That Chevy Wagon and Three Meetings: Not Just another Donut Story

I was pulling into the campus parking lot, weaving through the maze of construction that blocks most of the ways I’m used to navigating campus. After I pulled into the messiness of T-Lot, I started following an old Chevy wagon. You know the ones with the pseudo-wood panel sides? It’s probably from the 80’s. Not sure. But it’s a brownish tan color and you could tell it’s seen a lot of miles. Dents and missing parts of the moldings and side panels. As I continued following it, I tried to see who was driving, but I couldn’t see the person. S/he must be short because his/her head did not make it over the seat back. Finally, as I crossed 12th Avenue to get to my parking lot, I saw a little man with white hair trimming the edges of his head. I couldn’t help but fall in love with the wagon and man. I don’t know him. I don’t even know what he really looks like, but there was something about the combination of him driving that wagon that consumed my attention. I was no longer focused on the meeting that was the main reason I was going to campus that day.

As I was heading to that meeting, I could feel the lessons of my teacher training becoming a fainter and fainter memory. I was trying to remember the important points. I was trying to remember how empowered I felt when I went into the meetings last week: clean, devoid of expectations. I wasn't over-investing myself emotionally in the outcomes. I wasn't worrying about what the men in the room thought of me. This is what was spinning in my head when I became sidetracked by that Chevy wagon. And it was the perfect distraction, because it reminded me that my work upon returning home from my teacher training has been to let go of that damned donut.

But I’m sure most of you are wondering what the hell I’m talking about. Donut? Do you mean those sweet fried treats? What could that have to do with meetings and work and Chevy wagons? Well, I sort of mean those sweet treats. But only because of their shape.



In the context of my teacher training it was more about the shape. It was—or is the shape of our preconceived notions that come in the form of the stories we tell ourselves. Stories that help us keep recreating a small, comfortable, familiar way of knowing ourselves. It’s hard to describe succinctly. There is the donut. And the hole in the center of the donut is our self. And the matter in the donut (the sprinkles, pink icing, etc.) includes all that we know. Our personality and limits that enable us to define what we are--and what we're not…. The outside, beyond the donut and the sprinkles and the icing, consists of that great unknown. All the things we could be; everything that our donut stories keep us from recognizing as possible in ourselves. The donut contains the narratives we create about how we have been hurt, how we have suffered, how we have been mistreated. The deeper those donut stories go, the harder it can be for us to permeate the false boundaries they (we) create. The stories are safe. They give us a nicely defined line that comfort us into believing we know all we need to about what is out there—and who we are. That we already know what is possible in ourselves. But we don't know.

I think the metaphor of the donut story is perfect and silly. Perfect because it is silly. How a person can trap themselves into a limited life because of silly stories. But stories (silly and otherwise) are powerful. They have the power to shape our actions, reactions, choices. Silly donut stories weigh on us.

One of the stories that I found hidden deeply within in me was linked to the feeling of not being safe. I mentioned this before, but it is such a deep story for me. So deeply ground into my psyche that even though I recognize it as a story and have experienced the empowerment of letting that story go in a variety of different interactions, it creeps back in. My fear of not being safe—that story I told in response to the very real experiences I had as a girl, returns in moments of stress. And I could feel it creeping in as I drove to my meeting. Seeing that old Chevy helped me let go of the donut—at least for a moment.

And as I sat at the table before the meeting started, I was ready. I felt good. I knew it would be a stressful meeting, but I also knew I could rise to the occasion. But as the meeting progressed the fear moved in and out like the ocean. Big waves. Strong undertow, dragging me out to sea. But I knew I had to speak and I had to be the person I knew I was—knew I could be. I couldn’t hide anymore. And I said a lot of things I needed to say. And I was in the moment. Of course, the fear returned. I stumbled through my words at certain points. That story kept trying to convince me to hide again. Pull back. See the men around the table as threats. And when I went home, I did hide. I first tried to call a few friends to get them to support me. To make me feel like it was okay to say what I said. But, thankfully, nobody answered their phones and I had to sit with it. I had to come to terms with the fact that I didn’t need to have others tell me it was okay to stand up for myself. To stand up for my values and beliefs. I could be awake (and I don’t mean the opposite of sleeping here. I mean awake) and okay. I didn’t need to dissociate. I could be present and alive. And I managed. Although, as the evening progressed, it all wore on me. It was emotionally taxing.

