Tag Archives: understanding

You Are Nature & Standing in the Midst

Look at your hands.
They are blossoms, your fingers, petals.
Look at your feet.
They, too, open and close,
your toes, each one, precious petals
it doesn’t matter
they curved, crooked and callused
when the magic happened inside of you,
the energetic core of you
the magic always happening.

Look at you. You are the interstices of love and itself,
deep inside this web of life
you stand in the inbetween.
You are the intersection of all and everything,
You know, the love and the Love
in the midst of it
and still at the same time
you are a dusty star
like me
because we are in the midst of it
we are nothing and everything together
floating on the spectrums of spanda,
expanding and contracting along
the continuums of impermanence
cosmic and miniscule
exploding and swaddling
always together alone
and
alone together.

Between games I found a metropark and spent my time in the grass, with all the ants. On the earthy soil along the river with all the stones. Beside all the growing things with all the roots, and I was growing, too.

My 16-year-old soccer player rested in the air-conditioned car after one too many ants interrupted her napping. I bathed in the air coming from the water, leaves, bark, branches, and blossoms. They were everywhere, all the growing things. And when I looked down – me(!) I was growing, too. Just like you. Right now. This very moment.

Impermanence keeps swelling up in my awareness, whether I like it or not. Sometimes I love it. Sometimes I cry. Sometimes joy, sometimes grief. Always bittersweet.

These little pink and yellow blossoms might not be there if I were to go back today. But maybe they would be. And either scenario would be just fine.

I noticed a lot of things on my walk through the woods, like how the deer cut paths I don’t want to follow, and how the river lays sea shells on the sand where there is no sea and there is no sand. I noticed, too, how humans interact with each other, and I all can say is this: to be understood is the greatest gift one sweet person and give to another.

I watched two people from different generations and different cultures smile and laugh as they signed to each other with their hands and fingers. I watched dads and babies at the edge of the Olentangy acknowledge the mess of water and soil. I watched myself proclaim to a mom that her self-assured young boy would be very wise one day.

I walked through these family-centered woods alone, my own four kids and husband spread out in various places, resting, playing, working, being in their individual days. But I am never alone. I thought to myself, “This young mom has no idea I have kids, 21, 16, 14, and 13. I’m just walking through these trees “free,” with my arms swinging slowly by my sides, and my hands “empty.”

She couldn’t see my what my hands used to hold. She couldn’t see my heart, not with her eyes. If she could, she would’ve known things about me because my heart is bulbous and bursting with all those beings inside of it: My children, T, S, E, D, and my husband, J, and the puppy, B. My heart is soft and squishy and malleable. My heart gets callused and blistered, gorgeous biologic bandages sloughing off in time. My heart grows and shrinks, and expands and contracts with love and fear and all the things a human can feel.

When my daughter and I were lying on blankets in the weedy grass beneath the maple trees, the ants embraced us. I watched them and thought, “If I were a horse, would I mind? Would I know? If I were a cow, would I notice, would I care?

“The ants are crawling on me, and I am lying on the earth. I am in it. I am not separate.

Then I offered my teenager the air-conditioned mini-van so that she could rest. I have spent hours and hours playing yoga shapes outside under the sky. I built up a capacity for discomfort and annoyance. I have a high ant tolerance now. I chose this.

Photo by Paul H on Pexels.com

Freedom does not exist
outside of me.
I used to think it did.
I used to think I could reach outside myself, control external forces,
control everything, everywhere and get to freedom.

But when I realized
I couldn’t feed a baby breakfast
before I’d fed her dinner,
I set out to find
ease
and realized I needed to recruit
allowing
and it took a
looooooong
long time to find.

Freedom, maybe, exists within the self-organized structures of the smallest bits of us – quarks and antiquarks, mesons and hadrons, stability lying beneath storminess; protons, neutrons, baryons, sort of like the “organized chaos” of the Montessori working, learning, playing house, string theory and chaos theory intersecting all over the place.

