*after the Wallace Stevens Poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” (reprinted below)
I.
Every Spring I grumble on the eve of the clocks jumping one hour forward. The thought of "losing" an hour of sleep exacerbates the sense I have that there's not enough time for, well you name it, there’s just not enough time. It’s the curse of modern life, that infernal sense of busyness. So a few weeks ago, I grumbled as usual on Saturday evening as I reminded myself of the clocks changing, and I grumbled a little extra on Sunday morning as I got up at the new 7am, still feeling very much like 6am—I was teaching a full day of yoga training so the early start was not optional. But this year, something very different happened on the Sunday evening. At the end of a long but rewarding day of teaching, I was grateful that as I was making my way home, there was still plenty of light and I could appreciate the play of sun and cloud shadow on the mountains that form a ring around Sligo. I was profoundly struck by the boost to my sense of inner brightness.
In the days that followed, I continued to notice this gratitude for what seemed like an infusion of light pouring into my awareness, allowing me to see the world around me with more clarity, more focus. After months of the literal darkness of winter and the metaphorical darkness of grief in my own life following my mother’s death in November, I am now deeply grateful for this shift back towards the light.
II.
My mother was weeks away from her 76th birthday when she suffered a sudden rupture of her large intestine and went into a cascading septic shock she was unable to recover from. The day she died, just two days after the symptoms of sepsis began, her surgeon discovered her pelvic organs were riddled with cancer that had turned gangrenous and simply eaten through her colon. She died not knowing any of this as she had slipped into unconsciousness the night before. As a family, we were horrified by the speed of her descent towards death but grateful that it meant she was spared prolonged pain and suffering. While my mother had been struggling with dementia, she still knew who and where she was up until the day before she died and was in otherwise relatively good health, so it was a very sudden and unexpected death. One Saturday she starting vomiting and on Sunday doctors were talking about the possibility of cancer and on Monday she was gone. It felt like a shocking rip in the fabric of reality.
III.
Death is happening at every moment and as such, is utterly normal but when it comes to your door, nothing feels normal. There are few things as uncanny as losing someone you love to the complete void of sense-making. The world is full of stories that try to make sense of life and death—this is the stock-in-trade of all religious, spiritual and philosophical traditions.
I’m a committed yogi and have always been fascinated by the big questions, always trying to make sense of things. My mother complained that as I child I was infuriating and exhausting because my response to all the patient explanations she offered to my endless series of “why this?” and “why that?” was yet another more insistent, “but why?”
So I’ve spent my life searching and I have found some perspectives on the big questions that resonate very strongly with me. But any person of faith and reason has to admit that for most of the important questions—from where did we come, to where are we going, and what are we wisely to do in this in between place--there simply are no definitive answers. No surety. Truly, even the noblest of traditions, and you can take your own pick, is just making things up. The best we can hope for is to find answers that ring true for us. And regardless of how resonant this ringing true is, nothing will test our fidelity to our beliefs as ruthlessly as death.
IV.
My mother wasn’t young and I turned fifty six weeks after she died. Middle age is not a tragic time to lose a mother or father. But the death of a parent feels strangely disorienting no matter what age you are. As adult as you might consider yourself, some ineffable light is extinguished in your universe. Some door has been closed and locked. You start to feel small, like a vulnerable child left alone in the darkening woods. Something took your mother. That same something can come for you too. There’s no protection. Your protector has been taken. No more pretending at protection from this wolf of mortality.
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
V.
This Spring, when the clocks changed, more than ever before, I felt the power of the sun’s outer illumination; the burst of joy brought by that extra hour of sunlight dancing on the mountains lead to a sudden inner illumination: this moment of “joy” feels strange, foreign, misplaced. In that moment, I realised I had lost touch with joy.
The many beautiful Spring evenings that followed the clocks changing provided me the much needed nourishment of being reminded that nature renews herself. Everywhere, from the increasingly less shy buds on the trees to the bold declarations of the trumpeting daffodils, when we open our eyes to Spring we can see that no matter our personal ups and downs, nature is relentless in her cyclical expression of aliveness and vitality.
While we know that as individuals, we and those we love are not eternal and all must make some peace with this hard reality, the soft reality of the earth melting into life again at this time of year reminds us of the bigger tapestry of existence, an expansive universe in which an unbreakable energy seems to thread through everything, a dazzling life force which will neither cease and desist nor bow to our desire to fully understand its mysteries. It’s an unanswerable why. It’s an inexorable question. Scientists cannot identify its limits but thankfully the bluebells know it's rhythms.
