Being Patient with Your Practice

Yesterday, I wrote about how I had managed to stop moving for an afternoon and how being still showed me there was a lot more time than I thought.

When I finished, I gave a deep, happy sigh. It was just after noon. A whole afternoon stretched ahead of me, free of urgency or panic and full of time to run to Target for some greatly needed toilet paper so I would no longer have to resort to the box of tissues I keep in the bathroom to clean the hairs off the sink.



Enjoying my freedom from having too much to do in too little time, I sauntered downstairs and ate the piece of flourless chocolate cake I bought for Mike on Friday. We are, I reasoned, scheduled to have our insurance physicals in a week, and my cholesterol levels can much better handle the butter holding the chocolate and sugar together than his can. Then I called him to see if there was anything he needed from Target.

"There's a trimmer I want at Lowe's," he said. "But I don't want you to go out of your way."

"No problem," I assured him as I licked chocolate off the fork. "I've got plenty of time."

And then I was in the car and it was after 1:00 and my heart began beating a little bit faster, as if at the start of a race against the dashboard clock. My hand cramped up as I turned the key in the ignition, seemingly wanting to prevent me from leaving the house when there was still work I could be doing there. What had happened to all the free time? And how quickly could I make it to Lowe's and Target and back home again to do some of it before picking Jake up from school?

So much for the lesson I had just written about learning.


Peace Gone to Pieces

I flew into Lowe's and headed straight for the aisle Mike had described as the repository of his preferred trimmer. The first I grabbed had an open box; impatiently, I pushed it aside. Another had a big gash in the packaging. Wheezing slightly, I maneuvered an acceptable one around the rejects. The label described the trimmer as lightweight, but plainly something resting inside with it was not.

I wrestled the trimmer off the shelf and tucked the box awkwardly under my arm. Feeling rushed but still time-efficient, I headed past rows of gas grills and cheerful displays of patio vacuums toward the most promising of the three check-out lines.

Patiently, I waited, practicing a little bit of yoga by not staring at the checker with a glare of unwarranted annoyance. Finally, however, when several minutes had passed without anything resembling progress, I stole a look. There was the checker, watched over by an embarrassed customer struggling not to look embarrassed, painstakingly going through a notebook to figure out the scan code for a whole bunch of metal pipes the embarrassed woman was buying.

It got worse. Directly in front of me, I noticed a small child. The sight started the usual dance of guilt and primal need my heart taps out when I am somewhere that other people have children and I don't have Jake.

"Oh, Lord," the woman with him said at one point.

The child asked her why she had said, "Oh, Lord." I listened with interest to see how she handled it.

"Because Grandma always gets in the wrong line when she's in a hurry," Grandma answered. She hadn't really addressed what the Lord had to do with it, but she did instill in me a deep sense of being late for something, even though I wasn't.

Feeling jumpy -- I can't say whether from too much sugar and caffeine or from my habitual panic over being out among children without my child or from some ominous and totally illogical internal warning that if I wasted my afternoon running errands instead of working I would spontaneously combust -- I cut my losses and peeled away for another line.

"I can help you here," offered the man just opening up a lane. See? The Universe was telling me there is plenty of time, as long as you don't waste it watching a flustered checker page through a notebook full of bar codes.

I hit the Target just down the road brimming energy and efficiency. Until I heard a child cry and had one of those momentary spinning panic attacks: My child's crying! Where is my child?! Where am I and why am I here??!!

Once I recovered, I simply had to do a dash through the toddlers clothes to buy Jake a pair of shorts, even though it was about 50 degrees out. I suppose it made me feel closer to him, despite the unmistakable feeling of time suck that happens when you are in a big store with no windows and all sorts of distractions.

But I didn't completely crumble with time-fearing anxiety until I was in the mall.

I know the mall seems an unlikely place to head when you are already feeling prickles of panic in your fingers and toes and really just want to go back home to do some work, even in the absence of a pressing deadline. But it made sense, really. I knew I wanted a summer skirt, and I knew I couldn't shop for one with Jake in tow, and I knew I would never find the time and desire to make a special trip to the mall, so I figured the thing to do as I was driving by it anyhow was to hang a left and just plunge right in.

I did a hurried race-walk to the Gap, and grabbed at skirts indiscriminately. But where were the tank tops? I zigged and zagged past displays and then fell into the timeless zone of the sale racks. What were a few more minutes when there were bargains to be found?

Arms laden, I headed for the dressing rooms. As if being crammed too close to a full-length mirror under the world's most unflattering fluorescent lighting weren't enough to make me hurry, the insistent idea that I was WASTING TIME made me practically sweat with the effort of throwing clothes on and off. "It's fine," I told myself sternly before I could turn for one more profile. "Just go."

Not that I got too far, with Baby Gap next door and a cavewoman-like need to acknowledge that I do have a child, even if I had left him behind to shop. But what's the point of getting a miniature three dollar long-sleeved shirt when your brain is too addled with panic to consider whether Jake will get any mileage out of it? Besides, I realized with a jolt as electric as a cattle prod mistakenly grasped by a bargain-searching hand, I just didn't have the five minutes I would have to spend at the cash register to make the purchase. I flew out of the store in such a rush I feel certain a store detective would have stopped me if I weren't already protected by an oversized Gap shopping bag proving I know how to pay for my merchandise.

Which isn't to say I didn't have five minutes to pay for a few sale items at Banana Republic. But it was right in front of the escalators back to the parking lot, so I barely went out of my way.

I got home with plenty of time to tackle some legal work while my blood pressure slowly returned to normal. Because the truth of the matter is that my time crunch was entirely of my own making. It was, I suppose, the counterpunch to my peaceful morning salvo of centeredness, the disproof of my smug assertion that all you need to do is stop and breathe and you will see how much time there really is.

