Meeting Your Experience

Many people come to the practice of yoga with a somewhat superficial definition of what yoga is. In my early days practicing, I ran into one of my dry-cleaning delivery customers in the parking lot where he works. In our chat, I told him that I was going to try a certain yoga class that night. “That’s pretty cool,” he replied sincerely, “I’d like to get into yoga myself, but I’m just not very flexible.”

I didn’t really have a rebuttal to it at the time, but his comment stayed with me. I mused later that it made about as much sense as saying, “I’d like to join a gym and start exercising but I’m just not very fit.” At the very least, I estimated yoga as a path to becoming flexible rather than a platform to show off how flexible I intrinsically was, but I understood where his concern might come from. I do not imagine he would be unique in such a perspective. 

Yoga is often depicted in its most most ostentatious form- impressive contortions rendered by some svelte young body with a bright, enthusiastic facial expression. Anyone who ever glimpsed the cover of Yoga Journal in the checkout line at the supermarket might be prone to arrive at a similar conclusion. 

Here’s a classic from our local hometown favorite Richard Freeman:

I suppose there is a certain irony to the headline “Ease your Anxiety,” as one can see Mr. Freeman in such an impossibly contorted shape as to almost induce it. I’m sure some people found inspiration in such grace and flexibility, but one can also see how such imagery could actually scare people away from the practice of yoga. Placing one's leg comfortably behind one's own head is a feat that most of my students cannot do, let alone rendering it in the context of an arm balance. 

It is a powerful image for sure, but to the uninitiated it might look positively frightening, and it would be very logical to impose such an image onto a definition of what yoga is. 

After that brief exchange in the parking lot, it would be many months later that I began to understand the practice in a more nuanced way- described no so much through the blunt imagery of advanced poses, but through an inward journey that cannot be simply discovered in putting your body into a shape.

I remember watching an episode of the 70’s television show Three’s Company when I was a kid. In one particular episode, Janet and Chrissy are doing yoga in their living room. Jack, their roommate comes in and asks what they are doing. When they share that they are “exercising,” he scoffs at their definition of exercise and calls it “kid’s stuff.” Janet rebuffs his assertion and challenges him try something simple- the Lotus pose. Now it should noted that the Lotus pose actually requires such extraordinary hip mobility that it is elusive to even the most seasoned practitioners, but Jack, with a certain intrepid naivety, manages to knot his legs into the shape, yanking his sock to hoist his foot into position and wincing and and gritting his teeth throughout the whole process. He accomplishes the shape but it seems miles from comfortable and with some apparent distress he earnestly asks Janet how to get out. Janet flippantly replies, “That’s next week’s lesson” and gets up. Jack, with his legs now resolutely stuck in their self-imposed knot, frantically chases after her, using his arms to huck his hips forward in an absurd, desperate locomotion. The studio audience howls with laughter. 

This episode originally aired in the late 70’s when yoga was so culturally fringe the writers didn’t even call it yoga. Shortly thereafter in 1979 Rupert Holmes released his hit song “Escape” where he expressly declares his desire to meet someone who is “not into yoga and has half a brain.”

Clearly the practice of yoga was shrouded in an air of foolishness in those days. Although the practice gradually became more accepted and normalized, to the outsider, even decades later, it was still very much couched in the surface level sense that yoga was just a pointless system of contortionist naval-gazing. It’s no wonder someone would consider his or her inflexibility to be a disqualifying factor from participation. 

I never forgot that remark from my client in the parking lot and when I began teaching yoga, I recognized that many beginners might likely come to their mats saddled with a similar sense of what the practice was about. I would, in the beginning of class, make a point of mentioning that yoga was not about showing off one’s flexibility, but meeting one’s inflexibility with kindness. It was a point that seemed to resonate with students. Students often told me that those words took much of the pressure off of them. Their anxiety faded and they found a way of participating without getting sucked into the limited binary evaluations of success or failure. 

To be honest, I cannot take credit for this point though. It was actually in my very first yoga class that the teacher said something similar. He said, “None of us are where we ultimately want to be in our flexibility, but yoga is about meeting your inflexibility with compassion.”

