My Teacher

Many of you know of my interest in Naikan, a method of self-reflection.  I touched on it in this blog back in 2008.  In my opinion, it’s one of the most powerful methods there is for getting out of your head and looking at yourself in the way that others experience you.  One of its key goals is to open our eyes to all of the ways we’re being cared for by the world around us.  From the head of lettuce and the turkey and the wheat plant that gave their lives for your lunch to the people all around you who do things to make your life a little (or a lot) better.  It’s a formalized gratitude practice and it takes a very simple approach to make you recognize the blessings in your life. 

I was on a plane this week from New York to San Francisco, seated in coach.  I had brought Gregg Krech’s book on Naikan with me to read, and was once again revisiting the techniques and the premises of the practice.  I was reflecting back on my prior week, month and year, going through the exercises in my mind, writing down a few things here and there.  Looking at the world in this way, even for a short time, really does have a meaningful impact on how you think about the people and things around you.  I was feeling really connected and natural in the practice, like it had sunk into my bones over the years.  To be honest, I felt like the practice had become a part of who I am, that I had come to a place where I routinely looked at the world in this way.  That’s not to say that I thought I had eliminated selfishness, ego-centricity or thoughtlessness from my life – not at all – but I guess I felt like I was becoming a lot more mindful of how those traits impact my behavior, and that I had become a lot less susceptible to being spun out of control by them.

The universe laughs at hubris.  And then, usually, it smacks you directly upside the head.

The flight attendants came down the aisle with the beverage cart, and I ordered my usual sparkling water.  The guy next to me ordered the same.  I got my cup full of sparkling water, and he got his.  And then they put a whole can down on his tray.  I sat back and took my hands off my tray, making room for my can, only to hear the click of the brake releasing and the cart continuing on down the aisle.  I turned around in disbelief, assuming that the attendant would quickly notice that she had a half-empty can of sparkling water – MY sparkling water, mind you – and immediately correct this grievous error with a profuse apology and maybe a couple of thousand extra frequent flyer miles added to my account.  Instead, she was chatting away with some couple in matching family reunion tee shirts a couple of rows back.  I turned to the guy next to me, expecting at least and embarrassed smile and maybe – if he had any honor at all – an offer to pour half of his can into my glass when I needed a refill.  But no.  He was sitting there reading his stupid celebrity chef book, paying no mind whatsoever to the injustice that had occurred.  In fact, was that a little smirk?  The smug bastard was enjoying this.  I hoped he’d spill it all over his crappy middle seat.

Oh, a couple of other important points.  First, I had brought a water on board with me, so I wasn’t in the least bit thirsty.  Second, I had gotten a cup of sparkling water on the flight out and had been just fine with it.  Third, someone had taken that water from the source, canned it and distributed it.  Some truck driver had delivered it.  Someone else had brought it into a warehouse.  Someone loaded it on my plane, and this flight attendant had pushed this unwieldy cart down a crowded aisle full of grouchy, impatient passengers so that I could have a cup of water on my flight.  Now here I was, fuming, because the guy next to me had more of something I didn’t really want or need than I did. 

Back to page 1 I guess.

It’s gotten so prevalent that you would expect you could walk into any yoga studio in the world and every other student would be having breakthroughs every day.  And for many people practicing yoga it leads to a natural question:  “Hey, where’s MY breakthrough?!!”

Well, here’s the thing.  I’ve been practicing yoga since people were coming to class in legwarmers and off-the-shoulder sweatshirts, and I can tell you one thing for sure: breakthroughs are hard to come by.  For most of us most of the time, the experience of yoga is about getting onto your mat, fighting off your physical and mental resistance to getting started, and then slowly working into a groove.  You start to feel a little better, a little warmer, a little clearer.  You breathe better and feel more awake.  You push into a few tight spots and nurse a few sore spots and challenge a few strong spots and you begin to slow down your frenetic mind.  Eventually, you start to feel like pushing through the initial lethargy or anxiety was worth it.  You begin to play, and move, and have some fun.  Maybe you do a little extra meditation at the end, or maybe you don’t, and then you roll up your mat, take a shower and go on with your day (or go to bed, depending on when life lets you practice).

