Tag Archives: expectations

The “It’s Been Awhile Newsletter” (Such a Classic): and a new-ish piece about violence

Hello, Dear Reader, Lover of Yoga, Poetry, Writers, and (maybe) Music too(?),

Thank you for opening this post. I love you.

(New-ish piece is below if you wanna just scroll there.)

So, yeah, it’s been a while and this is a classic headline for me — and many other people scattered about the world. I know, because I subscribe. (Little side-smile with eye-twinkle.)

I have made a monumental decision:

Are you ready for it?

I’m going to write Like MySelf.

Yep. That’s it. I’m gonna write like myself.

Years ago, in college, I took a nonfiction writing course. I can’t remember the actual title, but there was a lot of memoir-work. My final portfolio project was a collection of bits and pieces of my life, kinda like a collage-mosaic in a binder. I was born in 1978, so I was taking this class when email had just been released to the general population and websites were experimenting with what it meant “to be a web.” Not kidding: my dear computer-lab-writing-center-director was COMPLETELY JAZZED about the possibilities of the interconnectedness of information. She was GENUINELY THRILLED about something she was calling a “hyper-link.” Her enthusiasm was contagious even if confusing.

Anyway, at the end of this nonfiction writing course, I turned in a binder that held some of the most precious moments of my 20 years. It was received with tenderness, but was returned with notes about how this structure just wasn’t going to work. It just wasn’t right. It just wasn’t what it needed to be. It wasn’t cohesive (or something). I was so struck by this feedback that to this day I can’t even remember what I had titled it. I blocked it out. I think I even threw it out in one of my “fits of cleaning.” I only remember one word: Snippets. I just wanted to share snippets of my life, like some kind of scrapbook that only had words inside. I thought this course was a creative nonfiction writing course. Was it? I can’t remember. And isn’t memoir-writing creative? I mean, come on – we all know that when we write our life experience we live twice. We all know that in the writing we are creating. Why wasn’t I allowed to offer unstructured “snippets” of my life. Who’s keeping these gates?

Well, I’m opening them now.

Okay, so, that’s one announcement: I’m going to write like myself. I’m going to post snippets. I’m going to use all the genres if I want and I might make up new ones and I might opt out of using commas (see this sentence). I’m going to use the word “just” as many times as I feel appropriate (just please see above). I’m going to make references and probably not “hyperlink” them to anything so that you can focus on just one thing. AND, I’m going to use repetitive sentence structure if it’s effective, and I want to.

Thank you for indulging me in this adventure of being myself.

Second announcement: I’m going to try to actively grow my readership on Substack. Please subscribe: @amysecrist on Substack.

Third announcement: I’m going to finish writing my books. Some of them are in a word document; some of them are in my mind; some of them are in the archives; some of them are in my body-mind; some of them are in my heart-mind-body-mind; some of them have working titles: Curiosity & Kindness: The Way We BE Together; Magnolia Meditations: 30 Poem-Prompts for Your Inspiration.

Okay. I think that’s it for this moment.

I started the piece below two years ago. I don’t know what happened. (I have about 84 different drafts in my drafts folder.) I got distracted. I abandoned it. It abandoned me. Or maybe more truthfully, we got separated. Please enjoy.

The Violence of Expectations

Storied, admired, and celebrated Montessori preschool teacher, whom I met in the final two years of her long tenure, gave me advice after a conference for our oldest child, our oldest son:  Be tender.  That stuff about tough love?  Don’t buy it. 

This was after she told us, He’s already got his perfectionism issues. Don’t add to them.  

And this:  Don’t believe what they tell you about being firm and strict and exacting with your discipline.  It’s love, it’s all love. 

She had become a grandmother by this point, and would share stories of her experiences with her young granddaughters, all they were teaching her.

All they were teaching her.

I’m working at that school now, teaching even the youngest students a little bit about neuroscience and the power they have to change how they feel, the freedom that exists in their breath when they choose the way they will exhale: like a lion, an owl, like someone blowing bubbles or cooling off hot chocolate.

