Release the Grip

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Over the past month and a half, I’ve been enrolled in an online course set to teach breathwork, meditation and neuroscience. Since the beginning of quarantine, I’ve been looking for some sort of continuing education course to deepen my practice. At one point I was considering returning to school for traditional Chinese medicine. Luckily I took a moment to stop and breathe, realizing that maybe going further and further into student loan debt was not the best possible route at the moment. But when a teacher that I really respect posted about her upcoming online course, it seemed like another sign from the universe.

I signed up and blocked out my weekend schedule for the upcoming six weeks. That irked me a bit as I’d be missing the last couple of beach days in southern California before it began to get actually cold, but it seems like to create the life you envision you always have to trade part of the life that you are already living.

The class itself ran fairly smoothly. My instructor had a wealth of knowledge in her field and was able to share it in an incredibly accessible way. I tend to get a little annoyed at the pace that these classes go at, but that’s mostly because some of it is review for me. While my fellow students are learning about neuroplasticity, axons and dendrites for the first time, I’m flashing back to my college days with all of it seeming eerily familiar. This in itself is always a good practice for me.

I’m forced to remind myself that this is our training, not mine.

And the very interesting thing about this training was that most of it disagreed with some of my core beliefs. When learning ancient Pranayama techniques such as Bhastrika and Kapalbhati, you realize that the point of the practice is to take hold over your current state of being and adjust it in such a way that you come to a state you have decided may be better for you. But since when does anybody really know what would be better for them?

We also learned quite a bit about Mantras. A Mantra is like a focus point for you to use during your meditations. You can chant, you can speak peacefully to yourself, you can use ancient language or words that supposedly send vibrations to different parts of your brain or your Chakras to help regulate. I use a mantra sometimes. When meditating with my hematite Mala beads, I’ll often whisper ‘be love’ to myself as I pass beads between my fingers. Again, it’s a reminder of what kind of energy I am trying to bring into my life, and even if I don’t believe that the actual word means a thing, I still might use that Mantra as an intention for my day. So that in every moment, I can act in a way that I believe is in line with me ‘being love.’

But in the thoughts of zen, these two acts are just replacing one type of addiction for another. In the same way that you go from smoking to nicotine gum, you’re probably doing better than you were before, but sooner or later if you’re going to make real change, you’ll have to sit with the underlying issue rather than just replacing this for that. The problem, in my mind, seems to be that practices like this give the illusion of control. The thought that you can actively decide to not feel the way that you are feeling and breathe, chant or visualize your way to that utopic enlightened everyday existence.

This can, perhaps, be a dangerous thing to teach because in the same way that I discussed my battle with depression a few months ago, the thought that I shouldn’t be feeling those feelings is more troubling than the actual feelings. It makes you feel like with all of these practices at your disposal, there must be something inherently wrong with me if I’m not able to effectively use them to keep out of feelings like sadness, anger, jealousy, hate and the other ones that we’ve deemed to be less appealing. As I’ve said so many times before, I don’t believe in spiritual practices of leveling up to some higher realm. I’m not really trying to be a saint.

I’m just trying to be a person.

So with all of these internal disagreements that I had with what we were learning, you can imagine what a challenging six weeks this course was for me. But I muscled through (only playing hookie once to run up into the canyons of Malibu after a rainstorm) and this past weekend we had our practical exam where we were all tasked with teaching a 15-minute demonstration of some of the techniques that we had learned. I taught Nadi Shodhana, an alternate nostril breathing technique aimed at balancing the hemispheres of your brain, and a lotus flower visualization meditation in which we pulled energy from the sun to invigorate and energy from the earth to cool and calm. The lotus flower has always been a very important symbol in my own spirituality. Those of you familiar with dharma transmission and the buddha’s first sermon will know that this small flower was able to convey what all the words throughout history could not.

I wrapped my class and our teacher asked me how that felt, and not only did she ask me how it felt, but she also acknowledged that she assumed it had been pretty difficult for me to teach in this way. She knows me. She knows how I approach my spirituality. She knows my thoughts on meditation and she saw me teach in a way that couldn’t be further from how I would typically teach a meditation class. And in that moment I fell back to the wise words of Master Shifu from the classic cinematic trilogy Kung Fu Panda,

“If you only do what you can do, you will never be more than you are now.”

— Master Shifu, Kung Fu Panda

Beliefs are weird. For the most part we base our belief system on what we have found to be true from our own experiences. Even a religion that you don’t really agree with can be understood better when considering the followers who flock to it and the experiences that they have had. It’s easy to lean into our beliefs too. It’s easy to hold them close and tight and allow ourselves to be comforted by the thought that we at the very least know that a couple of things are true.

But beliefs can also close us off to new experience and new knowledge if we hold onto them too tightly. My commitment to zen made it a bit of a struggle to willingly accept new information given from someone who only wanted to expand my horizons and share their expertise. 

I’m happy to say, though, that it worked. Despite my preconceived notions of what is and isn’t meditation, and my thoughts that the goal of meditation was to have no goal at all, I was able to learn a ton from this course. I won’t say that I agreed with everything, but even the things that I disagreed with allowed me to look a little closer as to why that was, rather than just standing behind things that I learned sometime ago.

So I’m thinking that the key might be to hold everything with an open hand.

Clinging to beliefs, careers, relationships and even life stands in stark contrast to the true nature of reality in this universe, which is change. And the less we grasp and reach to the safe and solid shoreline, the more easily we will float down the river and end up where we were always going anyway.

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