This was earth-shattering to me at the time. I felt stuck in my circumstances and to hear those words, well, I felt a tremendous load lifted off me. I extended this concept of meeting inflexibility with compassion to the broader structure of life itself and saw my condition in a radically softer light. Even if I was stuck, I could at least give myself some grace for being so. It was a message that was completely and utterly counter to what the world seemed to be constantly yelling at me: achieve, move forward, and follow your dreams! For reasons out of my control at the time, I couldn’t move forward- certainly not in the way I wanted to. I simply needed to hear that this was okay. I remember thinking, “If this is the message they’re delivering in a yoga class, I need more of it.” 

Over the years, I have in my own teachings gradually refined and manicured this message. I would now say that yoga is about meeting your whole experience with three distinct consciousness tones: curiosity, kindness, and compassion. Though these three words have a certain overlap in their connotations, they are distinct from each other and worth a brief bit of elucidation.

Kindness

Kindness means to confront without animosity. We are kind to ourselves and that which we are experiencing. We do not condemn ourselves for having tension, or pain, or moodiness, or whatever seems initially unembraceable. We prioritize a kind of self-acceptance even if what we feel is not enjoyable. We release any language or thinking that implies we are in some way inadequate because we have to contend with a quality we perceive to be a flaw or deficiency. Kindness celebrates our humanity- messy and uncontrollable as it may be. It is this kindness that lets us say openly, “Here I am!” without the immediate burden to be any other way. 

     We are also kind to that which is being experienced. We are not trying to triumph over it as a military commander might to an enemy army. We approach our body’s messages with reverence and humility. We might ask, “How does this thing that I am feeling help me grow?” or “How can I be with this feeling simply because it is what is here?” Kindness invites us to work with our conditions rather than against them. We do not wage war with our perceived inflexibility or weakness. We forge a kind of truce instead. It’s like two rivals deciding that they must ultimately work together for no other reason than the base fact that they are stuck with each other for the time being.

   Kindness is essential to the practice. Without it we are locked into the achievement orientation of the ego mind. We saddle ourselves with something to prove. Where a limitation is encountered, we fight it. The gentleness of being with ourselves at this point evaporates and we are like Jack, suffering through a thoroughly unpleasant process to get to the pose and likely risking injury to get there. Do not forgo kindness. It will keep you patient and gracious in a way that spills outward. When we are kind with ourselves, we have a capacity for kindness towards others. We can offer a deeper and more sincere acceptance towards the foibles and faults of other people. We forgive more readily. When we impose fewer demands on reality, we are able to enjoy, or at the very least tolerate, both ourselves and others in our full authentic humanness. 

Curiosity

    Curiosity is simply the active willingness to look more closely at what we are experiencing. As if driven by the question, “What is really going on here,” we seek a deeper intimacy with how and what we are feeling. For example, in a hamstring stretch or a hip-opener, the mind is asking, “What do I feel and where do I feel it?” It’s like turning up the magnification on the microscope, refining the focus, and accessing greater detail in what is being observed. 

    I had a teacher who once defined the act of love as “the act of turning or moving towards something to achieve a greater intimacy with it.” He didn’t mean a kind of geographic move, like a kid trying to sit closer to someone they have a crush on in the cafeteria. He meant an active attention shift towards an aspect of our experience to be in a more complete relationship with it. It could be, for example, another person- wherein we might ask them questions and fully listen to their responses to to get a deeper sense of who they are and what they are going through. It could be something external, a piece of art or music perhaps- where we offer a bit more time to steep in its presence, looking and listening for what makes it beautiful. 

   In the context of yoga, we express love by attuning our attention inward to ever-deepening levels of subtlety and sensitivity. I sometimes ask students in the seated forward fold at the end of the class, “How do you know where your limit is? Where does your body seem to say that this is enough?” I have often observed students immediately go deeper into their fold, not because they are forcing it, but because that simple level of inquiry offers an immediate piercing of their idea of what is possible to reveal what actually is possible. 

    We might work a similar approach to certain physical extremes like hot, cold, hunger, endurance, stress, or breath retention. Curiosity supports examining our thresholds of comfort. We ask, “How do I really know this is getting overwhelming?” Rather than turning our back on something that may appear instantly unpleasant, we lean into it.

