My Oh My, How That Pendulum Does Swing

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Sweat Yoga is aptly named, especially if you haven’t been to any sort of hot yoga in months. I can remember a time when I was teaching ten hot yoga classes per week and thought nothing of it. Now my eyes are burning from the sweat that just won’t stop dripping, and the last time I stood up into Mountain Pose, I had to actively try not to pass out. I’m trying to keep my cool, though I’m sure my face is as red as an apple. Wouldn’t want to go dead-fish in front of the teacher who used to be a student of mine way back when. I must have done alright because at the end, she told me my practice looked great and asked if I might want to teach at this studio. Little did she know.

I really lost the yoga bug last year.

That doesn’t bother me much. I’ve always waxed and waned in my physical interests. In high school when coaches were begging me to focus my attention on one sport, I hopped from season to season. I’m not sure one sport or endeavor could have kept my attention for the duration of a year. So for me to drop yoga and lean into running or weights or kettle bells or calisthenics is pretty on-brand. I am, however, embarrassed to say that for the first time in I can’t remember when, I lost my meditation practice.

I know, I know. I’m just as disappointed in myself as you are. I can read the headlines now, “2021: The Year That Kev Was Not So Zen.” After this article drops I’ll be inundated with emails and DMs letting me know how I let everyone down and should be ashamed. To be honest I am a little ashamed. Meditation has been something that has helped me so much that I have never been accurately able to put it to words. There just aren’t words for it. So why did I allow the most regular and helpful aspect of my self care and spirituality to just slowly slip through the cracks over the course of the year? The answer, like most true answers, is complicated.

A friend of mine recently told me on a hike (I get all my best information on hikes) that it’s all about watering your garden. The flowers and vegetables and plants that you have out in your garden all need water. Your water is your time and your energy and you only have so much in your little watering can. As you get older, you’ve got to make some difficult choices in the name of water/energy conservation. There’s only so much to go around. The key to keeping a beautiful garden is what he calls the art of saying ‘no.’ 

It’s an important skill that often gets overlooked in our opportunity obsessed and dream chasing society. I think of it in the same way as Dr. Seuss:

‘You’ll look up and down streets

Look ‘em over with care

And some you will say

I don’t choose to go there’

Choosing what not to do is just as important, if not more so, than choosing what to do.

If that tomato plant asked for water and you just couldn’t say no, then you’ve effectively taken some water away from your azaleas. Maybe you want to grow an awesome tomato plant, in which case this is good, but if the goal of the year was to have award winning azaleas, then maybe not so much.

My goal for 2021 was all business. Recently for the winter solstice I opened up the treasure chest that also serves as my altar to reveal the goals I had set for last year and they are almost all based on getting a solid foundation down for Family Health PT. That is truly what I wanted to focus on and I am happy to say that I did.

However, in doing so, there were some plants that didn’t get watered. Eight clients in a day with travel time in between does not leave a ton of space for movement, nutrition and meditation. It’s a rather unsustainable lifestyle that will lead to burnout and worse, but it needed to be done. It was year four of being in business and we needed to take some steps forward as a company to know that we were a viable enterprise moving forward. 

And so that little ball at the end of the string swang all the way to the right.

One of the best reasons I can give for a regular meditation or self reflection practice is that it allows you to see when the ball has swung one direction. On the right side there is work. There is a career. There is money. There is a house. There is a family. There is stability. There are a million things that can be considered good. There are a million reasons for staying on this side of the swing.

But there’s some good stuff over on the left side too. There is art. There is writing and reading. There are midday yoga classes. There are festivals. There are exciting new places to travel to. There are these endless and untethered possibilities of what could be possible. I like the left side, and when I’ve been over on the right side for too long I get this intense urge to swing myself all the way back over. 

Buddhism urges a third option. Buddhism suggests that true peace can be found in the middle where the ball hangs directly down. The Buddha’s original teachings reject extreme asceticism and sensual indulgence. The belief being that if you walked a straight line between the two, that is the sweet spot. It feels almost sacrilegious to suggest, but stand up comedian Doug Stanhope has an idea in which he supports excess in moderation. Rather than regularly indulging, avoid indulgences on the regular, but when you do indulge, you should INDULGE. That kind of serves like a middle way within the middle way. 

In my experience, I’ve found that middle way to be difficult to travel.

The Buddha is probably right in the thought that the middle way is the space where you can find peace of mind, but peace of mind can be pretty boring at times. There’s a reason why we as a society like trashy reality television. Conflict in general is interesting. Not only is it interesting, it’s part of the human experience. I believe that monks who sit meditating in the mountains for years on end can transcend and reach another state, but in doing so I also think that they deprive themselves of a truly human experience. So their ‘middle way,’ from my point of view, is more of an extreme than a middle. Maybe it’s all just three dimensional and not as simple as a binary back and forth motion. 

So as I struggle through my first yoga class in months, I start to make some pretty epic plans for the future. I can come to this class every week, start working on arm balances again and maybe even find a little peace of mind. I’ll attend a retreat somewhere in a rainforest, sit for an ayahuasca ceremony and level up my soul. I’ll commit to the left side to counterbalance my year on the right.

But that’s really all it is. We swing back and forth through the extremes of this life creating grand plans and attributing deep meaning to everyday happenings. In our deepest dreams we show up as flawless heroes or tragic villains rather than the extremely muddled and complex beings that we truly are. As that pendulum swings back and forth you have highs and lows and everything in between as the search for balance continues unbothered by what we may think of it. In the stinky dark sweat of a hot yoga room, I’m just trying to enjoy the swing.

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