Thai Yoga Massage: Snippets

I am in a cab, late for the Thai yoga massage training I've been awaiting for weeks. I'd feel worse about being late on the first day if I didn't feel so exhausted and nauseated. I slept till 7:30, when I had intended to run first and arrive early.

While in cab: we pass by Lawrence House. Hi, Mama.


I can get my tattoo now. I've made some brave decisions and commitments. Maybe that is what I was waiting for.


As I sit in my training, I see a light glancing off the window across the way. It's a small ball of fire, seemingly disconnected from anything terrestrial. At the very least, it's source doesn't show through our big window. It's only there for a second, and nobody else seems to notice. Hi, Ma.

I write a message to her on the bathroom wall, in the provided chalk.


During our discussion of the four Brahma Viharas, someone says, decisively, "I'm going to be okay with that." It's not a prediction - it's an action. This distinction knocks me flat for a second. I think about what such a pronouncement could do to and for my life.


Upekkha, our teacher tells us, can be defined in English as equanimity or as non-prejudice. I am struck by the link between those two concepts. I have already linked metta and chesed, but that's because the English translation is the same. This comes from the other side. As I muse over the connection between the words, I realize that part of my own difficulty with the idea of losing contol can be mitigated by the following mindset: so I didn't get to do the thing I wanted or accomplish the thing I expected. What will I get out of this day instead? Get is active here, not passive.

In the discussion of the term, someone brings up her bipolar diagnosis. She says that she renames the stages in order to see them in a different light and (I suspect, knowing something about naming) in order to be more in control. She also wears grey when it reflects the complexities of her mood. I wonder if I have such a power color.

Another way to look at it, in the language of this practice: tension is potential energy that's been tied in knots.

Sunday Morning Thoughts

"Throughout my whole life, during every minute of it, the world has been gradually lighting up and blazing before my eyes until it has come to surround me, entirely lit up from within."
- Teilhard de Chardin

Nick Flynn quotes de Chardin in his memoir. He quotes a lot of people at the beginning, and then he shifts into his own voice. He mentions that catharsis, in Greek, is more of a practice than an event (282). I think that this might be the perfect description of grief for which I've spent three and a half months searching. I conceptualizer it as a Derridean event (my iPad does not know this adjective - it autocorrects to "deride and").

I open my window to air things out. I lie in my sunbeam, just my legs coated in its rays. I keep an eye on the cat, ready for her surgery 24 hours ahead of time. I know I need to get up, but I lie still a moment longer, and listen to the birds hiring, trying to turn this event into a practice.

Thoughts on the Brahma Viharas: Upekkha

Here we are at the final of the Four Brahma Viharas:

1. Metta: loving kindness
2. Karuna: compassion
3. Mudita: sympathetic joy
4. Upekkha: equanimity

This is maybe the hardest brahma vihara of all for me. I live my life on an emotional rollercoaster, and I always have. I tend toward the happy, except in periods of sadness. This year of such deep mourning finds me in a near-constant spiral between the two extremes. 

Buddhanet again: "In the practice of Upekkha Bhavana one first selects the neutral person. Bearing him [sic] in mind one reflects that he is the owner of his own Kamma. [...] When one does so with understanding, the even state of mind with regard to the person arises." What interests me about this passage is the notion of equanimity as a characteristic of a person as well as a way of relating to that person. "The neutral person," it seems to me, isn't necessarily an even-keeled one, but they may be touched by your equanimity towards them. It's a little bit like paying it forward.

When I think of trying to regard someone with that "even state of mind" even as my joys and sorrows cloud around me all the time, I imagine ascending to a small cloud, above the riot of sunshine and rain, and observing the person from there. Up there, all of the preconceptions and assumptions and other baggage one might carry with regard to a person fades away, and all you are left with is the connection between that person and you. The world might be a better place if we all had those little clouds to tote around.

