They Grow Up So Fast

I remember when I was pregnant with my daughter, someone told me "they grow up so fast." I'm sure many people told me that along the way but I do remember one time when it just stood out and I took it in.

I know they grow up fast. I know I can stay present so it doesn't feel like it's going by so fast. And then sometimes - bam - it feels like it's happening so fast.

At first it was the little things - when she liked to eat - then that would change. Or what she liked to wear. What her favourite colour was. Just when I thought I had it down, it would change. Just as I got used to her being little, she grew. As soon as I got used to her knowing this much, she showed me she was aware of so much more.

I knew she was getting on a plane today - I bought her the ticket for heaven's sake - but I didn't realize that I wasn't ready for her to go away for two weeks. I know it's not a long time. I know I'll see her down at Omega in two weeks. But knowing that didn't take away the surprise pang of missing I felt when she got in her dad's car this morning to go to the airport.

She even said, "Mom, do you want to come to the airport?" and I said no. I'd already made up my mind I wasn't going this morning. I have other things to do. And I do. But that sweet surprise feeling of "Wait! Don't go! You're my daughter and I'll miss you for two weeks," just sort of jumped out of nowhere.

I know this is a preview of her leaving many, many times in the future. There will be so many goodbyes and hellos I expect. This one just caught me off guard. I love her so much and I love being her mom. What a great relationship that is. I guess sometimes I take it for granted because it's always just there - the fighting and hugging and challenging and joking - and this morning I have a little taste of that being not there. Loving a teenager - it's an awesome challenge and I love it! Sniff!

(Update: she's cleared Customs and I have permission to use this picture from last week.)
(Update #2: she wanted to read the post and the picture below is of the text she sent me. Sniff!)

Practising Non-Attachment as a Parent

I remember learning about attachment before I became a parent. I didn't quite get it. I was young. I thought Buddha maybe just had a bad attitude and if he could shift his perspective, he'd see that suffering really was optional. Oh dear.

Then I became a mother. Now I know what attachment is. And let me tell you, not all attachment is bad. In fact, I used to say that if I wasn't attached to my daughter, I'm not sure how I would have kept taking care of her. So it serves a purpose...

So there I was, a practising non-attacher, having a kid, wanting her to be great, but not because I was forcing or pushing her, but because she was just turning out that way, through you know, her nature.

While she was little, we enrolled her in Suzuki violin. One of our yoga students was a Suzuki teacher and it made a lot of sense. I figured I'd be fighting, I mean interacting, with my daughter about something like dance or gymnastics classes, so it might as well be playing the violin. At least parents are involved and there's good communication and it's a pretty wholesome activity.

So my daughter was a "musician." She had an instrument and we had a purpose. We invested in lessons and music camp and pretty note drop earrings. We sat through hours of lessons and many more hours of practising at home in addition to arguing about practising and getting ready to go and spending time in traffic getting to, violin lessons. We did this for years.

I didn't realize how attached I'd become to being a parent of a little musician until one day she stopped playing. "What do you mean you're not going to play the violin anymore? We've spent thousands of dollars on this activity. What will you do instead? Don't you know that kids who are in the orchestra don't wind up in trouble at school?"

I kept the paraphernalia in a drawer and on shelves. The music books. Music stand. Extra shoulder and chin rests. Resin. Little things. And sort of let go of my attachment to my daughter being a musician. She dabbled in the bass and that was cool but she didn't really get back into it. Oh well. She used to be a musician. Now she just sits on the couch and plays on the computer. Oh well. She was probably too structured in the past. Oh well.

Years pass. She picks up modelling. The fashion kind. That freaked me out and I watched my attachment to her not being a model show up. "Just let it go. Pay for the photos. It's an activity. It's good she's doing something. Her hair looks really nice now and her make up sure is pretty. Allow her to be herself..."