And that’s it.  No beams of white light shooting from your eyes.  No levitating.  No flash of insight about the oneness of all things.  You usually feel better, and crisper and happier for having done it.  You’ve at least paid attention to yourself for a little while, and nurtured yourself a bit.  Every once in a while, you may experience something else and it can feel magical, but then you grasp for it and it’s like grabbing at smoke.  It’s gone.  Over time, maybe you teach yourself how not to grasp at it and to keep it around for a little longer.  But at the end of the meditation, or the asana, or whatever practice is bringing you to this point, you still roll up your mat and go on.

If you approach your yoga practice as an easter egg hunt for breakthroughs, you’re going to get frustrated pretty quickly.  Instead, try expanding your capacity to take pleasure in feeling better at the end of your practice.  Enjoy the process of watching your tight, tired muscles come to life, strengthen and lengthen.  Watch your mind begin- ever so slowly- to focus and settle, and when it scatters watch it begin to settle again.  Teach yourself to enjoy the process of yoga more than the achievement of a breakthrough, or of a pose for that matter.  If you can let it be sweet, it will be sweet.  And that will really be a breakthrough.

Well, I’m no Buddha and no prince in a kingdom.  However, every once in a while my eyes are opened to the way that we play King Śuddhodana to ourselves, despite the world’s attempts to play the old man.  Most of us don’t have the ability to have the unfortunate experiences of the world removed from our sight, so instead we develop the ability to adjust what we see.  How many of us walk by the suffering old man panhandling on the corner and after a momentary internal cringe, turn our attention to our grande nonfat mocha and within forty seconds forget that he even existed?  I do.  When we walk away, he’s still there.  Still in his reality. 

When I think about it, it’s not the rich guy walking by with his Starbuck’s that is the heartbreaking part.  It’s the five minutes after he’s gone, when the old man is still there, unnoticed. 

Every once in a while the old man gets through your filter and you see him.  He takes many forms.  Tonight he took the form of a yellow labrador, sitting on a street corner with a cardboard sign in his mouth in an attempt to attract money to some drug kids.  One of the kids whacked him on the haunch and he scurried, cowering, but never dropped the sign.  In the grand scheme of things – the suffering we see every day in a big city, the news from Haiti – this was relatively nothing.  But now it’s four in the morning, and it’s pouring rain outside and I can’t find sleep.  And somewhere out there is that dog.  And that old man I walked by this morning on the way to get coffee.

Some of these filters seem to be necessary just to live in the world.  I think if I threw them all off and let everything in I’d end up curled in the corner, catatonic.  I can’t save every person from their suffering, and more likely I can’t save any of them.  But if you listen to people who have lived on the streets, they say that it’s not the jerk who walks by and says “get a job” that bothers them.  It’s the hundreds who walk by trying desperately to filter this person from their experience.  I should have stopped and petted that dog.  I should have bought that guy a warm drink, or at least looked at him and said hello. 

Yoga is a way to practice removing filters, and to build your capacity to let more of the world in without losing yourself to it.  But it’s not what you can do when you’re in class, or even when you walk out and re-encounter the world that matters the most.  It’s the next day on the way to work in the rain.  It’s walking down a busy street with a friend on your way home.  It’s not enough to take the filters down for a 90-minute class.  We’ve got to be able to keep them down. 

It’s still hours until daylight, and the house is quiet.  There is only the clicking of the keyboard and the sound of the rain outside.  Before long, though, we’ll be back at it.  I’ll be in front of my Saturday morning yoga class talking to them about openness and compassion and love.  I’ll try to connect with each and every person in that room, even if it’s only for a moment.  But then I’ll probably go and get a coffee, and all I can hope is that I see Siddhartha’s old man, whatever form he decides to take this morning.

All,

I wanted to take a moment to reach out to my yoga community and to thank each of you for your energy over the course of this past year.  I always look forward to this week.  Whatever it is that we’re celebrating this season, from the birth of a savior to the rededication of the Temple to “lo, Saturnalia” to lengthening days and shortening nights to finally getting a few days off work to go ski, it feels like a big annual exhale to me.

