Valentine from an Ex-Punk

Love is about all the changes you make and not just three small words.

Now, it’s true that I normally wouldn’t take ideas about love from a British ex-punk who writes songs about being so drunk he doesn’t know where he is when he wakes up; getting tattoos because he’s bored; declaring that God is dead; and has the habit of throwing down  more F-bombs than I do.  (Although to be fair, the word “fuck” sounds naughty as opposed to nasty in a British accent). 

However, the line above struck me when I first listened to it last fall.  As with most concerts, Nels did his homework and prepared us to see Frank Turner at the House of Blues in Boston (for the record, one of the very best shows I have ever seen) by making a mix CD from the set lists from Frank’s U.S. tour.  We had seen Frank at the Folk Festival in August and were blown away by his energy and authenticity, not to mention his funny, insightful, and obscene lyrics. 

I am a sucker for good lines and underline them in student work and anything else I read.  I remember lines from my high school students’ writing, and I left Aurora in 2001.  When students wrote with detail, genuineness, and love, such as Ashley writing about how a caregiver made homemade tortillas; Suellen writing about how her cousin showed her how to just be, Dave writing about tearing bits of paper and letting them fall into the ocean; and Coley talking about how discovering that working out asked her to question what kind of life she wanted to live, well, there is nothing to do but appreciate the wisdom that can come from just one sentence.   

In the song “The Way I Tend to Be,” the narrator laments his tendency to not appreciate the daily stuff of life, and often wishes for time to go faster because it’s troubling and trying and he’s not sure there’s anything worthwhile at the end:

I stand alone in airport bars

And gather thoughts to think

That if all I had was one long road

It could drive a man to drink.

To go with this depressing picture, the narrator sings about trying to compensate for his loneliness by saying “I love you” to the woman of the moment because it seems like the way to heal his spirit, when in fact, it just makes things worse.  However, one lover taught him that the way he tends to be is not the way he has to be:

But then I remember you

And the way you shine like truth in all you do

And if you remembered me

You could save me from the way I tend to be.

Thus, the lover inspired the narrator to break out of who he tends to be, and that love is the source of the narrator’s willingness to change. 

I am not the person I was when I met Nels almost 22 years ago, and we can all be thankful for that.  As writers often say at the beginning of their books, I thank him for all the inspiration, thoughtfulness, and love he has offered, and all mistakes and shortcomings are mine.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Check out the song at:  http://youtu.be/Cf5O2M5GaEA

The Freight of Expectations

When I was in college and going to bars regularly, I liked to people-watch.  When I was single, that was really guy-watching.  As an unapologetic flirt, I was always conscious of a specific Zone of Attractiveness.  I knew not to aim too high (I didn’t want to be turned down), and hoped that the beer goggles wouldn’t set in and I would aim too low (although that happened a time or two). 

I was amazed that many guys did not seem to have this same understanding of the Zone of Attractiveness.  There were a lot of less-than-appealing guys who would try to buy me drinks.  Being the ethical person that I am, I would refuse the drink unless I thought I wanted to talk to him.  One time, against my better judgment, a group of Bloomington townies managed to buy drinks for my group of friends at Jake’s (yes, back when it was Jake’s).  When one of them asked me my major, I told him I was applying to law school.   He started strutting around like a sheriff from Gunsmoke and saying, “I’m a LAWWWWman!”  Naturally, I thought he was an idiot and refused to talk to him the rest of the night.  That was when one of my philosophies of life—as only a person in her 20’s could come up with—arose:  Ugly people don’t know they’re ugly.

Recently, a close friend of mine was upset because the leader of her organization was cancelling appointments, not showing up to ones she had scheduled, and in general, not being very reliable or present.  Because my friend is hyper-responsible, she took the actions of this leader personally, and characterized them as self-indulgent. 

I have been in similar situations when people have not lived up to my expectations.  I have also felt it when I have not lived up to others’ expectations.  It is a hard thing to accept, even if it’s just viscerally, that you are disappointing others.  Not being able to meet your own expectations, or those of others, is a recipe for self-hatred.  Thinking that you “should” be able to do everything to a high standard, by a certain deadline, is the curse of high achievers. As an academic and a runner, I know a lot of them. 

