Welcome to Your Mortality!

by Nina

“New scientific studies allow us to predict who will die in their lifetime.” —Caitlin Doughty

A while back I wrote a post Meeting Death at the Front Door, in which I said I believed that truthfulness (the niyama satya—see The Second Branch of Yoga) will help you face your death and die the way you want to, and will enable you to help your loved ones as they die. Facing death is not usually a fun topic to write about, but considering what I had learned from helping both my parents die, I had decided it was important for me to address the topic.

Notice I said that facing death is not “usually” a fun topic to write about. That’s because yesterday I was delighted to discover that there is a young woman out there, Caitlin Doughty, a mortician by trade, who is not only on a similar mission to encourage people to face death honestly but who is actually using humor to spread the word. I became intrigued by her work when I heard her being interviewed on Fresh Air yesterday about her book Smoke Gets in Your Eyes And Other Lessons from the Crematory.

Although she wasn’t exactly cracking jokes during her interview (which I only heard part of), I liked her right away for her straightforwardness: 

“Death is going to happen to you — whether you want it to or not — and you're never going to be completely comfortable with it. But it's an important process, and please consider facing it.”

But Terry Gross mentioned Doughty’s videos and how humorous they were, so I went to her website to check them out. The first one I watched was her welcome video. Wow, she uses such a great mixture of wit, humor, and directness to get her message across—I had no idea that death kills so many people in the US alone. Welcome to Your Mortality! (I'd link to the video on youtube but can't get to it for some reason.) So, in general, I recommend her work, and in her other videos she has a lot of “death answers” for “death questions” that you might also have.

But what does all this have to do with yoga? Well, first of all, we’ve been writing about the klesahs lately, the five afflictions that cause human suffering (see Attachment (Raga) to Our Ideas About Ourselves and Attachment to My Face). One of the klesahs is abhinivesah, which B.K.S. defines in Light on the Yoga Sutras both as “clinging to life” and “fear of death.” So I think the work of someone like Doughty, who is helping to dispel some of the fear around death by answering common “death questions” and encouraging people to face their own mortality, helps us cultivate satya (truthfulness) in the face of abhinivesah (fear of death/clinging to life). 

But really I decided to write about Doughty because of something surprising she said during her Fresh Air interview. After being asked by Terry Gross whether her job as a mortician—and being around so much death—was stressful, she admitted that it was:

"Not only are you dealing with the dead bodies, you're dealing with the incredible sorrow of the families and the fact that they can get very mad at you. ... They're angry that somebody has died and they're looking for somebody to take it out on."

But then she went on to say something like (and I’m quoting from memory now):

"I do take good care of myself. I have a therapist, I do yoga…."

Yes, Doughty is not only practicing satya (truthfulness) to combat abhinivesah (fear of death), but she also does yoga, which I take to mean asana, to support herself in her work. And, of course, we here at YFHA all know how an asana practice—the combination of exercise and time spent focusing on mindful movement, with hopefully, some relaxing practices added into the mix—can help people deal with difficulty and stress and to support them in the important work they have committed to.

You know, I never expected that I would become such a dedicated yoga practitioner. Yoga practice was not even something I chose intentionally—it was just the most convenient exercise class for me at the time. But after I kind of fell into yoga, I slowly began to realize how much it was helping me. And I eventually began to understand that it was exactly this combination of a yogic attitude toward life and an asana practice to fortify my body and my nervous system to help me maintain that attitude that I found so compelling. So here I am, still practicing—and writing about it—after all these years.

Subscribe to Yoga for Healthy Aging by Email ° Follow Yoga for Healthy Aging on Facebook ° Join this site with Google Friend Connect

Read More

Attachment (Raga) to Our Ideas About Ourselves

by Nina

Phil and Rita Stuck on Groundhog Day

2.3 avidya asmita raga dvesha abhinevesha klesah

The five afflictions (klesahs) which disturb the equilibrium of consciousness are: ignorance or lack of wisdom, ego, pride of the ego or the sense of ‘I,’ attachment to pleasure, aversion to pain, fear of death and clinging to life. —Yoga Sutras, translation by Edwin Bryant 

Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time talking with a young person who is struggling with depression. Of all the things this person told me, one sentence keeps haunting me. In a voice choked with tears, the person said, “I thought I had my life all figured out—and I thought I knew who I was—but now all that is gone.” 

Some time ago I wrote a post The Pains Which Are to Come about the klesahs, the five afflictions that cause human suffering (interestingly, the word means “poison” in Sanskrit). In that post, I concentrated on aversion to pain and fear of death/clinging to life. Today, I thought I’d consider attachment (raga). Here's the yoga sutra that defines attachment:

2.7 Attachment stems from experience of happiness

Edwin Bryant explains this sutra as:

“Attachment is craving for pleasure by one who remembers past experience of pleasure. Ego is the root of attachment just as ignorance is the root of ego. Ignorance and ego cause the deluded mind to associate the self with the latent impressions of past experience of pleasure.” 

Often attachment is described—as it is above—as attachment to pleasure or to things that give us pleasure. Attachment to pleasure causes suffering because we crave more of the same, and we suffer when we can’t get more. Perhaps it was a material object that gave us pleasure, and we end up acquiring more and more of the same thing until we end up overspending or hoarding or perhaps we just can’t afford more and are tortured by cravings. Or perhaps it was a sensory experience that gave us pleasure, such as eating or having sex, both of which can lead to problems if you go overboard with them. Or, perhaps it was an emotional experience. Remember in the movie "Groundhog Day" (yes, that’s one of my all-time favorite movies), when Phil has his first wonderful evening with Rita, the woman he secretly loves, and then he desperately tries to repeat that same night over and over, always failing?

