Big Waters

Having a background in the Navy, I’ve grown a fondness for “Big Waters.”  I’ve spent over half of my life near the ocean, but in my book the Great Lakes certainly fall into the category of Big Waters.

These are places where the land meets a great body of water, and you’re unable to perceive an obvious impact from the other side of the expanse.  The water stretches to the horizon and beyond.

Thunderstorm rolling in from Lake Erie

These waters produce their own weather, and the weather drives the waves.  They have a life of their own. Where they meet the land, there is conflict, but in the end there is a balance that’s retained for years.  Sand may move from one spot to the other, but the water and the land maintain and active but still stable meeting point.

It’s a boundary area on earth, and at these boundaries the curtain between the physical world and the spiritual world thins just a little.  These are places where real magic happens. Old magic driven by the ancient and perpetual powers of the Universe herself.

Today we were blessed with visiting this border zone.  We saw a thunderstorm from and roll into the lake. The land took the water and returned it to its origin.  Sand flowed from the land into the water with the rain, and the waves washed up more sand from the water to the beach. Undeniable action and movement, yet, the balanced was maintained.

Being away from the ocean, I’m grateful for moments like these where I can once again gaze out upon the Big Waters.  They are a place where it is easier to reach out and touch the hand of the divine.

Yoga

I mentioned yesterday that I’d recently started the practice of yoga.  I really don’t know why it took me so long to get started on the practice of yoga.  That questioning outlook on my apparent procrastination is particularly relevant when I start to consider the number of positive things that I’ve learned over the last six months since starting the practice.  A 2012 study indicated that somewhere between eight and twelve percent of the population practices yoga on a consistent basis. If you’re part of that lucky or far sighted minority. If you haven’t yet pulled the trigger and given yoga a try, I recommend you consider the opportunity.  

Without further ado, here are some things I’ve learned over the last six months while practicing yoga.

1. Even on a “bad” day of yoga practice, I manage to learn something or accomplish something that I didn’t really know I could accomplish.  This happened today. I don’t know what was going on, but my back was sore and my whole body was tired today when I showed up for my AllVibez yoga class.  I could go into the details, but you don’t want to hear about my whole body stiffness, epic sweating, or any of my other complaints. Suffice it to say, I was not feeling it.  This happens from time to time, and the yoga teachers will tell you just to listen to your body and deal with what shows up for you. I wanted to quit and go home about half way through the one hour class.  Unfortunately for me, I was deep into the room away from the exit, and there was no real way to extricate myself from the class without causing a ruckus. Toward the end of the class, we finally got to the bridge and wheel pose sequences.  To date, I’ve only been able to get myself into the bridge pose. I was having such a miserable time of it, that I decided that I had nothing to lose and would try to lever my upper body up into the elusive wheel pose. Much to my surprise, I was able to lift myself onto the crown of my head and from there straighten my arms and resolve into wheel for the very first time.  I like to think it looked a little like this, although I’m sure it was not as graceful.

This is not me...I'm pretty sure I looked more awkward than this person.

The moral of the story is that even though I was having a “bad” yoga session, I was able to stick with what showed up.  What showed up for me was progress.

2.  The strength and flexibility benefits of yoga are well documented, and I’m not going to waste a whole lot of your time describing them.  I will say this. I turned forty five years old last week. I thought the type of strength and flexibility that I’ve been able to see develop with a disciplined and consistent yoga practice over the last six months were a thing of the past for me.  I’m not going to say it’s the fountain of youth, but the practice has certainly started to slowly reverse the consequences of some very poor health choices that I made in my thirties. Again, I wish I’d started this twenty years ago. It’s a hell of a lot easier to keep your health than to try to get it back at a later date.

3.  This is for the guys out there.  As a caucasian male, I’ve never really had to deal with the visceral feelings of what it’s like to be a minority until I started yoga.  Those same studies referenced earlier indicate that of the Americans who practice yoga, only eighteen to twenty five percent of them are men.  I can tell you that my anecdotal evidence indicates that this is probably still about right. If you’re a male going to a yoga class, you can expect that there will be between three and six women practicing for every man practicing in the class.  The other thing you can be fairly certain about is that most of the women are going to more skilled, more flexible, better balanced, and not nearly as funny looking as you’re going to be when you first start. In other words, you’re not only going to be an obvious minority, but you’re going to be in a room where almost everyone is better at yoga than you.  They are likely to be skeptical of your motives as well. This is a humbling experience, and is one of the greatest lessons that participating in the practice has taught me. You are going to have to get over yourself to survive and keep going in this environment. Don’t believe me. Just wait until you’re rolling up from your back through your knees into tabletop and you rip a loud fart.  You’re going to want to melt into your mat and disappear. It’s at this moment you’re going to have to decide whether to get over yourself and keep going so you can learn something or take your fragile ego and hide away in a place where you’re comfortable. I chose to stay, and the benefits have far outweighed the cost.