I didn’t know much, if anything, about resilience when my boy was in preschool, but the head teacher’s comments changed the way I approached him. I became a little softer, more patient, more observant, and better able to absorb the wisdom emanating from his innocence. He’s now entering his senior year at university, and I’ve taught him everything I knew at every moment the opportunity presented itself throughout his busy and chaotic adolescent years. When I learned it, I shared it. We currently discuss books and songs about spiritual philosophies. We send each other links to interesting teachings and satirical commentaries, and continue to encourage each other to remember our keys, cards, travel mugs, and important papers because we are more likely to be celebrating the effects of some gorgeous solfeggio frequency than checking our “notes app to-do list.”

Needless to say, the two of us help each other and one of his younger sisters navigate balancing our experience of having our heads in the clouds and our feet on the ground. There’s so much to “get done” in this world, in this life, and the three of us are quite enthralled with how we all feel about it rather than what it takes to complete it. We are practicing, and progressing, getting better at checking our lists and gathering our supplies. We are becoming ourselves.

It wasn’t always this way for me, this way of “practicing” and “becoming.” I have spent my entire conscious life navigating around, wrestling with, and understanding my relationship to society’s expectations, specifically Mid-West-American-Christian society’s expectations of me as a middle-class-cisgender-heteronormative-white-woman who was born in 1978, and the way I interpreted them: Do every thing you can for every one else all the time while doing everything for yourself by yourself because “you don’t need anyone and are completely self-sufficient,” while also producing goods and services for the community as efficiently as possible, while at the same time growing human beings in your body, one after another, while always smiling and keeping a pristine home, fulfilling spiritual and corporal works of mercy, volunteering and contributing to any and all manner of activism movements to support people who are oppressed and marginalized, including the environment, while being in peak physical condition, and while meeting all standards of beauty and attractiveness At All Times because “it’s (technically?) possible” to do so. I’m not saying that any one person or any one group taught me these things. I’m acknowledging that this is what I inhaled growing up – it was in the atmosphere, and the atmosphere is layered.

In Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Thomas Merton writes:

“There is a pervasive form of modern violence to which the idealist…most easily succumbs: activism and over-work. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence.

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence.

The frenzy of the activist neutralizes [their] work… It destroys the fruitfulness of [their]…work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”

When I first encountered this understanding of the violence of modernity, my brain immediately processed it and applied it to the torrent of expectations I was experiencing, all day every day, all of society’s and all of the internalized expectations I thought were mine. I finally began to understand that I am able to create expectations for myself. Ones that are in alignment with reality. So that’s what I do now. I get in touch with reality. To the best of my ability. I vet my sources. I make decisions. I create space to choose. As best I can.

My son’s preschool teacher came to the senior violin recital he performed at his highschool graduation party 4 years ago. I told her I loved her. She expressed her happiness for my son, her student. I am no longer exacting in my parenting. I gave that up about 17 years ago, so his three younger siblings have benefitted greatly. And I teach my preschool, elementary, middle, and high school students about the terror of perfectionism and the cruelty of the self-improvement cycle. We play around with compassion and with wisdom, two wings of the bird of peace.

Don’t worry or be too impressed or too hard on yourself – I still wrestle, but gently now, you know, because, my joints. They hurt.

I love you. Thank you for reading.

xoxo,

A.

The “It’s Been Awhile Newsletter” (Such a Classic): and a new-ish piece about violence

Hello, Dear Reader, Lover of Yoga, Poetry, Writers, and (maybe) Music too(?),

Thank you for opening this post. I love you.

(New-ish piece is below if you wanna just scroll there.)

So, yeah, it’s been a while and this is a classic headline for me — and many other people scattered about the world. I know, because I subscribe. (Little side-smile with eye-twinkle.)

I have made a monumental decision:

Are you ready for it?

I’m going to write Like MySelf.

