"To begin, begin."
William Wordsworth
A lot of students hear me say over and over that the heart of a sustainable and meaningful (Yoga) practice is consistency. Through consistency, we gain traction, and with traction we (re)gain the solid ground we need to take the next step.
Dabbling won't do it. And a lot of us dabble.
(I know, I was a dabbler for about 12 years of my practice before there was a reason--a WHY--to dig in and get consistent).
If you are erratic and inconsistent, you get erratic and inconsistent results.
But we can be a fickle, scrolling, swiping species, no?
We tinker, we shop around, and we are led by the overdeveloped consumerist muscles of Liking and Not Liking, skillfully avoiding what makes us uncomfortable or might challenge who we think we are or need to be. And the truth is, you can do a lot under the banner of "yoga," a word that has become paradoxically peripheral and hyphenated as the dilute descriptive add-on to just about any activity you can come up with. Just add "yoga."
But it doesn't really work that way.
A lot of what I witness out there isn't actually, de facto, cultivating the experience (the embodied, lasting, transmitted, felt experience) of Yoga for people. Meaning, we do an awful lot we call "yoga" that may or may not actually cultivate Yoga. Some folks practice in ways that actually reinforce and reify the pattern that is causing their greatest suffering. Some people have practices that mire them ever further in straining and striving to be something, as though they aren't something already.
And this is just a good, solid teaching to keep in mind. What you DO are techniques and practices that are designed to invoke, provoke, and evoke whatever is blocking your freed experience of your whole, fine self. You ARE Yoga. What is in the way of that becomes the focal point of a lot of formal practice. As TKV Desikachar famously, said, "Yoga is 99% waste removal."
While many people are drawn to Yoga practices and other traditions as a way of fostering or navigating transformation, the majority of us more or less stumble into a class as a novel experience or because someone encouraged us to try it or because we read something somewhere about the benefits. This is the entry point. And the entry points are infinite (Read: each individual has a myriad of portals through which they might step into a practice that matters. Repeat: there is no one way.)
And, for equally infinite and legit and personal reasons, people also lose interest, lose steam, lose stride, lose rhythm. They stop practicing, stop engaging.
But, hey, this isn't just another call for commitment or dedication for its own sake or the sake of some future salvation or effect. After all, (and most especially these days in the revolutionary and revelatory context of crumbling hierarchies and a robust calling down from the pedestal those who abuse and use power to create a following), mere obedience and memorization/repetition of someone else's method or experience is hardly transformative in an empowering, personal, lasting sense.
And it's that lasting sense, the longevity of the charge, the sustainability of the effect that most interests me here.
People drop off from regular practice for lots of reasons, but one might be that the charge doesn't hold. There are a million ways to get high, but until you find a way to sustain a sense of WHOLE, it can all feel very unsteady.
In my own experience, the practice of actual Yoga really began when the sudden death of my father pulled the proverbial rug out from beneath me. Suddenly, in the span of one phone call, one utterance ("Dad is dead"), everything that had felt certain and predictable and stable had irrevocably and undeniably shifted.
The world tilted, and so did I.
While I had dabbled in various practices, styles, methods, and brands of yoga, it was clear that the experience of that--embodied, real, lasting sense of wholeness--was not kicking in for me when I most needed it.
But, the practice did.
That is, I actually began to take my practice very seriously. It went from 2-3 weekly classes to daily practice in the grass, on the dining room floor, in the early morning, in the middle of the night.
Because nothing else felt stable. Because it was the only time, for months and months, I felt simultaneously present to what I was actually experiencing AND able to feel and digest and come into relationship with it (vs numbing it or denying it or sublimating it or compartmentalizing it).
The "what" was there. I practiced Yoga. Or, more honestly, I practiced techniques and methods that may or may not lead to the experience of Yoga.
Only, now, I was practicing from a very different "why." And that shaped a very, very different HOW.
I have, throughout the years, described it as a lifeline, an anchor, and solid ground. I would say, "my practice keeps me tethered when the shit storm around me is blowing hard and without pause." It was the one thing I could do, every day--no matter the time or setting or temperature or whatever other external conditions--to feel into that part of me that wasn't in so much chaos. Experiencing myself as the actual harmony of my breath and body (rather than the conflict of that) became daily medicine.
