A Tattoo Meditation

I got my fourth tattoo this weekend. It was my largest (size of a face), longest (two hours), most complexly designed (lots of little lines running over differently sized curves), and most intense (on ribs and touching hips).

Getting a tattoo is so meditative, despite its intensity (and I don't call the feeling pain - it doesn't operate on me the way that pain does). I kept very still, didn't clench my toes or fists, and barely had any muscle spasms (something that did happen with my first hip tattoo). I breathed into any discomfort, and tried to still my thoughts. I imagined my body moving up to the needle instead of it moving down into me - when I mentioned it, my artist concurred that that really works. I turned on my yoga teaching mindset and thought about which bandhas I was engaging. I traced the sensations like a map across my hip and rips, trying to determine where it felt better (I think my back ribs felt best, with hip and front ribs coming in as more intense). I also noticed the times when I was wrong about where the needle actually was. I bathed in the buzz and the smell of the ink.

I didn't think twice about wandering through the shop with my shirt hiked up (which, to be fair, I don't think twice about in kickboxing, either). I walked barefoot (same). What I said, when the artist and my friend asked about how I felt, was that I was okay. And I was. When it got tough, that moment ended, often replaced by a good moment. Sometimes just letting my gaze unravel its focus was helpful. Sometimes I curled one set of toes. I though about my mom, my ex-boyfriends, my friends, my cat, my homework. I got Writing Ideas. I thought about all the things the tat and I would experience together. I took in as much of the experience as I could, and when I left, I felt a high like the one I got after my first (fifteen minute) tat.

First Book. Next Installment.

I read the following section of my memoir at the 2014 Winter Follies at Spoke the Hub. (Please never spell my name this non-way.) See if you can find one of the title contenders.

Dedicated, as always, to my amazing mom.

The year my mom died - 2013, last year - wasn't light. It sat on my shoulders and pressed me deeper to the earth, the earth they say receives us when we die. I saw the worst ravages of cancer claim her formerly healthy body. It only took nine months. She fought her physical demons and I fought my emotional ones, both of us staring down the prospect of our little unit of two being torn apart. It was unthinkable. I spent most of my childhood thinking it was unthinkable. Now it's my reality.

In another sense, though, the year was suffused with glow. It was the year I learned to take myself upside down in the advanced yoga classes I used to shy away from. It was the year I learned to lighten my own load of grief, discovering a fierce kickboxing warrior inside my runner's frame. It was a year with a lot of self-discovery and love along with grief and loneliness. It was the year in which I had to find a middle way - between that of my life with my mother and my life without her. It would take a book to tell you our story, a book that I'm writing, a book that will have this in it. It only takes a few minutes to tell you that she lived, she was so important, and I miss her with every fiber of the being that she made.

In The Long Goodbye, her memoir of her mother's illness and death, Meghan O’Rourke talks about mourners thinking that their lost loved one is somewhere else and will appear. I empathize. For me, it's like my mother is just around the corner, or behind an invisible wall that I can't beat down, no matter how hard I learn to punch. I wonder if some part of me thinks that writing this will bring my mother back. My words will somehow alchemize a turning back in time, or a sea change in biochemistry, a putting-together of rended matter. It sounds plausible to my little girl brain. The four year-old who lives in me doesn’t believe in the finality of death or what it does to the earthly body. The yoga teacher that I am now is starting not to either. It's more comforting that way, and there are holy traditions behind it.

I try to do things my mom did, to carry on her many, many small good works, working up to the bigger ones. I pledge to my local NPR affiliate in part because she always did. I compost like she did. I say, "Hey kids" the way that she did, and "I'm well, 'n you?". I wear her earrings and, when at home sometimes, her robe. I kept it folded next to my pillow for some months after her death. When I was tiny and she would leave me with a babysitter for a few hours, I would wear the same robe, and wouldn't go to sleep without it. I'm in grad school pursuing my Ph.D, and I'll be the second Dr. Ashton in our family, after my mother. I always knew it was something I wanted to do, but now I realize that it's in my blood.