Yep. That’s it. I’m gonna write like myself.

Years ago, in college, I took a nonfiction writing course. I can’t remember the actual title, but there was a lot of memoir-work. My final portfolio project was a collection of bits and pieces of my life, kinda like a collage-mosaic in a binder. I was born in 1978, so I was taking this class when email had just been released to the general population and websites were experimenting with what it meant “to be a web.” Not kidding: my dear computer-lab-writing-center-director was COMPLETELY JAZZED about the possibilities of the interconnectedness of information. She was GENUINELY THRILLED about something she was calling a “hyper-link.” Her enthusiasm was contagious even if confusing.

Anyway, at the end of this nonfiction writing course, I turned in a binder that held some of the most precious moments of my 20 years. It was received with tenderness, but was returned with notes about how this structure just wasn’t going to work. It just wasn’t right. It just wasn’t what it needed to be. It wasn’t cohesive (or something). I was so struck by this feedback that to this day I can’t even remember what I had titled it. I blocked it out. I think I even threw it out in one of my “fits of cleaning.” I only remember one word: Snippets. I just wanted to share snippets of my life, like some kind of scrapbook that only had words inside. I thought this course was a creative nonfiction writing course. Was it? I can’t remember. And isn’t memoir-writing creative? I mean, come on – we all know that when we write our life experience we live twice. We all know that in the writing we are creating. Why wasn’t I allowed to offer unstructured “snippets” of my life. Who’s keeping these gates?

Well, I’m opening them now.

Okay, so, that’s one announcement: I’m going to write like myself. I’m going to post snippets. I’m going to use all the genres if I want and I might make up new ones and I might opt out of using commas (see this sentence). I’m going to use the word “just” as many times as I feel appropriate (just please see above). I’m going to make references and probably not “hyperlink” them to anything so that you can focus on just one thing. AND, I’m going to use repetitive sentence structure if it’s effective, and I want to.

Thank you for indulging me in this adventure of being myself.

Second announcement: I’m going to try to actively grow my readership on Substack. Please subscribe: @amysecrist on Substack.

Third announcement: I’m going to finish writing my books. Some of them are in a word document; some of them are in my mind; some of them are in the archives; some of them are in my body-mind; some of them are in my heart-mind-body-mind; some of them have working titles: Curiosity & Kindness: The Way We BE Together; Magnolia Meditations: 30 Poem-Prompts for Your Inspiration.

Okay. I think that’s it for this moment.

I started the piece below two years ago. I don’t know what happened. (I have about 84 different drafts in my drafts folder.) I got distracted. I abandoned it. It abandoned me. Or maybe more truthfully, we got separated. Please enjoy.

The Violence of Expectations

Storied, admired, and celebrated Montessori preschool teacher, whom I met in the final two years of her long tenure, gave me advice after a conference for our oldest child, our oldest son:  Be tender.  That stuff about tough love?  Don’t buy it. 

This was after she told us, He’s already got his perfectionism issues. Don’t add to them.  

And this:  Don’t believe what they tell you about being firm and strict and exacting with your discipline.  It’s love, it’s all love. 

She had become a grandmother by this point, and would share stories of her experiences with her young granddaughters, all they were teaching her.

All they were teaching her.

I’m working at that school now, teaching even the youngest students a little bit about neuroscience and the power they have to change how they feel, the freedom that exists in their breath when they choose the way they will exhale: like a lion, an owl, like someone blowing bubbles or cooling off hot chocolate.

I didn’t know much, if anything, about resilience when my boy was in preschool, but the head teacher’s comments changed the way I approached him. I became a little softer, more patient, more observant, and better able to absorb the wisdom emanating from his innocence. He’s now entering his senior year at university, and I’ve taught him everything I knew at every moment the opportunity presented itself throughout his busy and chaotic adolescent years. When I learned it, I shared it. We currently discuss books and songs about spiritual philosophies. We send each other links to interesting teachings and satirical commentaries, and continue to encourage each other to remember our keys, cards, travel mugs, and important papers because we are more likely to be celebrating the effects of some gorgeous solfeggio frequency than checking our “notes app to-do list.”