Every year, I know the bluebells are coming to my favourite woodland walk, and yet I know I will still gasp again in awe of their beauty as I round that bend in Hazelwood and behold their hovering song of purple whispers for the first time of the year. How does nature concoct this glorious display all by herself? There is such joy in the wonder and delight of nature expressing itself. The knowledge of my past experience of bluebells and the logic of the future reincarnation of their joy serves to wake me up. Even the word “bluebells” brings a smile into my mind. It’s good to remember I am still capable of these feelings even if they are quiet in me now. Joy does return. Or rather, it never leaves but our vision of it gets crowded out and gets covered over. But we can find our way back to joy. This Spring light is illuminating the places where I have been blocking my own path. Not knowingly, but quite naturally as an act of compassionate protection. But now I know it’s time to clear the way home to my joy, to my heart.
VI.
Spring has always been a time that inspires clearing out the old to make room for the new. We typically think of it as something we do in our homes, but yoga teaches that our body mind heart is our truest home. If we are not happy within ourselves, everything else is just endlessly moving the furniture around.
In many traditions, there is a period of fasting (cleansing) during which we take on a new wholesome activity (nourishment). I grew up Catholic, giving up sweets and going to mass for lent. It’s the same idea. The Spring Cleanse is a crucial time in the calendar for Ayurveda (Traditional Indian Medicine). It’s a time of simplifying one’s diet, giving up things we know are not serving us, like too much alcohol, caffeine, sugar, slouching and couching, social media, etc and we take on the nourishment of warm whole foods, regular movement, meditation and rest. So yoga is an essential part of an Ayurvedic cleanse. The breathing and movement supports not only physical digestion but also the digestion of our emotional lives and the transformation of difficult experiences into wisdom once we know what to hold onto as “nourishment” from our experience and what to cleanse ourselves of, what to let go.
One such cleansing or letting go that I very much need is the aforementioned notion that "there isn't enough time for .... (insert your own longed for activity)". I frequently find myself feeling that there isn’t enough time to sleep and rest.
Ordinarily, I sleep and rest quite well, but since my mother’s death, they have been elusive. I have found it very difficult to settle and hated going to bed. I often stayed up late imbibing the comfort (for the mind) food of old TV shows and movies that I knew I liked and could rely on for that soothing sense of familiarity. Familiarity has the word Family baked right in. I stayed up late to be close to a sense of family and typically fell asleep on the couch, waking at 3am and padding up the stairs grateful to now just fall into bed without having to lie there thinking. I knew this wasn’t “healthy” or “good sleep hygiene.” I didn’t care.
Some part of me deliberately wanted to do the “wrong” thing, to not be a good yogi. I was a good yogi most of the time and where did that get me? Did it protect me from loss and grief? No! Of course this is nonsensical, but I was having a very quiet inner temper tantrum with yoga! Being a yogi means committing to awareness, choosing to consciously be conscious! But I was pulled towards numbing out. But, not being aware, I didn’t quite know that was what I wanted or was indeed doing. I just thought I was fine. I was kinda sorta choosing a time-out from my regular yoga practice. Apart from chanting which was a balm to the soul, the typical movement and meditation I would ordinarily do didn’t feel inviting. I just didn’t want to do it. I didn’t really ask myself why. And because I was avoiding conscious thinking as well as the conscious non thinking of meditation, what wanted to be known and felt had to go somewhere . . . had to go undercover.
VII.
In general, we are a sleep and rest deprived culture. I think we typically ricochet between the extremes of the overstimulated "go! go! go! so much to do! do! do!" and a state of collapse in which we are sometimes so tired we can't even fall asleep easily or if we do, we usually can't stay asleep. We toss and turn, dozing fitfully and wake without having rested much at all. Personally, my sleep has lately been punctuated by so much frantic dreaming that I wake feeling more tired than when I lay down.
After a few months of this, I’m finally acknowledging what's been happening for me--despite all my best efforts to be skilful as I negotiated grief and to be honest with myself, I find I have been running from my grief with either the excuse of busyness pinned to my chest, or the numb out alternative. Consequently, there's been an underlying agitation, the depth of feeling and questioning that wants to be known, felt, wrestled with, embraced and integrated, instead ignored and pushed away, pushed under. I don’t blame myself for the avoidance. How human of me to be unwilling to fully turn towards a crescendo of sorrow, pain and its accompanying questions of mortality and meaning. It's so much easier to watch Netflix, have a glass of wine and push it all into my unconscious. Distract more, feel less, and less, and less . . . until you realise that you are not feeling fine, you are feeling almost nothing other than flat.
VIII.
With the increasing light of this Spring season, I’m starting to realise that the fullness of grief and its confusions and doubts are knocking on my door with the same dedication that the buds return to the trees--it's part of the process of life to lose those we love and it’s also part of the process of the heart to try to protect us from the sudden blunt force of that loss. But it's also part of the process for that protective numbing to start to dissolve, it part of the process to realise you have just been too sad or scared to grieve and it’s part of the process to eventually and to gradually let grief in. To let grief move through, with all her stories and all her tears and all her memories and all her joys and all her wisdom. I know I need to cleanse myself, not of grief, but of my very understandable unconscious resistance to grieving.