Thoughts on the Brahma Viharas: Mudita

Halfway done. Now, the third of the Four Brahma Viharas:

1. Metta: loving kindness
2. Karuna: compassion
3. Mudita: sympathetic joy
4. Upekkha: equanimity

I've gotten better at sympathetic joy over the years. Buddhanet defines it thusly: "Mudita means sympathetic joy or rejoicing at others' happiness and prosperity. It is the opposite of jealousy or envy, and therefore it is suitable for one wishing to overcome it. The object and near cause of sympathetic joy is the prospering or happy being. So one who wishes to develop mudita should select such a person who is doing well spiritually and materially. Preference will of course be given to spiritual happiness as it is a more true and lasting type."


I'm pretty prone to jealousy and envy in a knee-jerk kind of way. As I've gotten older, I've worked harder and harder on making it just a knee-jerk reaction, and making congratulations just as automatic. I still get envious of people when they have something I want, but automating congratulations makes it easier to be happy for them immediately, and then when I reflect on it, I find an even more genuine kind of happiness for them.

I also think that part of being able to practice mudita is keeping joy about your own circumstances and achievements close to the surface. What better way to combat envy of what another has than to stare straight at your own pride in what you have? It' a rationalized way of getting to mudita, maybe, but it's a start.

Thoughts on the Brahma Viharas: Karuna

On to the second of the Four Brahma Viharas:

1. Metta: loving kindness
2. Karuna: compassion
3. Mudita: sympathetic joyt
4. Upekkha: equanimity

It seems to me that one immediate difference between metta and karuna is one of vectors. Loving kindness doesn't have to go in any one direction or have any particular target, but compassion is transitive. (It's also reflexive, but more on that later.) As the reliable Buddhanet has it, "it is clear that the degree and quality of compassion comes with the degree of understanding of what suffering is."

My life is turbulent right now - in the last six months, I have lost, to illness and death, two close friends and, worst of all, my mother. Now my uncle is dying, as well. Now feels like a particularly apt time to think about compassion. I'm receiving a lot of it, from more directions than I probably even know. I'm working on showing it to myself as much as I can. I tend to be pretty exigent where habits and expectations are concerned, and I'm trying to learn how to loosen up a bit, to give my grieving soul a little more freedom to breathe.

I'm also making sure that I show compassion to others. Even so-called "silly problems" can be important - we all have them - and I've been taking care to let my friends know that they can still vent to me and confide in me. If I haven't said it directly, let this be their notice that this is true. I wouldn't be able to get out of bed every day without the love that I receive from friends and family on an hourly basis, and I need to make sure that they know that I'm sending it right back, just as my mother always did.

Life Lessons from Sarah Manguso's Two Kinds of Decay

I sped through Sarah Manguso's Two Kinds of Decay over the weekend. It fits in with my grief and death books - the familiar atmosphere of a hospital, doctors who can't insert IVs, worried family members. The difference is that Manguso lives, and writes another book, which just came for me from the library.

The book is a fascinating study in the representation of illness. Other reviewers have pointed to Manguso's background as a poet to detail the lyricism of her descriptions and the litheness of her form. Often there is just as much white space on a page as there are words. Pairs of sentences stick together and stand out more, one thinks, than most sentences that are clustered together. What would writing be like if we adopted this convention? It fits poetic descriptions of illness and wellness and in between, but would it fit news? Book reviews? Financial statements?

Looked at through my lens of grief, some of her sentences grabbed me by the throat. From page 82: "I started listening to Oldies 103 because it reminded me that something had happened to me since I was sick, and that I was different. And that even if I forgot to stay that way, I'd keep the habit of listening to the new radio station, and it might remind me." I have taken on several new habits and interests in the three short months since my mother's death (spinning, composting, and, to my mother's certain chagrin, fancy makeup). My current favorite authors are ones I didn't know much about when she was alive (though she probably had read at least one of them). Manguso's take on beginnings and endings that center on a dramatic and painful event is more optimistic than mine. It helps me cut away at my tendency to over-memorialize, one which I've miraculously been relatively free of since Mom died, and one which would surely hobble my recovery. (The line between memorializing and fetishizing is a provocative one that I'd like to take on in another post.)