Nels taught me a saying from the business world:  it’s better to under-promise and over-deliver.  The problem is, a lot of us tend to do the opposite.  We are attracted to all that is new and want to be a part of it, even if we already have too much going on.  When we cannot physically or mentally do what we promised, we feel like crap and others lose respect for us.  It’s a lose-lose situation. 

It is difficult to have compassion instead of contempt for those with whom we work who are woefully unequipped for their jobs, because of life circumstance, disposition, lack of required abilities and skills, or all of the above.  With students, my colleagues and I try to gently convince them they don’t belong in the teaching profession, with more or less success, depending on how much time, money, and psychic investment they have devoted to becoming a teacher.  Imagine what happens when somebody is already IN the profession.  That has to be much worse.  Most self-aware people know when they are not doing a good job, and they hate it.  How do they get out of it when it is how they make a living?  And what harm is done?

As a Midwesterner, I’m all about work ethic, but I also have a short attention span when it comes to doing things that don’t interest me.  When I worked for a car rental company, it was my job to add up the receipts at night and make a correct deposit.  For the life of me, I could not reconcile the accounts, so I got creative (not appreciated here, I found out), which the manager had to undo in the morning.  One time, I overheard two employees talking about me.  The guy who washed cars said, “But she has two college degrees!”  The manager replied, “She can’t add worth a shit!”  They were both correct. 

While I understand the ideals behind the Common Core State Standards, in that the developers wanted to ensure that every student has certain skills to graduate, the highly politicized nature of their creation, not to mention that actual teachers were not involved, render them highly suspect.  When my college juniors and seniors were presented with test questions on the literature exam for high school sophomores, they were unable to decipher the questions, much less answer them, and these were English majors.  If these folks were unprepared, how might high school students feel when looking at this test?   Sure, you could take one of my three routes—decide that there was a Zone where you belonged to or not; OR internalize feelings of failure when you could not live up to others’ expectations; OR get creative and make up some bullshit (the faithful go-to of all English majors).  But this teaches—and assesses—nothing about the student’s abilities to analyze literature. 

Having high expectations is fine, but they have to be individualized to the learner.  At the school where I taught, high expectations might mean a paragraph from the kid with dyslexia, or a thoughtful five page paper from the dedicated writer.  As everyone knows, some folks are good at English and bad at math and vice versa.  It doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have devoted more time to studying math, but it does mean that connecting my ability to graduate to arbitrary standards on an un-scientifically designed test is beyond wrong.    

It appears that the creators of the Common Core, like those drunk guys who thought they could pick me up, do not have an accurate understanding of the Zone of Authentic Knowledge.  Thus, students are stuck with the freight of unrealistic expectations that do not take into account their cultural and individual circumstances.  It is up to us, educators, parents, and students, to refuse the free drinks and tell the jerks that they are jerks.  

Wisdom for a Desert Island

My sister-in-law likes to play the Desert Island game.  We are given a category, such as fruit, and asked to give the top five that we would want if we were stranded on a Desert Island.  The Island motif serves as a metaphor for the things you couldn’t live without if you had to choose.  Notwithstanding that many folks actually live on real versions of a Desert Island, with their choices conscripted by their social, psychological, economic, and/or cultural circumstances, it’s worth thinking about what really matters in a world where Dennis Rodman in North Korea makes the front page, and I have to read about the war in Afghanistan in Doonesbury. 

I never could answer those Desert Island questions because there are too many contextualizing factors.  Take the fruit example.  I would probably pick clementines, but after that, the choice is less clear.  If I picked apples, would they be the hard, juicy kind that bite you back?  I eat blueberries in my oatmeal every day in summer, but what if I don’t have oatmeal on the island?  And of course I love avocados, but they have a lot of fat.  And are they even a fruit? 

So you see my dilemma.  Give me any Desert Island category, and I will not be able to come up with a definitive list because of the range of variables.  For example, with movies, I know I would get sick of watching the same five over and over, so would I choose something that requires multiple watchings to understand, as opposed to say, The Big Lebowski, which makes me laugh and cringe at the same time? 

Books are the same way.  I’d have to weigh fiction and nonfiction, philosophy and poetry, young adult, popular fiction, literary fiction, books of theories and essays. Books on yoga, books on meditation, books on compassion, books on spirituality.  Books on social justice, books on schooling, books on social justice in schools.   Books on writing, books on teaching, books on teaching writing.  It is impossible to choose. 