So numbing is not unnatural. And really busyness is just a sneaky kind of numbing. The endless apparently unavoidable tasks are often just camouflaging the absence of any answer to “how are you feeling?” other than a perky “busy!” But busy isn’t a feeling, it’s a state of mind. A delusional state of mind. I have to, HAVE TO check off these things on the to do list, even if that to-doing is worrying about others. How can you reasonably argue or persuade yourself out of that? It’s unselfish right? I’m caring so I have to worry about family!
This one is a toughie, but the truth is it’s not actually noble to always be primarily concerned about others, it’s a deflection from turning the awareness back on yourself. Much easier to imagine you could help solve other people’s problems than confront the fears and sorrows of your own heart. And the fact is, when you are not clear about your own state of bodymindheart, you are most likely showing up to “help” in ways that are counter-productive and probably laced with potential resentment. Ever try to argue someone into accepting your help? It usually doesn’t work out well for either party. Many of us know that feeling of righteous indignation when someone doesn’t agree with or isn’t extremely grateful for our “helpful” plan for making their lives better! But this feeling is a red flag that we need to get our own house in order. It’s like complaining about all the other bad drivers as you swing around the roundabout oblivious to the irony that there isn’t any clicking or flashing of an indicator light coming from your own vehicle. Your battery for judging others is all revved up but your self-awareness is flat. You’re running on empty and you’re likely to crash! If you’re lucky it will be a solo collision but when we are disconnected from our source of power, we can harm others whether we mean to or not, whether by our actions or our inability to act when that is what is needed.
IX.
It was becoming harder and harder to get on my yoga mat, or to sit on my meditation cushion. I was confused—I had always been very disciplined in my own practice. I didn’t really think of it as discipline in the usual way—it was devotion. Yoga saved my life years ago; suffering from years of depression and self medication, I was on a slowly self destructing path when yoga and buddhism came into my life. Committing to a thorough exploration of these teachings in tandem with psychotherapy turned my life around. I was so deeply grateful for this new lease of life that I wanted to show up and bow down in appreciation, to pay homage to my body mind heart and all that it had patiently accepted, all it had forgiven and all that it continued to offer me in daily outer activities and inner refuge. It was a love affair. Our dates needed no coaxing. But in the months after my mother’s death, there was outright resistance! We didn’t exactly break up, but there was a definitely cooling off in our relationship.
I was surprised and confused.
“Why are you not taking refuge in practice” I asked myself, “You know this would help you.”
No answer came.
It seemed I didn’t want to be helped.
Then, it dawned on me with those extra hours of sunlight once the clocks changed. Yoga is the practice making the unconscious conscious and I just wasn’t ready to be fully conscious. It had a big wallop of grief that seemed to knock loose a lot of other smaller losses and I was just not ready to digest it all. On one level I knew how much digesting had to be done and I just didn’t have the time! I just didn’t have the energy.
I firmly believe that many of us are suffering from the "I don't have time for ....." syndrome. We busy ourselves with running around, running away from all kinds of things; our griefs big and small, our sense of meaning and purpose, our fears about the state of the world. This running is exhausting and so we are prone to collapse on a number of levels, physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. As a committed yogi, I don't think any of these things are separate, but we can certainly experience the collapse on different levels with more or less intensity.
X.
Increasingly, I hear folks talking about being worn out, fed up, unsure of what they can trust or believe and adrift without a real sense of purpose. Jon Kabat Zinn, the creator of the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (a way of bringing the wisdom of mindfulness teachings out of the esoteric east where they feel off limits to many and into modern western life) has commented that the degree to which you feel like you haven't time for something that will allow you to slow down, feel your body and breath and connect to the aliveness that is right here, is the degree to which you desperately need to do just that. You must practice such a connection as if your life depended on it, because it does. Because when we are running around busy! busy! busy! we are not really living. We are running away from living. Resisting the sorrows and the joys. You don't get to pick and choose. Life comes with the whole package.
From November 28th until April 2nd, I was running away from my joys and sorrows. I didn’t really know it and now that I do, I don’t blame myself. Sometimes we are ready to make the unconscious conscious and sometimes we are not. Sometimes it’s wise to actively work with the obstacles to awareness and sometimes it’s compassionate to be numb for a while. It takes energy and courage to grieve properly and I had temporarily run out of both. I believe that my wise compassionate heart was just biding its time.
