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.

Backspacer... Backtracing Mental Landscape with Pearl Jam

Rewind....

So, I’m listening to Pearl Jam's Vitalogy. I remember buying this album right around my birthday—on cassette. I remember so vividly. I loved (and still do) this album and defended it from its many critics. I believed (and still do) that it was a critical album in the career of Pearl Jam. It was December of 1994. I turned 23 that year. I was living in Santa Cruz and going to night school at Cabrillo Community College. I remember listening to the tape as I walked home from school. Just like the early Ani albums, Pearl Jam’s albums take me back to that time. Those years in Santa Cruz… I keep going back there with my music. There is a strong link between that time and what I’m feeling now.

“Don’t mean to push…but I’m being shoved!
I’m just like you, think we’ve had enough…

“I don’t believe a thing they want us to…
Oh, we all got our scars, they should have ‘em too...”
--“Whipping"

Except Pearl Jam takes me a bit further back. I started listening to them on the cusp of one of my first shifts in consciousness as a young adult. It was a big shift that can be told through the music I listened to during that time. I was a huge fan of heavy metal—cock rock—until right around 1990-1991. Bon Jovi, Motley Crue, Skid Row, Guns ‘n’ Roses…. Hair bands. But it took my fortuitous exposure to Mother Love Bone and Soundgarden to start to make me hear new things at a time when I was needing new answers to questions I had been asking my whole life. Soon after, Nirvana and Pearl Jam would make a tiny splash that would quickly make intense waves and undercurrents in my life—and in music.

Music is more than entertainment for me. It is a marker in my intellectual, emotional, and spiritual journeys. As a young child, my parents were huge music fans. They have a great album collection that provided me with eclectic tastes. Everything from Bob Dylan to Led Zepplin to War to Fleetwood Mac to Cream. Yet, as I grew up, music in my house generated intense anxiety and fear for me. When my dad cranked the music at home, it was nearly always followed by drunken violence of some sort. It would set a mood that would always start with frenetic fun and would eventually end in frenetic, chaotic, brutality. So, I tried to counter that by making my music an ordered part of my imagination. To fade out the bad stuff in the house. Like books, I would use music to construct my own little world, apart from my parents, my sister—everybody. It was my world and I would create it the way I wanted to. Music has the capacity to carry darkness and lightness within a single chord progression or chorus. It carries emotion in ways that words alone cannot. It gives me the space to contemplate the world in which I live. And at the time, it gave me the space to hide from the parts of the world that terrified and controlled me.

At age 16, I read No One Here Gets Out Alive, a biography of Jim Morrison and The Doors. I read it after I found out that I shared my birthday with Jim Morrison and that he died the year I was born. I convinced myself that it was fate. I became obsessed with Jim Morrison. I listened to all of his music with The Doors and read all the poetry he wrote. I read the authors who influenced him: Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley. I tried to revisit the places that influenced him when he was a young man living in the Bay Area. It was like I was trying to find my life in his.

From there, I detoured off into cock rock. It was heavy, loud, and nothing like anything my friends at school listened to. That was important. My friends were listening to Fine Young Cannibals and INXS. At the time, I think it was my way of revolting against the upper middle-class clicks I often belonged to…marginally. It was the way I asserted my identity as a girl from a poor working class family. I did like some of the bands my school friends liked, but I fell under the spell of big hair, spandex, heavy guitars, and pyrotechnics. I didn’t want the life that some of my friends were moving toward in their AP classes and drama club plays and parties. I dreamed of being the girlfriend of Jon Bon Jovi and Nikki Sixx. I knitted fairy tale yarns in my head that constructed these men as sensitive artists who would talk all night with me about music, books, and the meaning of life. My own talents would bloom in their presence and I would become an amazing songwriter and author. I would not be their muse; I would be their co-creator of music and art. We would be artistic power couples. I was so naïve. I blinded myself to the reality of who these men were/are and the ways in which they treated women.

[The CD changer just moved to Pearl Jam’s first album. Perfect timing.]

It was as I was waking from that cock rock dream that I tripped over Mother Love Bone and some other predecessors of grunge. It was a happy accident that I ran into these bands. I was working at one of my earliest dead end jobs right after high school—clerk at The Warehouse [a record store for those who may be too young to know]. And I stocked music and interacted with music geeks. It was my first step into the labyrinth of music freaks and geeks. But most importantly, it led to my early discovery of Pearl Jam. I think I liked the fact that they were still rockin’, but there was a different vibe to them. Their music meant something real at a time when I could no longer dream past the sheen of hair bands’ spandex tights. Pearl Jam’s lyrics addressed emotions I could identify with. The days in which I contorted myself into songs such as “She Goes Down” and “Lay Your Hands on Me” were gone.