As the evening wore on, that meeting (added to the two other meetings from last week) grew heavier and heavier on my emotions and I just collapsed. I sat for a moment to watch a television show and didn’t remember anything until about 2am— 6 hours later. I wish I could say this work is easy, but it’s not. I felt good about what I did. But I realized that what I was really working through was that I no longer had that old story as a safe retreat. I felt at some points over the days that followed lost, unsure what story to tell. Unsure where to go--emotionally speaking.

And then I was rereading something by Judith Butler that I was teaching this week. I had read it prior to the meeting on Monday, but it was when I went back over it on Wednesday that I started feeling it. Really feeling it.

“I have tried here to argue that our very sense of personhood is linked to the desire for recognition, and that desire places us outside ourselves, in a realm of social norms that we do not fully choose, but that provides the horizon and the resource for any sense of choice that we have.” --Judith Butler, Undoing Gender

The quandary that Butler sets up between living our lives among others (to belong in a community) and not being constrained by the limitations we often create around our interpretations of the norms and values within those communities is a fine line. Often, as we try to become a coherent subject (self), we see the boundaries of our bodies and selves as finite, static, unchangeable. That donut is a solid force to be reckoned with. To see out of those stories takes continual work. Donut stories can dominate us to such a degree that we no longer know why we do what we do, nor do we see how much those stories are limiting our possibilities. Yet, that social world is out there. It is part of us. It is significant. Our communities can be tremendous resources to help us see what else is out there for us. To see possibilities. To see something… else.

“To assume responsibility for a future, however, is not to know its direction fully in advance, since the future, especially the future with and for others, requires a certain openness and unknowingness; it implies becoming part of a process the outcome of which no one subject can surely predict. It also implies that a certain agonism and contestation over the course of direction will and must be in play.” --Judith Butler, Undoing Gender

Yet, we do not know exactly what possibilities are out there for us. We can imagine beyond, but we do not know for certain how a community will emerge, how a movement (both within ourselves and with others) will emerge. The dynamics of many voices and bodies coming together means that there is a degree of unknown that has to be allowed in. I had to wake up to that during my teacher training. Learn to rely on others. To let others into my world. To step into their worlds. To let go of some of those fears I have of other people. Nonsensical fears in the context of my life now, but very real and rational in the context of the life I was living when the seeds of those fears were planted. We have to start to understand how our way is not the only way. And when we allow ourselves to grow and build something with others, we have to let ourselves enter into something bigger. That we cannot fully control.

“Contestation must be in play for politics to become democratic. Democracy does not speak in unison; its tunes are dissonant, and necessarily so. It is not a predictable process; it must be undergone, like a passion must be undergone. It may also be that life itself becomes foreclosed when the right way is decided in advance, when we impose what is right for everyone and without finding a way to enter into community, and to discover the ‘right’ in the midst of cultural translation.” --Judith Butler, Undoing Gender

Chautauqua, Part 2: Being With--Seeing, Really Seeing

“So the thing to do when working on a motorcycle, as in any other task, is to cultivate the peace of mind which does not separate one’s self from one’s surroundings.”
–Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Being in the moment, with my surroundings, is yet another lesson to cultivate in my world here and now. Pirsig’s statement stood out to me upon my return home for a variety of reasons. Not least of which is the work and cultivation of being with—an exercise from my training. Moving through this Chautauqua, being with appears as a long thread linking together the world of training with the present world in which I now sit.

How do I even begin to explain the exercise of being with? I could say that we spent a late evening standing in small groups before the rest of the community. We stood there and looked at the people in the audience. We were not allowed to fade our gaze off in the distance or mentally escape from the room. It was a meditation that required our full attention to those in the audience. We couldn’t speak, nor move around. I could also say that after we stood there for about 10 minutes—maybe more—we then had a second group walk up to us and stand about an inch away from us and we had to look into each other’s eyes. We stood there for about 10 minutes. We weren’t allowed to look away. We had to keep looking. I could say that some people tried to laugh away their discomfort, other people cried in a swell of emotion. But none of these things speak to the emotions swirling in me—and the room—that night. The room was thick and full of intensity and compassion.

