Last night as I was washing the day's sippy cups I listened to a podcast of Fresh Air featuring Pico Iyer, who has known the Dalai Lama for 33 years and recently wrote a book about him.
The only one awake in the still house on a soft spring night, fresh from dinner out at Marco's, a family friendly pizza place where Jake joyfully played peek-a-boo with the two-year-old at the table across from us, I felt peaceful listening to stories of this man I so admire. But at the same time I felt a small rasp of unease, like an emery board being softly drawn across my Buddhist convictions.
I was, I think, confronting the fact that nearly everything I know about Buddhism comes from places like Fresh Air interviews -- easily packaged bits of information for Type-A westerners like myself who clothe their humanism in a shallow understanding of some basic, and attractive, Buddhist precepts: show compassion for all living things; god exists in all of us; suffering can be alleviated by giving in to our hearts.
Okay, sure, good points all, but how much of my life do I really devote to these ideas I find so important? And do I live by them when it's not easy, like when I find a sluggish wasp in my child's bedroom and think it's pretty big of me to apologize before I crush it with a rolled up issue of the New Yorker?
And then Pico Iyer said something that gave me permission to be the Buddhist dilettante I am without apology. The Dalai Lama, he said, doesn't want westerners to convert to Buddhism. He feels there is too much of a cultural divide for people like us to live fully by it.
Wow, I thought. I'm doing exactly what the Dalai Lama would do. If the Dalai Lama were a fairly dedicated but easily distracted yogini with a beautiful little boy she loves so much it sometimes makes her cry, a decidedly un-yoga-like meat-eating husband, and a deep aversion to wearing flowing clothes made of hemp.
I saw myself as the Dalai Lama might -- with generosity and kindness and acceptance. I saw a woman with a joyful love for her family, a true well of compassion for others, but --sorry -- a strong need to live in the world of comfort and possessions and attachment to things that a good Buddhist would renounce as unnecessary. For example, my perfectly fitted $120 Lucky jeans aren't strictly necessary. But they do make me feel really, really good.
Here, I realized, was a lesson about motherhood. About why I have owned at least four baby books and followed the advice in none of them (going so far as to toss What to Expect During the First Year in the trash when it made me doubt my conviction that Jake did not need sleep training at the tender age of four months). About why trying to emulate shining examples of the sort of mother I think I should be always ends up making me feel crappy about myself. About why, no matter what anyone else tells me, I always have to find my own way to doing what I think is right for my child.
There is a vast cultural divide, it turns out, between the mothers we are and all of the advice, information, exhortations thrown at us by people who aren't us and don't know our children as well as we do.
We mothers are all, in a way, Buddhist Lite. We take what speaks to our hearts, hold it close, teach it to our children, and we quietly, sometimes somewhat guiltily, but very wisely let the rest fall away.
Finding Your Own Path
Just as growing up in a western culture makes it nearly impossible for one to fully understand and embrace Buddhism, so each and every one of our individual children makes it impossible for us to fully understand and embrace any one school of child rearing.
Nearly every time I stroll the aisles of Target, I see a tiny infant, head lolling to the side, blinking against the fluorescent lights, and I think, "I would never take a baby so young to Target." No, actually, I didn't take Jake to a Target until he was about four months old because my mother instinct told me that he needed a lot of peace and quiet in his early months. There's nothing to say I won't be carting some future infant through the toy department to buy a ball for his big brother Jake, if he seems like the kind of baby who would be okay with it.
Or there are those millions of things our mothers say they did when we were babies that we swear we will never, ever do ourselves. (Formula feed, use disposable diapers, leave the baby on the floor for the dog to lick.) And then we end up doing ninety percent of them, or forty percent, or some other proportion, because it turns out that's just what our child needs.
So, much as I admire, say, the concept of attachment parenting -- of wearing your baby everywhere and never using a stroller and starting early toilet training as a way of deeply bonding to your baby's rhythms -- I just can't do it. It didn't seem to be what worked for Jake -- and, just as importantly, it wasn't what worked for me.
The Dalai Lama, I hear, thinks that's perfectly okay. And so do I.
Being True to Your Path
Here's the other thing I heard in the Dalai Lama's ideas, and it's something I've actually been saying for a long time: I'm not ready for enlightenment. I get the concept, I think it would be lovely to finally get it after (if you believe this) all these lives on earth. But, much as I'm not anxious to do this whole life thing over again, I'm just not ready to do what it takes to avoid it. I know this because I know that I am as unprepared to give up my Lucky jeans as I am to give up my beautiful family to live in silence in a Buddhist monastery. It's just not my path in this life.
You'd think following one's path would be pretty simple, since it is, to my mind, what life is about. If you're not following your path, what are you doing?
Following the paths others have laid out for you, it seems. Doing what you think you're supposed to do (go to law school, have a safe and secure life) rather than what you feel you should be doing (quit your job, sell your house, spend years writing without getting paid for it). Reading fifteen baby books when preparing for your first child because someone has to tell you how to do it. Having the right job, home, car, living room furniture.
