Buddha Face and the Impatient Yogini

I joined a gym last week. Our community built an absolutely gorgeous park a few years back, and I sometimes take Zeus there to walk him along the walking paths and bridges. The gym I joined is on the second floor of the community center there, and its walls are all darkly curving glass overlooking a lovely desert wash, partly landscaped by people, partly by nature.

I went to my first class today. I picked yoga, since I already do it, and I thought maybe I’d save the classes with scary names like Absolute Power and Cardio Kickbox for later, when I’m in better shape.

I arrived early, so I had a little wait, and ended up meeting another woman who was there for her  first class as well. We chatted while everyone else arrived. I got a good look at who would be taking the class, which is always fun; people come in so many varieties.

guyan mudra

If you’ve ever been to a yoga class, you know it attracts several types. There are those who have been doing it for years, and actually live a yoga lifestyle. Probably they’re vegan. They look slim and limber. Suppleness comes to mind. They’ve got the Buddha face; smooth and worry-free. They wear flip-flops and have organic fiber mats. The Buddha babes calmly unfurl their mats and drop down into sukhasana  right away, hands moving gracefully into gyan mudra.

Next there’s the hardcore yogini. She does yoga like it’s a competition—forget all that spiritual stuff. It’s part of the cross-training her personal fitness coach recommends. She’ll be in one of the scary classes tomorrow, or out pumping weight in the gym after yoga. She’s got a high, rock hard ass that could crack a walnut, and sinewy feet. She enters the yoga studio and snaps her mat open with a sound like a gunshot. Rather than sitting,  she talks to the yogini next to her about what she has to do after class, or what she was doing before.

Then there’re the ones like my new friend and I. Where do we put our shoes and socks? Where does the teacher sit…which way should we face? Ooo, look at the pretty view out the glass walls! Where do they keep the bolsters? Oh, we need a strap?

I got myself situated with a minimum of disturbance…I aspire to being a Buddha babe.  But honestly, I know I’ll never be a vegetarian, let alone a vegan, however much I admire those who are. I need a tattoo that says: Cows, chickens, and pigs beware! I watch my husband feed the pigeons mornings—they’re hugely plump (and delicious-looking) from all the carbs he administers—and I think: In medieval times we would eat those. I wonder what they taste like? But then I would never think of eating Zeus. The very idea horrifies me. What is it with us humans, that we can compartmentalize other living creatures this way? Some we eat; some we pet and spoil.

Zeus, The Spoiled.

It bears thinking about.

Anyway…

The teacher walked in and glided across the pale blond wood floor to the front; a small, very fit looking young woman with a long dark, smooth ponytail. She told us we’d be doing a ‘restorative’ class today. I greeted this announcement with (quiet) cheer.

For those of you who don’t know what a restorative class is, it’s basically stretching and holding in relaxed positions, while watching your breath. It’s deceptively simple, but can actually be challenging, if not done in the right spirit. It’s one of my favorite yoga classes to take. I excel at relaxing. The trick is to surrender.

Surrender what?

Well…that depends.

This whole concept of surrendering used to be anathema to me. Me? Surrender? Not on your life, buddy! But that was because I didn’t really understand it. I just thought of it as throwing in the towel, waving the white flag. Maybe even an act of cowardice.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

One day, a few years ago, I was holding trikona asana  and I couldn’t get all the way down to a flat hand on the mat beside my foot. I was frustrated and trying to force my body into position. Suddenly I heard this very patient, calm voice suggesting I surrender. And I got the very distinct notion it wasn’t just suggesting I surrender with regard to the yoga. I was going through some challenging times in my life.

With it came the perfect understanding of what surrendering really means; not giving up, and certainly not giving in, but simply to stop struggling.

I took a deep breath and let go of the thought that my hand had to lay flat or I wasn’t good enough. When I let go of the breath, my hand was…okay, not flat. But almost. And I had the slowly dawning realization that struggle actually creates opposition. A pushing back.

Struggle creates opposition within ourselves, and also within the world.

Surrender is a powerful kungfu-like mental technique, and once we get that, things start going more our way. It’s all about what’s going on within our thoughts, and in our heart. We can move with the world and it will accommodate us, or we can struggle against it, and we’ll constantly be frustrated.

It’s a paradox. Cool, huh?

So, now we’re back to yoga class again, and I promise, no more digressions.

We were half way through class. I was lying in this pose with my left shoulder on the mat and my right hand resting, palm up, on the small of my back. I was breathing and relaxing (surrendering) deeper into the pose.

I let my eyes travel along the shining wood floor and out the glass wall to the deep cornflower blue sky. White, billowy clouds hung without moving. They appeared perfectly still. It looked hot out, and probably was, but inside the studio it was cool. A light breeze floated all around me from a lazily turning fan overhead. The instructor had put on a CD of women singing together.  

I thought about how grateful I am to live in a community where we have a center like this one. And how thankful I am to be self-employed, so I can come to a class like this one during the day if I want. And just how sweet life is.

The instructor was one of those who didn’t talk a lot beyond the need to know stuff, like what we were doing next. Perfect, since the entire point of restorative yoga is to relax the mind, stretch and simply chill out. No thinking, and definitely no talking. She moved us through the poses, and I felt my muscles, tight from yesterday’s workout on the weight machines, begin to elongate, my face, breath and attitude softened like cream cheese left out on the kitchen counter.

We moved into savasana, which is lying on your back with your palms face up. We had the bolster under our knees. The music played very low in the background, dulcet voices softly chanting.

