Know Yourself
If you aren’t deeply familiar with your old wounds and self-destructive tendencies, they will continue to rule your life. Not knowing or understanding yourself is the loneliest thing there is. In order to be at peace, you have to be at home within yourself, and avoiding the work required to heal and open is also choosing to live life in misery. You will recall that svadhyaya is one of the niyamas (observances) and means “self-study.”
After the incident at Whole Foods with the “Cheese Guy,” I decided to go on a little dating hiatus. When I looked back over my romantic relationships at that point, I realized there was a pattern, a common theme. I kept choosing partners who needed help in some way, men who were needy or troubled. Some of this had to do with my pattern with my dad. When I was honest about it, I understood this was fulfilling my own desire to feel wanted, needed, necessary, and unleavable. But underneath that, I was beginning to suspect the real issue was that I feared I might be unlovable. And if that’s the driving force when you embark on a relationship, you’re almost guaranteed to sail into shark-infested waters with no life jacket on board. If your main intention is not to be left, to make yourself indispensable, that is not going to lead to a healthy or fulfilling relationship.
I was living in Los Angeles at this point, and really just beginning to set down my roots here. I was teaching twenty-seven classes a week and driving all over town from the crack of dawn until well after nine or ten o’clock on most nights. I was building some friendships. I had a couple of solid girlfriends I hung out with, and I had my dog. I decided to swear off dating, at least until I had a better handle on why I was ignoring my intuition when I sensed trouble ahead.
It was at this time that I decided to go on my first silent meditation retreat. I’d heard about Vipassana meditation (vipassana means “insight”), and the idea of it appealed to me. When I went online, I found that there were Vipassana centers all over the world and that the silent retreats were led “by donation.” You’d fill out an application and see if you were accepted. If so, you’d head to one of the locations for twelve days. The first evening would be orientation, and then silence would begin—no talking, no eye contact with anyone, and no electronic devices of any kind for ten days.
It sounded a little scary to me, but I felt pulled to do it. So I got subs for all my classes, sent my dog to a “camp,” and drove off to my destination. At orientation, we were given the blueprint for the “sit.” We’d wake up at 4:00 a.m. every morning for the first meditation. We’d break for breakfast at 6:00 a.m., and we were also invited to walk around the lake, if that was appealing. Then we’d go back to meditate at 8:00 a.m. We’d work this way all day, with short breaks, until 9:00 p.m. The technique would be taught over the course of the retreat, and by the end, we’d have a meditation practice we could take home with us.
During the retreat, we were not to look at anyone, speak with anyone, read or write, or practice any other form of meditation, including yoga. We were asked to fully immerse ourselves in the process.
I’m not going to lie to you. The first three days were hell. I thought I might truly lose my mind. Every time I’d go to sit and breathe, my mind would rebel and take off in twenty different directions at once. Or I’d daydream, or have sexual fantasies, or obsess over how my dog was doing. And I could not get comfortable. No matter what I did, no matter how many meditation cushions, blankets, or sandbags I’d use to prop myself up, after ten minutes I’d be in agony and feel the need to move. I looked at the people around me, and they didn’t seem to be struggling as much. I kept looking for that feeling in yoga when the pose feels “right.”
After three days of feeling like the princess in “The Princess and the Pea,” I looked up at the stage in exasperation. There were the three teachers sitting quietly, deep in meditation. None of them had sandbags, blankets, or meditation chairs. Each of them had a small, simple pillow propping up their tailbone. So I got up with all of my different props and hefted them to the back of the room, where I traded them in for a small, simple pillow. I placed it under my tailbone, crossed my legs, and sat still for the rest of the retreat.
It had finally occurred to me that seated meditation is not like yoga, where we move, modify, or adjust if there is discomfort. On the contrary, seated meditation is an invitation to observe your experience without identifying with it so strongly. Feeling confronted was part of the process. I began to realize that even if I didn’t move, even if I didn’t change anything about my position, the sensations kept changing. Maybe I’d scan my body from top to bottom and find searing heat between my shoulder blades. A few minutes later, I’d feel intense tingling in my legs, but the heat between my shoulder blades would have spread down into my lower back. The sensations kept moving and changing, and my only job was to witness what was happening.
