Gitali: Knowledge, Wisdom, and Love

“She has had an impact on so many lives and she doesn’t even live here!”

                                                            Bridget, fellow yogi

It’s true.  Gitali never lived here in Bristol, but her presence at Bristol Yoga Studio has been significant from the moment of her arrival several years ago.  On the most surface level, it could be her expertise as a yoga teacher.  Not only does she know a rich repertoire of sequences and poses, everything from restorative to vinyasa and in between; she can also intuit the mood and tone of individuals and the class as a whole to see what is needed.  This last week, her very last class, I made an offhand comment about having a possible injury to my right foot.  Gitali worked a brief self-foot massage into our class.  As all 12 of us were twisting our toes and pressing knuckles into arches, giggling at the tickling, I marveled at her care and attention for me, and for us.  This is just a small example of who she is.  Whether we need calm or playfulness, she offers us healing energy. 

Gitali also provides wisdom.  She never attended the preachy “I know better than you” school of yoga, where yoga teachers try to fix their students.  Instead, she asks us to be attentive and responsible to ourselves.  She also asks us to consider how we are connected to one another and to the divine energy that runs through each of us, connecting us to one another, to nature, and to life itself.  Last week, she asked the class if anyone had a specific intention, and somebody said, “world peace” as the standby joke.  After we laughed a bit, Gitali talked about how she does believe in world peace, but has come to realize that it has to start in her relationships first.  When she experiences negative emotions about somebody, she asks herself how she is contributing to peace in the world if she can’t experience peace in this relationship.  That is an excellent question for all of us.  Peace isn’t some abstraction that lies within the arcane language of international treaties or documents.  It is something we can cultivate within ourselves.

Most of all, Gitali is an embodiment of love.  In her presence, I feel accepted, loved, and honored, no matter how grumpy or upset I may be feeling, no matter what mistakes I made that week, or nasty things I thought or said.  At the end of each class when Gitali says, “The beauty within me, the light within me, recognizes and honors the beauty within you, the light within you,” it is clearly and deeply meant and felt. 

Farewell, my friend.  We at BYS are going to miss you tremendously, but your love and light are with us.  

Listen to Your Body...Unless You Happen to be a Teenager

I finally believe it is spring because we have planted the vegetables and put the down comforters away, replacing them with light summer quilts.  For my friends with teenagers, though, spring has those meanings, but there is also something darker and more troubling going on.  And I’m not talking about zombies.  It was Tennyson who wrote the famous line, “In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love” and proms are now held at this time to honor this fancy.  But it’s not just young men, but young women who also turn to thoughts of love, or at least a cool dress.

As I watch a beautiful young neighbor bask in the attention of her first boyfriend and hear her parents simultaneously fret and enjoy her happiness, I think back to being 16 and my first love.  It felt amazing to make out, coming home with bruised lips and the occasional hickey, and the longing to touch and be touched, definitely over the clothes because things were just too messy and unknown underneath.  There was the knowledge that you liked someone, and there was physical evidence that he liked you back.  It felt powerful that first time, not in a bad way, but in a wow, I had no idea my body could feel so alive and sensitive.  

There was also the emotional part, where every waking moment was spent thinking about the other person with sheer happiness and lightness of being.

Except.

While the story of my first love did not have a happy ending (he was a good kisser but a thief and liar), it does not have to be that way for my neighbor.  I would simply suggest that she ignore yogis and runners, who often advise a person to listen to the body over the mind.

Runners and yogis carefully inventory their bodies for twinges and shadows of previous injuries.  This is where they try to circumvent the pesky ego who often rules the mind and seems to divide messages between “That soreness you feel is imaginary.  Don’t be a fool.  Run fast/do 40 sun salutations and ignore it” and “You’re a fool.  Everybody in this race/class is faster/stronger/more fit/smarter than you.  You’ll probably come in last/be the only one who can’t get into handstand.” 

So, messages from the mind are questioned through the lens of the body.  Research shows that runners’ minds tell them to slow down before they physically need to in a tough race.  And yogic research indicates that if practitioners are patient and soft with their hamstrings, for example, they may actually loosen over the course of a class.  It’s almost like the body needs to trick the mind, but we have been trained to ignore the body’s messages since the ego behaves like that obnoxious bare-chested guy in the stands with a huge sign who is yelling “Look at me!  Look at me!”  In contrast, the body is the woman in the hoodie reading a book in the corner, not hiding exactly, but not asking for attention. 