Then I get the strangest text out of the blue last month. "Should I start doing violin again" was what it said. "Ok" was the reply and "it'll give me something to do after school." Wow. I contacted her most recent old teacher (not my yoga student) who said he had room and after a bumpy start, we're back at it. Saw her old teacher for the first time in years and it was like no time had passed. She even picked up sort of where she'd left off. His handwriting was still in the books and he could see where she'd ended a few years ago. This time it's so different though. She practises with her own initiation. She suggests it and asks me to be there but if I'm not, she still plays. Her sound is great and it's really nice to hear live music in the house again.

It's not finished but I'm just enjoying the bobbing of the waves. Up and down. Life. Parenting. It's wonderful.

Attachment, refined

So in the conversation around attachment, it's bound to come up that we don't always know where we're attached. Yesterday's tidbit was to notice where you're attached and that's actually a way to let go of attachment, or the problems associated with attachment. And so the question is, "how do I know where I'm attached?"

A good way to notice where you're attached is to look at where you're unhappy. If you're not sure about that, consider what you complain about. What do you go on and on about or chronically complain about? If you're not sure, ask your friends or people you have spent time with. That complaint will be a site of attachment.

Then you notice you're attached there. That attachment is blocking your happiness. Knowing the attachment is there sometimes is enough to cause some space. "Wow, I just noticed I'm unhappy because I'm tired. I'm attached to being energetic. Good to know. I can drop this one right now and just be tired and do what I have to do and get more sleep later."

Other times knowing you're attached at that spot doesn't make a difference and the attachment stays there. "OMG. My relationships have sucked. I'm blah blah blah. He was blah blah blah. Will I ever blah blah blah? Will it ever go away?" Or maybe your friends are attached, "my business blah blah blah; my partner blah blah blah; my job blah blah blah; my health; my back; my money; blahdeeblahblah."

On the one hand, that's life. Too bad, that's where you're attached, relax, get over it, be attached, don't worry about it. On the other hand you may want to dig a little deeper if that attachment is the source of a lot of pain. It depends on what you're going for, what you're willing to do, what you want in the moment. And knowing that, is going to take some familiarity with yourself in places already examined in the previous Yamas (see side bar for quick references or come to Living your Yoga or the Yoga Teacher Training with me and Kat - we love dealing with this stuff).

Remember that areas where we go into pain and reaction are unconscious places. Finding those places while we're unconscious will be difficult. Our thoughts will wander, we'll get sleepy, we won't want to look anymore, we'll get distracted. It's normal. So keep going to the places you feel and breathe into them. Same thing. It keeps coming back to the same thing. Being present with what is. Read the beginning again for the instructions in finding out where you're attached, which will lead to this being present everybody's talking about.

Eventually, after you've done it for a while, breathing into the sensations, locating your attachments, you will be so bored with the process. The sensations will be familiar and you won't even want to go there anymore. Something else happens at that point but going straight to it won't work. Going through the attachment at its site, source, physical location, is important. Then you can use it as a jumping off place, but only once you've gotten to know it and what you do with yourself in that place a bit first.

Attachment, reviewed

Over the years on this blog, I've written a bit about attachment. And again, it's that time in the yoga teacher training where we've hit Aparigraha. And again, I want to read the class some passages from Anthony De Mello's book, Way to Love.

The way to really practise non-attachment is to notice where we're attached. That's sort of the only way. Just notice where we're attached. In yoga practise it's like breathing into the places we feel. In meditation it's like leaning into the sharp points. In Landmark Education language it's like being authentic about where we're inauthentic. And that's how to become non-attached. It's how to allow. It's how to be present. Go to the things you feel and let them be there. There's nothing to do afterwards. Things will either fall away or they'll still be there. You won't have to do anything.

Non-attachment is such a goal and people sometimes don't like to admit where they're attached. Your friends and family know what you're attached to. It's not something you can hide. And it's often annoying, especially if we're attached to people being a certain way for us. We might think the amount we're attached to someone is a gauge of how much we love them, but that's not it. It doesn't feel good to be loved when there's so much attachment around it. Going the other way, it isn't relaxing to love someone with lots of attachment.