In addition to our annual pledge to eat better, exercise more and quit smoking/coffee/whatever, this is a natural time to reflect on our lives past and future.  We make plans, reminisce and organize.  Our minds stretch forward and back, integrating all the chaos of the year into a personal history that we’ll bore our grandkids with.  I just wanted to remind you that sandwiched in between all this past and future there’s a fragile little thing called Present.  The whole universe lives there.  We tend not to like it because it’s not as pliable as past or future.  Past, we can filter, alter details in our mind, forget pieces entirely.  Future is even more malleable.  We can change it wholesale.  Watch this:  image you won the lottery.  Boom.  Totally changed, and you can change it dozens of other ways with just a thought.  Now Present, we can’t really change in this way.  It’s here, and it’s what it is.  All we can do is control how wide we open the shutters to let it in.  In the middle of holiday shopping in Union Square with thousands of people swarming around us, we might close the shutters down to a crack, just looking at the next block and keeping the gift list in the forefront of our minds.  In yoga class, we try to open them as wide as they’ll go, feeling and experiencing as much as possible in each moment.  It’s like giving shivering little Present a big, warm hug.

So, as the family and friends come and go, as we hurtle headlong into New Year’s Celebrations and then prepare to return to our daily routines, take a minute to appreciate Present, the present you have given yourself through the efforts of your thoughts and deeds.  Try it right now…straighten your spine, take a nice deep breath and take off all the filters for a couple of seconds.  Let all the sensations in.  Smile down at Present, the quieter, underappreciated child.  Just like that, you’ve done a yoga practice, without a single downward dog.

Namaste.

Kevin

It had been a very long time since I’d done a teacher training.  I was supposed to go two years ago, made it as far as the Cancun airport before Hurricane Dean said, “no, I don’t think so”.  Several of my students asked why I was doing it at all.  After all, I’ve been teaching for a long time – ten years this week – and I’m not looking to get work at a new studio.  Why bother?  Why spend all that money?  Why take all that time?  Well, to me, this one was a no-brainer.  Ever since my bills decided that it was time to give up full-time yoga teaching and go back to work, I’ve felt the slow but inexorable strain on the connections between me and my yoga.  Yes, I still taught every week, and yes I still practiced, but for most of the week I was living in a very different mindset.  Many of you have heard me say that my goal was to bring yoga’s heart to my business week and business clarity to my yoga teaching.  It takes a toll, and I was feeling disconnected.  On day two, Bryan was talking about people who teach but don’t practice and he said that over time, you begin to teach more and more from your mind – from memory – than from your body and that it shows.  That really struck me because even though I was still able to teach from my own true experience, it was only the physical practice that was real to me…the rest of yoga, especially yoga mind, was being drowned out by deadlines and powerpoints and conferences and speaking events.  I needed to reconnect, and I felt it very deeply.

So I did.  I spent three weeks with the following schedule:  wake up, silent 1 hour walk on the beach, eat amazing local food, chill and digest, long practice, meditation, eat, swim, satsang, meditation, eat, write, snooze, repeat.  I lived yoga for three weeks, pouring nourishment and water on roots that had been dry for far too long.  I re-energized my connection to it.  It felt amazing.  By the end, I was anxious to come back and teach – I mean, all the things I used to talk about came back – my philosophy of yoga, the heart of my yoga reawakened. 

When I got back, I had a bunch of emails from people asking how it was.  It seems that there is a concern that I’m coming back with a whole new repertoire of evil, complicated poses and that we’re all going to be starting tomorrow morning in one armed thumbstand or something.  Let me assuage your concerns with a quick summary of my training:

Number of handstands I did:  0

Number of headstands I did:  0

Number of wheels I did:  0

Number of pigeons I did:  0

Number of times I had my leg behind my head:  0

Number of crows I did:  2

Number of new poses I learned:  0

And yet we practiced for hours every day.  Here’s the thing.  We did simple poses.  What you would call boring poses.  We did extended planks, and bent over while lifting one leg in the air, and straddle folds, and balanced on one leg.  We did stuff that ain’t gonna get you on YouTube.  And it was perfect, especially for me, because this training wasn’t about what I teach.  It was about how and why I teach.  And that’s just what I needed to be reminded of. 

I’m looking forward to seeing you this weekend.

“In twenty-five years the population of China will be 1.5 billion people, and if each of them wants to drive their own private car, China will need 99 million barrels of oil every day.  But world production today is only 84 million barrels per day, so the American dream is not possible for the Chinese, nor the Indians or the Vietnamese.  The American dream is no longer possible for the Americans.  We cannot continue to live like this.  It is not a sustainable economy.”

