Resistance and Malasana

Resistance.

That is probably the best way to describe what I have been experiencing these past few weeks since my last entry. As per my usual process, I will try to delve into the word to better understand what it is I'm experiencing.

Resistance, according to Merriam-Webster: the refusal to accept something new or different; effort made to stop or fight against something; the ability to prevent something from having an effect.

I seem to be in resistance mode.  My sense is that I'm trying to fight against the shifts naturally taking place this time of year.  If I think about it, it's a big shift.  We are moving from a time in which we are in full bloom throughout summer and into a time of shedding those dying blooms and retreating inward to strengthen our resources, our fire. But it doesn't feel that way.  It just feels like everything is drying up and blowing away from me. I feel like I have to work harder to see and feel the beauty of the world.

At the same time, the sun is present less and less.  She is fading through the changing angles and motions of the earth and I just don't like it.  I realize that it has to happen. I'm trying hard to embrace that transition, but it is not easy. I'm trying to be kind to myself as I experience resistance, but I can feel by body stiffen, brace itself, worry, fortify, and do everything I can to resist things I can't control.  Futile, perhaps.

Iyengar's Beautiful Malasana

Symbolic of this struggle is my relationship to the yoga pose, malasana.  Garland pose. Iyengar does this pose so beautifully.  But me?  I am the purple bear below trying to access the pose.  Except I'm not smiling. I get angrier and angrier with my body when it won't do what I want it to do.  I stiffen, brace myself, worry, fortify, curse, and stop listening to what my body wants me to hear.  What I know, though, is that the angrier I get, the more impossible it is to do this pose in an effective way.

I will say, though, that I had a moment of serendipity as I started this blog post, because I was looking for descriptions and images of malasana online.  I found a random blog called "five-minute yoga" (http://myfiveminuteyoga.com/411/take-the-five-minute-malasana-challenge/).  The post asks its readers to take the five minute malasana challenge for seven days.  I have been sort of doing this each morning--taking several minutes to practice malasana and get angrier and more upset with my limitations.  But it redirected and reminded me that the point is not to look like Iyengar, but to embrace my heavy-bear moments. It became clear to me this morning in my yoga practice that when I come to this pose, I stop feeling. It becomes more a matter of conquering, accomplishing, this pose.  Why, though? To feel good about myself?  What happens if I stop and just feel the pose?

What happens is that I truly experience the discomfort of my tight hips. I fully experience the fear my body holds with the idea of letting go.  Total resistance.  I realize I need to send my hips love and compassion so they know it is okay to relax and let go.  They do not feel safe in my brutal attempts at fighting my way into the pose and it makes the pose miserable. I can't feel where the tightness centers itself. I can't feel my body at all. I'm on the surface of my skin, bossing my muscles around and as a result, they resist.  They do not want forceable change.

Not unlike in malasana, my body fights against the changes that start moving me into winter. It's like I try to strong-arm myself into accepting the transition from summer through fall and into winter.  I sit at the surface and try to boss myself around and tell myself I need to just be okay and pretend that the world around me isn't changing.  So then my body resists enjoying fall and the release of the beautiful blooms. I try to hold on so tightly to some sort of forever summer and I know it is not sustainable. Yet, I often don't even realize that is what I'm doing.  I lose intention and no longer really know why I'm doing anything that I'm doing.  I'm doing things totally out of habit (even if it is a good habit). Or I do the same practices expecting the same results all the time. That is when I know I'm not doing any of those activities with intention and I can't reap all the benefits that I could.  Fall is the time of harvest. It is the time to reap benefits, but instead of reaping those benefits I find myself worrying and waiting and bracing for some storm to arrive.

Impending doom, as Brene Brown calls it.  I can't enjoy the moment, because I'm so afraid of some other shoe dropping or some bad thing happening to somehow reinforce all my negative talk. You know that talk when you convince yourself that you do not deserve to experience pure joy.  It is such a tender area for me. And this is such a tender season for me.  I need to remember that and be kind.  Therefore, I will take the seven day malasana challenge and practice it with kindness.  I will practice it with intention, reminding myself that it is time to shed the impending doom voice.  Or, at the very least, not let it be the dominant voice in my busy mind.

