Introduction

In Wheatberries Coffee Shop, Sechelt BC, Canada, the following message is posted:

“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy. The chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans:

that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too.

All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred.

A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no one could have dreamed would have come their way.”

Whatever you do, or dream you can,
begin it.

Boldness has genius

power and magic in it.

Begin it now.

                                          -Goethe

In the August of 2010, this message awakened a long dormant need for adventure within me. The seeds of a book were summoned forth and with them a move across the world to a new way of life and meaning of living.

As I read those words my heart began to beat faster, my breath held suspended in my chest and my ears filled with a chant that stays with me still:

Begin it. Begin it now. Now begin it!

Awareness 1.65: Flowing in the Current

A teaser from the writing project I'm working on:

As I was chatting with a friend today, the subject of Awareness came up. She told me a beautiful story that I would like to share.


Driving down the street, my friend stopped as a man ran out into the road. He took up both lanes of traffic in his frenzy, all the while racing around in circles looking skyward.

It took her a moment to realize that the man was chasing a runaway kite. Far above the beeping horns, speeding bikes and racing cars, he had his gaze set upon his prize.

It’s moments like this that we miss when we are focused on our own narrow plot. Lovely chance encounters with life that will easily pass by those who walk with their eyes to the pavement.

The movie consumes us. We begin in control; the creator, the designer, but quickly the plot becomes the director, shuffling us about rather unconsciously.

Awareness is the art of stepping into the current that is already flowing all around you.



I find it often serves the imagination to approach an idea through the wide open eyes of a child.

Picture a hot summer day. You and your friends have trekked to the local watering hole to swim and splash and cool down. A large inflatable inner tube rests across your shoulders. You lower it into the water. A lazy current threads past at your feet, calling to you with the silvery flicker of fish and a shimmer of pebbles beneath the surface.

You test the water. It’s warm and inviting.

You step into the tube, clutching the sides with both hands. You drink in the scent of sun-warmed rubber, fresh water and blue skies.

The current is friendly with whispered promises of adventures yet to be written.

With a smile across your lips, you wriggle yourself into the centre of the tube, take a deep breath and close your eyes.

Your feet lift off and the water pulls you smoothly into its flow.

This is what it is to be Aware: a gentle surrender into the flowing eddies of life.

Two Legs Are Better Than Six

Winter has come to Ubud. This is meant to be the dry and cool season, though you wouldn’t know it by stepping out your door. Maybe the cold wet season. Damp and moldy season. Season when bugs literally come out of the woodwork.

Due to the, I’m told, unseasonable rains we’ve been having lately, I’ve been experiencing more than my casual weekly encounters with the multi-legged beings with whom I share my home.

Usually when the sun is out in full strength, the daily heat keeps insects far from sight, burrowed into whichever hellish corners they prefer to abide. A sort of tentative agreement is struck between this temperate zone Canadian and the jungle natives: they stay where I can’t see them, I pretend they aren’t there, and no one gets hurt.

The recent turn of bad weather has tipped the balance. My can of multi-purpose Baygon bug spray stands at the ready, promising to kill or maim spider, mosquito, midgie or roach. I scour my room each time I return home, fingers anxiously poised on the trigger, shuffling boxes and clothes just waiting for a scuttle, a skitter, the smallest sign of insect life.

This is war.



Any Last Words?



Three cockroaches have met their fate in as many days. There was Jandle-geddon by the rubbish bins on Thursday when the enemy made a last moment attempt to storm the kitchen before being decimated by my flip flop. The battle of Meg vs Roach-Under-My-Sink on Friday, where a generous cloud of Baygon was employed to rouse the enemy from his foxhole behind my toiletry bins. Today, I returned home to find my foe boldly resting in plain sight, practically sneering at me from fractured eyes until my dust pan came crashing down to seal the victory in my favour.

But I know they’re out there. It’s an uneasy truce as I tuck into bed at night, my electric mosquito repellant dispenser plugged in beside my bed. They know I am momentarily subdued with the lights out, vulnerable in the dark where by nature they conduct the majority of their business.

On top of the issue of unwanted houseguests, my human friends and I are also battling the silent threat of mold. Many of our homes have been built in areas any first rate engineer would shake their head at. Beside rivers. Over rice fields. Nestled into hill sides below Balinese family compounds with questionable water drainage practices.



