E M B R A C I N G . I M P E R M A N E N C E

“Impermanence can teach you a lot about how to cheer up” - Pema Chodron

Impermanence is something we usually prefer to avoid facing. We like when things are settled and dependable. We like to know that when we come home it is how we left it, that when we fall in love, we will stay in love; we like the security of knowing who we are and what’s next.

I can remember my first pair of sneakers, they were pink and white and when I started to outgrow them, I refused to believe it. My mom still reminds me how I loved them so much I even wore them to bed.

Of course there comes a time when we outgrow something, it outgrows us, or things simply change. We are asked to look at our attachments and illusions about something fundamentally groundless. The great Yogi, Master Patanjali reminds us in the Yoga Sutras (II.15) that it is the most pleasurable things in our lives that are actually the most painful, because eventually we will have to let them go.

In a yoga class I took a few weeks ago, the teacher had us hold that horribly awkward pose, Utkatasana for a horribly long time. She asked the class if the feeling we were experiencing was how it felt to be us, and how it was always going to feel. Although we knew we would soon transition into a different pose, we were completely engrossed in the difficulty of the moment. When you are immersed in such a heightened state you start to embrace the permanence of impermanence. You start to love it! In fact, you are mentally trying to woo it into existence so your legs, shoulders and back can have relief.

When we finally did release into a forward bend, you could sense the whole room in celebration. We were thanking the Gods of impermanence!

But impermanence isn’t only worth embracing in times of difficulty, when we are reminded, this too shall pass…

It is because of impermanence that not only do painful times pass, but also great opportunities come. It is due to the beautiful fact that nothing is fixed or written in stone that we are able to transform. The next time you feel you have slipped into negative tendencies, remember nothing is permanent about who you are or what you are capable of. When you change just one aspect of yourself you have unveiled the farse of permanence. It is always possible for us to be healthier, more forgiving, more loving, happy in our jobs and with our partners. Without impermanence yoga practice could accomplish very little. It’s the transient nature of the body and mind that allows it to open and to ease up on its chit-chat. The inevitability of change and the act of embracing this fact, brings us, as yogis, into a truthful state of mind. We are no longer blinded by false perceptions, we are seeing clearly the nature of reality.

The next time someone annoys you, remember impermanence. The next time you find yourself laughing and completely content, also remember impermanence. It is teaching you about the preciousness of the moment. Let it invoke your gratitude and appreciation for what is, and your openness to the miracles yet to come.

P R E G N A N T . W I T H . D E S I R E . F O R . R E S O L U T I O N

“The experience of certain feelings can seem particularly pregnant with desire for resolution: loneliness, boredom, anxiety. Unless we can relax with these feelings, it’s very hard to stay in the middle when we experience them. We want victory or defeat, praise or blame. For example, if someone abandons us, we don’t want to be with that raw discomfort. Instead, we conjure up a familiar identity of ourselves as a hapless victim. Or maybe we avoid the rawness by acting out and righteously telling the person how messed up he or she is. We automatically want to cover over the pain in one way or another, identifying with victory or victimhood.” - Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart, page 55

Have you ever tried to change a situation when it starts to feel uncomfortable? Have you ever tried adjusting your seat numerous times, or going shopping when you’re feeling a little blue or talking a situation over with experts, friends, family in order to figure out what so and so meant, or what you should do? This is what it means to be pregnant with a desire for resolution. It’s a common human trait, to seek some ground to stand on and to be complete with something that makes us feel uneasy. We would like to figure out a way to fix it, and fast, because life should only be about pleasure, right? As soon as pain arises, we have developed the habit to do whatever we can as soon as possible to get rid of pain and replace it with pleasure.

The yoga practice seeks to ease this desire, to control it in a sense, and to put us back in the center, in the middle. Its not bad to want pleasure, to attempt to do something about a situation, but oftentimes a feeling or a situation is out of our control, which is when we need to learn to come to the center again. The great yogis of the past realized that we aren’t necessarily going to overcome desire all together, but we can learn to relax with its presence, to cease identifying ourselves with the fluctuations of the mind, or desires for resolution. If we learn to sit with the resistance to pain and practice breathing mindfully, we are forced into seeing the present moment fully. We learn we don’t need to run away, or change it, or elongate it, or grasp to it, or cling to some judgement about it or statement defining it, but just look it straight in the eye. Maybe there we will find that our pain is more closely related to the constant fidgeting and resisting to get out of where we are, then where we actually are. Maybe it’s the scratching that prolongs the itch?

In asana practice, the desire to constantly fidget and adjust a pose can be beneficial, but at some point its important to just relax and be in the pose. There’s actually no final pose itself to be in, so why not just be? Be still and listen to what it’s telling you. The desire for it to feel differently might not change, but relaxing for a moment might reveal some poignant aspects of where our suffering is truly coming from. In meditation when we try to sit still, we have to do this with our mind. We have to sit with the chaos and silliness of our minds. We have to listen to it with nowhere to run, no music to turn on, no distractions anywhere. Anyone who has practiced meditation knows that after only a few minutes it’s incredibly tempting to be done, or to change ones physical position when the foot falls asleep. If we are disciplined, and just stay still, not following those impulses immediately, a lot of magic and wisdom can be revealed to us. We begin to uncover what the chaos is showing us about ourselves, our pain and the human experience. Understanding the human experience always develops our compassion and understanding for ourselves and others.

Ram Dass, in his famous book “Be Here Now” writes, “Will it ever be an eternal ice cream cone? Or is it always going to melt? You gotta keep eating it yet it melts and melts, that’s its problem. You gotta keep eating it cause it will melt and then its gone. You know that taste in your mouth when you finish and you want a glass of water? Right? Then you have a glass of water and there’s that bloaty feeling? Then you’re ready for the next one…to get rid of that one…lets take a walk, and you take a walk, its cold out. Lets have some hot chocolate. Yes, lets have some hot chocolate. Yes, lets have some, and on and on and on and its called life”.

Life: the endless cycle known as Samsara, round and round we go. Many people come to a yoga practice as a means to escape pain and discomfort. In some ways, it will give you a means of escape, but not necessarily through the door you were expecting. It isn’t like the glass of water after the ice cream, which indefinitely leads to another unresolved desire, forcing us to seek some more resolution. Instead, yoga works on the underlying factors beneath the desire for resolution, the part in us that feels like we are missing something. The part in us that feels we are incomplete and need some solid ground to stand on, to complete us, to resolve everything. Shri Brahmananda Saraswati defined yoga as “the state of missing nothing”. As we embark on this path, try to be with what arises, without needing to fix your current physical state, emotional state, or spiritual state. We aren’t here to run away or to fix anything broken, but to enter into the wholeness that already exists, and the brokenness that exists at the same time. We are here to walk in the middle of both, holding hands with wholeness and holding hands with brokenness.