    I sometimes teach certain breath work techniques that put people into what I would lightly call altered states of consciousness. Occasionally people divulge that such breath techniques made them “dizzy.” It’s a nebulous term that many use to describe a fluid, slightly ungrounded state, where their sense of the body has shifted out of its norm. Unfortunately, in simply giving it a name like "dizziness," it offers a label in which to categorize their experience as bad or undesirable. Without the element of curiosity, the experience is reduced to simplistic concepts and descriptions with no real nuance or complexity. They can then declare that they did not like it and perhaps resolve to never partake again. When teaching breath work now, I have grown to discourage labelling the effects. Curiosity is infinitely more valuable. Just watch how you feel. Once a label is affixed to what is being experienced, we have reduced it to an idea. We can then qualify it as good or bad, and we have a readily erectable wall to shield our sensitivity. No need to look more closely than the label. We have decided that we get it and there is nothing more to do but pray for the effects to wear off soon and decide to minimize our contact with similar experiences in the future. Curiosity keeps our experiences free from the tight dualistic parameters of merely liking or disliking. It creates a space for love and engagement when our natural impulse may be to simply declare, "This sucks. Make it stop."

    Curiosity is also a powerful antidote to boredom. I have witnessed an increasing shift in yoga sequencing to involve more elaborate poses and transitions while eschewing classical shapes like Warrior 2 or Crescent Lunge. It’s as if certain shapes have become decidedly dry wells, where no further wisdom can be extracted. I actively encourage curiosity in those deeply familiar poses that we may feel have nothing more to offer us. The subtle body, that is, the energetic expression underneath the outward physical expression of muscles, bones, skin, and such, is the playground of our curiosity. We no longer just check the box of doing the pose. We become more introspective within it. We plunge deeper into the vast ocean of information inside ourselves. We look more closely, in greater detail, at the complex internal territory of our nervous system. It is a place that no teacher can accurately describe to us. We must actively experience it ourselves. Curiosity is our internal propulsion system to push us further into self-knowledge, to participate in our own self-discovery- even in the most ordinary of poses, moments, and situations. 

    I often say to students, “There are no wasted moments.” When curiosity is at work, even if we aren’t actively doing a certain shape, we can scan the internal landscape of thoughts and emotions to see what is coming up just from being aware of what is happening. Curiosity may lead us to the question, “If I can’t literally take that shape the teacher is showing me, how close could I get without hurting myself” or “What else could I do instead?” What may seem like an overt dead-end, might reveal itself to have any number of intriguing roads and paths to take us further into our experience.

    The walls of our limiting beliefs do not hold up very well under the scrutiny of a curious mind. Around each new corner, we often discover that we are capable of doing things and having experiences that may have been previously dismissed as pointless or impossible. It is certainly good to recognize your limits, but it is also good to see them as being somewhat blurry and expandable. Curiosity is an essential way of opening up to the mystery of who we are, what we can do, and what the world around us can offer when we simply let our minds receive the less overt impressions of our experiences. 

Compassion

Compassion is often used interchangeably with both empathy and sympathy. It implies a willingness to at least imagine walking in another person’s shoes- to feel what they feel or at least imagine what they feel. We might describe compassion as a quality of being that is deeply permeable to the suffering of other people. Etymologically, the word “compassion” means simply “suffering with” and this can be a good starting point to consider when we talk about compassion’s role in meeting one’s own experience. 

    What does it mean to “suffer with” your experiences? Well, we could say it is simply our willingness to have them. Good, bad, painful, challenging, stressful, uncomfortable- we let it in. Compassion is simply our permission to feel. We do not immediately seek to take an unpleasant experience and replace it with a more positive one. We first acknowledge where we are and we internally declare, “Okay, let’s start by just being here now.” 

    It seems simple enough but one might be surprised at all the devices we use to avoid feeling what makes us uncomfortable. These devices often operate insidiously within us, that is, without the self-awareness to see ourselves employing them as a natural mechanism of avoidance. Let’s look at the common ones.

   BLAME- This is an effective way of turning the uncomfortable somatic information of our body into a story that temporarily energizes us in a way. Anger has a tremendous energetic tone to it and can often be seen as preferable alternative to the less empowered impressions of emotions like grief, shame, or feeling helpless. If we do not like how we feel, we can generate a narrative that posits the blame on a person or experience that caused us to feel this way. The irony is that blame only gives us an illusion of empowerment while subtly doing the opposite- affirming that it is ultimately external people and events that dictate how we feel. We perceive ourselves to understand, to “get it,” that is, to have the intimate knowledge about why we feel a certain way. We decide that the source of our affliction is resolutely out of our control, so we reach for the one thing that feels like control- our ability to identify the REASON for our pain. We point to it and say, “There it is! I feel bad because THAT made me feel bad.” If we can identify the source of our discomfort, we can condemn it, and we get a brief hit of empowerment from this process. The old axiom that “knowledge is power,” plays out here. Blame says, “I know who or what made me feel this way.” All of this story-making is a way of avoiding responsibility for our internal relationship to our experience. There may be some accuracy in saying that we were wronged by a person or that something happened that was indeed out of our control, but we might miss the power that comes from taking ownership of how we feel about how we feel. Blame is simply a self-created traffic jam of thoughts that slows our journey towards wholeness. It may seem very real, and very valid, but it should be recognized for what it is- a tempting way of avoiding our own pain by spinning it into a story instead of leaning into the the direct feeling.

