Life is not a recipe

"Life is not a recipe. Recipes are just descriptions of one person's take on one moment in time. They're not rules. People think they are. They look as if they are. The say, 'Do this, not this. Add this, not that.' But, really, recipes are just suggestions that got written down." ~ Mario Batali

I haven't written in awhile.  I've had some things to say, but they just haven't made their way here.  A series of quotes have inspired me recently.  Mario's is one of them.

I love to cook.  I took a cooking class from Edward Espe Brown a couple of years ago.  One of the big realizations I took home from that class was that I wasn't tasting my food while I cooked.  I followed the recipe.  That generally came out fine.  But flavors get built along the way and tasting is a form of mindfulness practice that keeps your cooking alive and asks for your full participation.  Recipes are fine places to begin.  But every ingredient has the potential to vary.  No tomato tastes exactly the same.


Funny...I'd learned that in my yoga practice.  When I first began to practice and much later to teach, I followed the recipes of my teachers.  Most of the time that came out okay.  But I began to meet teachers who weren't offering recipes but were teaching me to cook.  Try this, taste it.  That's when my yoga practice really grew and my teaching felt authentic.  

Here's a mudra to try...vajrapradama mudra...a gesture of unshakeable trust.

Interlace your fingers lightly, your thumbs are free. Place your hands across your chest.  The feeling of your hands on your own heart will have an immediate effect but rest with it awhile.  Taste it.  You could look up more information on the internet.  You could find a recipe for this mudra.  But perhaps just see how it feels to you.  How long do you want to sit with it? Do you rest your hands on your chest or away from your body?  How is your breathing affected? Taste it.  Trust yourself.

Rapt

I recently stumbled across "Rapt - Attention and the Focused Life" by Winifred Gallagher.  She writes of a universe of ways that paying attention (or not) create the life we live.  The book contains plenty of neuroscience for the geeks among us, but it's an easy read for the less geeky.  Here is how the book ends...

Attending to pleasure is a reward in itself, but savoring also boosts your quotient of positive emotion, which in turn expands your focus and may confer health benefits, such as improved resilience and immune function.  During an illness, says Bryant (Fred Bryant, psychologist at Loyola University in Chicago), 'you should savor not just for the sheer joy of it, but also to help yourself recover.'  Then too, he says, 'just because something bad is happening doesn't mean lots of good things aren't also.  They're two very different phenomena.  The joy and meaning you find in life and the current stressor -- an illness, a troubled relative, a career setback -- are separate concerns, and you can experience both.'

The best strategy for savoring is learning to pay rapt attention to carefully chosen top-down targets.  To practice this skill, Bryant suggests taking a 'daily vacation': spending twenty to thirty minutes focusing on something you enjoy or suspect you might but have never done.  Then, at the end of the day, you revisit and relish that pleasurable interlude and plan the next sojourn.  After seven days, he says, 'most people say,  "What a great week! I wish I could do that all of the time!" Well why not?'

Falling in love

"Yoga is the Cultivation of Conscious Presence. 
Conscious presence begins as a wrestling match with the mind and ends as a love affair with the present moment."
 - Bhagavad Gita 2.50

Joseph LaPage (Integrative Yoga Therapy) wrote this recently in a commentary on
the Bhagavad Gita.   The entire piece is longer and lovely but these lines have stayed with me.


It isn't that the wrestling match with the mind is required of us or necessary but we do it anyway.  Maybe it's just what we do before we fall in love.

Small things

I was reading Verlyn Klinkenborg's piece "Sometimes the Smallest Things" in the New York Times this morning.  I've been reminded several times lately how important it is to keep looking, keep seeing, keep being curious, keep questioning.  A little quote I was sent recently illustrated this by pointing out that it was only about 100 years ago that someone thought up having left and right shoes. What a relief that must have been to a lot of people.

Yoga refers to samskara, a Sanskrit word meaning impression left by a previous thought or action; latent tendency.  These impressions, repeated become so deep that they become habit, which means we no longer see these actions as choices.  If we don't see that there is choice, there is no choice. 

So dance with life fully....mindfully.  Maybe we'll discover we don't have two left feet!

The future we expect

According to neuroscience, even before events happen the brain has already made a prediction about what is most likely to happen, and sets in motion the perception, behaviors, emotions, physiologic responses and interpersonal ways of relating that best fit with what is predicted. In a sense, we learn from the past what to predict for the future and then live the future we expect.

--Regina Pally, The Predicting Brain

This is a chapter heading quote from the book "Less - Accomplishing More by Doing Less" by Marc Lesser (and yes, that is his real name). He goes on in this chapter to illustrate how assumptions get in our way with this amusing story.

"...many years ago, when I was a young Zen student at Green Gulch Farm in California, a problem arose among the residents: a sliding wooden door at the entrance of the student living area was regularly being left open. As a result, cold Pacific Ocean winds would sweep in and chill our shared living space. Announcements were made at least a half dozen times at community work meetings reminding people to keep this door shut. But it was continually found open, and over time this became a surprisingly divisive issue. People grew emotional, blaming and pointing fingers. How could Zen students not remember to close a door? How could they exhibit such thoughtlessness for their fellow students? In the midst of one of these tense meetings, Sierra, the farm's pet golden retriever, opened the door from the outside, enterered the living space, and joined the group. Of course, Sierra had the dexteriety to open a sliding wooden door. The group's false assumptions had nearly led to an all-out battle."

When you read this, does it bring up moments for you, like it did for me, when you either put your foot in it, or, by some grace, managed to not act on your false assumptions?

In his blog, Mr. Lesser says "These predictions and assumptions reside within our bodies; often it seems as though literally within the cells of our bodies. When I hear people say “people don’t change”; I understand why this seems to be the case – changing both the what and the way we predict is difficult. I think of this as one of the great strengths of mindfulness and meditation practice – by slowing down our worlds, we can begin to get a glimpse of our predictions and assumptions."

I feel relaxed when I am able to notice the arrival of assumption and set it aside to arrive in the next moment with some clarity and peace. No perfection expected here, I am simply continuing to be interested in the play of a life lived. Sometimes it's Art.

Practice

It's been hard to get on my yoga mat the past few days. Seems like it's been one thing after another...meet the furnace repair guy...take the cat to the vet....hang around while furnace get's replaced...take the cat to the vet (again). So this evening, much later than I usually practice, I was finally able to do a little yoga. The house was warm again and quiet. I just stepped onto my mat and let it happen.


Leaning my hips against the wall for an easy forward fold.


Playing with the wall in half moon pose (ardhachandrasana).


Draping into the wall for bowing warrior (parsvotonasana)


Then on the floor for pigeon to half forward fold to a twist to a side bend on each side.


Then I settled into a mindfulness meditation.


I watched my mind reach back into the busyness of the week and then come back into the stillness and the quiet. Mind moving back and forth, watching.

This moment is like this

Dancing with Life
by Phillip Moffitt

I've got such a HUGE pile of books next to my bed just now. This one I may take awhile to read because I came across this phrase that just resonated with me so much, I've stopped to play with it awhile. The author quotes buddhist monk Ajahn Sumedho as saying (frequently) "This moment is like this". It really helps me to "understand the difference between skillfully observing a difficult experience from within and unskillfully getting lost in the content of that experience". It actually works really well for any kind of experience. We're not always that great at really diving into the joyful experiences either. We can get caught up in wanting them to last instead of experiencing them "like this".