The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
We all live under the influence of a great cosmic joke, and it goes something like this:
At some point in your life—most likely when you were young—you came to believe something about yourself. Someone said something to or about you, or something happened, and you took it to mean that you were limited in some way, or flawed, or compromised. Without you even realizing it, one small event became the defining theme of your life.
Here’s how it happens:
Let’s imagine you got separated from your parents at a big sports arena. You looked around and suddenly, no one you knew was there with you. Though you didn’t know it consciously at the time, that experience got emotionally rooted in you and you made it mean I’m all alone in the world.
A kid told you in first grade that you’re stupid, and you bought into that. Since then, you’ve lived your whole life believing that you’re not smart enough to accomplish your goals.
You were abandoned, hurt, or harmed in other ways by someone, and you took that as proof that you’re not lovable. And ever since, that belief has driven your actions and decisions. You’ve believed you’re not worthy of love, so perhaps you’ve left relationship after relationship, looking for the one that fulfills you.
You’ve believed you’re not worthy, so you overachieve to disprove that to yourself. Yet no matter what you accomplish, you never quite feel happy. You’re the best in your work, as a parent, on your yoga mat, but still your perception of yourself deep down doesn’t change.
Ready for the joke of it? That belief on which you’ve based your entire life is not real. You made it up. Or someone said it to you and you took their opinion as absolute fact.
You made up that you’re not strong . . . that you’re not lovable . . . that you’re not important . . . that nothing ever works out for you . . . that money is evil . . . that if you try something new, you’ll look foolish.
But these beliefs are not the truth.
The truth is not that you’re unlovable; it’s that you made up that you’re not lovable.
The truth is not that you’re weak; it’s that you made up that you’re not strong.
The truth is not that you’re alone in the world; it’s that you made up that no one supports or cares for you.
And yet every action you’ve taken, every word you’ve said, every decision you’ve made, every relationship you’ve formed or ended, every opportunity you’ve taken or shied away from has been dictated by that wrong assumption you’ve come to think of as “The Truth about Me.”
If your first reaction to hearing this is something like, “Wait a minute, Baron. I understand that this might be true for others, and I can see how they make stuff up about themselves, but that’s not me,” then I invite you to pause here for a moment. Stop, take a deep breath, find your feet, find your seat, and take a deeper look at your life. Look beyond the surface experiences and ask yourself if perhaps, just maybe, your beliefs have been running the show. We believe life happens to us, but so much of it we create by our own hand. How much of what’s occurred in your life repeats or has a consistent theme? There is usually the most obvious place to look for how and where the cosmic joke is at play in your life.
You’ve been a walking reaction to something you made up when you were 5, 10, 15 years old. But you’re reacting to ghosts . . . to stuff that isn’t even here today, and that’s exhausting. If you’re not responding to what’s actually happening right here, but rather reacting to your thoughts about what’s right here, you’re trapped in it. You keep doing, doing, doing—trying to get someplace new, but you keep landing back in the same place. Nothing gets better in our lives as long as we’re trying to outsmart the joke. You’ll move the pieces around—change jobs, cities, relationships, even yoga styles—but the joke follows you. You’ve heard the Zen saying “Wherever you go, there you are.”
Here’s where the joke gets even more absurd: We make stuff up about things that didn’t even happen yet. We project our default belief into every situation, and before we have to feel that feeling, we just take ourselves out. Oh, this person will leave me, so I’m not even going to get involved . . . I won’t be able to do that pose or class, so I won’t even try . . . Meditation might be great for some people, but it won’t work for me, so why bother?
Here’s a question to consider: How much of what’s happening in your head has to do with what’s happening in life, right here? My guess is absolutely nothing. Think about that. Your belief that you’re not strong literally has no bearing on your ability to do Crow Pose, other than to throw up resistance to your trying. Your body can objectively do what it can do, regardless of what you believe. That’s the joke of it!
Seeing all of this could make you want to cry, but allowing for the enormity of it is actually a good thing. Though it can seem deeply sobering and heavy just before you get the humor of the joke, please don’t bother running a whole number on yourself for falling for it; that’s just another way to keep yourself trapped in the vicious loop. Step back and look at it from the observer perspective, and just like getting the punch line of any joke, you will suddenly be struck with the aha moment. You may not know whether to laugh or cry at first, seeing how much this false belief has run your life. But it’ll take you much further to lighten up and laugh at the ridiculousness of it, and instead focus on the good news, which is this:
You had the power to make up this limiting belief, and you can use that same power to un-make it. When you see your default in the clear light of day, you’re no longer in its grip. You’ve stepped into the space where you have freedom of choice, in which you can decide to fall back into its grip and get more of the same, or do something new.