Here's some of what I've learned in the year without her. Live your life as fully as you can. Don't save anything for a special occasion - use it now. Use it when it calls to you. Say the word love until you can live inside it. Make room for serendipity, and room within time. Breathe more deeply. Know that some things return. Some experiences repeat. This is the life you're living. Live fully within it. Nobody's keeping score but you, and guess what? You don't have to either. More people admire you than you even can imagine. And so many people love you. 

Yoga Is

I've been thinking about the general pressure in the fitness world to make yoga "for" something. I read a lot of fitness mags and get headlines emailed to me, and they often scream, "Yoga Poses for a Better Butt!" "Tone and Tighten with Yoga!" "Yoga Your Way to a Sexy You!" (I made that last one completely up. It seems plausible.)

Look, I'm a yoga teacher, and I've been practicing for years. I know that yoga tightens and tones. But what bugs me about headlines like these, particularly at a time of year that is all-too often focused on "improvement" and "resolutions" and "doing better" (phrases that I am all too susceptible to believing, just like you may be) - well, hell, let's keep some practices sacred. Let's let yoga be. It is what it is and it does what it does, but it shouldn't be saddled with reasons. We have enough pressure out there. Let's keep our spiritual practices empty and see what comes to fill them.

Teaching Out in the Open

All of my teachers this semester hold their tricks and challenges out in the open. Some have shared personal stories in the service of the topic at hand. All have discussed their scholarly practices. It's a level of academic engagement in the highs and lows of the profession that I haven't seen since the conversations I used to have with my mother, a professor of psychology. The communication lines were different in my master's program. Though many of my professors there shared their honest experiences, there's a level of professionalization in the doctoral context that I think institutionalizes their honesty a bit. We're being treated, to some degree, as future colleagues, which is such a meaningful move. My yoga teachers make similar moves that chip away against the divide between teacher and student. They talk about the poses that challenge them, problems they overcame, things that bother them. They do it with love, underlining the yogic belief that we are all works in progress. 

This aspect of my academic and professional training makes me think differently about what kind of teacher I want to be. There's less performative drama and less hierarchy, but more listening. I try to be this kind of yoga teacher, and next year I hope to be this kind of college teacher as well. The wall between teacher and student breaks down when these qualities come in, and it will be my challenge to keep that wall down, or at least low, in lecture settings and in situations when I need to discipline. A version of the latter scenario can come up in yoga - when a student attempts a pose for which the class hasn't warmed up, for example - and in those situations, I've found it's pretty easy to shift from warm to stern and back again. The balance of that in my college teaching experiences will be interesting to compare.

Multi-Tasking with Yoga

I know. Not at all the point. Yoga is about focus, about yoking (literally) the physical body to the breath with the ultimate goal of releasing each individual's potential energy (traditionally, prana, or lifeforce) and ultimately, eventually, step-by-step, attaining a higher truth.

It takes abhyasa - sustained practice. It's a concept I had tattooed on my arm after graduating from teacher training. I believe in it. It's hard, and it takes time, but it's so worth working toward.

That said, I also believe that sometimes even a little bit of unfocused yoga is better than none at all.

Take my personal practice today. It's the last day of 2013. This year has been fraught with tragedy and pain for me. Family and yoga and kickboxing and writing have held me up when nothing else would. I honor these things above all, up there with my mother's blessed memory and my belief that each person on this planet has the capacity for positive change. Today's a day when I'm leaving lots of loose ends untied in order to make meaning. I'm no longer tethered to the feeling I always used to have when December rolled around, the feeling of needing to finish all chores and errands and start the new year without anything hanging over my head. It's a near-impossible task, I saw time and again. This year, my mother's last year on this planet, is different.