In line with my current interest in the conflict (and harmonies) between movement and stasis, Manguso says this: "I didn’t know it at the time, but I was paying attention. I was not hoping I would learn how to do it, or despairing that I might not learn how to do it. I was unaware that I was learning or practicing or doing anything" (109). The "it" she's talking about doesn't matter for my purposes (and you really should read the book anyway, so go sleuth it out!). I'm interested in the idea of not realizing that you are learning or improving or changing or even backsliding in the moments in which you are doing it. Such confusion is nearly constant - we all, as the cliche goes, learn new things every day - but there must be moments when it doesn't actually need attention paid to it - the point is the learning, not the fact that you know you're doing it. 

Since I'm thinking about the battle between anger and loving kindness anyway, this sentence struck me, too: "I’d have to do harder things before my self-regard lost the mean air that had inflated it" (137). How many of us can say that we puff ourselves up with niceness instead of jealousy or competitiveness or other negative forces? I think one of the common misconceptions about sickness is that it turns people into angels. My mother was a sweetheart, but she certainly got frustrated - less than she could have, in my opinion. Part of what Manguso is doing here is asserting her own right to a complex humanity full of power, fear, anger, meanness, love, and courage. We all have that - maybe it's time to start looking harder at the relative proportions.

Maybe these thoughts aren't life lessons for everyone, but they made me stop and think during a hectic weekend in which I was trying pretty hard not to do either. My mother was my calming agent. Now I have to learn to do it for myself. I'm thirty years old, and I'm re-learning to breathe and be still. 

Thoughts on the Brahma Viharas: Metta

The Four Brahma Viharas are:
1. Metta: loving kindness
2. Karuna: compassion
3. Mudita: sympathetic joy
4. Upekkha: equanimity

I'm going to devote four posts in the next two weeks to an examination of each of these as part of my homework for a Thai yoga massage training I'm about to take.

Metta is a word that I've known for most of my life, at least in terms of the sounds of its letters. My mother had a college friend named Metta. People talk about it a lot in yoga and in peace and justice circles in which I participate. When I started studying Judaism, I learned it again as chesed, which also translates to loving kindness. (It's interesting that the term in English is mostly used as a translation for other terms. I'd bet there's a word for it in Irish.)

Buddhanet (linked above) says that "the direct enemy of Metta is anger." In the wake of my mother's death (and the deaths of two close friends preceding hers and additional family illness shortly after her death), I've spent at least part of most days angry in some form. Now feels like a perfect time for me to take stock of the relative frequency of anger and metta in my life, and work on decreasing the former by increasing the latter. I can't reject my anger entirely, because that wouldn't be true to how I feel, but I'm happy to try to make it smaller. I first learned that love vanquishes anger from my mother, and then from The Beatles. The concept seems much more simplistic in English than in Sanskrit, but not necessarily any easier to deploy. Without having looked at the other three principles, I wonder if there is any sort of enemy of sadness. It can't be happiness. I feel both simultaneously on a regular basis.

What's especially interesting to me in the texts is the link between Metta and concentration. Any time I'm angry, I definitely feel that my anger makes it hard for me to focus on anything but my anger, and it makes it hard to show loving kindness to anyone, least of all the object of my anger. Sometimes movement is the only way to shake me out of it. That's deliberate. Ive also had what i think of as surprise infusions of loving kindness toward a person I'm angered by. Sometimes it starts with pity or regret, but it ends in a rush of love. Even if it's fleeting, the fact that it sometimes appears makes me wonder if my yoga is having more of an impact on my spirit than I sometimes think.

Buddhanet also says: "The cultivation of this state of mind [of Metta] is called Bhavana or normally translated as meditation. When we cultivate it, it becomes strong, powerful and useful. It brings us abundant, deep and intense peace and happiness. The cultivation of it involves the following:
1 The concentration of metta. Concentrated, it becomes strong and powerful.
2 Metta is also trained so that it can be given to anybody. That is, it is flexible, versatile, universal and boundless.
3 When this potent force has become powerful we can make use of it to produce many marvels to make everyone's life better.
To do this effectively one needs the method. Acquiring the skill requires patience. With experience one improves."

