The Muppets of Thought

I've been loving the abundant use of Muppet characters to personify the voices in our heads.

Earlier this month, Mindful Magazine used the Statler and Waldorf heckling duo from The Muppets to personify our Inner Critic.

My favorite animated movie Inside Out  presented its own adorable muppet-esque characters to represent five of Paul Ekman's six universal emotions: Sadness, Fear, Anger, Joy, and Disgust (leaving out Surprise).

I love this phenomenon because imagining these voices as muppets completely disarms them. In my head, there are more than a few voices who are often fully locked and loaded, ready to fire at anything that moves, like: 

The guy at the coffee shop who is laughing too loudly.
The woman at my panel discussion who wouldn't smile when I looked at her.
Anytime I get in front of more than five people to share something I know.

Any of these events can trigger the peanut gallery and the commentary rolls in:

There are other people working here, sir.
What happened to you this morning? Wait, what am I doing wrong? Why don't you like me? 
I don't know anything, and I need to get out of here before they figure it out.

These trains of thought can be incredibly powerful and completely derailing. They can impact how we respond to others (I've on more than one occasion glared at THAT guy). If we aren't careful, they run around without us even realizing it, driving us to do things that we wouldn't choose to do. We need to do some work to put them in their place.

Step 1: Notice you're having those thoughts. Creating quiet unstimulated space each day often brings thoughts to the forefront. They eagerly present themselves to your consciousness, filling any empty space you give them. This doesn't have to be anything formal. Keep your phone in your pocket for a few minutes of your bus ride, while on the loo, or while walking down the street. Get curious about what's going on up there.

So let's say we start gaining that awareness and noticing we are having those thoughts. Then what? 

My first instinct is always to fight 'em (I've got a bit of a fiery personality): 

Relax! It's not such a big deal.
Stop being so judgy and such a coward! You don't know what's going on with her.
Shut up.

There's a back, a forth, and before you know it, World War III is taking place in my head. 

Unless. Unless I...

Step 2: Imagine them as Muppets. This helps me in a couple of ways. 

One. It helps me remember my thoughts aren't me. That is, they are some separate beings that don't have to be taken too seriously, and I don't have to blame myself when they say something terrible or embarrassing. I've heard it said that the brain secretes thoughts like the mouth secretes saliva. Our thoughts are just going to keep spinning whether we like it or not, and they are going to be all sorts of crazy, so we best not get too attached to them. 

Two. Muppets are cute, and cute things are hard to take seriously. Even the grumpy ones are fuzzy and soft. So when I consider them as Muppets, I feel less annoyed at their existence. It is much easier for me to look upon them with compassion, which both defuses them and my sometimes overly aggressive reply.

This is easy enough to remember in my calmer moments, but how do I remember it during the more chaotic moments when they Muppets are on a tirade, and I can barely hear myself?  We need to train when things are relatively easeful if we most want to have access to that rational chill part of self that can laugh at our Muppets. 

Step 3: Train in the emotional off season.

Because of my more hot-headed nature, my teacher, Vinny Ferarro, prescribed me compassion meditation at a retreat last year. When I spoke of the silly annoyances I found arising through our silent practice— like the person who would walk through my mindful walking space, for instance— he suggested combating those "Muppets" gets you no where. Instead, I was told to try actively cultivating a compassionate voice. 

So I put aside my skepticism and have added repetition of the lines below into my daily practice. (Into the blank space you can insert "I", the name of a friend or family member, or even an enemy if you've filled your heart up first with some warm fuzzies.)

May _______ be happy.
May _______ be healthy.
May _______ be patient.
May _______ be peaceful.

You can adapt these lines to fill whatever quality you are trying to cultivate. When I speak them to myself in meditation, I try to notice what it feels like in my body. It turns out that even sending the wishes to others still has the bonus benefit of creating the sensation of warmth and expansiveness in myself.

That warmth and expansiveness help me keep perspective. The sensation helps me remember my thoughts are nothing but Muppets, and are best dealt with in good humor and compassion. Every now and then I can even laugh at myself and the ridiculous things they find to be worried, angry, and frustrated about. 