A soft white fuzz has begun to flower from the base of my walls. I have set in face covered, bowls of bleach and sponge in hand, only to return three days later to find that any ground gained has been reclaimed.



All of my personal possessions have taken on the musty odour of jungle living. A clean dress hung in the wardrobe for more than a week requires a rewash. My most recent purchase is a bamboo unit, where at least in the open air my folded clothes have the potential to extend their shelf life. My ceiling fan, blackened around the edges of its blades, spins guard every day, trying to keep the air circulating and the humidity of my room at a minimum.



One begins to long for the hot heavy days of months gone by, when clothes could be hung from lines in the sun to bake to a crisp in half an hour. When mattresses could be leaned against a house to air, and a good stiff breeze was all you needed to reclaim scarves and sarongs alike.

As I write, an uneasy peace has been temporarily negotiated. The rains have subsided. It’s 5:30am, a time when the house is usually given over to its night loving occupants. My bedside lamp stands guard as I type. For the moment, its artificial rays cast a glow of protection around me.



The floor is littered with bodies that did not survive the night. For various reasons, their insect lives have escaped them. A final fluttering of wings. A cessation of multiple creeping legs. Whether they met their fate in the fumes of my plug-in repellant, or became the half eaten snack of my beloved nesting geckos, their blood thirsty whine will shiver my spine no more.



For now, all is quiet.

But peace can’t last forever.



"The only problem with bumping into a cockroach on Friday, is the fact that you have no idea where it has been on Wednesday."









What did I learn?

The teacher had never liked my Down Dog. It had been a subject of much contention over the week I had spent in her 100hr Advanced Teacher Intensive. Too long. Heels too high. Not stable enough. Shoulders slouching. Jaw clenched. That day in her class, I made my way into a pose I had taken hundreds of times and waited for her to walk by me. I steeled myself against the coming critique and breathed deeply.


But the correction didn’t come. She didn’t pass by. She stopped. I waited. Then to my surprise, as all of the decisions I had made about this woman imploded around my ears, instead of a cue, the teacher kneeled down beside me and lowered her voice to a whisper, “Now that is a Down Dog I wouldn’t fuck with.”



When you take a yoga teacher training, veterans will often warn you that it may take months, even years, to sift through what you’ve taken in. An intensive 30 days or even a week require time and patience to slowly unpack. Even at this stage, almost seven months since my 100hr teacher’s intensive, I am only just beginning to see what I learned about yoga and myself in 8 short days.

Short days. Let’s be honest, they were long and hellish on levels I cannot even begin to describe. Grueling. Testing. Trying. Every single one without exception ended with me bursting into the family compound in tears, involving hours on the part of my dear friends to slowly piece me back together.

But not for a moment have I felt that those days were lacking in worth.

The hardest part of the training for me was that I was surrounded by tried and tested instructors who had earned their battle stripes in studios and workshops around the world. Many of the students who didn’t carry this merit badge had taken hundreds of hours of training more than I had. Those that did not fall into these two categories benefited from a pre-existing student relationship with the teacher. Immediately, this put me at the bottom of the pecking order I’ve come to realize is an insidious part of the yoga community. I felt like I was starting behind the eight ball.

The teacher I chose to take my 200hr training with a year ago on the west coast of Canada is a man whom I have come to love and respect for both his ability to teach and his broad knowledge of anatomy, yoga history and philosophy. His world view is classic Tantra at its finest: a compassionate non-dualistic perspective of the world that I very much honor and continue to deepen in my own life and practice. Plus, he has a sense of humor and plays a mean guitar.

Because he does not claim a singular tradition, but instead chooses to draw from many, his credibility was called into question in many situations during my week long intensive. I found myself stuck in the precarious position of defending a teacher I admire while trying to prove my own beliefs.

Differing philosophies aside, I appreciated the opportunity to dig deep into the reasons for what I claim to be true, and the chance to begin to defend them to my peers. It became good practice for being able to teach my own methods as a teacher to students who by the nature of their position will (and should) question me. In the end I am grateful for the debates, the challenges and the critiques of the foundation of my world view and teaching style.