If you think about it even for a minute, the math is simple.  We live in an economy that is based on endless growth.  Stocks are priced with an implicit assumption of perpetual growth of between 2-3% for mature companies that grow that the rate of inflation and hundreds or thousands of percent for start-ups or hot sectors.  Imagine of your favorite stock posted the exact same revenues or earnings as last year.  It would be considered a disaster for most businesses.  Growth is implicit, expected.

The trouble is, growth at a system-wide level comes from one of three places.  Rising price levels, increases in population or improvements in productivity.  Rising price levels aren’t really growth, because although the revenue dollar figure goes up, your costs go up and the value of those dollars decline.  This is called inflation and is generally recognized as a bad thing.

Globally, population growth is an expected and baseline source of “true” growth, and productivity is the icing on the cake.  Now, I’m lumping some things together here.  Economists may tell me that the development of emerging economies like China and India are a huge source of global growth even if their total populations weren’t rising as quickly as they are.  My argument doesn’t require separating these things, though.  The bottom line is, each of them requires incremental natural resources in the form of energy, minerals, food, water, room, etc.  And like they always say about real estate, “they ain’t making any more of it” (except in Dubai).

A closed system with a finite supply of natural resources cannot support perpetual growth in production or population.

Our economy uses population growth the way an undisciplined consumer uses credit cards.  When the bill comes, I’ll have the money to pay it.  Then, when the bill comes, I don’t so I use them again.  Our entire economy is based on this premise.  For the most egregious example, see Social Security.   

If you’ve been waiting for me to now reveal the solution, you’re about to be disappointed.  The “free rider” problem here is ridiculously large.  How can you expect China or India to look at the rest of the developed world and their standards of living and say, “No, we’ll do the right thing for the planet and stay in verdant poverty”?  How can you expect Brazil to say, “No, we’ll leave the Amazon rain forests as they are and watch our people starve”? 

When I’m in a bad mood, I’m reminded of a virus, preying on the host, expanding, preying, expanding until the host dies and then of course the virus dies along with it.  When I’m in a very bad mood I think the only way out is population growth at zero or better yet negative – which of course would decimate the global economy, but tough crap.  Bring the world population down to 1 billion, or half a billion, or 3 billion…I don’t know what the right number is, but some number that allows for vast regions of the world to be untouched and where our footprint isn’t so ugly.  This is, of course, not gonna happen without some sort of massive disease, war or alien invasion and seems to me to be a pretty unappealing option.  Lower birthrates have never been proven to be sustainable, but you have to admit that fewer of us around would do a lot less damage than we’re doing now.

This is one of those problems that is too hard to think about, too big to do anything about and too scary to ignore.  I heard a guy from Google say that their biggest business risk right now is the availability of energy.  I think there are lots of things we can do with energy to be more efficient and remove this as a limitation.  Wait until gas goes to $10 a gallon, or $50 and watch us figure that one out in a hurry.  But what happens when it’s water, or food, or space.  What happens when we run out of magic tricks and we have to face the underlying reality that closed systems cannot support infinite growth?

I’m not a natural pessimist and neither is Thich Nhat Hanh, but somehow that guy’s got me in a bad mood.

Who understood light better, Einstein or Monet?

Now Einstein, he understood the whole wave-particle duality issue.  He figured out how finite energy quanta can be fixed in a point of space, worked out the speed of light in space.  I mean, the guy knew his light.  He had the equations, the formulae…he had the c-squared working.  Monet, on the other hand, never bothered with what light is…he just wanted to know how it works.  I think we’d all agree that he figured it out.  Monet learned how light reflects off of different surfaces, how it shimmers and draws out color, the tricks it plays.  Scientists are now figuring out quantitatively what guys like Monet intuited – how your eye and your brain process light.  How light feels, for lack of a better descriptor. 

So who understood it better?  The fact that this question can be so easily argued from both sides is illustrative of the concept behind manydoors yoga.  Every so often, I come across a student or a teacher who believes in the one true yoga.  There’s often a sense of fundamentalism about it – my yoga is the only path to enlightenment.  My guru is the one true guru.  Mine is right and yours is wrong.  If you aren’t coming to yoga with intention X or intention Y then you shouldn’t bother.  I even had one bozo tell a class I was in that you can’t say you’re doing yoga until you’ve mastered fifteen specific poses. 