Which might explain why my shopping bag remains on the bedroom floor full of the purchases I just haven't found the time to put away.


Practicing Peacefulness
So, okay, I'm here to say it's not that easy. Sometimes you're able to practice yoga, and sometimes it just isn't happening. Although the isn't happening is practicing yoga too.

There is, I will go so far as to say, as much value in recognizing when it isn't happening for you, in being conscious of your unreasonable panic over time, for instance, as there is in successfully stopping and breathing. Simply recognizing the things we do that are human helps keep us from being controlled by them. Its a way of saying, "Hey, there, panic. I see you're around again. Just wanted you to know I'm on to you. And little by little I'm gonna run you out of town."

Sorry. I don't know what's up with the cowboy speak.

The point is, I have a tendency to panic about wasting time. I can't say where it comes from, but that doesn't really matter. Nor does it matter that after years of practicing yoga I still have it. Panic is just a part of my constitution, and all the willpower in the world won't change it.

What will change it is practice. "Practice," as the word implies, doesn't mean Identify and Eradicate. It means practice. Try again and again. Feel good when you make progress -- when, for example, I can feel calm and centered and able to write about being still on a Monday morning -- and give yourself a break when, say, you find yourself running along a carpeted mall hallway whimpering that you Must. Get. Out. Of. Here.

Practicing peacefulness is no different from practicing an asana. Push yourself too hard and the best you can hope for is an injury that maybe doesn't keep you from trying that pose again for six months. Put too little effort in and you don't make any progress and end up kind of out of alignment because you're no longer mindful about what you're doing.

But find your edge -- that realm of discomfort but not pain -- and you start to move forward.

So when I compare my peacefulness index today to what it was, say, ten years ago I feel mighty centered indeed. In 1998 I was studying for my comprehensive exams in an American Studies doctoral program, suffering panic attacks so severe I literally couldn't breathe, and crying a lot as I walked my basset hound Roxanne in the evening and looked into the warm, lit windows of my neighbors and their families. Compared to that woman, I'm practically Buddha-esque.

Does this mean that ten years from now I will be completely panic free -- able to sashay through the mall with nary a moment of fear that I will be late to pick Jake up from school? Highly doubtful. Because the point of practice isn't to reach some place where you don't have to practice any longer. Rather, it's to keep stretching yourself -- both figuratively and literally -- going beyond where you ever thought you could to face even bigger challenges that will, in turn, allow you to stretch even further.

Why keep doing it? Because it makes you stronger. And stronger in yoga means more centered, more energetically balanced, and, yes, more peaceful.


Testing Your Patience -- Virabhadrasana III (Warrior III)

I don't know. Maybe it's me. To be honest, I don't know anyone else who considers this perhaps the most frustrating of asanas. But I offer it here because I simply can't understand why it feels like I'm the only one falling over in class when we practice it. At any rate, if you already know how to do a strong Virabhadrasana III you are advanced enough to identify a different pose to remind you that practice often happens in baby steps.

There are many ways to enter this pose. I offer here one that I feel imparts the strongest sense of the energy and intention of the pose. If you know it, choose more challenging ways to work through it as you like.

Virabhadrasana III Instructions

1) Start in Virabhadrasana I (Warrior I): From standing at the front of the mat, place your hands on your hips and step your left foot far back. Drop your left foot to the floor with your toes pointing toward the front and side of your mat. Your left foot will be at about a 45 degree angle.

2) Rooting strongly into the outer edge of your back foot, let your front knee bend. Your legs should be far enough apart to allow you to bend your front knee to a 90 degree angle.

3) Still with your hands on your hips, strengthen the pose. Press strongly through your back leg to push the outer edge of your back foot even more firmly into the floor. Think of rotating your back thigh in toward your midline and back to the back of the room. At the same time, lift the toes of your front foot, spread them, and place them back down.

4) Take a moment to feel the fullness of your front foot on the floor. Do a shoulder loop -- toward the front, up toward your ears, and down your back -- to free your heart and lengthen your spine.

5) Look to a spot on the floor a few feet in front of you and lean forward, leading with your heart. Keep your hands on your hips and point your elbows toward the back of the room to help with your balance.

6) Start shifting your weight into your front foot. Keep your eyes fixed on the point on the floor you have chosen. Let your spine be long. As you are ready, let your back leg float off the floor, leading with the inner thigh.

7) Continue shifting your weight and balancing on your right(front) foot until your body is perpendicular to your standing leg. Keep everything strong and long. Try to keep your hips square; the hip of your back leg is going to want to creep up higher than the hip of the standing leg. Try to bring them even with each other.

8) If you are having trouble with balance, drop your fingertips to the floor and work on lengthening your spine and really strongly reaching toward the back of the room with your back/floating leg. You can raise one hand at a time back to your hips.

9) If you would like to move on, try different arm variations: a) bring your arms out to the sides like an airplane; b) bring your arms straight in front of you, palms facing each other, as if you are flying, in classic Virabhadrasana III; c) if you are feeling particularly comfortable with this pose, bring your arms behind your back and either grab hold of your elbows or place your hands in reverse namaste, or reverse prayer position, strongly opening your shoulders.

10) When you are ready, slowly bend your standing knee and lower your back leg so you find yourself in a high lunge position. Either with your hands at your heart or on the floor for balance, step your back leg up to meet the front. Rest for a moment in uttansana (forward fold).

11) Repeat on the other side.

When you fall, fall with grace. Work on not feeling frustrated. I can attest to the fact that nothing in your life will change depending on your facility with Virabhadrasana III. Sometimes, the flying feeling comes from finding the pose. And sometimes it just comes when you are free of the frustration.

Baby steps. Think of how quickly they got your baby moving.