One warm evening not all that long ago, I found myself lying in Savasana (deep relaxation) after my yoga class with tears trickling down the sides of my face and into my hair.
I was glad everyone else’s eyes were closed. These weren’t tears of joy or even of release. The teacher had been extemporizing, during our meditation, about “ease” and “bliss” — two concepts from which I had felt increasingly alienated as the days and weeks went by.
What’s the matter with me? My practice was no longer a source of renewal, but just one more source of anguish. Why can’t I get there? It seemed I was once again in the unhappy position in which I had found myself as a teenager involved in a born-again Christian church: those around me constantly testified to the miracles of their “faith,” while I simply sweated from effort. What am I doing wrong?
This was a perennial and exhausting question in my life. Driven by that question, I had gotten an undergraduate degree in philosophy, pored over psychology and world religion texts independently, done years of therapy, given any number of self-help and spiritual gurus a fair shake, taken up meditation eight years ago and yoga five years ago — and still nothing had “fixed” me. I was in emotional pain, stymied in my life direction, conspicuously single, uninsured and underemployed, awash in self-doubt, and furious with the limitations of my aging size-fourteen body, which had hit a ceiling in terms of its strength and flexibility and had started to break down with chronic injuries. It was clear I was not going to become a yoga superstar. I couldn’t keep up with all the toned and agile acrobats, dewy with health, who surrounded me in class. (I added to my suffering by fretting that this greatly diminished my sexual capital; if I couldn’t twist myself into a pretzel — and make like Cirque du Soleil in the bedroom — what possible hope was there for me among all these Amazons?)
I felt that I had, in fact, turned out to be a failure in everything I set out to do.
My yoga-community friends had by that time become wildly enamored of The Secret, a movie that, as I may have mentioned before, asserts that all we have to do to get what we want is to believe, consistently, with visualization and focus, that we will have it. This is also known as the Law of Attraction. I too had seen this movie, and it had made me want to have nothing so much as a screaming fit.
I protested (though arguing with true believers proved pointless) that I had persisted, despite obstacles, through more than a few situations in my life, trying to keep the faith when I hit a wall, wasting years envisioning outcomes that never manifested, time and time again. By the logic of the film, of course, the failure is your fault — you didn’t believe enough. You let doubt and negativity creep in. Or perhaps you wanted something that was wrong for you. (This is also, by the way, the logic of the born-agains regarding unanswered prayers.)
My failures, my fault. These elements together began to spin themselves into one great infinite regress of self-criticism and self-blame. It wasn’t that these strategies didn’t work for me; it was me that didn’t work. If I weren’t so flawed, wounded, needy, deluded…if I “loved myself,” I would want for nothing. If I were properly connected to the ever-elusive Divine, God, the Source, I would no longer do or want the “wrong” thing. If I were healed and whole and perfect, my life would simply tidy up, stop hurting, and I could get on with it, for crying out loud!
I didn’t see the comical irony of flogging myself with this whip, all the while shouting “Heal! Heal! Why can’t you just love yourself?!!” As my shame about my perceived flaws became more acute, I sought out more and more external input, mistrusting the directives of my own heart and intuition and ignoring my internal compass. Not coincidentally, I became severely depressed and started to suffer headaches, insomnia, migraines, and painful abdominal cramps. Eventually I even caught pneumonia. This was all-out war. Rejection on a grand scale of everything and everyone I was in my current state, with all her inglorious pain and confusion and yearning and need.
Maybe there is such a thing as grace, but if so, it seems to be much subtler in my life than in that of my former Christian cohorts and fellow yogis. Someone had left a copy of The Marriage of Sex and Spirit at the front desk of the studio where I work part-time, and in it was an essay by San Francisco psychotherapist and writer Janna Wissler. Reading her wonderful essay, I broke down like a bullied child in her mother’s arms. With her beautiful, compassionate prose, she gave me permission to be who I was, where I was, in all my hurt and craving and apparent lack of enlightenment. She mentioned the practice of sitting in the fire, patiently — Calcinatio — when whatever we want, right or wrong, is frustrated. “Suffer the burning of your refining defeats,” she advised.
I had surely, I thought, had my share of refining defeats.
But what if that were really OK?
What if “bliss” had nothing to do with a destination or a pinnacle one reached by doing it right and hitting the jackpot, or leaving this sorry world behind, but were instead the result of being true and present to one’s deeply felt, if imperfect, experience? Follow your bliss, Joseph Campbell said, and he sure didn’t spend his life fasting on a mountaintop.
Many gurus and religious teachings give innumerable prescriptions and instructions. Do this, don’t do this, don’t eat that, practice this chant or exercise for two, four, even six hours a day. Then maybe, just maybe, after ten years of standing on your head, you might just see a glimmer of a shadow of the Truth, and the Secrets of the Universe may show a little petticoat. This reminds me of Christian conservatives who don’t want anybody to get a free lunch (dammit). You’ve got to work hard (“the way we did in my day”) to get yours. That’s why they love the Old Testament so much, with all its blood sacrifices and its plagues and its confusing and conflicting laws about not touching your pregnant wife with your left hand on a Tuesday.
But then there are the Tolles and the Krishnamurtis and the Nhat Hanhs who say that the Kingdom of Heaven is all right here, right now, and available to everyone. If we could just quit being so distracted.
A wonderful healer I have the privilege to know, a woman who frequently demonstrates an uncanny sort of psychic ability, stopped in her tracks the other day to gaze deeply into my eyes.
“You are perfect,” she said emphatically, “just as you are.” I crumbled like a cupcake. What a concept — not to have to struggle, not to have to try so hard, because everything is exactly as it should be. Because there is nothing wrong with me.
So what if I don’t have much in the bank? So what if I don’t know what I’m going to do next? So what if I’m not bow-chicka-bow-wow-ing with my madly beloved every night (in “reverse cowgirl”)? So what if I’m not seeing visions of the holy mother in my oatmeal? So what if I can’t do handstands or side crow or scorpion? So what?
Chicken butt.
(At least I think that’s what the Buddha said.)
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