It just makes no sense to me.  The great thing about yoga is that you can start anywhere.  You want to practice ‘cause Madonna or Sting do and you think they’re cool?  Fine.  You want to do it because you just read the Ramayana and you know the poses are named after some of the characters?  Ok.  You want a tighter butt?  You want to go because your attractive neighbor goes?  You want enlightenment?  You want better concentration?  Better breathing?  Rehabbing an injury?  Need time away from your kids?  FINE.  The thing about yoga is, the reason you show up is kind of irrelevant because of the way it works.

Where you start is almost never where you end.  Yoga is just so dynamic, confronting, and comprehensive that it’s almost impossible to not be exposed to more than you bargained for.  If you show up because you want to tone your body, you’re still going to get exposed to better breathing, to meditation or if not, at least to concentration.  You’re going to see changes outside of the ones that brought you in there and then you face the choice that all yoga students eventually face:  the red pill or the blue pill.  I’ve got students of mine who have come for years just for the workout.  Along the way, they’ve improved their breathing, they’ve improved their concentration, they’ve learned how to disassociate hard work in the body from strain and stress in the mind.  They’ve learned to pay more attention to what’s going on in their bodies.  They’ve learned to cultivate a bit of calmness in chaotic situations.  All that is just gravy, though.  They’re there to sweat and get stronger.  I don’t understand why that’s worthy of ridicule. 

I’ve got other students who use their practice to get closer to God, and they define God in many different ways.  For them, the physical work is a tool.  It’s about getting the body to help quiet the mind, and using the quiet mind to contemplate the divine.  That’s not worthy of ridicule either, whether you believe in their god or any god.  Don’t you think?

Others come for any number of other reasons.  Sometimes I know what they are and sometimes I don’t.  If I know, and I can provide some support to that goal, I will.  If I don’t, I just try to offer a place for them to explore it.  Some will tell me that this approach isn’t teaching yoga.  That I need to confront students in their comfort zones, push them to new levels, drive them down the well-trodden path to enlightenment. 

In yoga there are a number of stories about how the student begins down the path, goes through trials and tribulations, and ends up back where he started but with a new appreciation for his place.  Coming home again.  Basically, the story is that what you’re looking for outside you already have inside, but you need to go through the journey in order to discover it.  That makes me think about the “one true path” as well.  The message is that I’m looking for something I already have.  If I lose my car keys, I’m not going to walk in a straight line through the house and out the door and down the block until I find them.  I’m going to walk around, try different places, different approaches, circle back maybe and make sure I didn’t overlook them.

So one man’s advice.  Don’t get too hung up on someone else’s path.  Support them.  If you have some good advice from personal experience, maybe you offer it.  But this divisiveness, this elitism, it just doesn’t seem to me that it serves anyone.

Why is it that we as a nation have come to believe that our most important export is voting?  Don’t get me wrong, I believe that giving a voice to the people is a good thing, but we’ve become a bit myopic about this.  It’s almost as if we’ll accept a long list of hazardous and oppressive conditions in a nation so long as we can end the list with, “but at least they’re voting now”.  Voting.  I mean, honestly.  It’s like saying, “as long as your nation has $5 bills”, or “as long as you build a statue of liberty” you’re ok with us.

If I got to unilaterally choose the best features of a just society to offer to a nation, I’m not positive voting would make my top ten.  Independent judiciary, legislative and executive branches would be on there.  Maybe independent central bank.  Free press I think is an important one.  Access to health care.  Some sort of protective commerce laws.  Some safety net to protect the most vulnerable members of the society.  Compulsory education through some reasonable grade level.  I wasn’t a polysci major…I can’t do this off the top of my head.  But voting to me seems like such a symptom of a just society rather than a cause. 

Aside:  before you start flaming me about how the U.S. doesn’t have half of my list above and Bush does this and Congress does that, just chill.  I’m not holding out the U.S. as the model of societies and I know we’ve got plenty of collusion and rigging in our system.  All I’m doing is pointing out how weird it is to fixate so thoroughly on voting as the elixir to cure all societal ills.  You might find differing opinions from residents of Zimbabwe, the Congo, and on and on…not just Africa, in case you were going there.