It was a way of feeling into a kind of orderly, wise, consistent, steady place within when the surface of me felt so out of order. I wasn't interested in achieving something or perfecting something. It was just a practical means to drop me into my life as it was, actually. My life as it really was. (Sidenote, this isn't to say I haven't ALSO practiced to perform, achieve, strive, and master. I have. I have and will continue to write on those experiences, too. But this is already so long and clunky, and really...not the point for today).
Like most people in sudden and shocking grief (the first of many losses, we learn with that first blow), my horizon line and sense of center had likewise moved in ways that disallowed a simple "return" to what was (who I was, what I was doing). The shape of things had changed, and so I encountered the implicit existential crossroad: Do I forcibly insist on the old form that no longer reflects who/what/how I am for the sake of external continuity (and a kind of security)? Or, do I take a new shape that has no guarantees, but is guided by something deeply continuous and stable?
When the energy shifts, so too must the form. This is birth, this is death, and this is Life. As it actually is. We can come into direct relationship and intimacy with that, or we can try to outrun or hide from it.
Within a few years, my marriage, home, and career had all given way to an arguably more authentic experience of myself. There was who I had become (through time, culture, expectation, projection), and who I was after the ground shook. And in that process of unraveling the old education of who I thought I should be, I found a way to drop into the original wisdom of who I am, really.
Which makes it all sound very easy and smooth, but it was anything but. It was scary, messy, hard. I went from stable and relatively well off to broke and uncertain and doubtful. It was an unspooling for a long, long time before the weaving took shape of any substance or pattern. I have written a lot about that experience (which is, arguably the ultimate "why" behind the "what" I do and the "how" for the past 15 years). The point here is that the context of my practice shifted dramatically, and that is when the content began to have an actual meaning to me beyond a thing I dabbled in. My context gave meaning to my content. When I had a reason to really pay attention to how I was feeling and dealing, I did.
So, about consistency.
This morning, I was reflecting on why I am so dedicated in and to my own practice.
Notably, I am not dictating what that practice may be or look like.
And it occurred to me that one can be consistent in a practice for a lot of reasons.
"What has kept ME consistent?" I scribbled and asked myself this morning on an old note pad.
"REALITY," I wrote in all caps as a response.
Well, what the hell does that mean? (I took a good long walk in the woods holding that second question, trust me. And I am still working it out. Thanks for reading along as I wade through it.)
Here is what that means to me today.
Regular practice has given me the direct means to engage with life as it is. Not as I want it to be (I rail against, fantasize, wish, hope, expect, project, and dream like a champ). Not as I think it should be. Not even as I think it could be, though it's imperative to share that I believe we are more effective and potent in our actions when we are in responsive relationship vs reaction to life. When we are able to be steady and present to what is, we have a far more powerful perspective and influence on what will be.
I practice regularly so that I can be in actual intimacy with my life in all its gory glory--the beautiful, the terrible, the gut wrenching, the heart breaking, the awe inspiring, the nerve wracking, the illuminating, the galvanizing, the bland, the disheartening, the idealistic, the obligations, the shocks, the discoveries. All of it. All the ordinary, actual moments of my life.
It takes a kind of effort to remain more naturally established in something other than the ever-fluctuating emotions, reactions, curations, and interpretations of my experience. In the cacophony of our consumer conditioning, it's hard to hear ones own truth and know it as such.
As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment." This is what practice is for me. It's a way of clearing the static and clutter and reactivity and nervous system stimulation and endocrine system disregulation and pranic disturbance so that I can just feel into who and what and where and how I am. It gives me a way to sweep the space of all the accumulated experience and just be more clearly and more intimately present to myself and all my relations.
Having a regular, accessible, direct means for experiencing my breath-body-spirit-mind gives me a way to touch into what I might call the true center of my being, my center of gravity (which I often say is where we take ourselves most seriously in relation to what knocks us off balance). Having that sense of center is crucial, because it is what allows me to be ACTUALLY present to all the magnificence and fragility and tenuousness and fullness of reality (not just standing there, nodding my head, but meanwhile crafting a response or otherwise checked out). It allows me to be in actual relationship to what is happening, and therefore more resourced to deal with it.
Consistent practice gives me the traction to find a little solid ground beneath me when the worlds shifts in unkind and scary ways.
We are so often hijacked from our actual intimacy with life by messages and sensory stimulation that convince our nervous systems that we are not enough or not safe, so it takes a practical accessible means--what I am calling "practice"-- to free oneself from that patterning and drop into ourselves as part of the world.