And yet.  I do believe that I just read a book that covers almost all of the above.  This book, only 50 pages long, provides a framework for many of the issues I have been contemplating for the last 20 years or so. 

Here’s a quote:

Spiritual people, by and large, try to behave well, a habit I am not attempting to subvert.  Still, living by some idea about how things should be is not entirely preferable to living as you are.  For one thing, the goodness of others can have a shaming side, especially if the virtue has shallow roots.  People who do not or cannot, yet, behave very well may feel humiliated by spiritual language and behavior.  They may feel they aren’t good enough to sit at this table.  Or they may suspect, with reason, the quality of the food. (O’ Reilley, pp. 18-19).    

I have suspected the quality of food at many a spiritual table, even my own cooking.  I wrote rather lightheartedly last week about the obstacles of Ganesha, joking about yoga poses that elude me and traffic on 195.  The next morning, I found out that the 15 year old son of a friend had died in a tragic accident.  I also connected back to my friend’s father in the hospital, and another friend’s partner dying in the VA Hospital.  Screw Ganesha, I thought.    

And then, I remembered that I don’t actually believe that an elephant god puts obstacles in my path to teach me lessons about humility, patience, or anything else.  It is up to me to see the thing and behave in an authentic, thoughtful way, recognizing that my negative reactions are patterns, not character flaws.

O’Reilley acknowledges the injustices of the world and how it comes into our classrooms, whether we like it or not.  She writes,

Life comes to dark places, and people sit with stories that are truly hellacious….What does this have to do with teaching school, you may wonder.  Well, I think that if we can’t pull the weight of these stories off people, it’s very hard for them to learn.

Yes.  This is the real world of teaching, and yet there’s not a damn thing about it in the Common Core or in any educational policy that I have ever seen. 

I remember when, a few years after I graduated, I was marveling to my advisor that I couldn’t understand her feedback on my dissertation, and now it was crystal clear.  She said, “Janet, you couldn’t hear me then.” 

Sometimes students can’t hear us, maybe because of the stories they are carrying around.  But the wise teacher can at least make time to hear her/his students.  That’s our job, even if it isn’t in in our job descriptions or evaluations.

So my Desert Island list is pretty definitive after all: clementines, The Big Lebowski, and a tiny book called Radical Presence: Teaching as Contemplative Practice by Mary Rose O’Reilley. 

The Trouble with Ganesha

 On New Year’s Day, I went to Gitali’s Chant, Move, and Meditate class at Bristol Yoga Studio. We sang Ganesha’s chant, because, as Gitali said, Ganesha is the remover of spiritual and material obstacles. This seemed appropriate for beginning a new period of measured time. But she also said that sometimes Ganesha puts obstacles in the way to teach us that the world is sacred as it is, and that what we may interpret as obstacles or imperfections might provide us with something we do not even know we need yet.

 This was a reminder of how different the yogi interpretation of life is from the western perspective. As an American, I see obstacles as barriers to be overcome with effort and will, because they stand in the way of what I desire. Obstacles are, by definition, bad; things to be avoided or eradicated so that I can continue on a smooth path toward my goals.

 From the yogic viewpoint, obstacles are seen differently. Change and unpredictability are not foes to be vanquished or rivers to be dammed. Instead they are a given: an expectation. So, when there is a car accident or roadwork on 195 that keeps me from my usual speed, it is not an anomaly or obstacle, but simply part of life. When I can’t do certain poses because of tight shoulders, this is not preventing me from something I should be doing, but is an invitation to be attentive to how my shoulders represent what is happening in the mind. After all, Dharma Mittra says that there are no stiff bodies, only stiff minds.

 When Saturday morning rolled around at -1 Fahrenheit, I saw this as an obstacle to what I wanted to do, which was go for a run. This would be two non-running days in a row, with a half-marathon coming up that I don’t feel ready for. However, I had promised myself that I would not run if it was colder than 10 degrees (Nels had no such compunctions—he went running with other hardy folk). I happened to have a flier on my bulletin board for a yoga studio I wanted to try, and a vinyasa class started at 8:30 a.m. I bundled up and headed out.