So to the Muppets: I hear you, loves. I hear you.

Am I legit?

When have you done enough— enough studying, training, practicing, experiencing, researching, retreating — that you are legit?

Which of us get to be the teachers of this world, and who needs to sit back and do some more learning before they even approach the front of the room?

I have been thinking a lot about these questions recently, as I step onto a new path where I am 100% a newbie teacher.

Am I legit?

The first thing I am tempted to do in the face of this question is list the experiences that "legitimize" my teacher status. My grandmother was a yoga teacher, so it's in my blood. I have been practicing yoga seriously for over ten years. I am a certified yoga teacher and did my yoga teacher training in 2010, then taught at various points for the next five years. I have been intensively studying mindfulness in schools these last few years. I have committed myself to a particular lifestyle, and practice regularly, so I have a wealth of personal experiences to draw from.

My initial reaction to this list is that it's a middle of the road to bottom of the barrel resume, by any spiritual practice standards.  I can hear voices immediately naming that "real" teachers have studied in India for decades, sat silently in ashrams for months at a time, and studied with a teacher intensively in order to enhance their knowing. Or, in the secular movement, legit teachers have created their own evidence-based programs associated with high-powered institutions and conducted years of research on their work.

There have been a number of criticisms lobbed against both yoga and mindfulness for churning out unprepared teachers who offer superficial experiences and understandings of deep and ancient traditions.  My own yoga teacher trainer, Devarshi Steven Hartman, recently disowned the term "yogi" on his Facebook page for the highly commercialized corporatized empire he self-admittedly had a hand in building. And I, too, have had that response to the Lululemon exercise yoga craze that sits on top of a deeper, more complex, whole practice. I understand much of the mindfulness I practice is distilled from a deep Buddhist tradition.  I am left to wonder where the line is between superficial bum strengthening affirmation exercises and meaningful practice?

Furthermore, I am very aware that I am still early on this path. I still struggle in the morning to stay off my cell phone from the moment I awaken. I still fight sitting on my cushion. I still say mean things and wish I didn't. So am I "allowed" to be a teacher?

A few things have helped shape my answer to this question.

As I was talking through this with a friend, she pointed out something a teacher of hers shared: Buddhists don't have a trademark on mindfulness. The same could be said for Hinduism. While Buddhism certainly created many of the amazing practices we apply to secular spaces, they are not the only one with a tradition of mind-clearing and focusing exercises. Every spiritual tradition has some element of that. I attended a Quaker college, and a major component of that school's tradition is sitting in silence until you feel moved to speak. It is quieting the body and mind to hear something deeper. That's something anyone can do, of any or no religious background, and there are a million different ways of talking about how to get there.

And yet, I still wondered if I embody my practice enough to facilitate experiences for others. Ankati Heather Day and I hosted a yoga retreat last weekend, and we had women come who had deep practices and decades of experience steeped in their own spiritual traditions, from yoga to Judaism. What happened at that weekend reminded me that sometimes the role of the teacher is simply to create space and get out of the way.

I did not teach these women anything they did not already know. I held space for them to explore that. They brought their own deep knowledge to the table and together we co-created understanding.  I was transparent about my intimidation around the wealth of knowledge around me, and then again about the deep gratitude I had for them bringing their whole selves forward. Part of learning to trust myself as a teacher is trusting others to get what they need from an experience.

On the opposite end of that spectrum, I sat on a wellness panel this past week representing mindfulness alongside women from Harvard, Mass General Hospital, and a prestigious independent school. We were there to share our knowledge with parents who wanted to learn more about wellness in schools. I found I had things to say. And my perspective was valuable. Even if I wasn't conducting research as my fellow panelists were, I had experiences of kids practicing mindfulness to draw upon, and could speak to its beautiful messiness and complexity. I had my data from years of reading and studying. I had personal anecdotes. I found my voice had value there, too, even if it wasn't from the top of a well-established institution. I didn't have to be able to say all of the things, just the things I knew.