I hereby promise to report back next week on the outcome of this practice. I will spend this last week of fall holding myself accountable to the season and to malasana.

Grounding, Organization, Focus

As I enter into my third year of intentional focus on ayurveda practices, I am starting to find clarity in my work for each season.  The resonance of what I need to keep working on as autumn continues has strengthened over the past week.  

Grounding, Organization, Focus

Challenging practices for me in this season.  

What became clear over the past week was that my coping strategies for stress deteriorated.  I could feel myself fall into a vortex of self-critique and numbing.  Older residual habits that I've managed to avoid over these years.  And that is the issue.  I have out run some of those old habits, all the time fearing the moment they come back to dominate my life.  That means those habits are far from gone; they leave me reactive and at times responding in ways that are not always true to who I am now.

When I sat in that revelation for a few days, I could almost feel another layer of my older self peeling off of my body.  And what I realized was that I had to admit that those deeper fears of myself still had a pretty firm hold on me.  Bringing those fears out of my unconsciousness and into my conscious, intentioned self, I knew I needed to develop ways to handle that process with awareness and clarity, so I do go into reactive mode.

Grounding, Organization, Focus

Muscles I need to locate and strengthen.  

Grounding: To place on a foundation; to fix firmly; to settle or establish.  This is probably one of the hardest practices for me.  It is easy for me to loose touch with all that is beneath me. I forget to feel the earth. Attempts at settling down often produce greater unsettling. I can remember to ground in my yoga practice, but off the mat, it easily slips out of grasp. Yet, I know that in order to pay attention to my reactivity, I must stop and actually feel the ground.  Feel the world around me.  Feel the hardness of the ground. Feel the soft carpet tickling the bottoms of my feet. Feel the pointed tips of the grass between my toes. Feel my feet shuffling through leaves as I walk through my backyard.  But how do I remind myself of grounding in the moment? That will be my challenge.  


Organization: The state of being organized.  But what does it mean to be organized? I found an interesting definition: "to give organic structure or character to."  I like the idea that organization emerges organically, responsively to what is happening.  But not reactively. It means, for me, that the practice of organizing has to be done intentionally and with awareness. And even in the past few days, even the tiniest task to organize with intention has provided me calmness and relief.  Clearing out my dead and dried annuals and putting the planters under the deck provided the space for me to observe the way nature prepares for and responds to the changing seasons. Organizing my deck helped me embrace the end of a season of outward growth and welcome autumn's preparations for pulling inward. 

Focus: An act of concentrating interest or activity on something. To have focus on something, for me, means finding flow. Finding the zone.  Finding total absorption in something always puts me in a euphoric space.  I want to get in that zone with my research and writing.  Not simply to do the work in order to soothe some arbitrary ego requirement, but to feel the joy in the work.  I want to keep myself attuned to those spaces that bring me joy.





This is my work for the season. I have to stay awake and intentioned.  Focus, organization, and grounding. They all work together. They reinforce one another.  They feed and work on one another. 

Synchronicity: Where Kali Dances

There is a quote from Cixous that has stood out for me in my reading of her book, Rootprints. 

"What ties me to my elective relatives,
what holds me in the lure of my
spiritual guides, is not the question of
style, or of metaphors, it is what they
think about incessantly, the idea of
fire, over which we maintain a stealthy
silence, so as not to stop thinking about 
it. No complacency. Only the admit-
ting of the fear of fire. And the
compulsion to confront the fire. We
need fire." (p. 26)

I think of Cixous as an elective relative.  She is poetic, metaphorical, elusive, academic, but not an academic, and a woman who writes with her whole being.  Everything I strive to be.  

No complacency.

There is something in her language that aligns with the work I have been doing over the past year.  Interestingly, I have not picked up anything from Cixous since I taught "Laugh of the Medusa" about a year ago. I have not read Rootprints in quite a few years. She and I grew distant, but I see how her words settled into my unconscious, like a footprint, a rhizomatic set of memories of her words and metaphors.  Root. Print.

What blew me away in the quote were the lines: No complacency. Only the admitting of the fear of fire. And the compulsion to confront the fire. We need fire. This sums up the complex work I have been doing over the past year with ayurveda.  Facing fire. Facing fear.  

