Tag Archives: Personal

On My Mind

On Breathing

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Inhale.

The point of yoga is to let the breath move the body. The idea is to move the body in whatever way feels right as long as the body is guided by the breath. You can remain with what is comfortable and easy. You can find the space between discomfort and pain. You can reach into that space as far as your breath will let you, and then you can breathe more deeply and reach farther. Find the space.

Exhale.

The latter is what I try to do when I practice yoga, which I have been doing with some regularity for over seven years. It’s very important to understand that yoga is always a practice. Much of life is always a practice. When I learned this about compassion, living became easier and slowly began to make more sense. It became easier to accept and forgive, both others and myself.

Inhale.

The lack of an expert, model, or end goal makes yoga not only a practice of watching myself breathe, but also a reminder that we live our lives mostly in beginnings and middles. There is so much that is new to explore, so many paths to wander down. There are some ends, but those ends create beginnings.

Exhale.

We live in spaces where we’re trying as hard as we can do the best that we can. In Alain de Botton’s words, we’re all fragile. I’ve quoted him many times before but it never hurts to revist his words:

My view of human nature is that all of us are just holding it together in various ways – and that’s okay, and we just need to go easy with one another, knowing that we’re all these incredibly fragile beings.

Inhale.

I’ve spent the last month at home in Rochester with my family and I’m getting ready to leave. Truthfully, though, I’m never ready to leave. But the time comes.

Exhale.

And I leave.

Inhale.

I’ve cried in more airports than I can remember and on more airplanes. I’ve gone through security without looking back and I’ve jumped up and down trying to catch one more glimpse. I’ve looked back to see others waving and I’ve looked back to see others walking away. I’ve watched people try to smile through tears; I’ve tried to do the same. I’ve found myself unable to cry when others do, which almost never happens in daily life, and I’ve collapsed just when I thought I had it all together.

Exhale.

I’ve since learned that there’s no such thing as having it all together.

Inhale.

I was lucky this summer to spend time in Toronto and Montreal with my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and one of my cousins. We don’t see each other very often and time is on my mind. It’s stunning what changes in a year.

Exhale.

This summer has been a very happy time and breathing has been easy. Last week’s yoga class was the best one I’ve had in a long time because the breath moved the body. The breath guided the body. I felt and I also observed.

Inhale.

It’s not always so easy to breathe slowly and deliberately in the fast-paced, complex, often confusing world that we have created. But it’s so important to also create the space that allows for easy breathing.

Exhale.

Nearly a year ago I realized that I was looking for quiet. It’s amazing how much better life has been since I started learning balance and equanimity.

Inhale.

So while I will cry in an airport later this week, and maybe also on a plane, I will try to find that space between discomfort and pain. I will spend some time there between discomfort at returning to reality, which can be jarring, and pain at leaving my family. It’s okay to recognize both and choose to engage with neither.

Exhale.

And then when I’m ready, when I’m able to breathe more deeply, I can reach farther and play with the space around me. There’s much to discover and much to love and it’s open to me as long as I remain open to it.

Inhale.

And I will practice remembering to breathe.

Exhale.

On My Mind

On Happiness

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I’m teaching the culture part of a unit on sociocultural psychology. We talk about values and norms and the ways that people in different cultures remember, learn, and express what they know. We talk about learning how to behave in our own cultures and becoming part of new cultures. We talk about expectations. We talk about what it means to be happy.

Most of the time, happiness for me actually means contentment. It means feeling okay with and good about what’s happening immediately around me. Less “Wow, how awesome!” and more “This is really nice.” In the book How Emotions Are Made Lisa Feldman Barrett explains that there’s a difference between North American “happy happy joy joy” and East Asian tranquility and equanimity. We don’t all conceive of happiness in the same way and those differences are very important for the way we view the world. I was in the musical You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown back in high school and the closing number, “Happiness,” got me every time.

Though we sometimes forget it in the age of Instagram, Buzzfeed Top Ten lists, and selfie sticks, happiness is in simplicity.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot recently. Several times over the last few weeks, a conversation from half a year ago has returned to mind. I was with a friend who I’ve only seen once or twice since, neither of us speaking much that day. We were both concerned with and unsettled by the future. We were uncertain. Jobs, choices, change, moving, moving on. After some moments of silence, my friend asked, “What makes you happy?”

