I really like control.
As in…really like it.
When the world starts to slide, my impulse is to batten down the hatches. I make lists, design spreadsheets, and straight jacket anything that feels shaky. With steely-eyed determination, I impose order on chaos and bring entropy to its knees!
Naturally, this doesn’t always turn out very well.
The biggest shake up of my life occurred when my world came crashing down in 2006. I left a blooming life in New York City to get married and move to Vancouver, Canada. I’d never been to Vancouver before, but my boyfriend was Canadian and wanted to return home for our future together. My leap of faith felt romantic, exciting and inspiring. What joy to leap into the unknown!
However, my leap ended with a plunge into an abyss.
Just before we arrived in Canada, my husband – an alcoholic who had been dry for more than a decade – experienced a shattering loss when his mother died and started drinking on our honeymoon.
My life suddenly got very wobbly.
Before the move, I had identified myself as a empowered and successful woman. I had a rising career in my community, a happy home, and was proud to be a New Yorker. In the space of a few months, I had moved to a new country, changed jobs, and was witnessing the unravelling of my marriage. As my husband continued to drink, I became frozen in uncertainty. I lacked the tools and resources to support his grief, and became shut down in the spotlight of his anger. He mistook my silence for apathy, and our spiral of miscommunication drove the marriage to its breaking point.
All the identifications to which I had been anchored (New Yorker, “strong” woman, good person, committed partner) fell apart. The external labels that had given me my sense of self dissolved. And at the same time, my weaknesses were crowbarred open and exposed. It was like pulling up the floorboards of my own internal basement; a lot of dark, slimy corners were suddenly exposed to light. Who was this enabling, wimpy, silent, contracted shell of a woman? Where had the devoted partner and strong feminist gone? I was a crab out of my shell: vulnerable, raw, weak, and exposed.
That year was also one of the best things that has ever happened to me.
When my life fell apart, I simply couldn’t pretend that I had it all together any longer. Nothing in the outer world was steady. No amount of list making could bandage up the reality that I was standing in ruins.
When my outer world fell apart, the inner world started to become visible.
“Chaos should be regarded as very good news.”
– Pema Chodron
When something comes along to rock our lives and challenge our sense of self, we get scared and angry. We often stuff our feelings with Netflix, potato chips, or – as Brene Brown so insightfully notes in her Ted talk – “a few beers and a banana nut muffin.” When my world fell apart, I buried myself in work and started going to raves to avoid feeling the void. Being a workaholic felt productive and validating. Dance parties and drugs were a quick fix where I could feel exciting, loved, and connected.
But eventually, I was caught out. I couldn’t stay high forever. I’m one of the lucky ones that isn’t prone to addiction and – at some point – I had to stop running from my own emptiness. When I finally sat down in my shakiness, I realized that I hadn’t disappeared. Even though I was no longer a wife or a New Yorker, there was something else within me that was still safe and whole. But I could only feel this steadiness – my own Presence – when my control strategies fell apart.
My yoga practice became a doorway through which I began to heal. On the yoga mat, I could unclench my fists from manhandling my life, and practice staying present moment to moment. No matter how shaky I felt, yoga invited me to be in my body – and stay there one breath at a time. On the mat, I didn’t have to be strong, happy, optimistic, perfect, or even courageous. I only had to be. My yoga practice didn’t care if I had my outer life together; it only asked that I be present and feel.
Yoga philosophy has recognized our tendency to misidentify ourselves with the outer world for thousands of years. In the opening of the seminal yoga text, The Yoga Sutra, Patanjali explicitly lays out his definition for yoga. Here’s a rough paraphrase: “Yoga is the quieting of the fluctuations of your mind. When you do this, you can experience your Presence. Otherwise, you think you’re all the stuff in your head!”
Before I moved to Vancouver, my sense of self was intrinsically tied to how I was thinking about myself. Was I smart? Pretty? Hard-working? A failure? Accomplished? My sense of “Rachel” was defined by my achievements and shortcomings. When those identifications fell apart, something else had the opportunity to be seen.
When we quiet our minds, our true self – our Presence – becomes visible. But usually we’re so caught up in protecting these identities that we can’t experience our own depths. When our identifications get shaken, a space cracks open where we can question our stories. You have probably experienced this during a career change, relationship shift, or a conflict. The shakiness gives us the opportunity to rediscover who we are.
“Only the extent the we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.”
– Pema Chodron
So here’s the good news: our lives don’t have to be completely annihilated in order to reconnect to Presence. Thank goodness! By engaging in some consciously self-imposed wobbling, we can practice reconnecting to our Presence every day. Yoga is a great place to start.
When we wobble physically on our mats, our instinct is to cover it up. The ego takes over, and we want to hide from seeming imperfect. For example, if we feel wobbly in tree pose, we may grab the wall or rigidly brace ourselves. If we fall, we look around to see if anyone caught us out.
Perfect.
In that moment, we can notice our attachment to getting it right or looking good. Here’s another time when we are defining our worth by something external! When our minds create stories and the ego gets flustered (“I’m a loser,” “My balance sucks!”), we can recognize that we are still intrinsically okay. In my yoga classes, I invite my students to embrace their wobbles and reframe their experience: “If you fall out of the pose,” I say, “the first thing I want you to think is, ‘I’m sexy!’ Falling is sexy. Being shaky is sexy. Because it means that you’re willing to go someplace that is uncertain. And that’s a so much more wonderful than being afraid to move out of your comfort zone!” The mini wobbles that we experience on our mat can help create space to reconnect to a deeper identification with who we really are.
When we meditate in our yoga practice (whether it’s a formal meditation, or a mindfulness practice), we have the perfect opportunity to witness our minds in action. As the thoughts arise, we can begin to notice that they are not reality. When we see how much flotsam and jetsam is coming and going all the time across our consciousness, we can begin to not take what the mind tells us quite so seriously. Instead, we can begin to settle into the space that lies between the fluctuations of our thoughts.
When we can practice questioning the mind on the mat, we have more space to question our stories off the mat. When our egos are threatened, there is greater grace and deeper resources to recognize that we – and those around us – are still intrinsically worthy. When life falls apart (new job, new relationship, broken heart or loss of a loved one), it gets easier to pick up the pieces. Or we may even realize that we can leave the pieces where they lay, because we don’t need them to experience who we truly are.
Embrace your wobbles. Shake your own tree. And in the midst of that shakiness, discover the unshaking ground that lies within you.
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
― Rumi
When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about.”
PS: If you like this blog, you may enjoy checking out some of my books. XO