Now, we may make the argument that in order to get all those things I listed, you need voting.  The judiciary can’t be independent without an electorate to back them up (in which case we need to change our system), or the legislative branch has to be elected independently in order for them to behave independently.  I follow that argument, although I think figuring out how to drive more accountability once they’re in office will go farther faster than improving the way they get there.   I mean, look at us here in the U.S….we’re going to spend a whole year picking a hood ornament for our car without looking at the engine.

So really, why is it that whenever we send a whole bunch of marines into a country our message is always about bringing them elections.  No wonder they look at us like we have a cat on our head.  They’re like, “hello, can I get a hospital?  Some drinking water?  I don’t know, maybe some electricity?  You want me to vote…I vote you get your butt over here and build me a house…”

I had this odd experience today as I drove home from burying Meera.  In retrospect, I guess it’s probably something most people who have a trauma like this hit their lives feel, but I wasn’t prepared for it and it set off a string of reactions.  I heard these two women talking about whether they should get a salad or a sandwich for lunch and I found myself thinking, “How can you possibly stand there and worry about what to have for lunch?  It’s completely irrelevant in the face of death and loss, and Meera’s gone and…” you can imagine the rest.  This same string of thoughts came up again and again…”how can you stand there with a leaf blower – who frickin’ cares where those leaves sit?” and “so your kid dropped the ice cream cone…does it really matter?” right on up to “enough already with the ‘Israel’s right to exist’ squabbling – it’s just imaginary lines on an imaginary map.”

Suffice it to say, it was a good time to reexamine the fundamental principles by which I’m living.  So I’m asking questions like these:

·         What do I love?

·         What do I do as a means to an end?

·         What is that end and is it reasonable?   Will it make me happy?

·         When I’m 80, will I consider this time well used?

·         Am I treading water…being too careful, too willing to accept delay?

So, is it a midlife crisis brought on by a close personal reminder of my own mortality?  I don’t know.  I don’t think so.  I haven’t been considering my own mortality all that much during this time.  I already have a convertible and a motorcycle and I’m not feeling the need to get in the market for a twenty-two year old girlfriend.  But maybe the cliché midlife crisis isn’t the only kind, and maybe it doesn’t always have to come from the crisis part.  I’ll try to explain this developing theory.

Meera was such an important part of my life.  She was there through some pretty crazy times, and as I’ve said, there were days when the only reason I got out of bed was because I needed to take her for a walk.  She was the only one who was there when I was on a couple of nasty brinks.  She was also part of some of the best days of my life (so far).  She was a constant.

As I’ve had to come to grips with her leaving my life, I’ve realized that one thing I really have going for me was this…I didn’t feel guilt.  I know two things:  that I did every single thing I possibly could to try and save her from this awful cancer and more importantly that throughout her life, I never, ever took her for granted.  I’m not sure I can say that for a lot of the important people in my life, and it’s an interesting lesson.  I literally do not feel even the remotest pang of guilt about how I spent my time with her and I’m very surprised by how liberating that is.  I’m finding that it allows me to move much faster than I expected from dwelling exclusively on the loss of someone I loved, to finding gratitude for her presence. 

So my midlife crisis is sort of around this topic.  It’s not career or money or cars or supermodels.  It’s people, and yoga, and this house, and all the things I care most about.  It’s about knocking down a few more of those emotion = weakness filters, those fears of embarrassment, those “they must know that they’re important to me” assumptions. 

Meera and I have both been blessed with some amazing people in our lives.  Jenn, of course who sat through every second of this even as her own heart was breaking.  Christina, who drove like a maniac to be there when it was at its worst even under the most unimaginable circumstances.   And then literally dozens of other people, some of whom only knew Meera for the briefest of times, who called and sent emails and cards of condolence.  My Sunday night class sent a huge basket of really good cookies which have turned out to be an excellent incentive to get back into class tomorrow.  I always make a point to thank you for coming to class and sharing your energy, but thank you for being a true sangha, a supportive, spiritually awake community.  Your cards and calls have been like a life line to the best part of my world these past days.  I’ve heard from dear friends across the country and across the world that I haven’t done a good enough job of staying in touch with for my own liking.