So convinced we are that we are apart from what we need, we don't always hear the guidance that comes from just being in relationship to what we have. Especially when that guidance is actually asking of us to step into the unknown, the scary, the not-yet-shaped, the uncomfortable. Especially when the predominant motivation we have as consumers is to stave off the unknown, the scary, the not-yet-shaped, the uncomfortable.
I don't practice to evade what is hard. I practice to be in relationship with what is hard (and lovely, and temporary and ancient). In fact, I would argue that Yoga practices will stir up and reveal a lot that isn't super easy to be with. Perhaps this is the other reason a lot of people just dabble and distance themselves; they feel too much of that reality. And unless you are resourced to digest and process what you are experiencing, that flow can feel like a flood. If you aren't equipped and resourced to digest it all, you won't.
So a lot of our strategies become versions of fight, flee, or freeze. We grip harder at what we have known and resist what is asking of us to know differently.
Yet all living things grow and change.
All living things are in direct and actual relationship to the conditions that demand and nurture.
The phone call is coming for us all. That one moment when things can and will shift so irretrievably and drop us into reality in a way we haven't yet measured. And it can really help to have the means to know you are safe, okay, resilient, enough, whole, and capable. It can really help to have the musculature of your wholeness kick in before the story of brokenness has another recitation in you as you.
Which brings me back to the how and the why.
I say, be consistent. Stick with it. When it's hard. Because it's hard. When things get stirred up. Because things get stirred up.
Don't just dabble and lose interest.
If you stray away from your own practice (the WHAT), don't assume you can't return.
As Wordsworth said, "To begin, begin."
And if you don't think it's relevant, and you are saying, "that was just something I did once," don't chalk it up to a phase.
Well, ok, DO that--but if you lose interest in the surface of what it looked like, try not to lose interest in the reason for what you did. Stay curious about yourself and who and what you are (in truth, as my own teacher Mark Whitwell reminds us all, you are the beauty, intelligence, function, and wonder of the cosmos). After all, if you aren't curious about who you are, who will be?
And if what you are doing regularly in your life is convincing you otherwise, maybe a consistent practice of BEING that will help.
But it helps to clarify how and why.
We can be disciplined to garner validation and attention.
Or we can become disciples and caretakers of our own sacred experience.
Contrary to the fraught and shitty Cartesian perspective we have inherited, there is no separation of mind-body-breath-spirit. In fact, Yoga could be seen as the practical method for actualizing that integrated truth in a real way. It's the actual means of synchronizing the breath, the body, the mind, the awareness with what is.
Ok, so it's all one unified thing...why don't we FEEL that?
Well, right? Why WOULD you?
We are steeped in messages and industries that profit from our own dissociative stories of brokenness, fragmentation, and deficiency. We are inundated by narratives that indoctrinate us into our own dismembering--the slow severing of our parts and the embodied practice of them as separate.
Yet Yoga, in a true sense, has always been about remembering.
We remember what has been dismembered.
Which is to say, we bring back into the body the truth of who we are, really. We make possible the embodied experience of belonging--to ourselves, to the world. By giving ourselves back to the breath-body-wisdom, we allow and facilitate the natural digestion and processing of experience. In relationship with things as they are.
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| (photo by Christian Murdock) |
If we practice, daily, our own fragmentation, it's from that fragmented place we will be most likely to meet and interpret our own reality. And we will translate most of what happens as evidence of that broken story. We will need convincing of our wholeness (which is messy AND beautiful, mind you) but accept full stop that we need fixing.
All this actually happens in the body, and in the nervous system, and in the breath. The body is not just listening to the subtle cues, it's in deep, meaningful dialogue with them. And if we don't attend to that subtle level, which is congruent with the why and how, we are often just tinkering with the symptoms of our experience. The body has to be involved in the process. As breath, as pulsation, as life, as nerve impulse, as the extension of "the mind."
The body can be a site of conquest—colonization and internalization of dogma and method, the dissociative project of hierarchy and social patterning and performance (of gender of job of spiritual identity of familial role of socioeconomic position).
Or, the body can be the site of rebellion, reclamation, and liberation.
Our bodies can be well trained franchises of others’ work and disparate echoes of memorized and regurgitated scripts, theories, techniques. We can study a style, memorize a sequence, perfect a method, and weakly echo the experience of someone else.