Alleluia…Alleluia…

Harp music, a flute… I felt completely relaxed. I let my mind slip gently into neutral.

A feeling welled up within me.

Hello. What’s this?

A deep peacefulness suffused my stomach and chest. It radiated out to my fingertips like the sweetest of sugar rushes. It rose toward the crown of my head.

I felt tears start at the corners of my eyes. Don’t cry!

Oh, who cares…everyone’s eyes are closed. I breathed into it…floating on my own snowy cloud of bliss. I lifted my left hand to wipe away the moisture  on my cheeks. No worries…my eyelids fluttered open as I wiped them.

Inexplicably, the nut cracker yogini’s face hovered above mine. “Does this class usually last this long?”

You know that sound in movies, when something totally unexpected happens? It’s the sound of a needle dragging across a record, and everything comes to an abrupt freeze frame?

“Uh…I don’t know.”  I peered up at the yogini, wondering briefly if she’d seen me crying, then I lifted my head and looked at the instructor. “This is the first time I’ve taken this class from her.”

“I think she’s fallen asleep,” the yogini said, flipping her hand toward the front of the class. “This isn’t supposed to go on so long.” She walked off to deposit her bolster in the closet where they are kept, sinewy feet beating a busy tattoo across the wooden floor. Another yogini­ was also putting away her bolster. They had a sotto voce conference by the closet.

I turned and looked toward the front where the instructor was still in savasana, the pale soles of her bare feet facing me. The Buddha babes lay supine on their organic mats around her, bellies slowly rising and falling, a phalanx of serenity.

I lowered my head back down to the mat, quietly laughing. I couldn’t work myself up to be annoyed. I felt too good.

Five minutes later class was ending. The instructor beamed at us as her palms came together in front of her heart. She had the Buddha face going on.

She looked wide awake to me.

Eating the Elephant

And other good, hopefully inspiring stuff.

Have you ever felt completely hopeless about writing an entire novel?

Does completing a novel seem so daunting a task that you simply cannot see yourself ever getting one written?

That feeling, coupled with having to support a family, made me swear off writing a novel for almost a decade. I just could not imagine finishing a project that seemed so big, while also having a job, or any kind of life. Short stories were one thing, but:

How could I write an entire novel?

“How do you eat an elephant?

One bite at a time.”  ~ Anonymous

The way to write a novel is simply to sit down every day, and write some of it. It’s so simple. It seems like it should be obvious this is how they get done, and yet, for years I struggled with the overwhelming bigness of getting a novel written.

In The Artist’s Way Julia Cameron recommends writing what she dubbed Morning Pages. This, by any other name, is simply writing every day. Whatever you want to call it, writing every day is key to getting the flow of ideas and words going.

“If you’re going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow.”  ~ Louis L’Amour

Here’s another issue that haunted me during those unproductive, frozen years: Didn’t I have to have an outline? A brilliant concept with the plot twists and subplots, all thought out in advance and laid down like a road map? Surely writing a novel required some higher form of genius that I wasn’t capable of manifesting. I had to have the whole thing thought out before I started, right?

I’d never previously had a plot thought out for any of the novellas or short stories I’d written. They’d always occurred to me as I wrote the first draft—which, by the way, was part of my excitement and delight in writing them.

But a novel was a much bigger, more complicated thing, and all The Experts were shouting that I had to have an outline. (Well…not all of them. Just the really loud ones.)

It wasn’t enough that I had some characters that I couldn’t stop thinking about.

It wasn’t enough that I wanted to see what they would do, what choices they would make, in the world I imagined them in.

I had to have a high premise and plot points. Simply wanting to discover the repercussions of my characters choices, for good or evil, wouldn’t cut it.

Completely erroneous thinking, as it turns out.

“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”  ~ E.L. Doctorow

Here’s what I discovered: Plot is what happens when you sit down and write. The plot to your novel will show up if you do. It has to be excavated in pretty much the same way an archeologist digs up long buried bones. And once found, in the act of writing the first draft, the writer’s next job is to simply scrape and brush away everything that is NOT THAT.

It would have saved me so many wasted years if someone had just told me this. Okay, someone was saying it. Julia Cameron certainly was. And Diana Gabaldon’s always been open and honest about her process.  But I didn’t hear them over those other people shouting and waving their arms.

So, now I’m telling you: If you aren’t a genius—and most of us aren’t—just bring your excitement to your special writing place and sit down and write about those characters you love so much, and that fascinating world that they live in. Every day. It’ll be okay.

Very few writers really know what they are doing until they’ve done it.  ~ Anne Lamott  (AKA, Blessed Patron Saint of the Shitty First Draft)

If those two obstacles weren’t enough, there was this other damn thing. (Isn’t there always?) Every time I sat down to write I could only squeeze out 2000 or so words, and as often as not they were just so so; not polished and filled with awe inspiring metaphor like the novels I loved. I mistook this as proof that I wasn’t a writer. I mean, I didn’t have what it takes, obviously. Otherwise what I wrote would be brilliant, light-filled, like all those published novels, wouldn’t it?

“I’m not a very good writer, but I’m an excellent rewriter.”  ~ James Michener

“The first draft of anything is shit.”  ~  Ernest Hemingway

I believe I will end my post here, rather than attempt to add anything to Hemingway’s wisdom.

I hope this helps. XO

Now, what are you doing sitting here reading my blog? Haven’t you got something better to do?