The reason we practise the yama of non-attachment isn't because it's the right thing to do. It's because it frees us up energetically. To stay attached takes energy and drains us. Practising all of the yamas and niyamas is to let things go, open the energy channels, increase our health, things like that. That's what the yoga's for. It's not to burden ourselves with rules and things we should do. It's about freedom, union, balance, and what that takes is looking at where we're not free, where we're out of balance, and not making ourselves wrong or feeling rotten about that, but using those as cues to move us in the direction we want to go.

Mind Wrap

One of the exercises we did on the weekend was to allow our minds to take the shape of certain things - in this case we were using our bodies. So we'd wrap our mind around our head and allow our mind to take the shape of the head. Then remove the mind, letting it rest in the heart and then put it in the arms, letting it wrap around that and become the arms. It progressed from there.

It was a cool exercise for me because I hadn't noticed that my mind actually takes the shape of the thing I've wrapped my mind in. It actually becomes that thing and loses sight that obviously, it's not that thing. Consciousness is just consciousness but it gets close to objects and takes their form. In this type of example, the object that the mind wraps itself around could be an idea just as easily as a physical object. When that's happening, it's so clear that thoughts and ideas are form as well - they're matter just as much as a knee or table or anything outside.

So today my mind took the form of an idea or a sense that things aren't the way they should be; that I'm not the way I should be; and my mind wrapped around that mental object and has been holding on tight. I've tried unwrapping it, letting it go back to my heart centre, but it is super-clingy and just gets stuck again on "things aren't going the way I want them to," and I must say, it sucks. It's interesting to watch on the one hand, when I can get around to that, but then it just goes right back to forming the object that includes self-judgement.

And then my mind does something so powerful - it actually becomes the object and then I get to be a zombie or robot and all of a sudden I'm on auto-pilot, unconscious and acting from a place of being the object of "rejection" or "rejecting" and there's pain. And then I unwrap, notice my super-powers, look around, notice my body, and then the mind wraps around something else. "I'm on vacation, I'm supposed to be having a good time. I don't have room in my experience right now for things not working out the way I want them to," is one of the objects my mind forms.

So I'm watching. And it is kind of neat. As I've said lots before, the only way to really practise attachment is to notice where you're attached. This is the same thing. My mind is attached to certain objects and the way to have it reform into something else is to be well-aware of what my mind is currently in the shape of/wrapped around. Then I can see if that is serving me or not serving me and go from there.

I Did Not Escape Unscathed

There I was, almost a week ago (ha!), writing as though I was some how going to be able to ride out the wave of Christmas and just observe as the boats all around me were bobbing in the swelling sea of emotions and concerns. I must admit, I was impressed that I had made it to the 23rd of December, no less, without an injury, without symptoms of the stress of the season. That was the calm before the storm, my friends, the calm before the storm...

I was on the right track and it appeared that I had what it takes to make it through the holidays without emotional outbursts and displays of intense feeling. However, this was not the year for me. I have lived to tell the tale and that is the redeeming feature of this little story. But that's where the good part ends.

I will not even go into the details of the nightmare that was my Christmas with family because we've all been there, we've all had those scenes, those ways we've been that we regret, things we've said we wish we could take back, and those promises we've made about how it's not going to go like that again. And I can add on a positive note that all of my relationships are intact and I'm on great terms with my family, where really very little of this drama unfolded. I saved most of the good stuff for my partner and our private little hell we call home. And we're also okay and even good. But it wasn't fun or easy, those few days.

One of the things I got for Christmas was one of Anthony de Mello's books, Awareness. I've been listening to him on youtube all morning. It restores my balance, my understanding, my forgiveness for myself and the others around me. His words give me strength to carry on, oh yes they do.

The main thrust of his message is the same thing the Buddha says, who he says is the one that put it the easiest, but that all of the great teachers said basically this...

"The world is full of sorrow. The root of sorrow is desire. The uprooting of sorrow is desirelessness."

And of course, he goes on. But there's the message. If I'm upset it's because it's not going my way and my way is the thing I'm attached to. Just drop it. Okay, okay.