That’s enough about yoga for now.  If you haven’t given the practice a chance, I highly recommend giving it a shot.  I’ll always view the yoga practice I stumbled upon as part of my training for the N2N-TCP as one of the great physical, intellectual, and spiritual challenges that I’ve faced along this journey.  It’s quite a bit of fun once you start developing some of your own flexibility as well.

Burning the Candle at Both Ends

My temporary uptick in work at my day job is proving to be quite a challenge. One thing I have learned is that the physical fitness I've gained through calisthenics and daily walking if proving to be the pivotal factor in keeping my mind clear and my body cooperating. There's a lesson in fitness in all of this because I started down this daily practice path a little over a year ago, and I did not have to rely on the reserves of body centric strength until the last month or two.  Being prepared has really paid off.

Eight People Preparing Their Physical Beings for the Unknown on the Anacostia

We all walk a path into the unknown, and up till a little over three years ago, I'd been able to mostly rely on youth coupled with a lack of preparation and luck to see me through the scrapes I found along the way. It was an undisciplined approach to life, and proved successful enough that I never really stopped to think about the assumptions of the future that I was foolishly relying upon to keep me on a tenable path.

Fortunately for me, I have faced a series of events that have proven conclusively that I have absolutely no idea what's going to happen around the next bend in my life path. I've been able to deal with that uncertainty by taking action, and that's a relatively new step from my perspective.  In the past, I gave far too much credit to the ability of intellect and thinking to keep things manageable. I've come full circle.  I now believe that action is what allows the intellect to function. With action, my mind has grown clearer and stronger.  It did not wither as I'd assumed in the past. The whole experience has been a period of growth that never would have happened had I not faced what I believed was the end of my rope, the end...doom. That's just a bit too dramatic, but I did get quite a wake-up call through my own ill conceived thinking.

I remain uncertain why I've been allowed to follow this path, but I believe there is a reason that may or may not be revealed.  Until then, I look forward to the challenges that the rising of the sun tomorrow may reveal.

Meditation Experiment - Interim Report

Today, a vigorous mist in the afternoon followed a robust rain in the morning, so I failed to capture any images for this missive for the second day in a row.  Unlike yesterday, I did manage to achieve a fair bit of walking today.

Mostly out of an interest in keeping up with what has become my daily writing habit, I thought I'd provide an interim report on the meditation experiment I started last year. The initial thought behind the experiment came from a blog that suggested that practicing some form of meditation for one hundred days held a host of physical, spiritual, and mental benefits. It seemed like a pretty easy thing to try so I gave it a shot.

Before I even considered practicing what I've come to think of as "sitting quietly," I started the journey of daily deliberate walking. When I first started walking, I found that settling my mind and moving with a more conscious pace proved to be quite difficult.  My mind raced. Thoughts of doubt crept in, aa littnd I actually remember thinking about what other might think of my walking.  After only a few walks, my mind settled into the pace, the committee in my head was held in abeyance, and I began to live more deliberately and richly in the meter that surrounded my body.  Walking became a form of meditative practice.  It remains so to this day.

I observed some of the same racing of thoughts and inability to settle when I first started the practice of meditation.  I'm not sure it's accurate to even call what I was doing meditation. I found it almost impossible to sit still for longer than two or three minutes.  The time seemed interminable, and I stayed in a place mentally where I could only think about when the session would end.  This inability to sit and just be continued for about a month, but I kept at it.

When one hundred days had passed, I found I could sit quietly and clear my mind for about twenty minutes with some regularity. Thoughts still flashed through my mind, and resisting the temptation to render a judgement and continue the train down whatever rabbit hole it might head to was still not an easy task. Even given those circumstances, I'd gained a level of discipline that allowed me to recognize when that happened and return back to my breathing. I felt calmer when meditating and I believe I felt calmer in day to day interactions.

Having finished one hundred days, the experiment had become a habit, and I'm happy to report that I'm coming up on the two hundredth day in a row tomorrow. I have not made a great deal of progress since the first one hundred days, but I noticed about half way through the second hundred days that I took less time to settle. I also don't follow the thoughts that flash through my consciousness nearly as far as I did in the past. Returning to just being is getting easier and more natural.

While the heavens have not opened and angels with trumpets and swords haven't appeared, I believe that the practice is having the physical, mental, and spiritual benefits in my life that the proponents promised. Meditation has not evolved into a "burning bush" style miracle cure, and the practice has been far more work than I imagined in the beginning. The impact is more subtle, but I sense a tangible improvement in my ability to remain in a moment, to be calm and remain grounded in the present, and to relax into discomfort more readily than I did in the past.

I'm looking forward to tomorrow and the ability to capture something a little more colorful than the words on the page that have appeared the last two days. I'm not sure if photos will appear in the cards, but I hope that they appear in the cards that the universe deals my way.