It is not my desire to resolve the conflicts of that week in this essay. Many have evaporated in the months since the training as I have tried my ideas out in the arena of the classroom. As I become more confident in the seat of a teacher, I am able to chalk up disagreements about philosophies and teaching styles with my peers as part of the multi-coloured tapestry of the origins of our art. To the rest I can apply one simple phrase that my mother imparted to me the first week of kindergarten, “Meg, not everyone is going to like you.”

My desire here is to share what I learned. Allow me to preface by saying there are many things that I gained in the training, but the most important of these, the most helpful to me now seven months out, is the ability to communicate more clearly in the classroom.

Just as not a single one of my faith or practice beliefs were left off the discussion table, each over used phrase, flowery transition, and “ing” word were singled out before the class and called into question.

The most effective exercises with dialogue in the classroom involved the teachers using only 3 short cues to transition their student through various poses. I started to ask new questions of myself: did the cue help or hinder? Was the language necessary to convey what I wanted the student to do? Is it really important in parsvakonasana to ask a student to feel the light of the world shine forth from your heart to all the happy enlightened beings of the divine creation?

I learned that in an effort to make a class more artistically pleasing, teachers often confuse and muddle students, detracting from whatever experience might organically be developing on the mat. I have witnessed examples of this in studios time and time again since those 8 days, and find myself thinking how much that teacher could benefit from a week long intensive.

As I began to apply these distillation methods to my teaching post-training, I began to realize other truths as well.

For example, who am I to tell a student what they should or should not be feeling on a subtle level in a pose? If a student is entering into a space in agnistambhasana where they have suddenly realized they have a piriformis muscle and are communing with it on an intimate level, telling them to picture sunshine and lollipops while they go deep into their centre is going to make them feel as though they are missing the mark.

I have become more prone to give cues about anatomy than about philosophy, and to allow my students to have their own individual experience from that jumping off point. I think yoga instructors often run the risk of becoming like religious preachers to a captive audience.

My job is to teach them yoga.

My job is to not get in their way.

So every time I reach for a word that ends in “ing”, and choose a more direct cue instead I think of Denise. Whenever I take a moment to choose three words instead of 20 that might help a student struggling with a posture, I thank Denise. And each time I observe a student in a strong, individual expression of a pose that is in every way safe and effective, yet not exactly how I would do it, all I can think of are a few simple words that changed my practice forever, “I wouldn’t fuck with that Down Dog.”

Wahe, guru. Wahe.

Restorative Transformation

As a teacher a deep compassion arises in restorative yoga
    for the being in the body that is reclining there before you
    you begin to realize
    that their body is just like your own
            with aches and pains that plague it
            with trials and gains that aged it
                    threaded by victories and misses
                    stained by tears, peppered by kisses

A moment arises for the teacher
      where separation disappears
      it is now you reclining there on that mat
      it is your own self treating your body with care
            and it is this student
           who lays there at your feet
                   who transforms by the light of compassion
                   into your teacher

Where Palm Trees Make Way for Pines

Growing up in Padang Bai


I live in Bali.

Sometimes I forget that- like the way you forget that you have a spleen, or that a large percentage of the population has never watched Dirty Dancing.

Driving home from work, it will hit me- I’m looking at palm trees. It’s February and there’s no snow on the ground. That conversation I just had was in Bahasa.


It’s when I realize that the foreign has become familiar that it really sinks in. This country has taught me so many things about life that I now take entirely for granted. I’d like to share a few of my favourites.

Driving past a group of fierce looking local boys, hanging out in front of a local warung, I fully expect their faces to turn to me and break into a row of warm, flirtatious grins.

When I pass by an Ibu carrying 85ilbs of cement building blocks on top of her ancient head, I know that a smile, a nod and a softly spoken, “Sore, ‘Bu,” (“Afternoon, Mother,”) will be rewarded with a proud presentation of five perfect teeth.

I have learned to expect that a beep of my bike horn will not make a Bali dog get out of my way, but that barking wildly will make a pack scatter from the street.

That a laundry lady you can trust is worth her weight in gold.

That taxi drivers chorusing, “Taksi, taksi!”, who frequently annoy visitors, are often just lonely or curious and always appreciate a conversation as much as they do a paying customer.

That good quality alcohol is a luxury most of the world cannot afford, right up there with fine dark chocolate, cheese, and anything electronic beginning with an “I”.

That modifying an order at a restaurant is absolutely never worth the confusion that will ensue. Trust me on this. The craving you have for extra cheese might cost you an extra hour of your life.

