lines that create a beautiful and peaceful chaos. We are all perfect and complete. And our chaos can be beautiful and peaceful on the inside if we relax and focus on the present moment and detach from the outcome. Focus on the process and not the results.

When you color a mandala, you color tiny bits of it at a time. You don't usually worry about the final picture. You pick a color and start coloring little bits of the design. No matter which colors you choose, it will usually turn out beautiful. Sometimes people choose similar colors. Sometimes people choose colors that don't seem to go together at all. But the finished mandala is usually wonderful because you don't focus on the outcome as you color.

Another reminder of circles comes from my favorite show and character: Morgan Jones quoting Eastman on Tbe Walking Dead. It's all a circle and everything gets a return. I don't do Aikido, but I love yoga. I like wearing my KBuddah wrist bands to yoga. They are circles. I will try to use them as a reminder to detach. To be present.

The yoga teacher that I had yesterday was my yoga teacher today for 2 classes. I've had her for 3 styles of yoga now: sculpt, hatha, and restorative. She is my favorite yoga teacher since Jenny from Lifetime. I have liked most of my yoga teachers, but this teacher has made yoga really fun!

That's another reminder of the mandala. It's just fun. When you are present on the mat it's fun. If you fall, you fall. It's better to fall and try something than to not try it. I love trying crow any time they give you a chance. I enjoy balancing for even a split second. We tried rolling up to a flat footed squat. I tried 5 or 6 times and I never got there. But I tried it and it was fun.

She is like Khris. She has challenged me more and I've pushed more in really subtle ways and seen really interesting improvements from specific cues and adjustments. And she has been really compassionate and helped me soften and care for myself.

I understand the zen garden more now. I gave Khris some kind of water painting chalkboard thing once. I understand that concept more now, too. It's an exercise in detachment. I always understood the meditative idea of the creating part, but I like the idea of the impermanence part.

You can't get attached to whatever you create because it won't last. The sand will be raked away or the water will evaporate. You have to enjoy it while it lasts. It also allows you to feel freer to experiment and explore your creativity rather than get so paralyzed by fear of how it will turn out. Knowing that it's not meant to be something that needs to be saved forever gives you more space. More freedom. Permission to make mistakes.

I might have to get myself a mandala coloring book.