I was on my mat, sweating it out after an intense kickboxing morning. The cat crawled under my leg as I panted through my evolving Hanuman (full split). She didn't have room to stand up straight, which means I'm getting closer to the full expression of the pose. I worked through other sequences that I'd like to teach in class. I breathed. And then, from the top of my mat, I realized I hadn't dusted my bookshelf in a while. I paused to get 'er done, and then I tried out more yoga shapes.

When you don't have time or energy for complete focus, spurts of focus are okay, I think. Yoga is part of my busy, sometimes fractured life, and I'd rather have it punctuating chores and writing and other pursuits than not present in my day at all. Sometimes those spurts shift my whole day around - I toss myself up into a headstand and come down with a new idea for a section of a paper, or calm my racing thoughts with a few minutes of pranayama (breathing exercises).

Your yoga, as my teachers teach, is yours. It's nobody else's. It should look and feel like you, even when it's changing you from outside to inside and back again.

(Deep Breath) First Book

First Look at My Book sounded too Seussian for a post title, but that is what you are getting. Anyone who made it out to last week's Creative Fridays Showcase has already heard this (and thank y'all so much for being there! It meant so much to all of us).

Here's what I read. It's part of what will likely be an early chapter mixed with what will likely be a middle one. I started writing it after my mother died in January. Writing, along with friends, yoga, kickboxing, and grad school, is what kept me upright some weeks.

I am using other parts of the book as part of an ongoing project that sprung out of a final paper. When I read it in class, my professor suggested that I start blogging it to get it out there more. It's pretty amazing how many great mentors I still have (and find) even though my greatest one is gone.

Mom, this is for you. I hope you like it.

Love,
Hil



Nancy, my mom, had an absolute, all-encompassing interest in everything. She would read the New York Times and want to attend every cultural event and learn about every new issue. She was the embodiment of excited joy - she'd skip down the street in the rain, and would skip more assiduously if her only daughter got embarrassed. It wasn't until my adulthood that I really saw the importance of skipping, and of skipping together, with abandon.

This week is the eleven-month anniversary of her death. I keep thinking back to last year. I went home to visit her the weekend of St. Patrick's Day, and it was one of the last times we were able to walk around her town together. It was one of the last times I rode in a car with her driving. It was one of the last times that she was able to walk anywhere without incredible pain and at her normal speed.


It is still winter after my mother's death, perhaps creeping into spring. I make it to the platform just before the B train pulls in. I do not yet realize that I have left my travel mug of tea at home, sitting by the door. The subway smells like a damp dog. I read halfheartedly, sensing the dusty dull motes of sadness settling on me. Grief can be both blurry and hard: it comes in different forms, almost from moment to moment. It also has a strong grip, and I can feel it wrestling with my stress for control of my shoulder blades. I wish it were socially acceptable to take a sad day instead of a sick day. I could take an orphan day, a cancer witness day, a lonely day, a turning back time in my mind day.

I hope my grief lets me enter my kickboxing class first, trailing behind me like a wraith instead of sitting on my shoulders and driving me downward. My grief likes to remind me that it's still there. It's part of me now, because my mother will never come back. Even when I feel her presence the most strongly, and even when I am most in touch with the reality of her death, my grief sits right next to my other emotions. It's mine. It owns me, and I own it. Grief is disembodied, but attaches to you like a leech and stays there quietly. It uses your energy to keep itself going. It sidles up and grabs your hip and won't untangle itself, siphoning off as much energy as it needs in that minute.


On a frigid morning in March, I finally wake up scenting spring. It isn't here yet, but I know it's on its way. As I let my shower energize me, I feel that I am again channeling my mother's inveterate optimism. Her energy is my energy. It's part of me now, keeping me upright and moving forward.
On the subway, later, the train pitches sideways, and I am strangely proud of the other bleary commuters for not falling. They don't even trip. I reflect on the toughness and strange centeredness of the New York tribe. I follow the smell of skunk up the subway station steps, realizing that it's burnt rubber when I hit the sidewalk, but still feeling like it adds to my spring premonition. For a minute, I hover in my childhood backyard, and then the light changes.