I wrote a little talk for a workshop I gave a few years ago in which I said that to me, the best mental states you can be in are “inspired” and “grateful”.  Inspired because the energy of that state will drive you to express the very best of yourself, and grateful because it’s the most engaged, open-hearted way you can be.  And then I tortured them for two hours with backbends and balance poses, but that’s beside the point.  As I revisited that concept tonight, I’m realizing that my (capital Y) Yoga practice for a while needs to be about these two things.  It’s the best way I can imagine to honor what Meera gave to me, and I’m seeing that my own stupid filters of embarrassment, fear, assumption, are what can keep me from feeling the same sense of time well-used when my own time comes.  I think it will start with 7:00 a.m. class.

This is likely to be even less coherent than usual.  I’m up in Wisconsin on our annual golf trip, sitting on the floor in a beautiful house on the shores of Lake Michigan.  Tomorrow I’m supposed to play golf at Whistling Straits, one of the best courses in the country. 

But my heart’s not in it.  And my head’s not in it.  Two thousand miles away, Meera is lying alone in a cage in Adobe Hospital.  I have this image of a stark, off-white room filled with the sounds of suffering dogs…whining and barking and crying.  The feeling of stress and worry palpable in the air.  The image of her alone and confused and scared, not knowing why she’s here or what she’s done to deserve this.  I’m so tired from several nights of fitful sleep but I just can’t close my eyes.

The doctors don’t know what’s wrong.  It seems that her own immune system is attacking her.  She’s anemic, and her platelet count is plummeting.  They can’t figure out why.  Her bloodwork came back as generally ok except for the anemia, her initial cancer screen was negative.  And yet, she lays there with the life slowly draining from her. 

I swear to you, I would trade places with her in a second.  If I could take this away from her and take it onto myself, I would.  Instantly.  Without a second thought. 

I’m waiting to hear from the vet tomorrow to see how bad it is.  I’m struggling so hard with this question of whether to get out of here right now and head home or to wait and see.  I wouldn’t be able to see her or take her home, but at the same time, if I’m here and I need to be there, I’ll never forgive myself.  And so I sit alone in the corner, unable to participate in conversation, unable to enjoy even a glimmer of what’s supposed to be a highlight weekend.

 Any of you who know me know about this dog.  For a period of time, she was my whole life.  Literally the only reason I had to get out of bed in the morning.  During that period in 2002 when I was newly single, newly unemployed, newly homeless and locally friendless, Meera was the only good thing I had in my life.  I remember thinking at one point that if I didn’t wake up the next morning, nobody in the whole world would know or care until someone in my family happened to call.  Nobody of course, except Meera.  And that was what got me out of bed and out onto the trail.  The journey of a thousand miles started with those simple steps walking her around Tilden Park. 

The idea that she’s suffering, scared, confused is just horrifying to me.  I can’t come to grips with it.  I can’t process it.  It’s incapacitating. 

The doctors have not told me that she’s dying.  They’ve just said that her platelet count has plummeted, that she’s anemic and that they don’t know why.  You can hear it in the words they choose though, in the silences.  They’re not sure of what’s draining the life from her, but they’re sure that something is.  And so now all i can do tonight is sit here in this agony and wait.  Tomorrow, maybe I’ll cut out early and head home.  To what?  To do what?  I wish I could help her, save her the way that she saved me.  If there’s a way, tell me and I’ll do it, regardless of any consequence.

If you’re thinking of pointing out my very un-yogic attachment, don’t.  Not today.  Not on this topic.

I don’t know what’s going to happen.  I keep grasping for hope in the fact that the IV fluids seem to perk her up, in the fact that they can’t find a cancer or a blood disease, or a cause for this malaise.  But the doctors are so discouraging. 

Sorry for drawing you into my therapy session, but I needed to write this.  It’s helped me to clarify in my mind that I have to get out of here.  I have to come home.  I have to provide whatever comfort I can, in whatever small way, and hope that I can help her heal in the way she has helped me.  It’s obvious.  And maybe it can work.  Maybe I can lend her some strength in the same way she’s lent it to me so many times.  Maybe I can be a comfort in that awful place, and a step toward recovery.  I hope for nothing more.