This week I asked students who came to class if it were their choice to practice yoga. Though it is often said that everyone can benefit from yoga, not everyone wants yoga. About a year ago, I found myself listening in to an interesting conversation. I was going to teach corporate yoga, and as it was (and still is) my habit to be early to mentally prepare, I was asked to wait at the lobby. A student who practiced with me the week before saw his friend, and enthusiatically he invited his friend to join the class. The friend asked, "What is it like to do yoga?" to which he replied "Oh you get a good stretch, you feel calmer, more relaxed, you get some peace of mind." She quickly dismissed it and said, "Oh, I don't need that." It is true and she is right. Not everyone wants or needs yoga. As my teacher David Life says, "Yoga is not for everybody...It is not for people who are interested in staying the same. It is relevant, important for people if they are interested in evolution, if they are interested in changing, if they are interested in making a better world. If everything is fine with you and your world, if you are happy, Yoga is probably not for you. But if you are dissatisfied, if you have one grain of unhappiness inside of you that is pulling you down then you should consider it." Maybe the friend is already happy. Maybe she has a path that has worked out really well for her. Maybe she is already enlightened. It is not for me to know. But I do know that we who practice yoga choose yoga because we are fed up with this one grain or two or three of unhappiness that seems to come out all the time. It is easy to be deluded to think that we are peaceful. Then we get stuck in traffic or someone cuts in line in front of us or our mother says something we don't like hearing, and then the grain of unhappiness comes up and it becomes clear we are really not that peaceful. We think this unhappiness is caused by others doing things that affect us. We think others are blocking the pathway to our happiness. We think we are victimized by our circumstances. And we will continue to think such thoughts until we become fed up and have had enough and we start to wonder if there could be some other way of dealing with this cycle of unhappiness. Yoga makes us understand the fundamental characteristic of unhappiness. It is a mental construct that is projected from within us. Others did not make us unhappy. We made ourselves unhappy. We often associate happiness with some external condition, an if-and-then equation that involves money and relationships and work conditions and statuses and whatnot. But this if-and-then equation is flawed. For one thing, even if we got what we wanted, we could always lose it. Or we can get exactly what we want and find that we are no more happier than before. Then we think we need more. Then we set up more conditions. Then we get caught up in a cycle. That is, until we are fed up. Until we are fed up, we will be going through this viscious cycle of wanting what we do not have. But when we are ready to change, we see that all of that unhappiness is from within. And because it is a projection that we make, it is a state of mind that we can change. One practical way to turn this "fed-upness" into change is to consider what we are fed up with, and also see that we are completely capable of contributing to the change of that situation. If we are fed up with traffic, we can ride the bike or take public transportation or move closer to where we work or carpool. If we are fed up with animal cruelty, we can go vegan or adopt homeless animals or provide information to others or volunteer at a shelter. If we are fed up with our fear of falling from inversions, then we get up and ask the teacher for assistance or practice by the wall or learn how to fall safely. If we are fed up with something but continue to sit and do nothing, maybe it is because we are not fed up enough. If we are truly fed up beyond the brim of our tolerance, we change things, we take action, we get up and we do something about it. Yoga is not for everyone. It is for those of us who have a sincere desire to weed out unhappiness not only from ourselves but also from others. It is for those of us who are ready to accept that we are our own enemy and hero. It is for those of us who are fed up with our fickle, judgmental, dictatorial mind. It is for those of us who believe that all of our thoughts, words, and actions matter. It is for those of us who want to stop suffering. It is for those of us who want to be free.