DISTRACTION- This is a mechanism whereby we seek to replace some negative feeling with something perceived to be less negative. Television, shopping, entertainment, drinking, working, video games- there is an endless supply of distractions that we willfully enlist to shift us out of feeling the direct experience of our discomfort. Instead of “suffering with,” we attempt to leave the situation altogether. We go somewhere else, into a different activity, a different resting place for our attentions, where we don’t have to confront our afflictions. Like a toddler throwing a tantrum, we distract ourselves with some shiny new experiential toy to temporarily placate the distress. People can spend their whole lives hiding from their own pain and vulnerability. They keep life moving with a constant procession of thrills, merriment, and fleeting delights. But when things settle down, as they ultimately must, when there is quiet and stillness, and the lack of ease in one’s being comes bubbling up, such people will promptly stir things up again and find the next distraction. They will often seek out some new flash of excitement to keep their minds comfortably distanced from this deeply-rooted lack of ease. Presence isn’t easy to maintain, especially when it reveals something we do not care to feel. Distraction is an escape hatch for consciousness. When cornered into the direct relationship with suffering, the mind wiggles out to a safer place where such unpleasantries are temporarily pushed out. 

BYPASSING- This is similar to the act of distraction but the process is more internal. If we esteem that we are are experiencing an unpleasant emotion, we deny its strength by an internal process of discounting it and shifting our attention to something we esteem to be considerably warmer and more uplifting. We might adopt a gratitude practice, choosing to “focus on the positive,” instead of opening to the cavalcade of emotional demons coming to visit us. We declare that only the good feelings are valid and anything that triggers the contact with the bad ones must be eliminated. In the bypassing mechanism, we at least realize that much of our own discomfort is self-generated and we resort to a forced process of generating something else instead. We might tell ourselves that our negative thinking is the enemy and commit to an active attempt at positive thinking. We might employ certain enlightened-sounding spiritual aphorisms that “everything is an illusion,” or that “none of it matters” or that “we’re all gonna day someday anyway.” These assertions may actually seem depressing to some, but for many people, these ideas insulate them from the inevitable irritation that comes from feeling life’s many stressors, disappointments, and annoyances. Unlike distraction, bypassing at least starts with the honest recognition of our distress and simply seeks a way around. There is very little wisdom found at the end of a bypassing path. That which invites confrontation through an honest and authentic encounter is instead avoided and glossed over with with a forced, contrived, and inauthentic air of peace and contentment. Bypassing often operates in our social roles where we feel we must maintain an image of having our act together when we are actually falling apart. Our pain is merely being hidden under a mask of denial.

IMPATIENCE- Impatience can subvert out healing process when we impose an expected timeline on how long we should have to endure some bit of pain. We surmise that, after a certain amount of time we should get have gotten over our pain, or at the very least gotten used to it. We attempt to rush the necessary step of simply being with our pain. We decide that we’re ready to move on, though this assessment may be wildly inaccurate. Upon receiving some bit of advice on handling our pain, we might declare, “I’ve tried that. It didn’t work,” meaning that the resolution we had hoped would be immediate is taking a much longer time. Sometimes we are asked to bear discomfort that lasts weeks, months, or even years. Impatience can lead us to declare that we’ve done the work simply because we are tired of doing it. Remember that evolution and healing unfold with an organic timing that is often independent from our own agenda. There is a saying in healing circles, “In order to heal it, you have to feel it.” Patience is our implicit trust that the we sometimes have to feel things longer than we’d like. Some wounds are deeper than our own skin and bones, and as such are subject to a much longer timeline towards resolution. 