In meditation this morning, I was working with Kali.  My mind immediately took me to the place I often go to in my meditation.  I would call it my internal fire source near/around my third chakra. It's a dark primal space. There was Kali--dancing around and grabbing me and pulling me into her circular vortex. She was dancing around the fire source, but I didn't realize it at first. It was as though the fire source was camouflaged.  It was covered with dark gauzy cloth.  Lately, I've been feeling stagnant... Not stagnant.  I have been feeling myself wanting to revert to a place that no longer exists within me.  And Kali refused to let that happen. She, rather violently, pulled me into the vortex, which made me look more closely at the black gauzy formation.  I pulled it off and realized that it was my power source.  And there were red hot coals pulsing and emanating heat.  She made me stay with it.  Kali made me dance around with her and stoke the coals until flames started to rise from the pit.  Then I sat there shedding layers of myself and throwing them into the fire. All the gauze, clothes, masks, skin, that was inhibiting me.  It's wondrous to think about how all this can happen in 10 minutes of meditation.  But my mind took me there immediately. 

No complacency. Only the admitting of the fear of fire. And the compulsion to confront the fire. We need fire. 

Could Kali and Cixous be any more direct with me?  I don't think so. 

---------------------------------------------------transition----------------------------------------------

I've been struggling to understand the difference between synchronicity and serendipity.   I looked up each of the words in the dictionary.

Synchronicity: The simultaneous occurrence of events that appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection.

Serendipity: Supposedly, the first use of the word in the English language was by Horace Walpole in a letter to Horace Mann. He said he formed it from the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip, whose heroes "were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of."

On the surface, these words seem very similar to me. But for some reason, I'm more comfortable using serendipity.  Happy accidents. Reading the definition and history of the word, I have become more fascinated with it.  "Accidents and sagacity." I love that these two words aligned.  Training yourself, focusing yourself, putting yourself into the right mind frame to find the thing we were not looking for, but what we, ultimately, needed to find.  Following the rootprints down into something more.

At the same time, I know I often bring divergent ideas together. Things that seem to have no apparent connection align to bring new knowledge, new ideas.  It seems to me, that it is the cornerstone of creativity.  Opening myself up to things that seem unrelated.  One could say our lives are constantly moving and tangling up in all kinds of synchronistic potential.  

These are two words to think about more. They deserve contemplation, because I know they have guided me through some difficult moments. When I trust in the things that my gut--that space where Kali dances--tells me, I know I'm doing the right work.  I just have to keep focused enough to remember when I feel most distant and remote from my elective relatives (and myself). 

And just when I feel most distant from everything, something tangible arrives that grounds me back to this earth.  A solar wheel to remind me of the energy and power of light. And the energy and power of each serendipitous, synchronistic moment. 

Juncture: Between Roots and Flight

“And I was afraid. She frightens me because she can knock me down with a word. Because she does not know that writing is walking on a dizzying silence setting one word after the other on emptiness. Writing is miraculous and terrifying like the flight of a bird who has no wings but flings itself out and only gets wings by flying.” -Cixous

We are in the middle of the juncture between early fall and autumn.  

Right now, I do feel afraid.  I do feel myself walking on a dizzying silence. I think it's because I've been struggling to find the perfect metaphor for what has been going on this past week or so.  Perhaps it's because  I am trying to build my words upon the emptiness of time. I just haven't had enough time to contemplate all that has been going on.  I need that open space.  I need the blank page. I need to face the blank page and sit with the silence. The discomfort. The fear of flying.

Flying.  My dreams keep filling up with air and space. So much vata.  I have recurring dreams of flying into space and taking plane rides to new places that terrify and excite in equal measure.

“Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time.
Write yourself. Your body must be heard.” 

With moving out of the time of remembering my ancestors, I decided to return to another  family. My intellectual and emotional family.  Hélène Cixous is one of my divine mothers.  Her book, Rootprints: Memory and Lifewriting is one of my favorite books. And it has occurred to me that for the remainder of this juncture, I need to read that book.  I know she will help me find the right metaphor.  She is my mother bird nudging me out of the nest.   She was that for me years ago when I embarked on my intellectual and academic career.  It is time to return to her for yet another push.