That's a lot to unpack, but I quote it all in case it's helpful for someone, and to remind myself to return to it when I need a metta boost.

Bringing things back around to the beginning, a simplistic look at the sounds of the word compares it to the English adjective meta, one of my favorite words. Intellectually, I know they don't have any connection through their shared sounds, but more imaginatively, the concept of metts seems pretty darn meta to me. It should be, at the very least - couldn't we all use more loving kindness that, in referring back to itself, never ends?

Little Things

I think that the little things kept my mother going through cancer, since so many of the more traditionally important ones were off-limits or impossible. When you can't go outside, the tweeting of a bird at the window is a bright spot in a monotonous day. When all your body does is hurt, an hour nap is a beautiful thing. Three months after her death, as I spiral into one of the most suffocating phases of grief (when the Toad Cave looms behind everything I do), I notice that the little things are all that feel important, some days. I only have a small fraction of my normal energy, so I have to be proud of myself for running in the unseasonable cold when before, I did it every day. A caring note from a friend means the world.

I have been thinking a lot about how to pull myself out of the cave. I discovered that a midday bath, in my particular bathroom, is a soul rejuvenator. (Listening to Charles Bradley at the same time helps even more.) I relaxed in the bath salted water in my tub, adding more and more hot water to the lukewarm silk of the bath oils. Then I had an exquisite moment under the shower, looking at the sun streaming through the water, making its way from the skylight to my face. For just a minute, I felt like everything might actually be okay, like my mom always used to tell me.

Some of my more prosaic small pleasures include: Vitamin Water Zero, warm breezes, a cat purring, my living room on a sunny morning, my block at night.

Hisham Matar, Multilingual Selves, and Memo(ir/y) of Another

I discovered Hisham Matar by chance, on the New Yorker's podcast. I started listening idly, thinking that he was a writer my mother would have liked - she liked memoir, and tales of faraway places, especially the Middle East. I had to catch my breath when he described writing about his kidnapped father: "the challenge is trying to retain the person, and not have this event abstract them." I read this as how the hard part is keeping the person whole, or, in my case, as alive as possible. The challenge is to represent my mother as I knew her in a way that is recognizable to the others who knew her, and that is as authentic to her as I can make it.

Authenticity has always been an academic interest of mine, and something bordering on a personal fascination. When I lived in France, I wondered where my American self stopped and my French self began. I could tell that they were different. The tones of their voices were different. Their attitudes were different, too. My French self was tentative, in some ways, when words failed me, but also fairly argumentative, yet more polite with shopkeepers (as any Parisian will tell you, a pretty important skill). (Here I go again with the refracted self.)

Matar goes on: in writing a memoir, "the motor of the imagination, [which] gets excited about these black holes of not knowing, binds us to the person." The mysteries of my mother's life - the stories I have to reconstruct, the questions I can't ask, the specific emotions or thoughts to which I might not have had access - can only be filled in by me, now, and by the others left behind who loved her. We recreate her every time we talk about her, and we ensure that she will never disappear every time we say her name or picture her face or share a memory. The mystery, Matar soothes me, isn't as frightening as my mother's loss is. It's a way of knowing her in a different way, from a different distance, but it helps keep her alive all the same. 

As I write this post, I watch an Italian movie (by way of Austrian filmmakers), La Pivellina. The tale, of a red-haired circus performer who comes across an abandoned two year-old, utterly charms me. I have to look up to catch the subtitles and really understand (since, at this point, my Italian matches directly up with that of the eponymous toddler). But sometimes I let the sound wash over me, in its music that I'm not yet able to decipher. Head down, looking at my writing, I try to catch intonation and inflection. I try to guess what the characters are talking about. It's not entirely unlike trying to represent a person on a page in the way Matar describes it, particularly when you are delving into their past, a half reconstructing a story you've been told, and half inventing it.