Needless to say, the two of us help each other and one of his younger sisters navigate balancing our experience of having our heads in the clouds and our feet on the ground. There’s so much to “get done” in this world, in this life, and the three of us are quite enthralled with how we all feel about it rather than what it takes to complete it. We are practicing, and progressing, getting better at checking our lists and gathering our supplies. We are becoming ourselves.

It wasn’t always this way for me, this way of “practicing” and “becoming.” I have spent my entire conscious life navigating around, wrestling with, and understanding my relationship to society’s expectations, specifically Mid-West-American-Christian society’s expectations of me as a middle-class-cisgender-heteronormative-white-woman who was born in 1978, and the way I interpreted them: Do every thing you can for every one else all the time while doing everything for yourself by yourself because “you don’t need anyone and are completely self-sufficient,” while also producing goods and services for the community as efficiently as possible, while at the same time growing human beings in your body, one after another, while always smiling and keeping a pristine home, fulfilling spiritual and corporal works of mercy, volunteering and contributing to any and all manner of activism movements to support people who are oppressed and marginalized, including the environment, while being in peak physical condition, and while meeting all standards of beauty and attractiveness At All Times because “it’s (technically?) possible” to do so. I’m not saying that any one person or any one group taught me these things. I’m acknowledging that this is what I inhaled growing up – it was in the atmosphere, and the atmosphere is layered.

In Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Thomas Merton writes:

“There is a pervasive form of modern violence to which the idealist…most easily succumbs: activism and over-work. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence.

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence.

The frenzy of the activist neutralizes [their] work… It destroys the fruitfulness of [their]…work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”

When I first encountered this understanding of the violence of modernity, my brain immediately processed it and applied it to the torrent of expectations I was experiencing, all day every day, all of society’s and all of the internalized expectations I thought were mine. I finally began to understand that I am able to create expectations for myself. Ones that are in alignment with reality. So that’s what I do now. I get in touch with reality. To the best of my ability. I vet my sources. I make decisions. I create space to choose. As best I can.

My son’s preschool teacher came to the senior violin recital he performed at his highschool graduation party 4 years ago. I told her I loved her. She expressed her happiness for my son, her student. I am no longer exacting in my parenting. I gave that up about 17 years ago, so his three younger siblings have benefitted greatly. And I teach my preschool, elementary, middle, and high school students about the terror of perfectionism and the cruelty of the self-improvement cycle. We play around with compassion and with wisdom, two wings of the bird of peace.

Don’t worry or be too impressed or too hard on yourself – I still wrestle, but gently now, you know, because, my joints. They hurt.

I love you. Thank you for reading.

xoxo,

A.

Please subscribe: @amysecrist on Substack.

Our Own Mosaic

As Hatha Yoga practice has grown, blossomed, and spread into hundreds of varieties throughout the West, I find it increasingly more complicated to answer the moderately curious acquaintance when she asks me questions like, “So, what do you think about Hot Yoga?” Or, the even more complicated, “What’s your yoga class like?”

After some bumbling attempts at a coherent, clear, and concise answer in the grocery store, the random text bubble, or the school drop-off line, I’ve decided that in the face of complexity, the simple answer is best: “Hot Yoga’s not for everybody,” and “You’ll have to come to a class and find out!”

While it’s true that no one yoga class or style of yoga works for everybody, it is also true that there is at least one yoga practice that will work for each of us; it just takes some searching and seeking before we find it.

A quick internet search will turn up thousands of websites, articles, and posts regarding new yoga trends, yoga philosophy, the history of yoga in the West, and traditional yogic lineages. As you begin your yoga journey, it is good and wise to attend a variety of classes and workshops in different traditions and with different teachers within those traditions. You will quickly learn what works for you and what doesn’t. You might also find that what works for you during one phase of your life won’t help you during the next.