I began to observe in my own body the one constant: everything is always in a state of flux. The other thing I began to witness, as my mind quieted and I stopped fighting the process, was that there was a physical tightness all around the region of my heart, as if my heart were in a vise grip. When I allowed myself to feel that, to experience that clenching, tears just slid down my face. Sadness coursed through my whole body. I suddenly realized I’d been holding on to this sadness for years. Decades.
When you sit and meditate, it’s kind of like a mental fast, especially during a silent retreat. You aren’t making eye contact with anyone. You aren’t speaking or reading or writing or texting or listening to music. There’s not a lot of sensory information coming in, and there’s not a lot going out.
When you do a water fast (and you should always educate yourself well before you do any kind of fasting), even for a day, it’s the same idea. You aren’t taking in any food. So your body starts to process what’s being stored.
When you remove the white noise and allow your mind to settle, the same thing happens, whether you head to a silent retreat or begin a daily meditation practice at home. You process what’s already there. Deep emotions start to rise to the surface because they have some room, some space, to do that. I shed so many tears at my first retreat, I was astounded. By the end of the session, that grip around my heart had loosened. Not completely, but it wasn’t the same feeling of overwhelming strangulation like during those first several days.
Nothing teaches you to be present and to lean into what you’re feeling with curiosity like seated meditation. I don’t think I would have been able to open to all the gifts of meditation without the years of physical practice first, without the daily effort to quiet my mind and focus my attention. It changed the way I practiced yoga when I went home, and it changed the way I taught. By the end of the session, I didn’t want to speak. I didn’t really want to look at anyone—because I had finally traveled to that inner landscape, and I knew there was a lot of work to do there.
When I went home, I dedicated myself to a serious meditation practice. I started each day that way, sometimes before my physical practice and sometimes after. The next time I went to the retreat center, I could not wait to get there, because I felt pulled, driven, and excited to excavate and replant. I realized I was the keeper of the garden now. I was the one responsible for weeding, for cutting back the thorny flowers, for digging and unearthing and growing something new.
Show Up, Observe, and Hold Firm
In order to be accountable for who we are, for the energy we’re spreading, for the way we’re moving through the world, in order to honor what is in our heart, we have to know ourselves. It’s essential. In order to feel inspired to do this kind of work, we need tapas, another of the niyamas. Tapas means “fire” or “heat,” and this is the heat that propels the work. This is the fire that fuels the dedication and determination we need to show up and get real, even when we’d rather not—especially when we’d rather not. It’s the thing that gets you to your yoga mat or your meditation cushion on the days when you feel tired or resistant. It’s the foundation for discipline and dedication.
Not everyone naturally has this heat. Sometimes you really have to stoke the flame, and that’s when an inspiring teacher can be so helpful—someone who’s cheering you on and lighting the path so you know you’re not alone.
You’ll recall that dharana is one of the eight limbs of yoga and means “concentration” or “to hold firm.” It’s a practice of directing the mind to focus on one thing at a time. If we can’t direct our energy, it’s going to be very difficult for us to get anything done, to pursue our dreams, to be careful about how we’re spending our time and on what we’re placing importance.
There’s a great scene from the 2005 movie The Weather Man with Nicolas Cage. He’s gone to pick up Chinese food for his family. His wife has asked him, pointedly, to please be sure they include the hoisin sauce, and you get the feeling that he’s forgotten to do this in the past. The camera follows him walking from their house to the restaurant, and you hear his internal monologue. The screenwriter, Steven Conrad, does an exceptional job of capturing what it sounds like in most of our heads, most of the time. By the time Nicolas Cage’s character gets to the restaurant, which is maybe three blocks away, he’s had a million thoughts and forgotten all about the hoisin sauce.
