Mindfulness | A Very Narrow Bridge

March 27, 2012

Eleven Months, Part 3: Not at Some High Place Along the Way.

This has been moving through my mind for the last couple of weeks:

Birth is a beginning, And death a destination.
And life is a journey:

From childhood to maturity; And youth to age.
From innocence to awareness; And ignorance to knowing.
From foolishness to discretion; And then, perhaps, to wisdom.

From weakness to strength; Or strength to weakness
– And, often, back again.
From health to sickness, And back, we pray, to health again.

From offense to forgiveness, From loneliness to love,
From joy to gratitude, From pain to compassion,
And grief to understanding – From fear to faith.

From defeat to defeat to defeat – Until, looking backward or ahead,
We see that victory lies
Not at some high place along the way,
But in having made the journey, stage by stage,
A sacred pilgrimage.

Birth is a beginning And death a destination.
And life is a journey, A sacred pilgrimage
– To life everlasting.

(Gates of Repentance, p 283)

It’s a poem from the Kol Nidrei service in Gates of Repentance: Reform Judaism’s machzor. It was written by a rabbi named Alvin Fine.

Growing up, my rabbi read it almost every week at Friday night services. My mother loved that rabbi.

“…Victory lies not at some high place along the way, but in having made the journey…”

I wish my mother had gone to services more so she could have heard this man, for whom she had so much love and respect, repeat those words. She didn’t and I think, up until the end as the paramedics worked to resuscitate her for the final thirty minutes of her life, she hoped for some victory. Some victory that never came, but to which she was so attached that she missed out on massive amounts of potential happiness, and mired herself in misery and anger.

I’m on the table at the acupuncturist when the intern’s supervisor comes in and tells me, in no uncertain terms, that living primarily in my head is not viable. “In the end,” he says “The body always wins, so listen to your body now before it’s too late. That body will win—it will die.”

We don’t get a lot of time here and our bodies remind us of that most days. But listening to those reminders can enrich our life. Thich Nhat Hanh, in the Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings, explains that “…Looking deeply at our own suffering can help us cultivate understanding and compassion…”

“Life everlasting,” I think, starts with compassion.

January 10, 2012

Eleven Months, Part 2: Yoga and Tefillin

My arm hurts a little. Probably because the small box of Torah verses strapped there is digging into it as I pray.

“Bind them (mitzvot) as a sign on your hand and let them serve as a frontlet (totafot) between your eyes” (D’varim [Deuteronomy] 6:8)

Jewish mindfulness is pretty literal. Those words are bound to my arm and to my head with leather straps. Why actually do this? Isn’t it much better to take the verse from Deuteronomy as a metaphor? The teachings of the Torah are to be treasured, “like a piece of jewelry.”

Nice, right?

Nice, but not quite enough, at least for me. I like putting tefillin on. I like the fact that when I enter the synagogue each morning, I have to pause, to concentrate on wrapping the straps around my arm. I can’t just walk in with my mind on something else. I have to be where I am. I like the slight discomfort reminding me that I am bound to something much bigger than myself, like this teaching, or the people with whom I am praying.

Fast forward to a yoga class. The teacher is giving us a lot of instruction for Ardha Chandrasana, the pose we are in:

“Be aware of your foot planted on the ground, the rotation of your lower leg, your femur should be moving back toward the wall, settling into your hamstrings. Are your shoulders equally open? Your upper foot should be engaged, as if it’s also planted on the ground. Is your upper leg working as hard as the lower leg? How is its rotation affecting your groins? Stretch out through your side body to lengthen your spine. Now, keeping your hips even, try to dial your sacrum to move your tailbone towards your thigh, like we did in Trikonasana….”

“Wow,” I say, laughing, “You gave us like fourteen different things to think about during that pose.”

“Yeah,” comes the reply, “But you’re not thinking about anything else, are you?”

In another class, the teacher “invites us to enjoy Eka Pada Rajakapotasana.” There is no enjoying this asana for me. Being true to my smartass self, I ask the teacher “Ever notice how when you ‘invite us to enjoy’ something, it’s going to suck?”

Sometimes yoga asanas involve some discomfort. Sometimes exploring our connection to something bigger hurts, maybe just a little, like having a box strapped to your arm. But concentrating on all the various parts of an action keep us in the moment. The word yoga literally means “yoke.” Yoga binds us to existence. Putting on tefillin is another reminder of that.

November 1, 2011

Slow

Here I am in the bulk aisle of the grocery store. I have come here to impress a woman. I want her to know that I can actually cook, rather than simply apply heat to processed foods. I am completely okay with the possibility that she will find this sexy.

But cooking is slow. The black beans I buy need to soak for something like four hours before I can even cook them. Brown rice requires fifty minutes of planning ahead before it can be eaten. Tomatoes and onions, purchased fresh, will need to be chopped, and not dumped from a can. Ideally, fresh produce will be from a once-a-week farmer’s market and, though I believe in locally-grown food and supporting local businesses, this requires more scheduling than reading the sourcing information at the grocery store. The black beans and rice I crave need almost a week’s notice before they can become a dinner I can serve this woman to get her to reward me with a smile.

Compare this with a trip to the prepared section of the same grocery store, which uses some locally sourced, mostly sanely produced ingredients to make convenient items I can bring home and eat without any preparation and very little thought. Total time to the table: about twenty minutes, including joining my fellow DC residents in the snaking “15 items or fewer” express lines. But, you know, I really like this woman, so I continue with my shopping and avoid the delicious macaroni and cheese tempting me on the hot prepared food table.

Somehow, by the time I’ve gotten home, cooking to impress has taken on a life of its own and I’ve made a deal with myself that I will make almost all the meals I eat at home from actual ingredients—the basic building blocks that cooperate to become food. I will have to cooperate with them, too.

Now my kitchen, mostly bare for years, is more or less fully stocked and I have to think about what I eat. My refrigerator is filled with expensive fresh vegetables that I have to be diligent about using. I have to make time for cooking, too. Beans and rice wait in jars in my cupboards, but they are useless to me if I haven’t put some thought into when I will eat them, so I have to think about when I will cook. Getting home late, like from a yoga class ending at 9:30 or 10:00, means I have to start making dinner before I leave the house.

I find myself preparing things that I may want to eat much later. The salad I made the other night, for example, didn’t get eaten tonight. I made it because I wanted to use the cucumber and peppers I had and I figured I could bring it for lunch. I haven’t fermented anything yet, but it’s probably only a matter of time.

Slow food is mindful food. I catch myself appreciating the aesthetics of what I eat—the shapes and colors of vegetables, the texture of tofu, the patterns on fish. The chopping, pouring, boiling, frying, and baking. Mindful food is holy food and holy food is shared. I consider how I can feed people with what I make, rather than just grabbing something for myself. The very idea of sharing food makes me enjoy what I’m cooking more. The satisfaction starts when I look in the cupboard or the fridge and begin mixing things in my mind.

I am eating less, and only in part because I am too lazy to cook more. Eating less means buying less and wasting less, which makes my food into a reminder of how much food we waste as a country.

None of this is earth-shattering. I have experienced much of this before (hence my ability to actually cook and understand what to buy in the bulk aisle), but it’s been a while, so it feels sort of like I’m returning to something I like about myself, starting something in the middle, which always feels good. I’m not sure if I’ve impressed the woman who revived this all in me. Maybe that will have to wait until I make pickles or something, but in the meantime she seems to like it when I go to the farmer’s market with her.