Between roots and flight. That is the juncture in which I sit. A cross section of contradiction. 

"Wouldn't the worst be, isn't the worst, in truth, that women aren't castrated, that they have only to stop listening to the Sirens (for the Sirens were men) for history to change its meaning? You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing.” -Cixous

It's time to laugh.

His Locker: Unpacking the Gift

It is the time of pitru paksa, the time of ancestral remembrance. It is also the year anniversary of the start of this blog, Life in Seasons. This has brought me to a lot of reflection over the past week as I move forward in my seasonal work, as I think about heading into another cycle of this life of mine.

It has also been a time of reflection upon the professional side of my life, because I recently signed a contract for my dissertation manuscript to be published into a book. I spent the past few weeks rereading and editing the dissertation, turning in all the material just a few days ago. It was scary.  Revisiting the place where my professional life started was frightening and liberating--in equal measure.  It meant I had to sit in the place where it all started: children of Vietnam Veterans.  It is a knotty and dense place for me. A place where everything meets: personal, professional, past, present, hopes, and dreams. Everything. To revisit it as a person who has grown and become something so new was disarming.  Yet it provided a way for me to see how my hard work has brought me to where I'm at. Here.  Now.  As I write this, I can see why the past week or so has been... challenging.

His Locker

The photograph, "His Locker," is symbolic of a lot of what has been happening over the past week or so.  It is a haunting photograph. My father gave me this photograph quite a few years ago--back when I was in grad school.  I had asked for photos from his time in Vietnam and this one struck me as intriguing, undefined, yet full of meaning.  It was his locker.  His Vietnam locker. Until now I did not know what to do with it.  As I read my manuscript, though, I hit upon a section in which I analyze parts of Tim O'Brien's book, The Things They Carried.  Here is a section of my introduction:

"The Things They Carried focuses on one of the greatest hurdles in the process of remembering: putting traumatic memories to words. The quagmire of a lost past full of contradictory emotions, and the irresolution it carries, can (and often does) leave one paralyzed into silence.  O’Brien counters that silence through his disjointed stories that attempt to make sense of the things he carries. The book opens with a laundry list of things Lieutenant Cross and his men carried on their combat missions.  As we read the list of items, it soon grows apparent that there is a complex mixture of tangibles and intangibles.  With the guns, malaria tablets, and P-38 can openers, “They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing—these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight.” (O’Brien, 1990, 21). Thus, while language is necessary to express memories of the past, the stories of the past carry weight that goes beyond words.  Included in the stories O’Brien tells us are the interactions he has with his daughter. Kathleen has more than words to make sense of; she carries the weight of her own memories with her father.  Enmeshed in those memories are the love and turmoil found in their relationship. Language provides a skeleton, but the meaning, the flesh filling out the structure within it, comes from something beyond the words themselves."

For me, this locker carries all of the baggage and emotion that my father brought home with him--and what he brought into my life.  It is part of the gift that he left me. It is the ancestral legacy that I must work through in my own way, in my own time. Another excerpt:

"Walter Benjamin, via Shoshona Felman’s analysis, invites us to ponder the residue of a traumatic history.

What Benjamin attempts, in other words, is to transmit the story that cannot be told and to become himself the storyteller that cannot be one but that is one—the last narrator or the post-narrator. The trauma—or the breakdown of the story and of memory, the fragmentation of remembrance and the rupture of the chain or of the “web of stories”—is itself passed on to the next generation as a testament, a final gift. (2002, 46—my emphases)

The ruptures emerging from the breakdown of articulation is what makes trauma visible; the pieces being the gift handed to the next generation. For children of Vietnam Veterans, piecing together the fragments of remembrance is fraught with uncertainty; yet, it is the process of piecing together that transforms trauma into a space of insight, creating meaning in the crevices between what is known and unknown."

That locker holds so many stories, but they are fragments for me to decipher. A suitcase, shirts, canteens, cups, bottles, and numerous unknowns. 

