Life is Not a Problem

by Nina

In the Kusama Room by Brad Gibson

When I was in Holland and Denmark, the last couple of weeks, I was dealing long-distance with a family situation. It was hard to be so far away and be unable to help in person, and I even considered cutting the trip short and going back home in the hopes that my physical presence could help solve some of my family member’s problems (I’m being purposefully vague here, to protect someone’s privacy). Brad thought I should wait because the situation was still unfolding and he felt I could be of more use at a later date. So for a while, I just monitored the situation from afar, mostly texting back and forth because my family member was afraid a phone conversation would be too emotional. 

After a few days of that, I started getting more and more anxious myself. One night in Copenhagen, I started to recognize the physical and emotional symptoms that I experience when in high stress mode (which can lead to an anxiety attack). So I asked Brad to step in for me temporarily and I took some time to calm myself down by practicing—if you know me at all by now you can probably guess—Legs Up the Wall pose (see Featured Pose: Legs Up the Wall Pose). As always, that helped me quiet my nervous system. (Thank you, supported inverted poses!)

But even after that I was still worrying in general about my family member, and what I should or should not do about the situation. So I was up very early the next morning, unable to sleep in even though I was on vacation. What I did with my time was to spend some time researching Copenhagen to see which more offbeat things I could come up with to do (most people just tell you to visit the castles, which is kind of like saying when in New York, visit the Statue of Liberty). And I remembered then that Kierkegaard, a philosopher who Brad and I both studied about in college, was from Copenhagen. So I started reading up on him. And when I found a list of some of his most famous quotes, one jumped out at me:

“Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.” —Soren Kierkegaard

I instantly felt a sense of relief. Somehow just reading this statement allowed me to step back a bit from the family situation and let go of my attachment to the outcomes of my actions. I was still going to be helping as much as I could, of course, but anxiety started to lessen. Kierkegaard’s thought (he was considered to the first Existentialist) seemed very yogic to me and seemed related to the concept of detachment (see Acceptance, Active Engagement and the Bhagavad Gita). Today I’m trying to find a quote that reflects that same concept, and for now, the best I can do is this quote from the Bhagavad Gita, in which Krishna explains to Arjuna that a yogi is one:

“Who unperturbed by changing conditions sits apart and watches and says “the powers of nature go round”, and remains firm and shakes not.” —translation by Juan Mascaro

When Brad woke up, I excitedly told him what I had discovered. He loved the quote, too, and we started to wonder if we might visit Kierkegaard’s grave. A little research told us that he was buried in a graveyard quite far from where we were staying, and we decided that we didn’t want to give up a whole day in the city just to go there. But we did keep talking about Kierkegaard as we walked about his city, and almost took on that quote of his as a mantra.

One way Brad and I are compatible is in the way we like to explore a new city. We go everywhere on foot without a big agenda and spontaneously explore the things we stumble upon. For example, one day our agenda was simply to check out the oldest bakery in the city and try the snegles (cinnamon rolls!), and we ended up passing by the Round Tower on our way there so we went on in (it turned out to be one of the most beautiful interior spaces I’ve ever been in). On our last afternoon, we decided to walk back to our apartment a different way just to see what we might see, and ended up walking past the Royal Library, which was not a destination we would ever have picked. And, lo and behold, there it was, in the library garden, a beautiful statute of Kierkegaard.

Kierkegaard Statue by Brad Gibson

P.S. If you look closely at the photo of the Kusama room, you can see our reflections.

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The Death of a Friend: Karma Yoga, Non-Attachment, and Truthfulness

by Nina

At Home with Buster

I had sad news on Friday, January 9: Tama Blough, the woman with terminal cancer for whom I was fund raising—and who happened to be one of our readers—died that morning. Although the news was sad, I was comforted by the thought that Tama died at home, in the company of her beloved cat, Buster, and tended to by the caregiver we had hired with money that I help to raise. (And thank you so much to everyone who donated. It has been a profoundly moving experience to see so many people rally around a friend in need.)

You might recall that I wrote a post Karma Yoga Opportunities about why I decided to take on the task of raising money for this woman who learned she had terminal, non-treatable bile duct cancer and who was also destitute. It was her wish that she be able to die at home rather than in a hospital, and I decided to try to make that wish come true. Because there was no one to take care of her when she needed 24/7 care and also because she was no longer able to work to pay her living expenses, the thing I needed to do was raise enough money to pay for all of that. But the question was: exactly how much money would be enough?

It was actually stressful to try to estimate the total amount of money that would be needed. While I could look at predictable expenses such as her rent, utilities, food, and so on, as well as the typical hourly rate for a caregiver, I had no reliable estimate for how long she might live and for how long she might need paid caregivers. 