But it seems to me that, like the young man I described above, we can also have profound attachments to the lives we plan for ourselves or the images we have of who we are. That gives us a different kind of pleasure—a sense of security. And losing that can feel devastating. I’m pretty sure that we, as “aging” people, have either all gone through this ourselves or seen it happen to other people. Maybe a marriage we once thought would last forever ends in a divorce. Maybe years of striving for success in a certain job or profession ends in failure. Maybe someone close to you dies unexpectedly, your house burns down, or you develop a chronic illness, and that one event changes your entire life. Maybe you’ve always been the strong one, but now you need help for the first time. Of course, it is not always a negative experience that alters your ideas about your life and yourself—maybe you meet someone or make a discovery that puts you on an entirely unexpected path, and you wonder: how did I get here?

But as yoga sutra 2.3 says, it is “attachment” that causes the suffering, not the loss of pleasure. So it is only our clinging to the life we imagined we would live or the selves we thought we were that is the real cause of our suffering. Otherwise, we could just let go and move on. 

I actually find this observation about the nature of the human mind to be very helpful on its own. I try to bring awareness to my attachment to my fantasies about what my life should be or my beliefs about who I am. Right now I’m in New Jersey, where I didn’t expect to be this month, helping a family member. I’m not sure how long I’ll be here or what will happen next. And the yoga philosophy I described above—my understanding of my own attachment to what I expected my life to be—is helping me let go of the agenda I once had for this time period (not to mention the feeling—how on earth did I ever end up in New Jersey, where I never, ever wanted to live?). But obviously a young person who is feeling for the first time that his whole life—and self—is being destroyed has a much greater challenge. I see so clearly his desperate wish to return to the way things once were, and his stubborn clinging to his old self image, and I was once in the same position myself, many years ago.

So what does Patanjali have to say about all this? After describing the klesahs, including attachment (raga) in detail, Patanjali simply says the following: 

2.11. The states of mind produced by these klesahs are eliminated by meditation. 

However, it seems to me, before you can move on to that step, you need to be ready to admit that attachment IS an affliction. I sometimes think we cling to our attachments in a form of magical thinking, because we feel as if fervently wishing for what we desire will make some kind of magic that will allow us to return to living the life we always imagined or to the self we once believed we were. (Joan Didion’s book The Year of Magical Thinking described this kind of thinking that she experienced after the sudden death of her husband.) But despite the fact that the movie "Groundhog Day" was magical realism, it was only after Phil truly gave up on escaping the day he kept living over and over in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania and somehow making Rita love him back—beginning to truly live his life in Punxsutawney on Groundhog Day—that he was able to wake up the next morning to a brand new day.

Subscribe to Yoga for Healthy Aging by Email ° Follow Yoga for Healthy Aging on Facebook ° Join this site with Google Friend Connect

Read More

Restricting the Whirls of Consciousness, Part 2

by Baxter

Upside Down by Nina Zolotow

Nina did such a nice job on yesterday's post "Yoga Sutra 1.2: Restricting the Whirls of Consciousness" that I felt compelled to jump in and add my two cents. The tendency Nina identified for the mind to brood about the past or fret about the future is only of several dyads or other causes of our mental whirling, according to yoga's perspective. In fact, there are five main causes of affliction or klesahs that Patanjali identifies in the Yoga Sutras, and it is interesting to view any particular whirling difficult thought via his lens.

The first one, and the one that sprouts the others, is known as avidya, sometimes translated as misapprehension or an error in our view of reality. Yogis believe that we start out not quite understanding the world correctly, and out of that misunderstanding, all kinds of troubling thoughts arise, often connected to fear, jealousy, anger, greediness. One of the main problems is that we view ourselves as separate from all other people and beings in our reality, which almost guarantees conflict and struggle on some level. And therefore, because I don't quite view the world accurately, one of the first errors I make is to create this sense of I-am-ness, know as asmita, the second of the klesahs. This separates me, with all my opinions and ideas of who I am, and how I am different from you, with all my likes and dislikes.

In fact, out of my ego self arise the next two klesahs, raga and dvesha, or attachment (or things I desire or like) and aversion (things I dislike or try to push away). These two klesahs alone account for so much of our mental activity all day long: I want to do this, and a lot more or it!  I don't want to be doing this, I am bored with this, I wish I was doing that. You get the idea.

Finally, the yogis concluded that the preceding four klesahs create the condition of clinging desperately onto life, know as abhinivesha, even though we don't even really understand our reality clearly enough to know what we are clinging onto! And this desperate clinging can actually shut us down for living fully, as we become so fearful of aging, losing function, or death itself.

Oy, oy, oy! So what's a poor yogi to do? Well, the klesahs are said to exist in different states of activity, sometimes dormant, sometimes active, and sometimes influenced or attenuated by our yoga practices. I have noticed lately as I have been experiencing some increased effects of stressful changes in my life, that an active asana practice, guided relaxation via yoga nidra and breath awareness and mantra meditations have each been effective methods for attenuating the whirling patterns of thought that have been under the surface of my perception of stress. In other words, they seem to short circuit my mind's fruitless machinations, providing me with some temporary peace and quiet. And the more regularly I do my practice, the less frequent these particular upsetting patterns of thought happen. I even begin to notice that many of the thoughts are not even really true. I have also noticed that playing my violin for an hour, especially newer music I am not so familiar with, has a similar effect. If you find yourself under increased stress, instead of doing what a lot of my students seem to default to, which is to not practice as much, you might commit to doing a little yoga every day, and see if things don't start to shift for you, too.

Subscribe to YOGA FOR HEALTHY AGING by Email ° Follow Yoga for Healthy Aging on Facebook

Read More