It was an exercise in allowing others in as we really looked at and saw each other. I thought I would have a more difficult time than I did, but I realized that I valued the permission to really look at the people with whom I was building a community. I’m not claiming it was an easy exercise for me. I struggled. I wanted to mentally transport myself out of my skin. A typical response I have to stress and discomfort. Dissociation. It’s way too easy for me. But as I moved through the exercise, I approached it as I approach meditation and I let myself sit with the discomfort. How often do we have the opportunity to be in a safe space that allows us to work through some of our biggest obstacles?

We came back to this exercise on the last day of training when we stood before each person in the training (about 100 people) and looked each person in the eye for about a minute. We stood there for over an hour and half, looking at each other in silence. It was like nothing I have ever experienced and it was amazing.

But the thread that was knotted and sewn into me during those exercises traversed through my flight home to Fargo. It has spanned space and time. In the airport, I found it easier to look people in the eye and not immediately turn away. I was talking with people and not being uneasy looking at them as I spoke. Practicing really looking at people on the way home was exciting. To see it as a practice and not something that was a measure of how much I did or did not get out of the training opened me up in ways I could not have anticipated. Normally, I would pressure myself, judge myself in what I was able to do ‘right’ or what I had ‘failed’ at. That hasn’t even been an issue for me. I see—and feel—it as a practice. Similar to how I see myself on my yoga mat. Each pose is a practice. Some days I can go through Sun Salutations powerfully and openly, other days it feels like I’m doing them in mud. But that is not a reflection on my person. It is a reflection of the moment. It is a reflection of what I need to attune to in my body. So as I looked at my fellow travelers in the airport, I could see some of them stressed out. I could see some enjoying themselves with the people they were with. I could see myriad emotions running through them all and they ceased looking like distant threats circulating in the same physical space, and became human beings with worries and concerns and joys not that different from me. So looking at them was not scary and troubling. It was an exercise in exchanging and sharing a moment. No matter how brief it may have been.

Then when I came home and entered my work life again, I only opened more. In a meeting I had on Monday, I felt myself picking up the tools from the training and utilizing them. I looked at my colleagues when I spoke. I did not worry about how they would perceive me for having my own point of view that may depart from theirs. I allowed myself to speak and listen, openly. I didn’t get attached to my point of view. I had things I wanted to say, but I did not need the reinforcement of my colleagues to feel safe in articulating my perspective. I did not feel threatened or scared, so I did not speak from a place of defensiveness and fear. Rather, I spoke from a place of dialogue and exchange.

Normally after a meeting like that I feel my energy depleted. I’m emotionally taxed and frustrated. I just want to complain about what happened or what I didn’t do or say. I want to go home and stew and hide. Instead, I felt energized and hopeful. I felt excited to work on the items we discussed in the meeting. I then took a lot of that into a meeting on Wednesday, which was more stressful, more political. But I again felt amazingly uplifted after. And it wasn’t because the outcome was better than in the past. It was because I was different. My approach was different. The meeting was still full of problems and stress that will need to be dealt with for quite some time, but I felt like I had been able to say things that I had never been brave enough to say. And I didn’t state my positions in a way I would have in the past. I said them with less judgment and defensiveness. I stayed true to myself, yet open to the dialogue.

The way I felt this week has given me the encouragement to keep at this way of interacting and being with others. I know it will not always be easy, but the outcome is so much healthier for me. It is a practice that is one of the healthiest I have had in quite some time.

Starting the Chautauqua: Lessons from an Unconventional Teacher Training

“What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua…like the traveling tent-show Chautauquas that used to move across America, this America, the one that we are now in, an old-time series of popular talks intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer.” –Robert Pirsig


Serendipity is never coincidence. My life is a series of accidental and intuited links. I was rereading Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance on my way to the teacher training. I had been thinking a lot about the way he used Chautauquas to frame his story. Well, I guess his book is more of an exploration than a story. It’s hard to explain if you haven’t read the book, but so is my 8 day journey of teacher training.