CHECKING OUT- This is a close cousin to distraction but is much more immediate. A person who checks out has experienced discomfort of such magnitude that they simply leave the situation completely. Checking out might be geographical- we roll up our yoga mat and leave class, we storm out of the room, or we abruptly hang up the phone. It can certainly be a psychological process too- we go catatonic, gazing vacantly into space as someone criticizes us. Sometimes we cannot simply get up and go somewhere else, so we dissociate. We might fold our arms, look at the floor, and offer single word, mumbled answers to go through the motions of a conversation. We become like an abused animal in a room with no place to run, so we shrink and retreat to cower in our own numbed bodies. In the checking out mode, a person isn’t necessarily guided towards a more favorable condition. They only know that where they are is not it. They declare in some form, “I’m out,” though they may have little sense on where they will go next, they only know that it won’t be in or around whatever unpleasant thing is currently occupying their attention. Often the next step after checking out is to engage in some distraction to cleanse the palate of whatever residue was left from the painful experience. Checking out offers an immediate insulation from distress by simply running from it. Though it certainly can have short-term benefits for survival and coping, in the long run it becomes a dangerous default way of hiding from the realities of life. A person who has relied on checking out as a strategy for coping runs the risk of always doing this. If they have declared that pain and discomfort must be avoided at all costs, they will always be on the run. Pain is inevitable and comes with the territory of being sentient. We can’t simply toggle between neutrality and bliss. Checking out might offer the most immediate escape from discomfort but it has a number of unintended casualties- it makes communication near impossible, it shuts others out from intimacy with us, and it inhibits the development of our own resiliency. We cannot bounce back from hardship if all we ever do is run from it. 

Self-compassion is the curative to our habits of avoidance. Compassion towards ourselves means that if there is something challenging happening, we are at least committed to staying as open as we can to it. There may be a wisdom in backing off, taking a break, and giving yourself space to ground and recover, but these should never be seen as alternatives to knuckling down and confronting pain and hardship eventually. Of course self-compassion must be anchored in kindness. We allow ourselves to feel pain not because we esteem ourselves in need of punishment or hardship, but because we know that we are ultimately more free when we are less guarded. Compassion absolves us from the unstated agenda to only feel what is enjoyable. It broadens our spectrum of permitted experiences to put us more in alignment with reality which is not always fun, easy, or pleasant. 

Compassion anchors us in our current condition to move more wisely and courageously through it. 

Even if you never set foot on a yoga mat, never do a single chaturanga, never learn crow pose, never meditate, can’t touch your toes, or achieve any of the other superficial markers of what people conceptualize as “yoga,” the guiding principals of kindness, curiosity, and compassion are available to everyone. You don’t have to practice Buddhism to understand the inevitability of suffering in your own life. Simply put, we sentient creatures feel things. And to feel things means to feel unpleasant things- discomfort, pain, tension, stress, heat, cold, hunger, fatigue, loneliness, heartache, frustration. Kindness, curiosity, and compassion are the foundational aspects of what we call equanimity- that expression of an even, balanced mind that operates in both what it likes and enjoys, and what it clearly does not. Life gives us ample servings of both and we cannot predict what challenges will come or how long they will stay. People who actively lean into discomfort when it arises are less prone to meltdowns, lashing out, addiction, emotional drama, and the prolonged suffering that leads to any number of self-sabotaging bad choices that afflict humans. The irony of running from pain is that it produces a constant anxiety within us. We cannot be still, clear, and relaxed in any lasting way if avoidance is our standard. We will constantly depend on pleasant stimuli, pain-killers, and conditions in our external world that are impossible to maintain. To open up to one’s pain actually allows for a life where pain has less power over us. We discover an increased threshold for being recognizably uncomfortable and we expand our own capacity for internal peace and happiness. Little things that might otherwise ruin our day can be taken in stride. It’s not that that we no longer hurt, but that we can increasingly exist within such experiences in a way that is centered, grounded, and present. 

    So, don’t worry about getting your leg behind your head. You have nothing to prove and such talents will do very little to improve the quality of your life. It was the same Richard Freeman who graced that magazine cover above who once said quite simply and directly that the practice of yoga begins with the act of listening. Not being flexible, just listening. I wholeheartedly agree. I would add that the yoga continues this way too and it really never ends. Each moment is the practice of being in unity with what is. It really is that simple. Forget about the exotic contortions and feats of strength. Just live openly in your experience. Stay curious. Respect the messaging system of your own body. Recognize that your pain, stress, and discomfort are guides moving you to a state of greater harmony with the world around you. The insights gained from this level of openness are yours alone to be had. Don’t try to make sense of it; just listen with your whole being. Life is always speaking to us. Just breathe, soften and let it in.