For most people, the noise of the mind is loud, swirling, redundant, and obsessive. In his poem “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” William Butler Yeats talks about this very thing—this storm, this frenzy in the mind—when he says “a fire was in my head.” There’s controversy about how many thoughts we have per day, and it will probably be difficult for anyone to come up with a definitive number, but I think we can all agree that it’s a lot of thoughts! I’m not so interested in how many thousands of thoughts we might think in a day; I’m more curious about how many of them are repeated thoughts. “Yoga chitta vritti nirodha” is the oft-quoted second sutra of Book 1, and it means “Yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind.” The next sutra, “Tada drashtuh svarupe avasthanam,” translates to “Then the seer rests in his or her true nature.” Until we quiet the storm, we cannot come home to ourselves.
When the mind is so full of shoulds and can’ts, so obsessed with daydreaming, or clinging to opinions or ways of thinking about things, scheduling what’s coming next, or categorizing experiences, it’s very hard to know how we feel about anything. Intuition resides in the limbic part of the brain, the primal animal part. In order to get in touch with that area, we have to turn down the volume in the frontal lobes. In recent years, scientists have been studying something called “embodied cognition,” an idea that dates back to early-twentieth-century philosophers Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and John Dewey. Embodied cognition suggests that thoughts do not occur solely in the skull, but that, in fact, thoughts are influenced by our bodies and by the environment around us.
We don’t have to get into a scientific conversation about the brain here, but there is no doubt when you step onto a yoga mat and start thinking about your breath, and where your right foot is, and where your left foot is, and that you want to be drawing your navel in, and extending through your limbs, that you will no longer be thinking about the millions of things that have been swirling around in your head all day. You can’t do both at once. You can’t swirl and focus. So you become present and start to create space between your thoughts, and in that space, you’ll discover you also find peace.
Left untamed, the habit pattern of the mind is to head into the past, usually with some longing or sadness, or into the future, often with fear or anxiety. We really don’t want to move through life feeling anxious or depressed all the time. Sometimes we’re so focused on all the things we have to do and all the places we have to be that we forget to be right where we are. We can lose a lot of moments that way.
The thing is, life isn’t happening in the past. The experiences we’ve had have informed us and shaped us, but they can’t be rewritten. Once you’ve gleaned the information that’s going to be useful for you, once you’ve healed those old wounds so you’re able to recognize them immediately when a current situation sends a jab into that scar tissue, there isn’t anything productive that comes from dwelling on the things that have happened. There’s no potential there. Of course, if we’re remembering someone who’s been lost to us, that’s beautiful. We can keep people alive in our hearts. A sudden memory can flood us with gratitude, sadness, or joy, but we can’t live in the past.
Our past does not have to define our present or our future. The future is a total unknown. What we have for sure is right now, this moment, this day. The thing to dwell on is not what has happened before or what could happen in the future; the thing to dwell on is how to draw the beauty out of this day, this moment.
The meditation retreat wasn’t the first experience I had taking myself out of my normal environment to get quiet. We don’t have to go on a retreat to experience this kind of thing. Often there’s a pull to find solitude when we’re dealing with the force of our own grief. We understand intuitively when we need some quiet time to reflect on what has led us into certain situations or how to move forward when things have fallen apart.
It’s a funny thing when you set yourself up to deal with nothing but your own issues. It isn’t comfortable, but in my experience, and the experiences of countless other people I’ve met along the way, there’s something really important about knowing you can show up for yourself when you’re outside your comfort zone—such as when you’re in a foreign city or country, when your usual schedule is turned upside down, or when you aren’t talking to your loved ones the way you normally would. Life is a solitary experience in many ways. You’re going to spend more time with that voice inside your head than with anyone else. And if you aren’t comfortable in your own skin, you’re never going to be at ease in life.