Yogaloft is in the Cutler Mills off Child Street in Warren. The walls are exposed brick with tall windows, high ceilings, and a smooth natural wood floor. The entry opened into the spacious studio with props on one side and a door to the back that led to a bathroom shared with other businesses. Sharon, the teacher, was efficient, warm, and called me by name throughout the class. We started with stretching, twists, and core work before moving into sun salutations, warrior poses, balancing, and then to inversions, twists, and savasana. While it was a traditional class in many ways, some important things were reinforced. When Sharon asked us at the beginning of class to start with an intention, mine was “be present.” This supported me even as my mind went to various places that involved critiques of my flexibility, comparisons to other students, and wondering when the hell we were going to be done with Warrior I because my arms were freaking tired.

 I was reminded of how, when I’m practicing on my own, I like to move through most poses quickly. Nels recently teased me about my lack of patience, and I think that impatience is evident in my yoga practice as well. The only poses I like to extend are pigeon and savasana. This morning, though, Sharon reminded us to stay with the breath, so when moments of irritation arose, I was able to come back to the present, even as I was trying to avoid its unpleasantness. She did a terrific job with sequencing, encouraging, and adjustments, and I so appreciate that I chose, practically on a whim, to come to this class, on this day.

 Maybe because it’s a natural time for resolutions, but I hit upon a new intention for 2014 during the class: I want to visit every yoga studio in Rhode Island. I had resolved to work more intentionally on my yoga practice this year anyway, so what better or more fun way to do it? Ganesha will no doubt be at work, placing unexpected and perhaps unwelcome experiences and people along this journey. I’m already dreading Ashtanga and Bikram yoga, for example. If you have a favorite studio and instructor, let me know. I will share my experiences periodically.

 Judy McClain of Grace Studio once said that paradox is at the heart of yoga. Ganesha is part of that paradox as both the remover and placer of obstacles. No matter what our resolutions or intentions this year, he will be at work. So, if I don’t happen to get to all yoga studios this year, I’ll know whom to blame.

No Glory Days, but Plenty of Pop Songs: an Academic Celebrates Community

Going to conferences can be the perfect antidote for the day-to-day work of an academic.  I usually have mixed feelings of “Yay!  I get to go learn stuff and hang out with like-minded people” simultaneously with “I am soooo not ready for my presentation.  Do I have to do this?”  My friend Susan captured this perfectly.  The night before I left, I discovered that the luncheon I was to attend was 90 minutes earlier than I thought, which wrecked my plans for a leisurely, post-rush hour trip up 95.  Then, I looked at the convention program for the first time (I know, I know) and found out that my presentation was supposed to be on the article for which I won an award, not the new research I had just spent two weeks preparing for.  Oops.  When I told Susan these stories, she said, “When these things happen, don’t you wish you didn’t have to go, even if it’s something you looked forward to?” 

I understood what she meant, because I had had those exact same feelings at other times.  Nels and I almost didn’t take a trip to Puerto Rico, even though it was planned and paid for, because we had just been traveling to see family.  We did end up going, which was great.  For this trip to the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) annual conference, even with the last-minute problems, I still was excited to go.  Not to get the award, or talk about my research, but because I would be spending time with friends, old and new. 

The Buddhists call the assembly of ordained monks and nuns a “sangha.”  Yogis use the term more loosely, in that groups of students who practice together, say, at the same studio, might be called a sangha.  I like to think of it even more broadly, in that I feel like I’m a member of multiple sanghas—runners, yogis, writers, academics, Hoosiers.  Each of these sanghas have their own discourses and ways of being—their own social worlds. 

At NCTE, I was able to spend time with two different sanghas who differed in space and time.  One of my current sanghas is the Agentive Teachers’ Group, or ATG.  We are a coalition of teachers interested in social justice pedagogy and all that goes with it.  Our presentation was in the late afternoon on Friday, and we had a full house.  By staying away from the “talking heads” kind of presentation, we were able to engage in dialogue with the participants and learned as much from them as they did from us.  Although this group has existed for four to five years (none of us can remember, which I take as a good sign), I was gratified and humbled by how they talked about their work.  Afterward, at dinner, we didn’t talk about the presentation at all, beyond the initial “Wow, did you know Tom Romano was in our session?”  Instead, we talked about music, books, movies, and television shows, including arguments about what should be on the Top 10 Pop Song list of all time (a sampling of songs under discussion:  “Billie Jean,” “The Final Countdown,” “Heard It through the Grapevine”, along with newer stuff I didn’t recognize.  Hoosiers, rest assured I put in a vote for Mellencamp’s “Jack and Diane” and these East Coast folks agreed).    Sure, there was also beef regarding whether Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus” was crap or not.  What else can you expect from a bunch of English teachers? 