As I thought about my experiences over the week, I kept coming back to the Chautauquas. Traveling shows that enlightened and spoke to people about the world before the ubiquity of radio, television, internet. An oral tradition of communication. More like communion. I do not mean communion in the Christian sense, but in the idea of a shared space of community dialogues. These dialogues symbolize much of my experience of this teacher training. The community that we created in 7 days. I need to tell this Chautauqua to remember it. No, use it. Embody it. To help me bring this community into my life here, now, in Fargo.

“Every Chautauqua should have a list somewhere of valuable things to remember that can be kept in some safe place for times of future need and inspiration. Details.” –Robert Pirsig

What is the essential list of valuable things for this Chautauqua of mine? My journey on this blog now shifts again to the dialogues encountered in my teacher training. The dialogues are the valuable things. So the list. What must I include in this Chautauqua?

FROG
HOLDING THE SPACE
BEING SAFE
DONUT STORIES
BEING WITH
LISTENING AND FEELING
WHISPERS
CRACKED PHONE CONVERSATION
IF YOU CAN, YOU MUST



Frog: Lessons in Holding and Releasing

There I am, laying in frog pose. We’re concluding the end of a couple hour yoga session. It’s the second day of training. I’m hot and sweaty. It’s been a tough day. The kind of day in which you feel the shittiness just pouring out of you from all different places. Pores, cells, eyes, mouth. Emotions spilling and running through my body. Frog symbolized the week. The ups, the downs. The jumps out into the open. The camouflaging back into my surroundings. The pose was more than metaphor, though. It was the embodied practice of holding and releasing. I’m not sure how long Baron kept us in this pose, but I went through the gamut of fighting against the release of my hips and all the emotions they contain. The hips really are the epicenter of holding. And when we finally allow the release it is a powerful experience of vulnerability and exuberance.

But that night I mostly felt the vulnerability. I fought against the release. The day was stuck in my mind. My practice teaching session weighed heavily upon me, as did the day of dialogue that required us to look--really look-- at our personal demons in ways I usually prefer to avoid. I was fighting and holding. I wanted to jump out of my body and the room. I wanted to hightail it home. But I couldn’t and on some level, I knew I didn’t really want to leave. I wanted to feel myself in that moment. Feel the struggle. The turmoil. I knew I needed to confront the emotions locking up in my body. Emotions that were manifesting in my body as tightness, hardness. So I stayed. Tears welled up and soon there was some release, but it would take several more days before the release truly came to fruition in my body.

The next morning, in meditation, my body felt heavy. Not just heavy, but it felt like I had a 1,000 pound weight on top of my head and it was pushing me into the ground. The pushes and pulls from releasing and holding continued throughout the week. Baron exhausted us to the point that it left me unable to hold on any longer. I just had to let go. There was nowhere to retreat. Fourteen-hour days of emotional and physical pushing and pulling did not leave me anywhere to go. All my hiding places were lit up, exposed. And it scared the shit out of me. Without a place to hide, the resistance melted. But the process was far from a linear progression. It was jagged. Just as you think you have worked through one thing, it comes back in other forms. You may have felt it release in a dialogue session only to resurface in a yoga asana. Or you might find release in a yoga asana only to have the resistance bubble up during teaching practice. It was a true working-through.

I wish I could be more specific, but the experience is beyond words. Metaphors, like the frog, become the only way to try to articulate a week of highs and lows. This is not a typical teacher training that goes over pedagogy and concepts as something apart from you to simply be learned intellectually, mentally. Baron does not train by handing you an object of knowledge to hold on to. No. It is a program that teaches you to be what you teach so as to inspire others to be empowered with knowledge and practice. I experienced the pedagogy and concepts through action. Through practice teaching, dialogue and yoga practice. It is a lesson in enactment, not memorization. This was a challenge for me. Me. A person who finds safety in knowing before doing. A person who separates knowing and doing into a protective analytical binary shell that often limits my ability to explore deeper and beyond what I think is possible.