Our bodies can strain under the imposition of ideas about how we should look or sound or behave.
We can be obedient consumers, parroting and reproducing the insidious messages of deficiency and self loathing as virtues. We can strive and shop and seek our wholeness "out there" (in others, in possessions, in experiences, in control of variables, in pursuit of transient salves) further miring ourselves in the experience that we are broken.
We can inhabit our skin as penitent strangers, ignorant of our contours and terrified of our own messy edges.
Or we can arise, feral and singular, embodied and sensual and courageous and real.
We can be mere objects of others’ approval, validation, and acceptance.
Or we can be the subjects of our own lives.
We can be bodies, understood from the outside gaze inward, or we can be embodied, deeply intimate from the inside out. Your body-breath-spirit-heart-mind is a site of revolution and life.
These are not so much considerations of what we do, but rather why and how we do it.
I'm reminded of the ubiquitous Zen teaching that how we do anything is how we do everything.
Repeat that out loud: How I do anything is how I do everything.
How we practice is what we are really practicing. The subtle musculature and imprint of what you are doing is actually framed by the spirit with which you are doing it. And, the quality of the practice (the "how") is ultimately scaffolded by the "why."
That is, why you do something shapes HOW you do it.
And HOW you do something determines, in the end, just "what" is is you did.
While I teach and share this daily, and students in my classes have heard it ad nauseam, this isn't just a catchy saying. Rather, this is the recognition of how our experiences are translated and writ large by the subtle and nervous systems, the ultimate blueprints of our lasting experience.
In other words, what is driving your experience on those subtle levels is what is, in the end, getting stronger.
And, while I am here flipping through the teachings I give most often, let's add this:
How you practice is what you are really practicing.
And what you practice regularly, you embody.
What you embody, you transmit.
Transmission is another way of talking about presence. How we are in the world. How we are in all our relations. But presence also refers to our capacity to be aware, to show up, to engage and be in relationship to life. Unsurprisingly, our capacity to be present reflects our quality of presence.
If we muscle and barrel through life like we have something to prove, we get better at that way of being. We may "come off" as competitive, aggressive, always on the search for the next thing to conquer or attain. Or obtain.
When we engage regularly with life from the internalized storyline, "I am not enough," it shows up in all we do. If we think, speak, and act from a belief that we are broken, then we will seek everywhere to be fixed, made better, made whole. We go toward others like beggars asking to be filled up, and in so doing we reinforce the feeling that we are endless holes.
If we can only really show up (or only want to) if there is drama and heightened stakes, that has a felt currency in all we do. We get better at drama. Life becomes one triage after another.
When we go on "autopilot," and let our habits take the lead in our thoughts, speech, and action, we exercise our cultural patterning and conditioning. We get better at checking out, regardless of what is happening around and within us.
When we practice with a sense of wonder and curiosity, we cultivate those qualities and deepen that response to challenge.
When we engage regularly with life (the delightful, the disastrous, the messy, the magical, the heartbreaking, the awe inspiring) from a place of reverence and care, we strengthen those muscles.
What you practice regularly, you embody. What you embody, you transmit. And your transmission is your presence. As Meister Eckhart taught, “the concern of the soul isn’t about where to be or what to do, but how to be.”
How to be.
Chances are you don't engage so much in a formal practice anymore, in part, because WHY you were practicing (and therefore HOW) has changed. If you have a consistent way to drop into who you really are, deep beneath the performance, the roles you play, the curated persona, the whirring reactions and emotions, then you are practicing. If that is steady and kicks in for you when all the bullshit static and drama of life knocks you around, great.
If, however, your sense of self is primarily dictated and shaped by whatever the latest stirring is, perhaps you need a way to still yourself.
If your primary presence and transmission in your life is one of drama, reactivity, and despair, you might benefit from having a steady engagement in something less tumultuous. Something more ancient and wise than the latest emotional lens through which you are seeing yourself and the world.
And, from my experience, I would say this: commit to a daily practice that allows to flow freely and authentically that which you wish to be in the world. Whatever you want to transmit through you, as you.
And that is as much about the quality of being as it is the content.
Me, I am about the necessity of things. Life calls me into myself, and when I am lead by habits and shitty belief systems, I miss the call. And so I practice, consistently, because I want my next step into the given reality to be as steady and graceful as possible.