But the beauty of yoga is that it adapts. We don’t have to bend and twist ourselves to fit the yoga; the yoga can extend and untwist to fit us. So even if you trained and studied in one tradition, that doesn’t preclude you from dipping your toes in the waters of another. When you find what works for you, embrace it. There will be aspects of different styles that speak to us in different ways, and some will stay with us forever, throughout all our transformations. There will be other practices that served us well at one time but not longer fit, and still others that never fit in the first place, and we finally realize we can let them go.

Understanding ourselves is an important part of yogic practice; in Sanskrit it’s called svadhyaya, self-study, and is one of the five niyamas, or observances. However, when we study ourselves mercilessly, it is easy to get caught up in an endless cycle of striving toward an imagined future self, a constant and relentless “self-improvement.” We can easily apply this destructive habit to our yoga practice, or make our yoga practice itself a part of this negative striving. Self-study is important and necessary, but it is not a directive to hold ourselves to unrealistic expectations, on our yoga mat or off. It is a draining way of life to be consistently telling ourselves we can do better, instead of relishing the moments in which we do so very well. We deplete ourselves more and more with each I need to, I should do, and if only I could. We deceive ourselves when we repeat, I’m not good enough, I’ve not done enough, I don’t produce enough, I am not enough.

Instead, reflecting on ourselves positively, or with non-attachment and a suspension of judgement, can uncover our uniqueness. In our yoga practice, this means we give ourselves the freedom to let go of some poses or breathing practices and embrace others, to modify certain postures or theories and experiment with new ones. We never stop being curious, so we never stop learning. If we can do this on our mat, the hope is that we can do this in our lives. We can learn our strengths and our weaknesses so that going out into the world we ask for help when we know we need it, and offer help where we know we can serve. In this way we can be a force for good in the world, giving others the opportunity to love us, and acting on opportunities in which we can love another.

The magnitude of discovering who we are and then actually being ourselves cannot be overstated.

There is an old Hasidic tale that expresses the importance of being who we are, of being who we have been created to be:

When the great, sweet Rabbi Zusia of Hanipol was on his deathbed, his students gathered all around him. The Teacher said to them:
When I get to the Next World, I am not afraid if God will ask me, “Zusia, why weren’t you Moses, to lead the people out of this land where Jews are so oppressed and beaten by the people?” I can answer, “I did not have the leadership abilities of a Moses.”
And if God asks, “Zusia, why weren’t you Isaiah, reprimanding the people for their sins and urging them to change their ways, to repent?” I could answer, “I did not have the eloquence of Isaiah, the Great Master of powerful and dazzling speech.”
And if God should ask, “Zusia, why weren’t you Maimonides, to explain the deeper meaning of Judaism to the philosophers of the world, so they would understand the Jews better and perhaps treat them better?” I can answer, “I did not have the vast intellectual skills of Maimonides.”
No, my students, I am not afraid of those questions. What I fear is this: What if God asks me, “Zusia, why weren’t you Zusia?”
Then what will I say?

Indeed, God will not ask us, “Why were you not your neighbor or your friend? Why were you not your sister or your grandmother?” So why are we striving to be what we are not, and ignoring all that we are? Why do we hold ourselves to such exacting and incredibly damaging expectations?

If God will ask us, “Why were you not yourself?” then let us study with a tender heart to uncover our truest selves, to seek and to find the yogic lineage that fits us best, even if that means we create a new one, a mosaic that we piece together over a lifetime, a magnanimous collage of all that is benevolent and kind?

My dear friends,

May we offer ourselves the same compassion we offer our friends,
May we love ourselves as we love others,
May we discover and embrace our truest selves, and
May we finally be the person we have been created to be.

20170619_203950.jpg

Know that my gratitude for your continued dedication to your practice cannot be overestimated. You are an inspiration to me.

Happy Practicing!

The Catholic Yogi