“Find gratitude in your life story. Wake up every morning and say to yourself, “I made it here from where I started, and I am so proud of that.” When we do this, we bless ourselves and feed ourselves with the love required for us to flourish and keep going no matter where we come from or what we have been through.” – Cleo Wade
Our own growth can be hard to glimpse
There are moments when I catch myself responding to something – some irritation or flare of disagreement – by reminding myself that I love this person and, because I love this person, there is no need for me to waste energy making sure they know I’m irritated or convincing them that I am right.
Lest you think I’m tooting my own horn, I will confess that I haven’t always been able to do this. I was born a high-achieving, type-A, stubborn, oldest daughter quite confident in my abilities to get “it all” sorted out. I spent 53 years of my life making and keeping things okay. This worked well until life took a series of unplanned and unfixable turns which irreversibly changed me. The moments described above are so noticeable because they are glimpses of how I’ve changed over the last several years.
Gratitude for suffering? Really?
These dramatic, albeit momentary, glimpses of my transformation often leave me stunned to feel a sense of gratitude for the pain, loss and grief that I’ve experienced. Does the change I’m seeing in myself make all the loss worth it? Heck no. But does it reveal that maybe it wasn’t worthless? Kind of, yes.
Living in the wake of loss gives you a sense of clarity about what really matters. In the beginning, I thought that clarity was coming from the exhaustion of grief. I thought I simply didn’t have the energy to deal with “nonsense” like arguing with someone I care about. From my vantage point today, however, I think my clarity is coming from a deeper place.
It is said that grief is love with nowhere to go. I think that the clarity that allows me to step back from irritation or disagreement is a manifestation of the love I have for the people I’ve lost. More simply said, when I choose to lead with love rather than annoyance, that is my love for my brother, my mother-in-law, and my mom finding a new place to go. For this I am grateful.
I am even more grateful for my life story when I recall that prioritizing love over my own upset would have taken almost superhuman effort before I had lived through and with loss. But now, because of my journey, doing so simply feels right. It feels like I’m aligned with life rather than at battle with it. I trust that these moments, by giving me a sense of how much easier everything feels when you lead with love, will help me do so with less effort and more grace in the future.
Getting from effort to ease
Which brings me to yoga philosophy. In an earlier essay I explored how we are meant to balance effort (shtira) and ease (sukkah) in every yoga posture (asana) (YS 2.46). In the very next sutra (YS 2.47), Patanjali seems to contradict himself, telling his students that a posture cannot be perfected until all tension born of effort (prayatna) is relaxed. Which begs the question, how can we hope to balance effort and ease while also relaxing completely?
The easy answer is that with time and practice any new behavior or skill will begin to feel familiar or even normal. Anything done over and over again will eventually require less effort than it once did. But this development of a habit or even a sense of autopilot is not the type of ease or relaxation that Patanjali is inviting us to find.
The “perfection” Patanjali mentions in the sutra is not technical. Nor is it a skill. It is a quality of being. It is a quality of presence. It describes being fully engaged with the present moment –fully engaged in doing whatever needs doing; fully immersed in your experience whether it’s good or bad, happy or sad, or hard or easy; and yet, somehow, still objective enough that you notice that the quality of your presence is changing the moment.
What does this look like in the real world?
In a yoga posture, you would be doing all the work required of you to maintain proper alignment. If you weren’t, the posture would kind of collapse and seem lifeless. It is the nature of your effort that will have changed. Your effort will feel natural. You will be doing your part and also allowing the posture to do its part. Instead of holding the posture, you might have a momentary sense that the posture is holding you.
This is what these fleeting moments that I’ve been noticing feel like. I’m still holding a conversation – I’m listening, processing what I hear, recognizing my own opinions, formulating my own ideas of what is right and what is not. It takes effort to do all this. And – not but, but, and – somehow, I feel the conversation is also holding me. It is holding me in such a way that I do not need to be the star, and my way does not need to be the way it goes. I am more invested in the relationship than I am in the outcome of this one exchange.
It feels easy because you’re going with the flow
In her book on the yoga sutras, The Yogi’s Roadmap, Bhavani Maki writes that Patanjali is inviting us to slacken the tension born of our effort and align ourselves with the flow of life. In other words, our effort subtly shifts from trying to get it right to trying not to get in the way of the way it’s unfolding.
Do you see the difference? When we’re trying to get something right, we have a very clear idea of what “right” looks like. We are battling our way to an outcome. When we’re trying not to get in the way of how something is unfolding, we don’t know what is going to happen. Instead, we are going with the flow and trusting that whatever happens will eventually, somehow not be worthless.
We can’t make this happen. We can only get out of its way.
I’ll offer this reminder, in case, like me, you really like to get things right. Patanjali is very clear throughout the sutras (see verse 1.14 for example) that yoga is an endless process. It is a practice meant to last a lifetime. There is no such thing as finishing this journey of transformation; no such thing as being done. Which is all to say, we don’t have to get this right right away.
At this point in my journey, I feel like this is not something that we get right at all. The moments when I catch myself slipping into alignment with the flow of things (which is how it feels when I allow the love that is the basis of my relationships to be more important than my own position in an exchange within that relationship) feel like grace. They feel like they are happening to me or through me rather than because of me.
The same can be said about love. Love is something that we can feel, something we can do, something we can give, and something we can receive. But love is much bigger than all these wonderful manifestations of it. Love is all around us. We are held in it always. And, when those we love are no longer here with us, love does not die, but flows through us in amazing new ways. In these fleeing moments when I find myself leading with love, I am, for a moment at least, getting myself out of the way enough to allow Love to unfold in its own beautiful and surprising way.
In closing, I’ll repeat myself. Has this long spell of loss and grief in my life story been worth it? Heck no. Has it been worthless? Heck no – because somehow it has softened me (sometimes) into a little more alignment with the flow of love in my life. And that has made my life a story I feel grateful to be living.
Slacken the tension born of your effort and fuse yourself with the current of life force within. Reconcile yourself with the fact that it is an endless process. Trust, relax, redouble your efforts and keep going. – Yoga Sutra 2.47 as translated by Bhavani Maki in her book, The Yogi’s Roadmap
The practice of yoga will be firmly rooted when it is maintained consistently and with dedication for a long time. – Yoga Sutra 1.14