Layers

This week's inspiration came to me as I was taking a morning walk while listening to a podcast. The conversation in the podcast was about how these people had been experimenting with making changes in certain areas of their lives. One piece of advice was to do a small amount of change at a time in order to establish it and see how it works for you. It got me thinking about how our yoga and meditation practices are ongoing. We make our way to the mat and see what happens. We sit in meditation and notice how active, agitated, or calm our minds are during the session. The more we do these practices, the more we get to see how dynamic a process it all is. Things shift and change, often beyond anything we can control. Life shows up to challenge our best-laid intentions and, in doing so, we walk through the mud of transformation.

But are we actually transforming? Or are we simply trying to get back to the basic notion that what and who we are is inherently divine perfection?

In yoga, it is believed that we are born fully whole and nothing outside of us defines who we are at the core of our essence. Yet as we age, layers begin to form around this inner light as we learn to cope and grow in the adventure of being human. Over time, we gather layers of identity, sometimes connected to life events, often traumatic ones, and we define ourselves by what we do, how we look, and the professions we undertake. And instead of them being flimsy layers, they can become armored and seemingly impenetrable. We may be seen as tough, overly chatty, drearily quiet, reserved, outrageous, or slightly crazed. We describe ourselves through what we do - for example, I'm a yoga therapist/teacher and business owner. We can latch onto these descriptors whether they're actually true or not. It's like being given a nickname and unable to shake it throughout your life. It sticks and we believe everything connected to it.

If we're lucky, conscious, and/or curious, we may come across a method or practice that helps us to begin peeling back these layers of identification and once again begin to glimpse who we truly are. Having drunk the yoga and meditation flavored Kool-Aid years ago, I firmly believe it offers us a way to peek into our inner landscape. The ancient yogis described us as having five layers, or Koshas, making up the entirety of our being. Beginning at the most obvious physical layer they move toward a "bliss" layer as we pass through mental and emotional parts of our being. Our culture is notorious for getting overly stuck in the physical, body layer of how we look and the material wealth we accumulate.

If you've never undertaken this practice, take a couple of minutes and give it a try. First, make a list of who you are-you might include your name, occupation, how you're related to people (sister, father, aunt), your interests and descriptors. Next, imagine that you've taken this piece of paper, crumpled it into a ball and tossed it into a fire...completely obliterating your identity. If you are none of those things, then who are you? This is a common question posed along many spiritual paths. When you drop away the external shell and turn to your internal self, what do you find?

This is particularly potent as it relates to aging consciously. As our body changes with the loss of muscle mass and agility and as our memory may become sketchier, if we're overly identified with those parts of ourselves, we begin to create our own suffering. 

I used to play competitive tennis and "tennis player" would have been high on my list of what I was all about. Then I had a shoulder surgery that took me out of the sport as I wasn't able to play the way I had previously. A fellow tennis player said to me that she wouldn't know what she would do if she couldn't play tennis. I didn't really know how to respond to her other than to say that I had other things in my life which I loved and were fulfilling. I had made peace with letting go of that part of who I was and by doing that perhaps I stepped a bit closer to knowing that I was more than the label of 'tennis player'.

As Ram Dass so eloquently said: 
"I am not this body. I am in this body, and this is part of my incarnation and I honor it but that isn't who I am."