Required Post on Waking

This book is heart-wrenchingly difficult to read and the description of the hospital scenes brings back terrible memories.

I cannot imagine enduring the tragedy that Matthew Sanford went through, but I have a lot of experience sitting in waiting rooms and sleeping in hospital room chairs, so I can empathize with his mom and brother. As I read, I thought “This is so hard to read so soon after my grandparents passed” only to realize that it has been almost a year since the funerals. Most of last Fall was spent travelling between Waco and Humble, Texas to check-in on my grandfather’s health. When I simply couldn’t make it home for a weekend, I was on the phone, getting updates on his declining health. I never lost hope, at least, not until near the very end when it was clear there was no coming back. It made life hard, especially as a college student. My mind was rarely on my schoolwork. I had never lost a family member until this past January. It got was even worse in the spring semester; stricken with grief, my grandmother passed away shortly after, at the beginning of February. In addition to the emotional toll, this took an academic toll on me; one professor forced me to drop his class or fail me for missing an assignment, despite telling me that I could make-up the assignment once I returned. I become deeply bitter every time I see that professor…

I can’t imagine how Matthew’s brother managed to carry on so well despite what happened to his family. I can only imagine the emotional scarring that occurred.

The distrust that Matthew has for his body – at least until around college – is interesting. Most people at this age would be concerned about whether their body looked good, how muscular they were, whether or not they could lose a little weight or if they should spend some time in the sun. Matthew, however, fears his body because he has little control over his body and worries that it could betray him at any time. His body might do something out of his control – like the intestinal accidents that occurred in school – or that his body could be so fragile that it simply breaks, like the time he fell from being tickled and nearly broke his neck.

I’m not sure where I stand on the mind-body connection. The mind-body connection, sometimes mind-muscle, connection is a phrase brought up on weightlifting forums that is not properly defined, but generally means something like ‘building one’s mental ability to the point of being able to flex/strengthen a particular muscle.’ From a scientific standpoint, the mind-muscle connection is generally discredited. In reality, a person is just realizing how to properly engage that muscle during a lift. A similar phenomenon is observed in people that can wiggle their ears or raise one eyebrow higher than the other. They’ve simply realized how to do something they could do all along. If Matthew mentions the connection in this sense, then I completely understand what he means. Perhaps he’s just using the phrase as a coincidence and it just describes what he is feeling, but the mind-muscle connection is generally considered pseudo-science.

Doubt

 

These sutras hit home immediately; doubt and the inability to rest are abundantly apparent in my everyday life. As my GRE quickly approaches, I find myself filled with doubt. What if I don’t get a high enough score? What if I get hung up on one problem, get anxious and become too distracted to do well on the rest of the exam? It’s very frustrating and feels like I am waging a mental war with myself. The program wants a 300 on the GRE, a score that is exactly 50%. I have taken dozens of diagnostic tests in varying degrees of difficulty and have been predicted to make a 320 out of 340, with a small margin of error to account for variance in test questions that actually show up on the exam. My brain knows that I have the capability to do well and I think I know that I will succeed, but there’s this ever-present doubt that just eats away at me…

 

Making time during the day for yoga practice has become near impossible, so I have started practicing just before I try to sleep. I am unsure if the change in timing has impacted me. My quality of sleep has been very sporadic lately and there are no discernable variables that account for whether or not I sleep well. Perhaps practicing at night has helped me fall asleep faster, but I still wake up regularly throughout the night. However, I guess a lot of waking up can be explained by my sore back, detailed in the next paragraph.

 

I was practicing headstands at my house this weekend and my left side just sort of gave out. My left shoulder/side collapsed, causing me to fall over, and I landed on one of my rain boots that I had forgotten to move far enough away. I ended up with a small bruise on my leg, but more worryingly, my left shoulder blade/back have been feeling horrible since I fell over. I cannot walk, sit, lay down or even breathe without feeling pain in my back. I don’t think it’s a rib injury – that doesn’t really make sense when it was my shoulder/arm that gave out and caused me to fall – and I think it will go away relatively soon as it feels more like a muscle injury. Advil has helped mitigate the pain, but even at high doses, just breathing causes me to grimace at the pain. The whole thing is strange; my old injury is my right shoulder, so if anything, I would have expected that side to give out, but it was the other one. I’m already scheduled for a check-up over Thanksgiving Break, so if the pain is still occurring that far in the future, I can ask the doctor about it then.

