Tuesday, September 16, 2014

On Surfing and Falling Hard

I very recently took up surfing. It's hard to call what I do now surfing exactly, but I'm learning and working up to a legitimate ride. Anyway, I'm hooked, and yesterday I was thinking a lot about why I've fallen for it so hard.

Having an intimate relationship with the ocean makes me feel powerful. And it's not just about being in the water, but being a part of the culture. It's as much about carrying my board and my gear through the forest path to a cold ocean with massive rocks lining the shore as it is sitting on the outside, straddling my board and riding over the waves, watching as they roll up underneath me. But the other reason I love it, is because it plays with my hold on control. Once I turn around to position myself to take a wave, I get to release that control. Sure, I can learn to balance and position myself on the board, but when that wave comes crashing down on me, knocking me off, all I can do is squeeze my eyes shut, hold my breath, cover my head and roll around in the white water until the wave is done with me and spits me out. That moment under water, in the swirl and chaos of the wave, is scary, but beautifully and completely out of my control. When I come up, I am tired and breathless, but not from fighting the wave...from the adrenaline rush of my surrender.

I make my way back through that chaos over and over again to experience the power and the release. I walk onto the beach, feeling breathless and exhausted, proud and strong like I won a battle, maybe lost it even. And it's not the battle against the waves I'm talking about, it's a battle against surrender and my ego mind. In that moment when I'm in the fetal position, rolling through the crashing wave, I'm not thinking about power or control or even survival. I'm just there, completely and utterly present in a moment, alone and alive. And when I come up for air, nothing around me has changed. The other surfers are still in the line-up, their backs to me watching for formed waves and waiting for their own ride to whatever it is they feel compelled by out there. I imagine it will be different at each stage of the game as my skills develop. Maybe one day I'll love the ride on top more than I crave the loss of control at the bottom. In the meantime, I'll keep increasing my strength, gifted to me by the sea with a wink and a nod, a lover playing hard to get and impossible to tame. Who, like me, fights aggressively and passionately to come into the full presence of its power. 

Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Car Alarms, Chaos and Meditation

Tonight a car alarm started going off as I attempted to sit in meditation at my studio. Surprisingly, it wasn't the alarm, but the silence in the aftermath of the alarm that was deafening. It seems my mind is in chaos with alarm after alarm going off these days. Alert! There's not enough money! Alert! There's not enough time! Alert! That man is wrong for you! Alert! Don't let that one go!

I've been in survival mode for so long that it feels like there will never be peace. Like there will never be ease or enough. My brain seems to weigh 200 lbs and my poor heart is weightless and neglected.

I have recently strayed from my personal yoga practice and gone to great lengths to stop the noise in my mind; replacing it with the meaningless drone and numbed out distraction of TV, which I'm watching on my little computer for the first time in 3 years. I'm exhausted and all of my endeavors seem increasingly difficult; sometimes even futile.

And yet, oddly, people keep thanking me. My students keep coming to my classes and one of them on his way out the other day, thanked me over and over and then asked me if there was anything he could do for me. My students say things like, "thank you for everything you do" and "I'm so thankful that you chose to come here." Community leaders and officials have noticed my enthusiasm to make a difference and make it a point to encourage me, asking that I please continue my efforts.

Even though I am in personal chaos, what I'm doing, what I'm trying to accomplish... is working. It's grown in that gradual and slow way that only something you're so close to can without your noticing it. But it's building and growing and the spiritual community I set out to create has a little baby backbone where there was once thin air. And somehow, in between making sure there were money and plans and paint on the walls and the right schedule of classes....I became a teacher. I became their teacher and they became mine. If all was lost tomorrow, I would be left here, miles ahead of where I started with more knowledge in the last six months that I would have imagined possible in a lifetime.

Yesterday I read this Deepak Chopra quote to my students:

     "Happiness is much more than an aspiration. Happiness is our true nature, our very source of being. When we expand our awareness within, we discover that there is no limit to our happiness. And as we grow in happiness, we can't help but share that happiness with those around us."

I explained to my class after I read the quote, what it meant to me. That we always carry our happiness within us, wherever we go, no matter what we encounter along the journey. Sometimes people or experiences come along to cloud that happiness, but they can never take it away because it is a part of our being, it is our source. It is up to us to remember, that when it gets cloudy, our happiness is still there. Even that there are endless opportunities to un-cloud that happiness if we can learn to take the responsibility of reaching out and grabbing them.

I'm happier in this challenging and meaningful chaos that I have been in my entire adult life. I've been carrying that happiness with me all along and it's been cloudy lately, but it's there and it's bright. As hard as it is, I need to make the effort to reach out for the opportunities to expand that happiness and reject any that detract from it.

Monday, April 7, 2014

Becoming the Heroine of a New Story

Tonight I went down to the sea. Night waves are so moving and standing before them, I can bring up every past experience I've had in their presence. When something is truly moving, you keep it with you. When you emotionally connect with something, you retain the memory as a vivid picture. I stood there in the sand tonight watching movies of kisses and fires on the beach, long walks and deep discussions. It's a somewhat rare thing to find yourself on the beach at night and maybe that's why it feels so powerful. But tonight, I was alone just pulling up pictures of the past and walking slowly in shoes not conducive to a spontaneous shuffle through the sand. But it was ok. Everything was ok. Even the stuff that isn't ok, was ok. I found an abandoned beach fire and sat on the warm ring of rocks surrounding it. I breathed in the scent of burning wood as it mixed with the fresh air and attempted to empty my mind of the relentless plans and logic going on up there. I tuned into the sounds of the waves, the crackling fire and I could hear the light wind through the tunnel of my down hood. I realized sitting there by the fire on the beach, that I needed a new story. In that rare state of nature-induced neutrality, I realized I have become a strong and compelling character in a past and irrelevant story. That was a scary thought, but more than scary, it was liberating. Guess what you get to do when you find out you're a heroine in the wrong story? You get to write a new one. You get to start from scratch and begin with chapter one.