Practice and Lightness

I spent a lot of January reflecting on 2018 and my intentions for 2019. It’s been more challenging than I expected. Why?

1.     On first consideration, it seemed like my 2018 intentions – practice ahimsa (nonviolence in speech and thought) and reduce plastic – weren’t as successful as I would want. I hate to admit how often I lost my patience or responded to someone with crankiness – last year, but even last week. And giving up plastic proved much harder than I anticipated, largely because our systems too often offer no alternatives. That got me thinking about how slow progress can be, and about the desire to have a triumph instead of a slow and steady shift. But slow and steady shifts are how we get things done. So I’m working to let go of feeling the failure and to refocus on practice.

2.     Always, after yoga assessment, there’s a period of regrouping and figuring out the next challenge to tackle. I think I’m still in the regrouping stage. I’m not reading philosophy every day. I have a few things in my physical practice that I am starting to focus on, but still keeping things light. That means I’m not being inundated with new thoughts and insights like in the thick of the studying.

3.     We’re all sort of getting used to the DJT era. I hate to say that. I don’t want to be used to it, both because it is a horrible, painful reality and because getting used to it, for me, means a level of numbness that makes it harder to have energy and insight. It is toggling between fascination with the level of dysfunction and dismay and horror at what that dysfunction means for regular people. Everyone I know is working in new and different ways to make change, but the energy level feels pretty depleted. Even the excitement – for example of having a new governor in Wisconsin – is tempered by the reality of how hard it still is to make change.

It’s weird to be in a place where I feel like I’m not having new insights or observations. But actually that’s okay, because now is the time for practical thoughts. Practical solutions. And the nature of practice, even in the yoga sutras, is about long, uninterrupted dedication to doing something. Often it involves doing the same thing over and over again. When you think about practicing an instrument or a new language – repetition is one of the tools for making progress.

So this might be the year for practice – based on insight, but not necessarily depending on insight.

I thought a lot about just continuing my emphasis from 2018, since both of those projects are so unfinished. But I decided to add a different dimension. In 2019, I am focusing on lightness. The feeling and sensation. It applies to everything I believe in – lightness in human interactions is a way of practicing ahimsa. Lightness in our footprint on the earth.

But also, because of my ongoing mental health struggle, focusing on how to sustain lightness in my mood and attitude. Because the dense torpor is always on the horizon and instead of going toward it, I want to think more about how to keep it at bay. Exercise always helps, in part because it creates lightness.

So many people I know have been struggling with mental and emotional health during the DJT years. It feels like a constant attack. I’ve been reflecting a lot on how much my mental state has been impacted by the political situation. And then realizing, you can’t wait for the external political situation to change to find a way to be happy. I want to disentangle my happiness from the Trump reality. That doesn’t mean being willfully ignorant, it means maintaining internal lightness even when the external reality feels so heavy and daunting.

Alongside lightness, I plan to use 2019 to continue to work on understanding racism and white supremacy and my role in helping dismantle it. Right now I’m reading White Fragility, and I have several other books on my reading list. I invited some friends to be part of a white women/white supremacy discussion group. I’m finding whatever ways I can to be more active in this work.

And it is overwhelming! The system feels so powerful and so much bigger than what any of us can do. But we can’t do nothing. So I want to step into the learning, but remain light in approach. Take stock of my own failures, but not carry the weight of them in a way that inhibits learning and change. It seems like the only way forward.

I hope you are all finding your 2019 intentions, and that you also find some lightness among these heavy, difficult times.

With love, gratitude and solidarity forever.