Unless of course the body is attached to a teenager, in which case, I would suggest listening to the mind instead. The body is saying things in a Yoda-like way, such as “Take off your bra let him” while the mind is still behaving in a logical order, such as “Mom is going to freakin’ kill me and Dad is going to kill him.  And I LOVE him.” 

Those heady feelings and physical sensations are something, all right.  I feel like a little of that magic has spread across the grass from my neighbor and is lighting up the trees and flowers. We can be as cynical as we want about young love, but I say, let them enjoy it.  Let them bask in it, and let’s bask in it as well.  It can be this fun, innocent time, and maybe just for once I don’t have to be critical and think about gender, race, and class and can just enjoy the experience through a picket fence viewfinder. 

Intentional Sauntering: A Lesson from Thoreau

“It is a great art to saunter,” said Henry David Thoreau, according to the magnet on my refrigerator. 

I’ve often envied Thoreau’s schedule of tromping through the woods in the mornings and then writing in the afternoons.  Somewhere in there he hoed a lot of beans and made pencils.  Whatever he did, he focused on what he called “living deliberately.” 

In yoga, we call this intention.  At the beginning of class, yoga teachers will often offer an opportunity for students to have an intention for the class.  This intention is supposed to arise organically.  I have to admit that rarely happens for me.  Usually, the teacher provides an intention if you can’t think of one, but that feels like cheating to me.  So I struggle for a worthwhile intention, and then I just have to attend to what is actually happening, and that creates its own sense of purpose.   

For Thoreau, sauntering was not just physical.  It was also about taking time to read, write, and simply be present in the world instead of rushing around as he saw his fellow Concordians doing.  He was able to live outside of that and observe.  The events, upheavals, and experiences he witnessed back in the early 19^th century certainly resonate with us in the present day, which is probably why his work still strikes a chord. 

Most of the time, I am physically unable to saunter.  I walk fast, with purpose.  I remember going into a store one time to pick up some birthday cards on my way to work.  As I strode up the aisle, the proprietor looked up at the sound of my footsteps and said, “Somebody’s a Type A personality.”  Now, I know Type A personalities and I’m not one of them.  But apparently I walk like one.  That gave me pause (very briefly of course).  Does this reflect how I want to be in the world?  And then I was off again.  

I am also mentally unable to saunter.  My mind usually works quickly and impulsively, such that if I can’t figure a thing out within a short time, I drop it.  This is why I am unable to use any technology to its fullest extent, because it takes time to learn.   Back when I taught high school, we didn’t have bells to change classes, so I was always the one yelling that break time was over and it was time to get back to class.  Since coming to teach at Rhode Island College, I have filled every available space with work.  As a result, I have felt, by turns, oppressed, overworked, trapped.  There is no time for sauntering during the school year, it seems. 

A couple of years ago, my friend and colleague Jenn Cook invited me to participate in the National Day of Writing, sponsored by the National Writing Project and the RI Writing Project.  We and some of our students enjoyed a couple of hours sauntering to different areas on campus and writing in our notebooks, sometimes sharing, sometimes not.  Afterward, breathless and laughing at how much fun we had, Jenn asked, “Why can’t every day on this campus feel like that?” 

Why not, indeed?  Last Friday, we had another writing marathon to celebrate Jenn’s memory by doing what she loved to do best—writing with a community of like-minded folks.  As I sat down on “the waves of learning,” a series of gentle undulations in the grass where we had had that conversation, I realized that I could choose to have this kind of experience every day.  I chose this profession precisely because it offered me freedom and agency—and with that, the opportunity to saunter.  So why did I put myself in a box? 

Lack of intention, I think.  Just as with hard work, creating time and space for sauntering also requires intention and discipline.   

Thoreau, who studied the “Hindoos,” or yogis, somehow understood that the sauntering and the work are both necessary for a rich and full life. 

It’s not as if things happen for a reason, but we can make sense of them the way we need to, to keep going.  That’s why we are capable of reflection.

We don’t have to accept things at face value. 

We can make meaning from them. 