No doubt about it, it's easier to follow a path someone else has laid out for you. The people writing the baby books are experts, after all. Your mother has a lot more experience with motherhood than you do. So do your friends whose kids are older, or so they constantly seem to be telling you. "Just wait!" they tell you with a gleam in their eye every time you venture that the stage your child is in isn't nearly as bad as you'd been led to believe it would be. All of these people have information, and information is something you can grasp. It is knowable, certain, a guide to spelunking through the underground caves of motherhood.
Following your heart, on the other hand -- now that's just plain scary. You have no idea where your heart will lead you because no one else has been there before. You can't ask anyone else for assistance because they don't know what's in your heart. You can't plan ahead if the path is always this moment unfolding before you.
Then again, most of us are lucky if we know what school our child is going to next fall. We sure don't know what sport they'll be playing (if any), what dreams they'll have, what truly ugly pair of athletic shoes they will die if you don't buy for them. But we love them so much we don't care that we don't know. We love them so much we trust that wherever they lead us we will willingly follow. And it will be all right.
In this way, motherhood is itself a type of faith. So, it occurs to me, while the Dalai Lama can use his faith to teach me something about motherhood, my experience of motherhood could probably teach him something about faith.
And that, at least according to Pico Iyer, is a lesson the Dalai Lama, with all his compassion and love and wisdom, would embrace with pleasure.
Janu Sirsansana (Head to Knee Pose)
Truthfully, I should probably offer a meditation exercise here, since the best way to hear your heart is to quiet your mind, and that's what meditation is all about. But few of us are prepared to sit and meditate without a whole lot of practice. And, frankly, even after years of practicing yoga, meditation is hardly my strong suit. I told you I'm just not that close to enlightenment.
Janu sirsansana, often misleadingly called head-t0-knee pose, offers both the chance to meditate and the assistance we need to get a tiny bit closer to being able to do so effectively. In it, we work on opening both our hips -- home to stuck emotions -- and our hamstrings -- sites of rigidity as well as a constant reminder that we spend a good portion of our lives sitting in chairs doing things very, very far from our basic nature as human beings.
As in any yoga pose, find a balance between focusing on your body opening and the space that opening creates for your heart to start speaking to you.
Janu Sirsana Instructions
1) Sit on your mat with your legs stretched out in front of you. If it is difficult for you to do this with a straight spine (you seem to sink down and curve your back), sit on the very edge of a folded blanket. (Your sitting bones, not the backs of your thighs, will rest on the blanket.)
2) Place your hands by your hips for support and perform a shoulder loop -- forward, up toward your ears, and down your back. Let your heart lift. Bend your knees slightly if you need to to allow your spine to lengthen. Flex your feet, let your inner thighs rotate subtly toward the floor, and let your strong legs support your pose more than your hands.
3) Bend your right knee out to the side and place the sole of your right foot against the inside of your left thigh. The tighter your hips are the closer you should place your right foot to your left knee.
4) If your right knee is more than a few inches from the ground, place a rolled up blanket under it for support.
5) Place your hands by your hips again and perform another shoulder loop. Draw your navel in toward your spine and up toward your heart to maintain the length in your spine. Continue flexing your left foot and drawing your left inner thigh subtly toward the floor. Think about rotating your right thigh toward the ceiling and out to the right.
6) Inhale, lifting your heart even more. As you exhale, lead with your heart as you fold forward and reach with your right hand for the outside of your left leg.
7) Pause here, then inhale and lengthen your spine again, trying to draw your navel even with your left (straight) leg and squaring your shoulders toward the front of your mat.
8) Exhale and let your heart reach toward your left foot.
9) When you find your edge -- the place where you experience some tightness but not pain, stay where you are. Place your left hand on the outside of your left leg (or foot if you have very flexible hamstrings) and move your right hand to the inside of your left leg (or foot).
10) Remain here as you breathe slowly and deeply. Spend 5-8 long, slow, deep breaths focusing on the areas where you feel tight. Let each inhale send the breath to these tight spots; let each exhale release them.
11) For the next 5-8 long, slow, deep breaths, see if you can quiet your mind. Observe how each inhale draws energy from the sole of your left foot to your sitting bones. Watch as each exhale moves energy from your sitting bones out the crown of your head. Let any other thoughts drift away, as if you were ignoring a television on in the room where you are engaged in something much more interesting.
12) When you are ready, gently release the pose. Support your right knee with your hands as you draw it out of its hip opening position. Then repeat on the other side.
Most importantly, accept that this is your pose. If something I suggest doesn't work for you, trust that it is not what your body needs. If you discover something else in this pose, follow it. Make this a pose, above all, of trust.
Then, as always, carry that trust into the rest of your life. You are somewhere on your path. The challenge is to follow where it leads you.
No comments:
Post a Comment