We need yoga teachers who move us safely through asana and don't talk about flattening our bums or abs the whole time. We need mindfulness teachers who have sat with themselves and fully understand what it feels like to be in a space of equanimity. We need them both to be able to give us lots of metaphors, cues, anatomy lessons, and data, that explain these practices so we can find something that resonates for ourselves. We need well-trained practitioners who have committed to living their respective practices.

And we need them to be honest and humble, recognizing both their own strengths and limitations. We need them to be able to say when they don't know, and come out of postures when their backs hurt, and apologize when they make mistakes.  And we need them to trust us to take what we need from them and leave the parts that do not resonate. We need them to know they don't know everything about everything, and yet their experience and perspective still has value.

I strive to be that kind of teacher.  I am legit in that I can offer what I know and have learned, and admit there is much I still haven't experienced. I know there are teachers who have trained in their respective fields for much longer than I, and they offer a perspective from a different place on their path. But that doesn't mean that I what I offer is not valuable. So I continue on this path as student and teacher. But it is only through my honesty with what I do and don't know that I legitimize myself.

I aspire to the confidence of the sage MC Hammer's line,"Too legit, too legit to quit."

Gif credit to: Time Magazine

My deepest fear: Manual transmission.

I am currently engaging in one of the most terrifying stunts I have ever undertaken in my adult life:

I am learning to drive a stick shift.

The first time I got behind the wheel in the abandoned parking lot, I was literally shaking with fear. The shaking has not stopped in the month that I have been puttering around town stalling out, rolling backwards, and, on rare occasion, seamlessly shifting.  I take deep breaths and hum to myself.  Sometimes I have to have my boyfriend drive us back because I am too riled up and need to decompress.

People have fallen into two camps when I seek public support for this feat during various conversations and on social media platforms.  On the one hand, they are supportive and congratulatory. They say things like,

Or they tell me a story about how hard/impossible it was for them to learn it, and good on me (thanks guys!)

On the other hand, they say things like,

"It's really not that hard."

and

"I had to learn driving from one side of the country to the other. You'll be fine. (subtext: stop being a weenie)"

The problem with this side of the argument is that it ignores what is actually making driving this car so hard. They're probably right that the mechanics of driving a stick shift are totally manageable. Anyone who can simultaneously pat their head and rub their belly should be able to get this down eventually. But that is not really my biggest stumbling block.  It is my FEAR of driving the car that is so hard to overcome, justified or not (though I would argue that in a hilly city like Portland, the very real chance of rolling back into someone makes it justified.)

For those of you who can't possibly understand my terror, I ask that you suspend disbelief for one minute and imagine yourself doing something that is, in fact, very scary for you. Maybe putting your head in a lion's mouth. Maybe it's working with twenty-four bonkers middle schoolers by yourself. Whatever that scenario may be for you is what I face every time I get behind the wheel.  The heart pounding, muscle-shaking, hard-breathing is my physiology reminding me that I am ready to fight or flee. The fear is real.

To tell you the truth, I was kind of hoping that I would be able to escape this kind of fear when I decided to dedicate my life to mindfulness and yoga. Don't you, get, like, a free pass from being human when you're studying this stuff? Shouldn't you just be able to breathe yourself into a blissful calm and approach all scenarios with that grace and centeredness? Perhaps my set point is particularly low, and I just need A LOT of work to get there, but in the meantime I'm constantly bumping up against my humanity in all of its glory.

There was one article in Outside magazine that I recently read that gave me hope. It was about the great stuntman Felix Baumgartner who was getting ready to jump from 24 miles above the earth for the highest BASE jump ever. However, he was stymied from completing the feat, despite his impressive stuntman record, because of his overwhelming fear of one aspect: his spacesuit. He would put it on and panic.  It got so bad that he had to be slowly coached into wearing it, one body part at a time, by Michael Gervais, sports psychologist to the elite athletes (Baumgartner did eventually complete the jump successfully in October of 2012). This guy is no stranger to death-defying stunts, and surely had managed to get his fear in line on many occasions before. But this suit was really an obstacle for him, and he had to do a lot of work to overcome it.