We can be intentional about what we do as a result. 

Running, Fighting, and Writing

A dear friend and colleague, Jenn Cook, was killed on Friday, March 14, 2014 by an 86 year old man driving a Mazda truck.  She was walking with her mom, who was badly hurt but is now recovering.  Jenn was 43.  She was recently and happily married to Moira Collins.  Theirs was the best wedding we have ever been to, Nels and I agreed, even better than our own.  They were still like newlyweds, in that their care and attention for one another was profound and gentle.  Their wedding picture is still on our fridge as a reminder of what my mom would call “a happy day.”    

Jenn was a tireless advocate for teachers and students, someone who constantly stretched her intellectual muscles and those of everyone around her by delving into new ideas as far-ranging as using comic books in the classroom, engaging in research with friends from Great Britain on bringing inquiry into the undergraduate curriculum, and, I just found out, was known as THE person in RI to contact for Connected Learning.  In our last conversation, the week before she died, I was delighted to have convinced her to teach a qualitative research course in the Ph.D. Program in Education.  I also told her to see the movie Nebraska because of her close relationship with her elderly and ailing father.  The care that the son in the movie took with his cranky father was how I imagined Jenn with her dad:  attentive, supportive, and taking great care of his fragilities without being stultifying.   

In short, this world has suffered a huge loss.  I have suffered a huge loss. 

While I have written plenty of wrenching pages in my journal in the last month, I have not shared anything publicly yet, mostly because I want it to be good enough.  But just like the old poets said and Jenn taught, if I wait for that, then I will never send anything out.  I will never be able to fully capture who she was and what she meant, not only to me, but to her friends, colleagues, and students.  But I can still write and share (and so can you).  One blog will never do her justice, nor do justice to the many shades of emotion that I have experienced over the past month.  So, I have decided to write a series, not in the cloying sense of she-was-so-perfect (she wasn’t, and she was okay with that), but in the gritty current reality that all of us who knew and loved her now inhabit. 

 This stark actuality was echoed by one of the survivors of the Boston Marathon bombings.  She said, “You have to come to terms with knowing that your life can change in an instant.”  She lost her leg.  I lost a friend.  I don’t know exactly how my life will change—that’s still evolving and inconsistent.  One day I’m more compassionate and patient.  The next, I want to rip off someone’s head, as I become ever-more aware of that deep reservoir of anger I harbor, similar to Turtle Lake in Diary of a Part-time Indian or how Thoreau describes Walden Pond:  so deep that the bottom can’t be measured, maybe because it reaches the other side of the earth. 

Joey, one of Jenn’s students said, “I want to kill that driver.”  Apparently, I do too.  Last Tuesday was a dark and dreary day, and Nels and I ran our town route to keep close to home in case the rain became unbearable.  I remember being really upset with drivers, thinking that they weren’t stopping or paying enough attention.  Later, Nels told me that I was the aggressive one, practically daring drivers to hit me.  It’s true, I realize now.  I wanted to yell at someone, maybe have an excuse to punch a jaw and feel my fist hurt, hear bone against bone, even though I have no idea what that feels like.  Nels, playing amateur psychologist (ironically, his degree is in psychology), could see what I couldn’t:  that I wanted to punish someone, and since the driver who killed Jenn was unavailable, any other driver would have to do.

Luckily for the drivers in Bristol that day and for me (and for Nels, who would have had to defend me or the unlucky driver), that particular wave of emotion has passed, at least for now.  He didn’t even have to set up the Wii boxing for me to get out my aggressions that way. 

Instead, there will be another, much more appropriate way to honor Jenn this coming week.  On Friday, April 25, from 2-5 p.m., there will be a writing marathon held in her honor, starting at Donovan Dining Hall in the Faculty Center and moving across campus from there. 

If you are unable to attend this event, you can still participate by contributing to the “Who Is Jennifer Cook?” project that three students started.  Write about what Jenn--Dr. Cook--meant to you.

Please send your responses to one of the following:

JNTomich@gmail.com

AHart420@gmail.com

KSawyer.429@gmail.com

Thank you.  Those of us who loved her, or even just knew her, can engage in the healing work of writing, something Jenn believed in wholeheartedly.

This photo is from the RIWP event two years ago.  I'm so delighted that a photographer got this picture of Jenn and me.  