Asana practice is a rich opportunity to unearth our thoughts and move forward into a life free of those confining beliefs. The practice clears out old energy, creating new space. As we go through the flow of poses, things get energetically stirred up, which can be confronting. With experience, we get skillful at allowing the practice to work on us. We hold a space that allows for whatever needs to come up to do so, and we let it go.
Let’s say I’m holding Pigeon Pose, feeling an uncomfortable physical sensation. And let’s also say I have a belief I’ve made up or bought into that I am not strong enough to weather difficulty. As soon as the physical discomfort kicks in, so, too, will my default belief to signal the alarm bells of I can’t do this, get the heck out of here! Certainly, I can cut bait and come out of the pose. Or, I can allow that thought to come up, feel what I need to feel, give it up, and stay. I can get curious about what will happen to me if I just stay and be with my experience instead of running. By staying, I would discover that old emotional energy rises up and, if I just watch it, it will evaporate. Maybe I’d need to make appropriate physical shifts in the moment to adapt the physical pose, but the energetic debris would dissolve away.
My father had such depth to what he taught, but as a kid I never really understood what he was talking about. I remember when I was 10 years old being in my father’s meditation class at my parents’ yoga center in San Francisco. My father said to the class something to the effect of, “As you sit there dealing with your own mind, remember this: when interacting with thoughts in your head, or when interacting with another person in life, and something is thought or said to you that upsets you and makes you want to fight or flee, wait twenty-four hours before you respond.”
At the time I didn’t get what he was talking about. But now I do. If some thought in my head agitates or upsets me, or someone says something that insults me, I will first respond by saying to myself, “I will come back to my mat after twenty-four hours have passed, and determine then how or if I want to respond to the upsetting thought or insult. Even if the upsetting thought came from me and was something about my own practice.” This practice has opened up a whole new world in my own practice and continues to do so to this day.
A response is different than a reaction. A reaction is automatic—out of default—and a response is conscious. On the mat and off, it happens like this: some default thought arises, and if you immediately react to that thought, then you resist or quit, and there is not a single gap of time and space to get any perspective. You’re trapped in pure reaction. Or you can wait and see, and get curious about what else might arise. That allows space for conscious response rather than automatic reaction. Patience has been a powerful thing for me to develop, and the approach of waiting has taught me to see the “gaps” as points of power. There is a power of release that’s given by letting things just be.
Asana practice empowers us to experience the joyful free space on the other side of all the disempowering beliefs—what the yogis call samadhi. The word samadhi has beautiful depth of meaning. On one level, it means to see through a clear lens. But beyond that, samadhi refers to the “space,” which is the place from which the yogi observes. In this context, samadhi means everything is resolved: there is no “beyond” place to arrive to that will make you happier. This is it. Everything, including you, is whole, complete, and lacking nothing. In other words, you have come home.
What if instead of coming from disempowering beliefs you came from samadhi, your true north center, in every pose and danced in the pose from a place of already being at home with it all? You got the joke and now from samadhi you are free to be in the pose and create whatever you want in contrast to trying to fix something or get it right. Imagine how that would be . . . what you could do . . . what would be possible for you.
Once you get the cosmic joke, you naturally use everything in your life to lighten up rather than adding heaviness to your experience. If you do get swept up and spin off into seriousness, significance, and heaviness, choose to give it up and send it out on the outbreath. If you can practice this in the face of all that comes up, then you are well trained. Being well trained means that living inside the cosmic joke is over, because you can catch yourself when the disempowering belief looms and lighten up to let it go. You can use everything that comes up as a way to bring yourself back to the present moment, just like when you are about to fall out of a balance pose and catch yourself before you do and recover center.
What if you’ve read all this and still don’t get the joke? Let’s say it’s over your head and under your heels, and you really don’t get what I’m talking about, much like I didn’t get what my father meant at first all those years ago. That’s okay. Here’s a tip: just remember that doing anything that begins to shift the pattern and lessen the gravity of suffering or frustration is a breakthrough. In each pose and in every practice you undertake in your life, cultivate a practice of lightening up and not taking so seriously the failures and successes, the rewards and the consequences.
Great freedom arises from the experience of lightness.
Learn to laugh at the ridiculousness of the great cosmic joke. If you can practice lightening up even when taking yourself seriously, you will know you are up to something bigger in your practice and your life.