Sometimes what we find when we look in the mirror is deeply uncomfortable. But we have to start where we are, and there’s no shame in that. We all have our struggles and our raw places. Sometimes we’ve been clinging to self-righteousness or a victim mentality or our rage. Sometimes we’ve been numbing out or running from our pain. Most of us have made plenty of mistakes along the way. It’s fine, whatever it is. If you take an honest look at the state of things, the state of your life, and you find you’ve hurt people, unintentionally or otherwise, it’s never too late to own that. You might meet with forgiveness and you might not. That part you can’t control. But you can always let people know if you feel like you’ve let them down. You can always express your regret, unless you believe that doing so would cause them more pain or disruption.
Then you can take a look at where you’ve let yourself down, and practice some forgiveness there. That is within your domain.
Journal Exercise
1. If you were going to write one apology letter, to whom would you send it, and why? If it will free up some space for you, and you feel like it might bring comfort to the other party, go ahead and write it. You don’t have to send it, unless you decide that it feels right. If you do send it, send it because you want the other person to know you’re now aware of how they must have felt. You can share whatever details you’d like about what was driving you at that time, but don’t let it be a justification for your behavior or a cry for sympathy; just give them information they may not have had and you might not have understood at the time. Do not ask for a response, and don’t expect one. If you can’t send the letter just for the sake of sending it, without expecting a response, then don’t. If it’s going to torture you if you don’t receive a response, you’re better off keeping it. But work on forgiving yourself.
2. Write an apology to your younger self, at any age. What do you wish you knew then that you know now?
3. Write a letter of forgiveness to someone. You do not have to send it. Just go through the process of writing it. Try to imagine what must have happened in this person’s own history to drive them to do whatever they did. This may just be an exercise in releasing rage. It’s for your benefit, not the other party’s. You can burn the letter when you’re done.
4. What is the number-one thing you want from the people to whom you’re closest? Love? Loyalty? Respect? Why do you think that is?
Come to tadasana (mountain pose) and connect to your breath. Lengthen out your inhales and exhales, and begin to create that ocean sound. When you’re ready, do Series A three times (see Chapter 5), ending in mountain pose.
We’re going to practice Series C, because it’s a beautiful balance between being grounded (knowing yourself) and rising up (growing from your pain). Inhaling, reach your arms overhead; exhaling, fold forward. Inhaling, come to a flat back; exhaling, step the left foot back into a runner’s lunge and release your left knee to the floor. Inhaling, reach your arms overhead; exhaling, bring your hands down to the mat, lift your left knee so you’re back in a runner’s lunge, step your right foot back to meet your left foot (so you’re in plank), and lower to the floor. Inhaling, come to cobra pose; exhaling, draw the navel in and lift the hips back into down dog. Now step your left foot forward into runner’s lunge and release your right knee to the floor. Inhaling, reach the arms overhead; exhaling, bring your hands to the floor, tuck your back toes, and step to the front of your mat. Inhaling, come to a flat back; exhaling, fold in. Inhaling, lengthen your spine and come all the way up, reaching the arms overhead; exhaling, bring your hands to prayer at your heart. Begin again, this time stepping the right foot back first. Then come to sitting.
It’s meditation time, and we’re going to add a mudra today: the Gyan mudra (mudra of knowledge). Find a seated position that enables you to make a long spine. Close your eyes. Bring your thumbs and index fingers together lightly. Extend the other fingers, and place your hands on your legs, palms up.
Feel the breath moving in and out through your nose. Move through your body, starting at the crown of your head and working slowly, a few inches at a time, until you get to the tips of your toes. Just look for sensation. If thoughts arise, observe that you’re thinking, then come back to your breath and to the other sensations in your body. When you get to the toes, start working your way back up to the crown of your head, a few inches at a time, skipping nothing. If you can travel up and down the body that way a few times, observing sensation, that’s wonderful. If you’re moving at a mindful pace, one full sweep of the body (crown of the head to the toes, toes back up to the head) should take about ten minutes.