Of Foam Rollers and Chiropractors: A Discourse on Aging

On the occasion of reaching what could only be called my mid-40’s—no more early 40’s, not yet late 40’s—I find it odd to think that, by age, anyway, I’m a grownup.  Often it doesn’t feel that way, when I feel lost or ready to pitch a fit or utterly sad.  Those emotional patterns are embedded, and despite my age, the fact that Nels and I will be married for 20 years this year, and I have worked in a recognizable profession for 19 years, I just have to step back and say, “Seriously?  How did I get here?”  Here could mean the gray hair, less-than-elastic skin around my eyes, mouth, and neck, or knowing that I have to wear a suit for work on occasion (okay, only for interviews so far).   It could also mean living in Rhode Island, being a runner, being a yoga teacher, or being friends with some of the smartest people in the world. 

I can recall at the turn of every decade looking back on the previous ten years with a mixture of remorse and sheepishness, often with a dash of defensiveness thrown in.  When I was around 10, I’d look at my Fisher Price castle with disdain while I played with my Barbie house and wondered why her hair didn’t grow back after I cut it. 

At 20, the insecurities of middle and high school were still very apparent.   My proudest accomplishment up to that time was mowing enough lawns to buy contacts the summer before my sophomore year.  Such a small thing, but my world changed.  At last I had the attention from boys that I craved, and yet somehow, I didn’t feel any better about myself.  Even worse, I didn’t even notice that my level of self-consciousness rocketed up in direct correlation to my plummeting self-esteem.  That was probably what led to dropping out of college after one semester and moving in with a cute guy who rode a Kawasaki motorbike whom I met at a gas station on Coliseum Boulevard on a warm July evening around midnight.   

I could call that interlude of my life a mistake—my parents certainly would—but I don’t.  I learned a lot of important lessons about respecting people from all backgrounds.  I wasn’t doing too much different than what I did in college a little later—drinking beer on Saturday nights, listening to a lot of Eagles and Led Zeppelin—but the context was hugely different.   

  

My mid and later 20’s brought big changes—graduating from IU, getting married, becoming a teacher.  At 30, I looked back and couldn’t believe how long it took me to start living what I had conjectured to be a “normal” lifestyle.  We had bought a house.  I had the most interesting, taxing, and real-life job I will probably ever have (teaching at Aurora), and understood how little I knew, so I entered graduate school. 

In my 30’s, working full-time at IU, being in a doctoral program, I felt like an imposter.  My tasks and colleagues were grownup (although some of them didn’t act like it, for better or worse), and I was sure I would be revealed as the insecure girl who once loved riding on motorcycles but now was pretty happy that her husband was in a band.  Even then, though, I kept feeling like I was inside a box and could only knock it over, but didn’t have the map or the courage to actually get out of it. 

Once we moved to Rhode Island and signed a gigantic mortgage on a normal-size house (par for the course in New England), I became “Dr. Johnson” and my social and intellectual worlds opened even more but I still felt small and insecure.  Then, Nels and I started running, and I began doing yoga.  Running was the replacement for walking when I realized walking wasn’t leading to any real physical fitness.  But yoga?  I was reluctant to try it because as far as I could tell, it didn’t burn many calories and I didn’t see the point of spending 10 bucks on an exercise class that didn’t at least tell me how many calories I burned, like a bike or treadmill.  Somehow, though, it fulfilled something else in me. 

Now, in my solid mid-40’s, I can’t believe it took me so long to start running and to engage in the many practices of yoga—the physical practice, the meditation, the view of the world that starts with ahimsa, or non-harming.  I am a mid-pack runner, I am not particularly strong or flexible in yoga, and I fail at non-harming a minimum of a hundred times a day just with my thoughts.  Somehow, though, I would never go back to the days when I was too naïve to realize how much I never knew.

Most of the time, I’m good with here, although it feels weird to have to use a foam roller to ease aching muscles and visit a chiropractor because C1 and C2 are misaligned from years of tension in my shoulders.   I sure as hell don’t want to go back to any of the previous decades, but I am not sure if I will ever be free of my box.  It remains to be seen what my 50’s will bring; if nothing else, an easier time to qualify for the Boston Marathon.   

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.