Cream Cheese

Welcome to Sutra a Day.

My hairdresser is a 26 year old girl who alternately knows and is above everything and is vulnerable and sensitive. She is voluptuous, often wears an Electric Forest t-shirt and looks at you expectantly through wire-rimmed round glasses. Her hair is a different shade of red with every visit. She likes me, I think, because I sit back in my chair and just let her talk. I like her because I just sit back in my chair and I don’t have to talk.

I sat in the spinny chair last night, hair foiled up like I was trying to protect myself from alien mind controllers, making a to do list in my little red notebook, enjoying the space of silence as she went to eat dinner and recognized that I have taken on more things in life than I really know how to manage comfortably. 

Yoga, yes, I’m passionate, let’s do it! MFA, yes, this is the degree my soul should have done in my twenties, yes, not too late, let’s do it! Refugee org, yes, must do something for those who need help, yes, let’s volunteer for them! Work, well, i have to pay my bills, etc. In all this doing, the space for practice, for being, gets swallowed up. 

I once started (and didn’t finish) a short story in which people would go to the salon, change their hair, and walk out literally different people. In my head it seemed like such a great idea – people are always hoping that some external change will create some new, “better” version of themselves. In the story, they were still there inside (I guess some version of their past ego was), but no one recognized them anymore, they were seen as who they wanted to be – or thought they wanted to be. It wasn’t all it was cracked up to be to be someone new.

I didn’t finish. This story was hard to write. I often seem to lose confidence in myself and my ideas when things are hard – but perhaps that’s a topic for another sutra a day. 

Practice Makes Practice

12. Abhyasa vairagyabhyam tannirodha. “These mental modifications are restrained by practice and non-attachment.”

This sutra comes without a lot of pontificating from Sri Satchidananda. He basically validates my idea that at least a portion of the sutras are that letting go handbook I was looking for. Practice is really a part of that letting go. 

But, he also helps me understand the previous sutra, the one where I was so baffled that dreams and daydreams would be the way these MnMs (mental modifications) arrived. I realize now that he wasn’t saying that emotions, sensations, colors, songs, that date or marker of an event, whatever, weren’t triggering memories, for example. He was talking about the next step. The delivery method, like the bagel, delivers the cream cheese. And that’s why we are working on our minds. The dates, the colors, the songs, they exist independently. It’s the mind we can – maybe – control. 

13. Tatra sthitau yatno’bhyasah. “Of these two, effort toward steadiness of mind is practice”

I’ve been meditating every morning – mostly. I sit cross-legged on a cork block in dim light in the guest room which doubles as Gokul’s office and a gear room. There are quickdraws, cams, nuts, slings, harnesses, ropes, chalk bags, etc. everywhere – it’s like a climber’s version of a Christmas village. Still, it’s the space I have. In and out, I breathe while my thoughts dance in front of my mind. I do this for 5 – 10 minutes. Sometimes it feels like 2, sometimes it feels like 30. Time is slippery that way. 

Satchi tells me this is not enough. That it is not enough to practice for a few days or for a few minutes a day, but that you must become, “eternally watchful, scrutinizing every thought, every word and every action.”

I think that what I’m doing is a start, of course, but it’s a reminder that intention is an important part of life and of living. That a few minutes of meditation in the morning must also translate into a mindful way of living. That thoughts and observation translate to words and actions. That change comes from the inside. 

Stay tuned, apparently in the next three sutras, we learn how to do this. Wheee!