Then, instead of staying at the conference hotel, I stayed with two dear friends in Newton.  They are both educators, so of course we talked shop, but the topics ranged from politics to football to the benefits of vitamin D to contentment.  This is a different, more intimate sangha, and is just as important in sustaining my sense of connection and well-being.

Going to conferences is not just about current and local sanghas, though. It’s mostly about sanghas of the past.  If you have gotten your doctorate or been partnered with someone who has, (to this latter group, we owe you) then you know that graduate school sanghas, like professional sanghas, help you keep and retain your sanity.  Unless you’re in grad school, nobody really gets what you’re doing or why you’re doing it.  Even the language is different.  Meeting up with Beth, John, and Tasha was about reconnecting to a place and time that shaped who I am as a person and an educator.  I would not have made it through statistics without John’s patient tutelage and Tasha’s fierce commitment (I have called her Tenacious T ever since).  Beth and John were key members of the English Teachers Collaborative (ETC), the ancestor group of the current ATG.  Tasha, who is exactly five days older than me, and I share an Aquarian vibe that is both airy and fiery.  We haven’t seen each other in years, but it didn’t seem like it, as conversation flowed just as naturally about our current concerns and lives as it did ten years ago. 

Interestingly, conversations with my past sangha members were not about what we experienced together in grad school.  There was no, as Bruce Springsteen puts it, Sitting back/trying to recapture/a little of/glory days.  Instead, we talked about where we are now, who we are now, and what is going on in our field.  The mileage between the physical and social spaces of Michigan, South Carolina, Virginia, and Rhode Island may be far, but the connections we forged through a doc program that managed to be both demanding and supportive are still intellectually and socially stimulating. 

It is a shame that academic institutions are committing less funding for conference travel.   The benefits of attending these yearly conventions are not limited to going to sessions or even presenting.  Instead, I would argue that the main value comes from creating and sustaining relationships.  Relationships drive and sustain all professions, and I’m not talking about networking, which is purely strategic.  I’m talking about authentic dialogue that comes from genuine interest in and support for others, not what benefits the individual only.   So this Thanksgiving week, raise a toast or turkey leg to your own sanghas, whether they are family, friends, neighbors, colleagues, or members of a specialized group.  

What Billy Squier Taught Me about Integrity

Integrity.  The first time I remember thinking about this word was due to Billy Squier. 

For those of you who had the misfortune to be born post-80’s or outside the U.S., you may not know about the magic of somebody like Squier.  If I was a musical snob, I would completely disown that I ever liked this guy, but hey, I’m married to a guy who is unashamed of loving Dan Fogelberg, whom, to me, is the nadir of rock.  (“Leader of the Band”?  Seriously?  HATE that song). 

As I listen to videos via not-very-good YouTube videos, Squier’s songs still sound as tempting and revealing as they did back in the mid-80’s, when Don’t Say No was one of the biggest records around.  “The Stroke” was most popular, but to my ears, “Lonely is the Night” and “My Kinda Lover” sound as sincere as rock and roll possibly could in the 80’s.

I liked Billy Squier enough to want to go see him at the Fort Wayne Memorial Coliseum during my junior year of high school.  The only problem was the concert was on a school night, and thus my parents said no.  Not to be thwarted, I made up a story about how my friend Kim and I were going to a tech rehearsal for the school play, that I would stay overnight with her, and go to school from her house the next day.  Somehow, my parents bought it.

Interestingly, I remember nothing about that concert.  What I do remember is being caught a week later when my mom talked to Kim’s mom about an unrelated issue.  My mother, having been raised a Southern Gentlewoman, is not a screamer, but she has a firm and dangerous tone when she is mad.  And boy, was she mad.  The one statement that came through clearly was, “It’s a matter of integrity.”   

In my adolescence, it seemed far more convenient to lie, especially to my parents, to get what I wanted.  So I did.  I even said things like, “Lying to your parents is okay, even necessary,” and honestly believed it.

But when my mom said, “It’s a matter of integrity,” a seed was planted.  I lied to her and my dad plenty of times after that (after all, that was just my junior year), but I was conscious and remorseful of what I was doing.  Funnily enough, I was also lying to myself.