Photo by Mikhail Nilov on Pexels.com

I’m not saying I like ants crawling on my skin. It’s just that I’d rather feel easeful instead of irritated. And I think freedom exists in my choice to allow them to crawl from the grass to my blanket to my foot. I guess I think freedom exists in choices. Even when those choices are controlled by forces other than me.

I chose to lie down on the ground, an hour from my house where the ants live all the moments of their lives. I chose to play around in yoga shapes on the grounds of the local art center where I know ants have lived forever.

I still choose to sit beneath the magnolia tree in my backyard where I know some ants spend some of their time. I don’t choose to invite them inside my bedroom, though. I don’t allow them to walk through the window beside my pillow. So there’s some dis-ease there in that tension. I got a little freaked out when I couldn’t stop the flow of ants beside my sleeping face. (Yeah, I took steps to rectify that.)

All this is to say that I Just want you to know that you are nature. and by know I mean feel. And by feel I mean experience. Experience that you are nature and you are good. Your humanness is goodness.

I feel my best when I remember
I burst out into the world from the world.
My eyes, mouth, hands, feet, gut, mind, heart
opening and closing and opening again,
rhythmically,
dawn, day, dusk, dark.

My body is made of earth and stars
just like my mother’s body is of the earth and stars.
We are constellations on the ground,
my ancestors and I, you and I, all of us.
From the world into the world.
Humans in all of our humanness.

Are you standing in the midst with me?
What does your gut say?
Your heart?
Your mind?
Your body-heart-mind?
What does all of you say?

Practice in Virtues, Catholic and Yogic

As we continue to move through this season of anticipation here at the Catholic Yogi, the second week of Advent found our family practicing Understanding, and now, in the third week, the week of rejoicing, we are practicing Kindness.  As the weeks pass, much to my children’s dismay, we can’t happily throw out the patience we learned, the understanding we realized, or the kindnesses we are uncovering.  Instead, we are striving to create habits of these virtues and so carry them with us into our final week of preparing the way.

The kiddos cheer when they think “a week of being patient” has passed, the pressure’s off, no more patience needed!  But when we look at the root of all the virtures we find their life force is the same, Love.  So, in Understanding, we still find patience, and in Kindness, we still offer understanding.  When our fourth week of Advent brings Honesty to our door, I suspect patience, understanding, and kindness will inform our practice of truth.

The Eight Limbs of Yoga according to Patanjali offer Yamas and Niyamas as guidelines for ethical and moral behavior.  (For a quick peek at all eight limbs, check out this article by Mara Carrico.)  When I think of Patience, the second niyama, Samtosa, comes to mind.  It means Contentment.  Sometimes when practicing patience, finding contentment in our hearts is not only helpful, but necessary.  All the grasping that lives within our impatience is calmed when we are able to embrace the goodness of the right here and now.

Svadhyaya, the fourth niyama, is the study of the sacred scriptures and of one’s self.  This reminds me of Understanding.  When we seek to be understanding we can study our own habits, thoughts, and behaviors; we can study the scriptures of our own cultural and/or religious disciplines; and, finally, we can study the circumstances, experiences, and situations of others, of our close family, as well as members of our greater communities, even those we haven’t met.  When we have a better grasp of ourselves and others, empathy comes more easily.

Empathy has the ability to spur our feelings into action and take us from contemplation into motion.  Acts of Kindness resonate with the first yama, Ahimsa, meaning Non-violence.  In addition to avoiding harmful behaviors, we seek out ways to lighten the burden and bring comfort.

Satya, the second yama, means Truthfulness and is a great tool in our practice of Honesty.  (You can read an excellent article by Judith Hanson Lasater on the practical applications of truthfulness here.)  When we are sincere in our interactions with others, way down in the depths of the daily things, like “Are you hungry, would you like to eat before we leave?”  “Yes, I am.  That would be great,” we find there is less strife, less bitterness, less frustration, and less regret.

With all of these virtues swirling around in our hearts, what great gifts we can give to each other, not just one celebratory day each year, but here and now, way down deep in the daily living.

Happy Practicing!

The Catholic Yogi

~ For a more in-depth look at the Yamas, read Beginning the Journey by Judith Hanson Lasater, and for the Niyamas, read Cultivate Your Connections.