My Altar

I also look at this photograph and think about how my father's aesthetic is similar to my own.  I like photographs that capture meaningful things. Thing that are rich with meaning, yet undefined, chaotic, and full of metaphor.  Things I don't want to forget.  I think of my altar photograph and can't help but think about the ways in which we are both trying to communicate moments full of emotion. His locker (altar) is very different from my altar. But I can see how he might have gone to that locker for retreat, solace, and to get through a difficult time in his life. It was a space full of transformation and growth. He saw value in snapping that photograph.  That moment meant something to him.  And now here I am working through that meaning in my own way.

I'm not sure if the publisher will use my dad's photograph. I hope they do.

This time feels appropriate as a marker of the transition out of one cycle and into the another.  This book work, along with the ancestral work I have been doing during pitru paksa, is the perfect set of sadhanas to close out this cycle--and season.

Kali

Lately, I have been experiencing an intense transition in how I see myself in the world. I know it might sound a little cheesy or strange, but something has unsettled within me. It is intense, not because there is some dramatic unraveling of my external life. It is intense because it is happening at such a deep and subtle level that it is only now that I can feel like I have some ability to articulate what is shifting around for me. 

Sadhana: a discipline undertaken in the pursuit of a goal.  The goal of sadhana is to attain some level of spiritual realization, which can be understood as enlightenment.  For me it is the practice of practicing and the practice of reflexivity. 

The Path of Practice focuses a lot on sadhanas involving ancestral memories and accessing the divine feminine. Both of these have been practices I have been working with in a variety of other ways over the summer (and less so over the past few years) that didn't initially have any connection that I could see with what Tiwari articulates in her book. It took me some time to realize that my summer of research in Colorado was very much a practice of delving into the past of my family.  In addition, as I read my fun books, they had a consistent theme: the divine feminine and how vital it can be for a woman to access that internal power.  The link between that work and what I embarked upon with Tiwari's book very slowly started to come together.

As I worked with sadhanas that emphasized Kali and moon cycles with clarity and intentionality, I was facing challenges in my external world. Mother challenges. Work challenges. And in the face of these challenges, I could no longer react the way I have in the past.  Something in the sadhanas left my old ways of coping and handling stress unsustainable. 

Kali

Kali: the Hindu goddess associated with empowerment, shakti. She is the fierce aspect of the goddess Durga. Kali is the goddess of time and change. 

There are times when everything seems to fall together. Align. In the past few months experiences have aligned to bring me face-to-face with a woman I know well: me. It has brought me to a place in which I have to confront what I haven't been able to see within myself. It has also brought me to a place in which I understand that if I want the life I dream about, I have to start seeing myself with the fierceness that Kali embodies. No, I don't need a bent sword or a necklace of skulls, but I do need to comprehend that I have the right to assert my own voice and that I do have important things to say, things that matter. The time for people pleasing is drawing to an end and I have to stand by my own voice--not hide from it.  It is time to assert my right to be me out in the world, and not try to hide behind veils of fear and insecurity.

I know in the past I have worked with Kali mantras and practices, but there is something different in the practices I have undertaken in the past month or so. There is a visceral, qualitative difference. It is not just words I repeat, but something that truly has an energetic quality. There have been times my body has not known what to do and I've been frozen with fear. There have been other times in which I have been braver than I thought I ever could be--to the point in which it has actually startled me afterward. But I realize I am at a point in which I can't turn around and run for the hills of my previous self.  I have to settle into this new self that is intensely, subtly, me. 

Doing the Kali sadhanas while doing sadhanas that draw me into memories of my past and my family has created a strange synergy of shifts. I know it might be hard to comprehend if you haven't experienced it for yourself, but I am not exaggerating when I say that I can feel the unsettling changes not within my perspectival thoughts, but within my tissue and bone. It's like my body is trying to settle into what it going on and my brain is an observer, waiting for the tissue to find its own grounding and new set of normalcy. I say this because I have had moving muscle pain throughout this month of Kali and family sadhanas.  Muscle tension in places I never have muscle tension. I had a muscle spasm the first week I started doing the family work. I'm sure these things could easily be identified as coincidence or I could find numerous logical explanations. But what is going on right now is not about logic. It is about trusting what is going on and continuing with the sadhanas. It is about listening to my body with multifaceted ears that can hear the rational and the visceral and the primeval with equal measure.