Ironically, this came home to roost when I was teaching high school.  I loved the punks and goths because they were honest about what they did (drinking, getting high), what they didn’t do (my assignments), and who they were.  I took the truthful, greasy-haired, leather-jacketed kid reeking of last night’s alcohol over the sweet (ha!) blond blue-eyed girl who told me earnestly that 4:20 was not a drug reference, and that’s why she wanted it on her yearbook page.

Lying is a form of protection borne of the need to preserve others’ projections of us.  I was trying to protect my parents from knowing that I was not the person they projected me to be, however unconsciously.  I wasn’t as good or smart as I thought they thought I was, and I desperately didn’t want them to know that.  My students, even my college students (even graduate students!) have done the same thing with me.  I recently realized, in one of those lessons that needs to be experienced over and over again, is that I can’t take this personally.  As I wrote in my journal back in 2008:

What this tells me is that it’s [lying] not about me, the authority figure, but the person him or herself.  It may be a case of having high self-expectations and knowing you are falling short, but you don’t want to admit that to anyone, so you make up excuses or lie or get defensive when people see those cracks in your armor that you thought were invisible or that you had covered up, or even worse, that you didn’t even know were there. 

Now, when Sharon Salzberg, meditation teacher extraordinaire, talks about integrity, she means something more conceptual, as in living your values. I wrote about that later in the same journal entry:

Maybe it’s as basic as thinking and acting with integrity, not only toward others, but toward myself.  Sometimes I get so caught up in doing things so that others will like and respect me, that I don’t even do the things that I like and respect about myself.  In other words, I’m performing for others for the sake of my ego, as opposed to thinking about what I really want in life.  My ego…protects those small brittle places to make it so that I’m not vulnerable.  I figure if I try really hard to appease my ego, than those vulnerabilities will go away.  What I’m seeing is that they don’t; and that the ego stretches me too thin so I cycle through those dark moments time and again—that deep-seated anger at trying to play nice and to play strong as opposed to really getting down to business. 

I need to define for myself what acting with integrity really means.  It doesn’t mean doing what I want to do and not doing what I don’t want to do:  it means being truthful, even so far down and deep as learning to recognize those hard truths about myself.  It also means being generous toward others and myself. 

At the very least, then, I hope I can lie less to myself about what I can and cannot do.  My ego still wants people to like me, because maybe then I will like me; thus it thinks I can and should do all kinds of things.  I see the same thing with my colleagues.  At a meeting this week, every single person claimed to be overwhelmed.  You know what?  I am not overwhelmed—not yet this year anyway.  After years of burnout, my sabbatical taught me that taking time to do yoga, meditate, read, play in the garden, and even watch television, keeps me rejuvenated. 

Busyness is now the way we tell ourselves we are wanted.  The endless emails.  The taking on of more complex tasks.  I still sometimes get sucked into that, but can often come back to the place of “No more work this afternoon.  It’s time to read some young adult fiction.” 

If you are feeling overwhelmed, can you step away from your inbox, your promises to others, and keep the promise to yourself?  Can you offer yourself the generosity you would offer others?

      

 

Mindfulness, Compassion and Resilience, or making peace with why I didn't get a pony at age 12

I hadn’t realized how much I missed my yoga teacher training until I had a similar experience at Kripalu this weekend.  Kripalu is a “yoga center” in the Berkshires that used to be a monastery.  It consists of a huge brick building that looks like a college dorm and a modern annex on several hundred acres, including a large lakefront area.  The sleeping areas are Spartan, the food nutritious, organic, and delicious (yes, those three adjectives CAN go together), and the people mostly blissful.  No cell phones were allowed in public spaces, so instead of looking at hand-held screens, people conversed, read, or just gazed out the windows to see the changing leaves on the surrounding mountains.  As my friend Christine said the first time I went to Kripalu, it’s basically a weekend where you hang out in your pajamas (i.e., comfy yoga clothes) and don’t wear makeup.  In other words, paradise.    

Our session was led by Sharon Salzberg, one of the originators of bringing meditation and mindfulness to the United States in the 1970’s, and Stephen Cope, who directs a research institute that examines the benefits of yoga on the human brain.  We were in what must have been the main chapel at one time as it looked and felt like a church sanctuary with a soaring ceiling, altar area, and choir loft.  It was a sacred space, but not a solemn one, thanks to our leaders’ humor and authenticity. 