But I have also learned that a people who were alien to me a year ago can quickly become neighbours.

That the passage of days bend and warp until you cannot recall a time when you lived in another place. That accents blur, memories fade, and it quickly becomes difficult to fathom a land where strangers faces don’t always bloom into smiles and where palm trees make way for pines.


A random happy face left behind on a coaster by the condensation on my water glass

Karma

I awoke to the sounds of our peaceful garden home in chaos. Julie and Honey were barking wildly, despite efforts to hush them. I arrived on the scene to find Murdi speaking with a pair of guests. In her outstretched hand was a puppy, soiled and scared. The couple had heard it crying out last night, trapped in a rice field ditch. They had taken pity on it, wrapped it in a towel, and nursed it through the night. In the light of day they didn't know what to do with the puppy and had, as we all do in a domestic crisis, called on Murdi.

Murdi cluck clucked and tried to comfort all involved. In one hand, the soiled towel, in the other this tiny scrap of life. Despite Murdi's soothing tone, I knew this kid had very little chance of seeing the sunset. This corner of the world is absolutely packed to the rafters with four legged threads of life barely tethered down. Our own complex feeds and cares for four dogs. A fifth mouth to feed? Unlikely.

An interesting background to this story is the Balinese view of dogs. They believe that these street urchins are people who didn't live well in their last life, (gamblers, drunks, wife-beaters) and have returned in a lower physical form to serve a sort of penance. They also believe that since these beggars munch on the ground offerings in the streets, which are made to the lower gods, that they are somehow in cahoots with those deities. A resounding strike two. It's a double-edged lesson in humility.

Because the Balinese believe these dogs were once their relations, they do tend to care for them more than other non-human forms- there is a definite effort not to hit them with a motor bike or car, most of the street dogs are fed and housed at night, and there is a general sense of compassion towards them for their lot in life, sort of like we would have for a convicted family member in prison.

But they also believe this is the soul's chance to make amends, to sort out unfinished business from the last trip around the sun.

All that is maternal in my nature took one look at this little monkey and began to quiver. There is a place in the centre of my chest that physically feels as though it's falling in in these moments of intense cluckiness. Murdi was heading off to consult Ketut on the matter and I stopped her, reaching out for one of the soiled packets in her hands.

A set of brown, intelligent eyes gazed up at me. The way Murdi had been holding the dog had convinced it that it wasn't long for this world. Now that it was snuggled in against my heart, hope began to wash across it's eyes. The skinny little stick of a tail began to wag hesitantly, then finally picked up speed.

The scrawny body was wet and bony. Weeping sores and gashes covered him where fur should be. I can only guess they were the tell tale signs of mange and lost battles. I've never seen a dog in that condition up close. The smell was one that people of privilege are unaccustomed to- death, decay, disease.

Murdi returned, “He very sick.”
I nodded, “Yah, I smell him.”
“I give him to Ketut. Maybe he help him.”

We shared a look. Ketut is a sensible, compassionate man who feeds as many mouths as he can. But another puppy would need a lot of special care and attention, not to mention the possibility of infecting the other dogs in the complex. Maybe one of the western animal shelters in town would take the puppy in. Maybe...there was nothing I could do. I felt powerless. Helpless. Like I had let those brown eyes down.






Julie, a lucky Bali dog







I handed the pup off to Murdi and walked back to my house to sort out my emotions. As I changed my stained t-shirt and showered off the feeling of chest cave and tears, I wondered about the theory of reincarnation, and the Balinese version of the story.

If I am to believe that life on this planet is all part of a bigger wheel where we slide up and down the spokes each time around in a body, who exactly is metering out the justice? Does this idea not taste of the same hell and heaven of which most westerners have at least a passing familiarity?

And then a thought crossed my mind that hasn't shaken free. Instead of contemplating karma as some universal slap on the wrist for bad behaviour, perhaps the key is to look at this place as a life school for advanced learning. As long as we're breathing, the potential for growth is there.

That pair of hopeful eyes and I each took in a few advanced placement lessons today. He learned in the arms of the guests who rescued him that the world wasn't an entirely shitty place. He saw in my teary blues that the world is absolutely full of tall two-legged bleeding hearts. And I learned that the idea of universal punishment doesn't sit well on a falling in chest.

If I ever see him again, I think I'll call him Karma.



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