I take no credit for the wisdom and compassion I claim for my heart. My yoga and Buddhist training tell me it is not my personal talent but my universal inheritance. The teachings say that everyone has the seeds for lovingkindness, compassion, joy and wisdom. Not everyone has the opportunity to water those seeds. I feel like I got really lucky when yoga and meditation came into my life. Of course, yoga and meditation are not the only ways to tend the seeds, but they are two of the three that have worked best for me, the third being the aforementioned psychotherapy. That’s why I am so passionate about sharing yoga and dharma, while always recognising that they may not be sufficient for some people and that seeking individual counselling from a licensed psychotherapist can be extremely beneficial and is sometimes necessary resourcing when we are negotiating especially rocky excavations of our past and how they are showing up and sabotaging our present.
I said it before and I’ll say it again; yoga and mindfulness saved my life when I was lost in my 20s and into my early 30s. And yet, I feel like some part of me died with my mother and neither yoga, dharma nor therapy could save me from this death. This is a blessing. My wise husband reminds me often how lucky I am to have had a mother whom I loved so much and who loved me so much that her passing is so sorrowful. So Yoga and Mindfulness cannot save you from any part of death, but they can still enhance your ability to live.
I have found that the teaching of the Buddha very helpful in remembering to hold life and death in respectful balance. Buddhist Meditation teacher and writer Jack Kornfield often quotes an old proverb, “When Death Comes, May He Find You Still Alive!” Another beloved teacher of mine, Stephen Batchelor, says that although he has long since left the Tibetan tradition in which he began his life of buddhist exploration, he continues to recite the daily morning reflection he learned at that time;
Death is certain; The time of Death is uncertain; how then should I live my life?
XI.
You could argue that this is a terrible advertisement for yoga classes. If this yoga teacher, who was so committed to yoga still falls prey to this kind of slump, then what’s the point? You might say this whole story is just too self-indulgent too mournful, too dark, too depressing, pull yourself together and get on with things!
And you might be right. But I want no part in promoting the fluffy bunny rainbow brite version of yoga that is out there. There is as much turmoil, anger, sorrow and darkness in authentic yoga practice as love and light. I know people who use the phrase “love and light” a lot and I like some of them very much, but I am wary of relentlessly loving and lighting. I think that pointing always to love and light as some kind of yoga signature is delusional at best and dangerous at worst. It’s deeply unbalanced.
It’s pretty obvious that the opposite of light is dark, but I don’t believe the opposite of love is hate—I think it is fear. And the world is full of fear. A lot of it isn’t warranted, but a good deal of it is. It’s not easy to be a human in the 21st century with the twin threats of climate change and nuclear proliferation, not to mention the alienation of an increasingly virtual world and the dazzling displays of deception and delusion on social media.
But it’s always been scary to be alive—we must always be on the lookout for what we can eat and at the same time avoid being eaten—even though we don’t actually think like this consciously, evolutionarily we are animals, so we are wired for vigilance and fear. We cannot pretend to live in a world that isn’t a priori dangerous and even when we are relatively safe in modern life without the threat that hunters and gathers felt of being eaten by other animals, there are volcanoes, earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, and most commonly, other people who can do us harm. I don’t believe in evil people, I believe in the poisonous possibilities of human derangement that arise out of trauma, neglect, abuse both on both the personal and systemic levels. And mental illness is a real tragedy that can harm both the sufferer and others around them when resources and care are absent or insufficient. So the world is dangerous and we want to be clear eyed and discerning as we move through life. Yoga and dharma can help us learn how to live with these realities, how to live wisely with our fears, how to keep a balanced perspective and keep open a path to joy and love. But yoga should not teach us to pretend that fear and darkness do not exist as natural and normal aspects of experience.
XII
One of my favourite yoga teachers, Richard Freeman, says that yoga ruins your life. By that he means your Samsaric life. The wheel of samsara is like the hamster wheel of running away from the realities of life by engrossing yourself in distractions that numb you out, running after pleasure and running away from pain until eventually you collapse in exhaustion. So yes, yoga can ruin your samsaric life. Yoga will ruin your ability to habitually numb up and zone out. Yoga is a fantastic tool for scraping away at the unconscious to reveal what needs to be made conscious, for unblocking the energetic pathways of the body mind and heart, for recovering your universal inheritance, for remembering all your sorrows and all your joys, for talking to your grief, for unblocking the pathway to your heart and welcoming yourself home to your life.
XIII
When you are ready to grieve whatever your losses have been and ready yourself for the inevitable and unpredictable parade of losses still to come, consider yoga. You’ll meet yourself there, no part left out. Joy, sorrow, love, fear, darkness and light.
Talking to Grief
by Denise Levertov
Ah, grief, I should not treat you
like a homeless dog
who comes to the back door
for a crust, for a meatless bone.
I should trust you.
I should coax you
into the house and give you
your own corner,
a worn mat to lie on,
your own water dish.
You think I don’t know you’ve been living
under my porch.
You long for your real place to be readied
before winter comes. You need
your name,
your collar and tag. You need
the right to warn off intruders,
to consider my house your own
and me your person
and yourself
my own dog.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
By Wallace Stevens
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.
XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.