Here are two important things I learned this weekend:

1.      Mindfulness consists of two levels of awareness:

·         Seeing what is happening; and

·         Seeing my reaction to it. 

In other words, these are two separate and distinct actions.  The thing itself—an event, a person, a conversation—does not cause a specific reaction; my mind does.  Thus, I have the opportunity to respond skillfully; but that is predicated on being aware of what is happening in my mind before actually saying or doing something I might regret.  But, boy, the mind sure likes to create havoc in the meantime!

For example, earlier this week, I received a terse text from a friend. Apparently, I had awakened her by responding to a text she sent a few hours earlier.  In my mind, I was being polite by responding, albeit not immediately, because I had a meeting, then was driving, then had dinner, all of which I prioritize before non-emergency texting.  I read her response to my overture as irritable, and I reacted by getting defensive.  At first, my mind went something like this:  “Why would she keep her phone on when she’s asleep? Who does that?  She’s just asking for trouble.  I was just trying to be a little generous and humorous about a situation in which she was clearly pissed off, and now she’s even more upset about an opportunity I wanted to share with her, and this is how she reacts?  All I was trying to do was be a good friend.” 

That was my first reaction.  My second was to realize that, for her, having her phone on was necessary.  She was out of town.  Her parents are in ill health, and she is one of their caretakers. Of course her phone was on, and of course she was irritated that I woke her up to chat about something innocuous.  Then I felt guilty for my initial reaction, which continued the negative cycle.  “I suck.  I’m a bad friend.  I should have known better.” And so on. 

And this is what the mind (or my mind anyway—perhaps everyone else is enlightened) does.  It creates a story that makes me the victim so I can feel aggrieved and righteous, and thus justify my anger.  When that doesn’t work, it creates another story that makes me the jerk. In both cases, I am still the center of attention.  This self-centeredness is one of the inner “enemies” that Bob Thurman and Sharon Salzberg write about in their new book, Love Your Enemies: How to Break the Anger Habit and Be a Whole Lot Happier.

In her talk on Sunday, Salzberg told us that the Tibetan Buddhists say we pick up anger when we feel powerless because it makes us feel strong.  Anger is not just one emotion—it’s a bundle of fear, grief, and helplessness.  In our American culture especially, we like to feel in control, when in fact, we really have very little power over events or people.  But we do have control—when we choose to use it—over our own emotions. 

2.       Compassion is the source of resilience.   

Specifically, compassion for the self leads to resilience.  This is because compassion recognizes the vulnerability that we all share: it is a moving toward others—emotionally or physically—to see if we can lend support, but it also means that we accept our lack of control over events and people (see above).  Sharon said, “Resilience is the ability to start over.”  She was specifically referring to meditation, when over and over a meditator loses herself in thought, taking away from her focus on the object of concentration, whether it be the breath, a mantra, or something else.  Meditation is bringing oneself back to the object with compassion instead of negative judgment.  In my story above, once I took another perspective on my friend’s response, I could feel compassion toward her.  After my bout of guilt, I was able to feel compassion toward myself, and see that it was a tiny incident that my mind exploded into something larger.  That discernment dissolved my guilt.    

In life outside of meditation, resilience is the ability to accept change with equanimity and compassion even when things don’t happen the way we think they should.  Resilience offers us the energy to make a change, instead of stewing over what we can’t change.  For example, how we were brought up (why didn’t I get a pony?), how our colleagues act (how dare she talk to me that way!), and how people blame us for things that are not our fault (you didn’t get into that class because you didn’t make an advising appointment when I offered it).  Resilience is the opposite of apathy, because it allows us to know that what we see right in front of us is not the whole story; instead it’s the planting of a seed.  We may not know what the seed may grow into, but that’s okay.  It’s about giving up control of outcomes, and also taking responsibility for our actions and reactions.

That’s all fine and good you (I) say.  But what about the real world, when things happen and we instantly have shaming, blaming, angry thoughts?  What was so great about Sharon Salzberg is that she revealed that even though she has been meditating for over 40 years, her mind still offers those same negative stories.  This made her accessible and real, and also opened up the possibility for growing my own compassion and resilience.  Despite flunking compassion in yoga teacher training, it feels like there is hope for me now.