“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.
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