What I learned while lying on my yoga mat this morning

One afternoon in Herat, originally uploaded by frida world.

This morning I had a lovely moment – a moment in which I saw how some things which had seemed separate from each other were converging in a wonderful way. I saw that what I am exploring and learning now (through yoga, through meditation and through my new art journal) is not separate from my work here. Instead all these things help face the challenges of this kind of humanitarian work, the challenges of working as a ‘helper’ in the context of conflict and widespread suffering.

Recently I emerged from a period in which I had been running from my own pain, districting myself from my own sadness. One day I realised that this sadness was not going away, instead it was growing. As long as I tried to avoid it I was not allowing myself to accept the feelings. One day I saw that I had to acknowledge it, and from there, with the help of my friends and family and many people who read this blog, I was able to move to a place of sitting with the feelings (as painful as they were). I came to accept my own fear, my sadness, my pain and my confusion. I took the time to learn what those feeling had to teach me.

Out of that process came a renewed commitment to being present in each moment and experience of my life, and a renewed desire to cultivate a practice of letting go of my sense of responsibility for the outcomes of my efforts. I made a promise to myself to put this commitment into practice through 21 days of a morning ritual of 15 minutes of meditation.

But there was something else, something that I hadn’t dared articulate until I was sitting on the couch talking to the Commander yesterday. What I finally admitted to myself was that I had emerged from that painful process with a much greater sense of detachment from my work. What I said to J was that I was no longer sure that my heart was in this job. I know that detachment is a quality to be cultivated, and that part of my letting go would be an increased sense of release from responsibility. But this felt uncomfortable to me – as though the pendulum had swung too far the other way and I was crossing that line between letting go and giving up.

Giving up my responsibility to act rightly, to act in a way that embodies compassion for others and that makes the greatest contribution possible to alleviate suffering and increase equanimity and happiness, is not an option for me. These commitments go to the very core of who I am and what I believe. So what should I make of this new sense of detachment?

Some answers have begun to emerge from an unexpected place, i.e. from my morning rituals of letting go. It is unexpected because I think I still confuse letting go and giving up. But I am learning.

I’m coming to the close of a week of practicing my new morning rituals. This has grown from my first intention, which was to sit quietly for 15 minutes every morning to practice letting go. Those first 15-20 minutes of quietness every morning are opening me up in ways that leave me with more to do with my morning before I am ready to jump in the shower and dress myself for the outside world.

Each morning has been a little bit different. One morning, after breaking my previous ‘time barrier’ and sitting for 20 minutes of stillness and release I was filled with a sense of joy and celebration. I filled pages of my journal with words that celebrated the things that I am joyful about in myself. I put Peaches and Herb on my iPod and for five and a half minutes I ‘shook my groove thing’, dancing gleefully around my bedroom.

The next morning I came out of my meditation feeling quiet and gentle, I wanted to draw with my new pencils and I wrote a letter to myself in the future. I told myself about my hopes and dreams for myself, explaining what I was doing now to nurture those dreams and (because this is what I felt) I told myself that I had complete faith in myself to live the life that I dream of i.e. a life that embodies compassion for others and that brings maximum good to others and to the world; a life filled with love, joy and laughter, with friends and family; a life that is healthy and balanced and filled with fun, adventure and creativity. My dance that morning was slow and gentle, stretching out the muscles I had worked so hard with my yoga teacher the night before.

This morning I decided that I was ready to start thinking about what my meditation can be beyond simply (and importantly) letting go of all the things I hold in my body. I dug out some CDs given to me by a yoga teacher in New Zealand. Wow, I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect message for me this morning. The CDs are about bodhicitta – I won’t pretend that I can translate in one sentence the sense of bodhicitta that I got from the teachings I listened to this morning. The message to me was about cultivating a mind of great compassion, of wishing for all sentient beings to be free from suffering, and about cultivating my own enlightenment in order to be of maximum benefit to others.

Specifically for me, this morning, the message was about how we can allow more bodhicitta into our lives. The teacher talked about the need to stop running away from the places and feelings that scare us, the need to resist building walls to protect us from knowledge that is painful. She reminded me that I need to be present in those difficult and scary experiences and to be willing to allow them to renew my “soft spot”, to replenish my compassion.

I still don’t know whether the detachment I am feeling is a healthy equanimity or whether I have built up some less healthy walls to protect myself from the suffering that is all around me here. But at least now I know that this is the question that I want to ask myself.