My mom was magic. She led me in rain dances and I really believed it would rain. Even when she was dying, when she said it was going to be okay, I believed her, and she was the only person who could say that and make it sound like truth. Her memory is part of my being - she is in my DNA, as someone told me soon after her death -- she created it -- but her love and her memory and the way she raised me are part of the fabric of my world.


Now we are in spring, and we are gifted with hints of warmth, punctuated by breaths of winter. I think the weather wants to be different things. It struggles against the confines put on it by climate change. It reserves the right to be capricious, like a cat. It laughs, gently, at our obsession with it.

And the sun always returns.

Shyness, Bravery, and Compassion

I'm often struck by the perceptiveness and compassion that (comedian) John Hodgman shows in his rulings on the Judge John Hodgman podcast. The latest episode, The Right to Remain Silent, blew me away. The show is described this way: "Chris wants his daughter, Sophie, to get over her shyness and show more confidence in uncomfortable social situations. Sophie believes she is making progress in her own way and doesn't need any pushing from her Dad. Who's right and who's wrong? Only one man can decide." In these terms, the episode centers around a chance encounter Sophie and her dad had with comedian Eugene Mirman, one of Sophie's favorites (who happens to be one of my favorites, too). In an attempt to encourage his shy daughter to talk to Mirman, Chris pushes her forward, when she's already starting to cry from, it sounds like, sheer overwhelmedness. (It can be a word. Hush.)

Twelve year-old Sophie is much like I was at that age. She's the child of an outgoing academic type (difference: her dad is vice president of a college, my mom was a professor). She's shy. (I was incredibly outgoing through my early teens, and then took on shyness until early college. Now, I'm an outright extrovert.) I was firmly on her side for much of the episode, feeling like her father was pushing her too quickly and too hard to be someone she isn't sure she wants to be (yet).

Thing is, I do empathize with Chris. I can tell from what he says about his kid that he's genuinely proud of how smart and articulate she is, and how much he wants that to shine out for the world to see. (He also shares that he was even more shy than Sophie when he was a child - I wish he had elaborated on what that means.) His daughter writes poetry, and he wants her to participate in a poetry reading at his college. (As a faculty brat, I never would have submitted to such a thing. Even now, my poetry is winsome at best, and it's written for me, not for students six years my senior.)

What bothers me, other than the actual pushing, which Sophie said had gone too far, is his attitude that her shyness is something that can be "fixed." I'm not a parent, but as a formerly shy kid, what worked for me was having a parent who let me be who I was when I was it. My mom encouraged me to speak up and to try new things, but she also let me pull back when I needed to. The extrovert that I am today is shaped by the three decades of choice I got in that matter. I was never not enough for my mom. I don't think Chris' feelings about his daughter are that simple, by any means, but I think it's an important realization for any child to have. They are loved just as they are. They're encouraged to make changes, and to challenge themselves, but they're always loved, and the developmental stage they're in is (assuming nothing abnormally dangerous is happening) respected.

In the limitedly short glimpse I got of everyone's interactions with Sophie, I much prefer the way the comedians talk (to her) to the way her father does (about her). Mirman, in a surprise call-in appearance that initially breaks Sophie down, is gently funny in his typical deadpan manner, zeroing in on the problem with the pushing as he witnessed it. Hodgman puts it more bluntly - "Chris. Don't shove your daughter" - and talks to Sophie almost like she's a peer. He nudges her toward telling Mirman how much she likes his work, pointing out that "almost everyone in the world appreciates a polite, 'Hello, I think you're great. See you later.'" Bailiff Jesse Thorn, similarly empathetic to the girl, asks if she has "any plans to break out of [her] shell on [her] own time." The ruling Hodgman gives is in Sophie's favor, and in a lovely twist, the punishment Chris receives is just what he initially wanted his daughter to do: read poetry in public.