Gunas and Gummy Bears (Required Post on Yoga Sutras)

Right off the bat, many people are going to have trouble practicing yoga because the second verse says that Yoga is the ‘stilling of the mind.’ Personally, I find it incredibly difficult to stop my thoughts. I’m always thinking about something, turning over decisions in my mind, imaging different outcomes to scenarios if I had just done X, Y or Z differently and worrying about various things. If I could just ‘still my mind,’ I’d be much more relaxed, have lower blood pressure and would be able to fall asleep easier. Being told upfront that Yoga is ‘the stilling of the mind’ makes Yoga seem like a daunting task. How am I supposed to dwell in my own true splendor if my mind is overly restless?

I do not think that I could honestly claim my gunas are balanced, but I’m not exactly sure how imbalanced they are, either. If Tamas means sleep/laziness, I have a rather severe lack of Tamas. I’m always running around to do something, attend some event, answer emails or finish schoolwork. I rarely have free time, or even time to relax. In my case, it almost seems like having more Tamas would be beneficial and eliminate some stress. Is it possible for a lack of Tamas (a bad quality) could cause problems? If so, it sounds strange to say that a person is ‘worse off’ for having less of a bad quality.

On the topic of Rajas, I think I have too much. I am passionate about a lot of things and have a lot of attachments/desires. I want X, I would miss Y if it wasn’t there any more, how could I live without Z? It’s obvious to me that being too attached to things is negative and causes a person to lose sight of what is truly important (God), but it’s less obvious how being passionate is ‘bad.’ Is it a matter of moderation? For instance, if someone is incredibly passionate about Gummy Bears and another person says that chocolate is a far superior candy than Gummy Bears, it would be bad for that person to fly into a rage and be angry with the person that likes chocolate. However, if instead of getting mad, the person engaged in a discussion about the merits of Gummy Bears, that seems like a more moderate response and a situation in which a person’s rajas is under control. Can someone have too much Rajas in regards to God? Could someone be so passionate about God that it is bad? The text doesn’t really offer a clear answer, other than telling readers to balance the Gunas.

I’d like to think that I’m at least balanced in my Sattvic and Rajasic qualities. For instance, there are times when I can get very passionate about a subject and become frustrated/angry when arguing about the matter, but I can almost always control this and keep things civil. Depending on the subject, it can at times feel like I have a short-temper but a superhuman level of patience. It’s a strange feeling and hard to put into words, but it’s sort of like having an extreme emotional reaction to a matter, but knowing to suppress that reaction because I know that the reaction would only make a situation worse. Like I said, difficult to explain, but it does seem like my Sattva and Rajas are at least equal, if not a little in the favor of Sattva for knowing when/how to control emotions/passion when the need arises.

Please Pass (On) The Salt

This section of the reading opens with Arjuna asking about Sattva, Rajas and Tamas and how to determine if a person is exhibiting one of these qualities. The food section was intriguing and I wonder about its historical context. It seems like anything salty/spicy is considered ‘bad’ or at least worse than ‘normal food’ that Sattvic people eat. Could this be because salt and spices were a fairly expensive commodity? It would be bad for people to spend significant portions of their income on these items, especially if it means having to go without necessities in order to have tasty food. It would make a lot of sense to attribute the qualities of ‘pain, grief and disease’ to this because spending all of one’s money on salt/spices to flavor one’s food could definitely lead to negative consequences when one needs money for clothing or shelter. Perhaps I’m reading too much into this, but it would make a lot of practical sense to tell people that ‘normal food’ is the best and discourage what could be considered frivolous spending on making intricately flavored dishes.

Class on Thursday was very different than typical classes. Since there were so few people, we did a lot of work in the chairs, particularly with twists. Some of the more difficult poses strained my shoulder/back, but I was able to do all of the poses, even the crazy inversion/shoulder-stand thing at the end of class. I felt great the rest of the day and slept decently, but when I woke up the next morning, I felt terrible. My entire back was sore and extremely tight; I think I might have seriously overdone the twists. I wouldn’t call it pain – there were no sharp/stabbing feelings of pain – but I was horribly sore Friday and Saturday. Technically, I guess I could have just slept in a weird position and it just coincidentally lined up with the day we did the twists, but that seems unlikely. I think I just need to go a little easier on the twists to avoid this in the future.