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When we are fed up or angry or feeling sad or depressed, our well-meaning family members and friends often tell us to cheer up, to think of this thing or that thing instead. No one says "Oh you're fed up? Congratulations! Way to go! Good for you!" It seems like the wrong thing to say. But I want to tell you today that if you are fed up or angry or sad or depressed, congratulations! Your ability to experience the whole range of emotions and sensations and human predicament is intact. When we choose to acknowledge that there is a part of us that is capable and is perhaps currently feeling fed up, we are reminded that we are alive. We have chosen to feel everything- love and pain, joy and suffering, elation and heartbreak- over nothing at all. The positive and the negative are two sides of the same coin. When we feel all of that which we are capable of feeling, our existence becomes expansive. We know the nervous excitement of staring into the eyes of someone we're in the midst of falling in love with. We also know the paralyzing pain of things not working out. We are well aware of the scorching heat of the noontime sun. And we also know its comforting warmth. To feel fed up is to experience one shade out of many from the patchwork of emotions in this thing we call life. And what is the alternative to never being fed up? It is to feel nothing, to shut ourselves off, to deny our emotions, to minimize our complexity, to diminish our humanity. When we choose to feel nothing, what happens is precisely that. We live without feeling. Next time we feel fed up, let it be a reminder to us that we are alive and awake. It is a reminder that we are not perfect, nor are we meant to be. The struggle is a challenge for us to dig deeper, to be more compassionate, and to love more. Being fed up is being fully alive. It is like the appearance of sudden lighting- temporary and frightening, its beauty unintentional and underappreciated, its existence part of nature and all that is. I saw a little kitten who was run over today. I picked him up in the hopes that he would still be alive. I checked his breath but could not find any. It was too late. I did not know what else to do but place him on top of a bench and cover him with a piece of cloth that I had with me. I wrote him a note that said: Rest in peace, little kitten. You are loved. I know that life is impermanent. Of course I know this, but it still makes me really sad. I don't know why things are the way they are in general. And I don't know why innocent beings suffer. And I don't know why I'm feeling so much grief. Perhaps we are meant to feel the interconnection of all of life. I was too late. I named him Madison after the street where I found him. I knew him only briefly. I wanted him to live. In that short moment where I did not know whether he was alive or not, I wanted him to live. Please consider adopting or fostering any animal in honor of Madison. Please consider saving a life. Rest in peace, little kitten. You are loved. I read this book a while back called Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, and the story left a profound impression in my mind. The story revolves around these three kids. You see them in school and you follow them through their teenage years and adulthood. In many ways they are very relateable. As teenagers, they have this whole range of emotions that we as adolescents ourselves went through. There's even this little love triangle where the two girls like the same boy, and maybe some of us can relate to that too. But in this story, there are many things about the characters that are not relateable. For one thing, they are not going to grow old. They are not going to travel and see other places. They are not going to sit and wonder about what they should do with their lives. This is because they were born for the sole purpose of being organ donors. When their body wears out after the third or fourth donation (I am using this word loosely), they die. They are born because their body parts have value, but their lives essentially do not. It is a piece of fiction, and we may dismiss it as such. It's not real. It's a work of the writer's imagination. We can claim that all too easily. But if we get down to the mentality of such a twisted way of thinking, it already exists. The story is about how one group of beings sees another group of beings as inferior, and their use outweighs the interests of these individuals in the eyes of those who benefit from this arrangement. It is slavery. We already do this to animals. Countless animals are being bred as we speak for the sole purpose of being used. We use their body parts for experiments, for their meat, for their milk, for their eggs. And yet we may not immediately see how the fictional story is much like our present reality. This is what I think. We live in a society of disconnection. And the disconnection begins with the denial of our own experiences. Didn't we at some point feel sick but pushed ourselves to go to work or attend that important meeting or fulfill that obligation that we have? Didn't we at some point in our yoga asana practice saw someone in class doing an advanced pose and in our egoic desire to get to that pose ourselves we wanted to deny what our body is telling us? How about those times that we became emotionally rattled, and we noticed a little bit too late that the quality of our breath has changed, our heart beat raised, our voice shaken? If we have a challenging time connecting to our own bodies, no wonder we cannot connect with what we do to other beings' bodies. The attempt of our ego to take over has had self-effacing effects to our compassionate nature. And I am quite fed up with it. We hear about wars and famines and murders and rapes and our ego will dismiss them as events that have nothing to do with us. I sometimes wonder how I would feel if I ever came to a dire situation and everyone acted as though it had nothing to do with them. I wonder how many of us would be so comfortable in our disconnection if the tables were turned and we become the commodities for someone else's benefit. And I am quite fed up with it. But the beautiful thing about being fed up is that we reach that point where we say enough is enough. We reach that point where we demand change. And that is how we find yoga. It is a practice that allows us to reach into the deepest parts of our souls to heal our disconnection. It is a practice where we are able to see others as different and the same both at once. It is a practice where we are challenged about the concept of the "other". It is a practice where we see ourselves in the other so much that, as my teacher Sharon Gannon says, the other-ness disappears. Slavery exists today in the form of violence towards nonhumans and we can end this only when we heal our disconnection. Please watch the documentary Earthlings, and with all honesty, please ask yourself if you can still see them as "others". Your heart is full of kindness and I know you won't be able to turn a blind eye and claim it has nothing to do with any of us. Let us be fed up. Let us take it personally. Let us move the world to a more compassionate direction. When I was a child, my mother went to a fortune teller and she was told one of her children will go to prison. I was horrified that it would me. I feared for what heinous crime it was that I will commit and tried many times unsuccessfully to push the thought away. Then I became vegan. I no longer believe in fortune tellers. But even if I still do, I won't be so afraid anymore. Many animal rights activits are sent to prison for various reasons: liberating animals, protesting, filming undercover videos, all of which are illegal because it means they have to cross property lines and give false identities and break in commercial establishments. The world we live in considers killing animals legal but rescuing them illegal. It considers torturing animals a business but capturing this on film terrorism. Morality and legality- they are mutually exclusive concepts. I am clear about which side I am on. What about you? |
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