Not Being Safe (or How I Take My Stories With Me)

In this week of training I had an epiphany. I would not have come to it without the coaching of Baron. I’m sure I was afraid to admit what was driving the story of me. To have to see it so clearly was both amazing and terrifying. Sort of an ongoing theme of the week. Acting from within spaces of contradiction. Doesn't seem so enlightening, but it is a consciousness of those spaces of contradiction. Spaces you must function within, not analytically observe. It's not just thinking about yourself this way, but being forced to stay in it and respond to others from that position. I was unable to find an exit route through my analysis and the over-intellectualization of my experiences. Frog was only the beginning of having to experience myself as both/and. Like a lotus. Being born out of that dark murkiness of the pond and expanding into the light and air. Both are always present. Often I try to hold onto one feeling at the expense of the other. But at this training, I could not do that. I was continuously experiencing myself as dark and light. I never just felt the exuberant highs or the earthy dark lows. They were both hitting me at once. I never just felt empowered and free. It always came with waves of fear and containment. Over the week, though, the judgment started to evaporate and I could catch glimpses of each moment as simply experiences that one goes through. They do not have to define me with permanence. The best way I can explain is that I started to see life moments as yoga practice. In yoga practice your body is different every day and one day does not define your total yoga abilities. In fact, yoga is practice. It is not a thing. This training made me see my teaching and my life as practice. Wait. Not see, but experience my teaching and life as practice. Not a static set of experiences that defined me. This was a shift. The stuff I intellectually understood was dissolving into lived practice.

But back to the epiphany. In one of the dialogue sessions, I saw how my feeling of not being safe, which emerged early in my life, has defined much of my life since I was a young girl. My responses to people and situations are the direct result of how I felt unsafe in my childhood. I don’t want to tell this story to hold on to it, but to provide context to how I have been and from where my practice is now emerging.

One of the exercises we did that week was to tell a story from our early years that we identified as defining how we saw our current sense of self. The story I intuited as significant was when my father, in one of his drunken rages, pointed his shotgun at me, my sister, my mom, and himself. I vividly remember the terror and the physical responses. I remember my mother standing there helpless as my sister and I sat on the bed. The story I created of this event included my mom’s reaction to my dad’s actions. She did not do much when he pointed the gun at me and Penny (my sister), but when he pointed it at himself, she screamed. I had trouble articulating how that shaped me and my way of acting in the world, but as I told this story to the group, Baron helped me work through the impact of what happened. How what happened shaped my story. My life. I could see how my body would react to moments when I felt unsafe-- even though I was no longer in the same kind of danger I had lived through as a little girl. As I started to file through the various events in my adult life, I could see how I construct things around being safe. Avoiding those physical responses of fear. I so pride myself in taking leaps of faith and doing things that propel me beyond my comfort zone, but they are always calculated. Calculated risks. I keep a safety net around. I often hide it from people (and myself), but it’s there for me. Just in case. I've done it so often. It was a powerful moment for me. To see that story traveling through my relationships, my friendships, my jobs, my journeys. It was startling and freeing.

Seeing it was important. Not to render it bad or good, but to understand how I react to people and situations. Seeing it is helping me to work through changing that story. Well, not changing, more like letting it go. It is important to let those stories go. We will always have stories. They make us who we are. But what I could see as the week progressed was that story not having such a hold over me. I had the story, it did not have me. But I need to work those muscles—so to speak. Muscles that help me to respond from a bigger place. A place that is me, but a me that is beyond the stories. To respond from the me that is unknown, rather than the known. ‘

I’m not sure if this makes sense to those of you reading this. It’s hard to explain the feelings and how they link to the actual things I did during this training. But I will keep working at it as I develop my Chautauqua of this past week. I will keep working on it as I teach my classes and strengthen my relationships with those around me. I will keep working on it as I develop a community, actually allow myself to be part of a community. I hope those of you reading have patience with my limited expressions. I know they will become clearer as I keep working on enacting the things I learned in my life here and now.

I suppose this Chautauqua is a practice, so I will keep returning to shape it in the moment. Taking that week and making it present. If an oral tradition is to do anything it is to remain dynamic in the face of presence.