Outside practice has been fine. Grad school applications and GRE studying are eating up all of my free time, but I’m still managing to find time for yoga. I like going through the Warrior sequence of poses, particularly (What I think is) Warrior 3, where one foot is planted on the ground and everything else is parallel to the ground. My Downward Dog has gotten much better throughout the semester, but I still cannot bend at the waist far enough to keep my heels planted on the floor. I’m worried I might have hit a plateau on that pose until I can figure out how to hinge at the waist. I saw a strange pose on Facebook the other day. I have a friend that teaches Yoga at some retreat center in Houston and she regularly posts about yoga. This one was a picture labelled ‘Firefly’ and just looked weird. It’s like Crow pose, but instead of resting knees/shins on triceps; you just sort of swing all the way up and put your feet in the air by your head.

Required Gita Post (11/5)

This was my third time reading through the Bhagavad Gita, and while I learned more than I did than my two previous readings, much of the Gita just seems untouchable. Perhaps it’s a translation issue and certain words/concepts just don’t translate that well into English, but the material in the last few chapters (11 to the end) are far from clear.

I wish that we had gone through the Gita before World Cultures I did; I would have been much better equipped to teach my students, but this is more of a personal wish than any sort of complaint. It’s hard to teach a text that you barely understand yourself, but reading it for this Capstone course cleared up a number of issues that I couldn’t previously wrap my mind around.

For instance, I could not fully comprehend the Gunas. I understood the differences between Tamas, Rajas and Sattva, but I didn’t understand that the Gunas are not entirely ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ If I’m honest, I still don’t fully understand how Sattva (which seems to be the quality of being good) can even be considered a bad thing, but I do have a fuller and more accurate overall understanding.

I also didn’t appreciate just how far the concept of moderation was taken. In my mind, I understood it as “All things in moderation, even moderation” but it seems like the correct way to interpret the Gita’s stance on moderation is “complete detachment from emotions and physical objects in favor of pursuing God.” That’s radically different from my previous thoughts; the Gita is actually teaching how to be free from earthly desires while I thought it just meant to balance the different aspects of one’s life.

I really like the way that Krishna talks about Maya, or illusion. Illusion is the word used in the translation, but I think ‘perspective’ might actually be a better word. Krishna says that most people only ever see Maya; they never see Brahmin in everything, they just see things for what they are. A dog is nothing more than a dog to people stuck in this perspective. Once they transcend Maya and gain a new perspective on the world, they are able to see the truth. I don’t think illusion works as well as perspective, because it doesn’t seem obvious (to a majority of people) that an object like a rock has any sort of divine nature, so there’s not really an ‘illusion’ of the rock being just a rock. If anything, it means that people are missing a key truth about the nature of the world – they’re essentially stuck in a cave looking at shadows on a wall – and as they learn more about the true nature of the world, their eyes are opened and they gain a new perspective. They’re finally able to see the way that Brahmin is present in things like dogs and rocks.

Frustration

This section was incredibly dense and I struggled to understand anything from the text. If anything, it seemed like this section was just repeating previously mentioned material. Krishna repeats a bunch of stuff about Brahmin being the beginningless root of all things and that there is nothing without Brahmin. Perhaps it is my general frustration and anxiety bleeding over from graduate school applications, but I became unreasonably frustrated with trying to divine meaning from the obscure words of Krishna. It reminds of reading The Analects; I remember learning that Confucius wrote in brief, metaphorical language because the material he had to write on was very scarce. Thus, when he would write a confusing aphorism, his students would ask what it meant and he could explain it to them in more detail. This feels very similar; I cannot seem to understand any new information here and it almost seems like I need an interpreter to derive any meaning from the text.

There was no class last Thursday, so I used that time to work on graduate school applications. Further, my other Yoga class was cancelled on Monday, so I haven’t had a formal class in almost a week. I had to do a lot of outside practice to make up for it.

This outside practice was stressful; it has become very difficult for me to do anything but stress about application deadlines and berate myself for not starting earlier. From there, it just becomes a cycle of getting more and more frustrated with myself and I see anything that isn’t working on an application – even things like homework or yoga practice – as an inefficient way to utilize my time. There’s been a lot of mental turmoil recently. That said, I still made an effort to practice yoga, it just wasn’t the relaxing/freeing experience it was a few weeks ago. Sinus issues made me feel lightheaded/too much pressure in my head during some poses, so I ended up doing a lot of Warrior, Mountain and Tree poses. In addition to these poses, I did a lot of seated stretching and those funny toe/hand hugs to stretch the toes. It didn’t really clear my sinuses, but it did feel good. I tried to relax and destress with savasana, but my mind kept wandering and I couldn’t keep my thoughts under control.