Obviously just thinking about how long someone might or might not live is stressful in and of itself, but trying to make impossible estimates for how much money might actually be needed for various scenarios was even worse. What if we used up all the money we’d raised (over $20,000) and she was still alive and needing care? Or, conversely, what if she died more quickly than expected and we had a lot of money left over? I had some private conversations with her elderly mother and the friends who were helping me raise the money about these possibilities and we made some contingency plans. And I had to face the fact that if we ran out of money, she would have to go to a hospital, where her health insurance would cover the final costs. 

I’m bringing this all up because when you’re helping someone who is dying, obviously you don’t get all wrapped out in hopes for another possible outcome. But you can get wrapped out in your hopes and expectations for how the whole process unfolds. And in this particular case, I obviously had a strong attachment to making Tama’s wish to die at home come true. However, as you can see, I really had no guarantee that things would work out as I hoped. So I often reminded myself that I was doing my best, and because I had no control over the outcome, doing my best was all I could do. So when Ram wrote his post about karma yoga last Monday (see Altruism (Karma Yoga)), it struck me that my situation was a perfect example of what he meant by saying: 

"Selfless service requires an individual to perform any service without attachment or expectation, and remain unaffected by the results of such service." 

Of course, I didn’t do the “without attachment” thing perfectly, either. But, again, even with our efforts at being without "expectation" or "attachment," all any of us can do is our best.

I’d also like to say that Tama bravely faced her death with truthfulness (satya). As I wrote in Meeting Death at the Front Door, I feel that being honest about death and dying is the only way for us to die the way we say we want to. You have to face the truth yourself. You have to tell your family the truth. And you have to insist your doctors—and your loved ones—tell you the truth. And Tama did all those things, sometimes even with humor. So I thought I’d end with this story about her that her friend Joe Allegretti shared on Facebook:

My last conversation with Tama was in early November, I think, when she told me about the diagnosis. At one point, she was talking about how she had been hoping for months that she'd be able to get out of SF, move to another city, figure out a way to reinvent herself. The employment situation and everything else was really hard on her and I totally understood her wish for something new. Finally, she summed it up by saying, "I wanted a reboot."

Then she said, "Well I guess now I'm gonna get the BIIIIIIIG reboot." We both immediately laughed a lot.

And Joe's sharing of his story led to this beautiful one from her friend Drew Zeigler:

One of the last interactions she and I had was when my dog had gone missing and she kept popping in and making lovely hopeful comments to me, so I reached out to her. Her response was, "Well, just because I'm dying, that doesn't mean I can't still have compassion for others." 
 
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Detachment, Discrimination, and Mindful Yoga

by Baxter

Clouds Blowing By by Brad Gibson

At my recent workshop at The Yoga Project in Sellwood (see here), many insightful stories were shared among students over the course of our two days of practice together. One of my favorites came from Maleena on Saturday at the start of class. Maleena was one of the students who had taken both sessions on Friday. The practices we did that day included slower, introspective practices that involved noticing and feeling without jumping to judgment on the insights we perceived. An emphasis on grounded observation was encouraged throughout. Pranayama practices that were cooling, and long Savasanas were also a part of our work that first day.

Maleena mentioned a shift in reactivity that she had noticed upon returning home to her family on Friday evening. Maleena is a mother of three sons, ages 13, 15 and 18, and this night the 18 year old was up to some old patterns of interaction that would normally get Maleena stressed and worried, and could lead to a confrontation. But, to her surprise, she found that she was able to listen, observe and find curious the behavior her son was displaying without her usual emotional reaction.

As we explored this quite welcome discovery, it seemed that the slower, introspective yoga practices had grounded her is such a way that her old pattern had shifted. In yoga philosophy, this skill is known as vairagya, or detached awareness. The Yoga Sutras by Patanjali tells us that the practice of detachment is an important part of what it means to be a yogi:

“Renunciation is the practice of detachment (vairagyam) from desires.” Yoga Sutra 1.15, trans. B.K.S. Iyengar

This “detached awareness” does not imply Maleena did not care deeply about what her son was saying or feeling. But vairagya permits a yogini to have some space with which to apply another essential component of yoga, viveka, or discrimination, in order to chart a beneficial course of action for all involved.

“The ceaseless flow of discriminative knowledge (viveka) in thought, word and deed destroys ignorance, the source of pain.” Yoga Sutra 2.26, trans. B.K.S. Iyengar

And, of course, the more one mindfully practices, the more readily these new habits, or beneficial samskaras, supercede and eventually replace the older, obsolete reactions. This is one of the many milestone changes that take place as we deepen our practice that let us know we are on the right path. Thanks, Portland yoginis! I’ll see you in March! 

For those of you who are interested in learning more about mindful yoga, Nina will be writing a separate post on the topic this week (see Practicing Yoga Mindfully).

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