I wasn’t just waking up from my fantasy about heavy metal musicians; I was waking up to my own life and the numerous disconnects between me and the life I wanted to live. I guess it makes sense. Eighteen or so years old and you start to realize that this is now your life—not your parents’, not your friends’. It was my life. Don’t get me wrong. I straddled between my grunge love and heavy metal fantasies for quite some time, but within a year or so after I first heard Pearl Jam’s album—I believe I first heard it the spring of 1991—I would disown my association with heavy metal. I would throw away the cassettes, hide all my concert t-shirts, and recreate myself.

When I hear songs from that first Pearl Jam album, I’m immediately transported to my black Jeep Wrangler. With the top off, that Jeep took me many places. It took me to beaches all along the California coast. Half Moon Bay, San Gregorio Beach, Santa Cruz, Pismo Beach. It was during that summer of 1991 that I started to see myself living near the ocean, getting out of Redwood City.

For me all of those songs represented freedom. It represented another layer peeling off of my skin and psyche. I could take deep clear breaths in that music. I could see miles beyond my windshield in that music. The world didn’t look so blurry and two-dimensional. I didn’t feel trapped.

“Maybe someday
another child
won’t feel as alone as she does…

“She seems to be stronger
but what they want her to be is weak…

"She could just pretend
She could play the game
She could be another clone
Why go home?”
--"Why Go"

I often think that Pearl Jam’s first album tells the story of my transitions between high school and working and then working and deciding to go to college. It helps me tell the story of a person who had to take a detour through some unexcavated mental landscape. I had to pull off the scabs of my childhood and let the wounds bleed. Just bleed without trying to stop the flow. Only then could the dirt wash out of those wounds, giving them a real chance to heal. Those years were raw. I was convinced I had it together. I had a good paying job, a new Jeep Wrangler, and other stuff. I also had a small mound of debt to show for my efforts. Material things weren’t helping me. During that period, I learned that I didn’t have anything I really wanted. In fact, I had a bunch of junk that meant nothing to me. Absolutely nothing. All it did was tie me down to a place I didn’t belong.

So, I had a small mental breakdown and then moved to Santa Cruz. I sold my Wrangler. I quit my job and enrolled in junior college. I got a temp job, filed bankruptcy, and started walking and/or riding my bike everywhere. In other words, I took the leap. I followed my gut. The first temp job I had turned into a permanent job. A job I would have until I moved to Seattle. I was incredibly lucky. I never had money, because rent was expensive. But I was going to school and I found a place that I fit into. I’d be lying if I said it all just came together. As with most things in my life, transitions are jagged. I struggled. But I felt like I was struggling for the right things, which is what made me feel I made the right decision to let go of the things that bogged me down.

**********
It was as I was listening to Vitalogy that December in 1994 that I was still trying to figure many things out. But I felt unattached to anything. Free to make decisions. That I had control over my own life. But, obviously, I had much more to learn. The process of letting go of one location and jumping into a new one in search for something better is still with me. Fleeing as a (fleeting) form of freedom. I did it in 1991 and again in 1996 and again in 1999 and again in 2005; the pattern starts to be its own prison. It’s not the way to find true freedom. I’m still learning that lesson.

Fast Forward.... Backspacer

“Practiced are my sins,
never gonna let me win
under everything, just another human being
Yeh, I don’t wanna hurt, there’s so much in this world
To make me bleed”
--"Just Breathe"

So now the cd player shifts to Pearl Jam’s newest album, Backspacer. I am looking at my lifetime through the long career of a band that has been sewn into most of my adult memories. My adult mistakes. My adult triumphs. The theme of the album is love. Not romantic love, as I dreamed about in those imaginary conversations with rockers, but that deeper love that comes from a life that learns running away or retaliating with unbridled anger is not always an effective way to evoke change and hope in the world. It is a love that takes practice. But I still fail at it. I still scream and scratch and claw to get out of a system that is unfair. That hurts. I still have that uncontrollable urge to run. That animalistic fight or flight reaction is still deeply ground inside of me. But it is through the practice of this other kind of love that I have learned to stay present through that initial reaction to high tail it out of dodge. It is not a passive staying that means you just lay down and take it or bend to the powers that be. Instead, it is an active stillness—like a yoga asana—that enables you to work through the desire to give up and run. It makes you stay in order to think about what fine tuning can be done to change your relationship to the situation—and then change the situation. Diffuse it. It means letting go of that rawness that was so much a part of my life when I put that first Pearl Jam tape in my cassette player. It feels more like the passionate echoes I hear in Backspacer.

“When somethings dark
lemme shed a little light on it

“When somethings cold
Lemme put a little fire on it…

“When somethings gone
I wanna fight to get it back again

“When somethings broke
I wanna put a bit of fixing on it…

“When somethings low
I wanna put a little high on it

“When somethings lost
I wanna fight to get it back again…

“If there’s no love
I wanna try to get it back again”

--"The Fixer"