I remember it took me several seconds to respond. I remember the knot in my stomach and how I had to acknowledge it, experience it, and admit to it before I could let it go. I was not feeling happy in that moment and answering the question took time.

“Lots of things,” I replied, intellectually knowing this was the right answer even if I couldn’t quite feel it.

“Like what?”

“Oh, you know, things.” It took a moment, but there’s a lot to be said for state-dependent memory (and learning). Once the ideas came, they came quickly. “The smell of coffee. Sunny mornings with a breeze. Being outside. Books. Writing. Taking pictures. Being with friends and family. Intimate moments. Traveling. Learning new things. Delicious vegetables. Making food for people.”

That conversation has come back to me strangely often in the last few weeks. I’ve been experiencing a sort of mental shift, I think, one that started when I was in Europe at the beginning of April. Over the last month, I’ve grown more accustomed to the calm and quiet that my mind has found. Sometimes I find myself feeling okay in a situation or with thoughts that would have bothered me just weeks ago. This is good.

Maybe this is what it means to grow up. Maybe there’s wisdom in letting go, in observing, and in accepting today without judgment. There certainly seems to be freedom there. The only thing I know for sure is that a better version of myself is one who sees happiness in all the small moments that occur every day, and I’m glad to be there right now.

 

On My Mind

Lessons from Parks and Pools

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Simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and thoughts, you return to the source of being.
Patient with both friends and enemies,
you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world.

-Lao Tzu

After my run today, I stripped off my t-shirt and socks and jumped in the pool. I floated lazily, watching the rainbows reflecting off the tile. The run left me calm and quiet, reluctant to go back inside where I knew I would start thinking about the day ahead. So to postpone that moment, I jumped in the pool.

I love running down the beach in East Coast Park early on a weekend morning. I’ve always loved morning runs. The sun looks fresh and new, sparkly, not yet limp and dull, hanging heavy with the humidity that will roll in as the day grows later. I love how the sun turns green leaves a bright yellow. The breeze that picks up on the water every morning and afternoon is a pleasure to run in; it brings the smell of salt that reminds me of childhood summers in South Carolina with sand castles, the stickiness of sunscreen, and eating my cheese and lettuce sandwich in the water.

Today I passed by a huge tree that had grown sideways, the trunk halfway between parallel and perpendicular to the ground. Some of the branches had rooted themselves to the earth, too, and the tree created a fort, an igloo-shaped dome of branches and leaves. I stopped my watch and stepped inside, wishing immediately for a blanket, book, and 20 years ago when my sister and I would have happily made ourselves a home in there and passed the day away. We loved secret spaces to curl up with a story. I still do.

Catching rainbows in the pool, I realized that I felt perfectly content. Running is the time of the day where I let my mind drift wherever it wants to go. Increasingly, my mind has found tranquility. I’ve been spending more time feeling calm, more time experiencing equanimity. I have noticed a change in my behavior and general outlook. Some of this might come from practicing meditation, but I think more of it comes from feeling comfortable with myself as a person. Comfortable being wherever I am, with whoever I’m with, and doing whatever I’m doing. This is a new feeling that I’m slowly uncovering; it’s fragile but full of possibility. It has been a long time (my best guess is fall of 2015) since I’ve felt that who I am and who I want to be might just match.

It’s a peculiar thing to realize.

Shortly after ringing in 2018, a friend and I were messaging about the holidays and providing general life updates. I mentioned that one of my hopes for this year was to fall in love again. He wished me luck with that pursuit and we moved on to discuss more normal things like education, Donald Trump, and how to take proper care of plants.

I haven’t fallen in love, but it’s been a while since I’ve believed that I can. Coming back to that state of being has been a journey, a journey that I didn’t really know I was on. And now that I can see it, I’m happy to be where I am. What has been has been, what will be will be. This is what I’m doing today. And that is enough.

In the end these things matter most: How well did you love? How fully did you live? How deeply did you let go? -Buddha

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