My point is that we all have fears, even crazy stuntmen, and when we are confronted with them, we have to figure out how to manage that fear.

Today I texted my boyfriend, proudly reporting that I had driven around the block. By myself. I literally took a right, and another right, and a third before gliding back into our parking spot. But what a relief it was to do it!  It wasn't the driving I was proud of. I was proud because I sat with that nervousness, breathing and observing my body challenging me to take off running from this stressful scenario. I sat until my blood stopped pumping so hard through my veins, so I could turn on the ignition and make the loop.

I still (not-so)-secretly hope that we will be gifted a new car with automatic transmission (anyone trying to get rid of theirs?) I am in no way enjoying this process, as I don't really like driving in the first place, and there are lots of extra steps to think about now. But I am trying. And I am proving to myself I can do scary things. I guess that might be worth it.

The Trees Don't Care

Chewonki

The Trees

The trees do not care about
   your voice quaking when you speak in public
   that flap of skin that dangles from your upper arm
   the unanswered emails piling up in your inbox.

They sigh only in response to
   the wind.

Nor do they care about
   the countless hours you've sat in meditation
   the rugged mountains you've summited
   the "A" you received on your Spanish midterm sophomore year.

They applaud only in response to
    the wind.


One of my biggest fears is to become a Spiritual Egoist. You know the type. They may have an abundance of culturally appropriated items— bindis, mala beads, henna ink — adorning their body. They may speak to you in Sanskrit, have a spiritual name, and end every exchange with "Namaste."  Every yoga class is an opportunity to show off their press handstand, and every conversation becomes a time to share stories of how much gratitude they experienced after spending time in India, with those who have so little. They are conspicuous because they lack authenticity. They are "so far long along their spiritual journey" that they see no way to learn from the voices and experiences of people around them.

Most of us in this community have some of these elements in our lives. After all, cliches only become trite after overuse, but are first rich nuggets of truth. The elements alone are not what make us inauthentic. For some, they are deeply meaningful displays of who we are. A close friend of mine was given a new name after a powerful ceremony, and to her that embodies who she is. I see nothing wrong with that. Another friend lives in India half the time because it is there that she feels most fulfilled. I, myself, have a set of mala beads that I wore around my wrist from my yoga teacher training, imbued with the love of all the yogis in my class. It is when we use these things to pump ourselves up, to shore up our identities as spiritual people, that we've gone astray.

I had to catch myself in these moments of egoism this past week when I spent four days with thirty amazing educators at a Teachings In Mindful Education (TIME) retreat at Chewonki, an environmental education organization an hour outside of Portland. There, we were invited to explore self care and mindfulness in a community of teachers from up and down the East Coast. Having spent the last year and half studying mindfulness in education, and implementing programming in my school, I had to hold back from jumping in on lectures and answering questions. I knew the answers! I wanted to tell everyone what I knew!  In truth, I also wanted everyone else to know I knew.

When I noticed myself seeking this, I recoiled in disgust. I was being that person. I was unavailable to hear from other participants because I was so eager to share with everyone what I thought.  I wanted affirmation. And I wanted it, I came to realize, because of insecurity. I am about to embark on a new adventure, providing mindfulness education to young people and teachers around New England. In those moments, I needed assurance from others that I was qualified. That I was someone they would trust to bring mindfulness to their school. 

But spending my energy showing off left me unavailable to take in what was being offered right then. In order to really soak in that experience, I had to be present for it. And in fact, in order to really offer anything to others, I needed to move my ego back and heart forward. Indeed, the moment when I felt most useful to anyone involved saying very little. It was a deep listening exercise when I was tasked with hearing someone's dilemma, without fixing, critiquing, or judging, but just listening deeply.  It was being present in that moment for this brave soul that I felt most skillful. In not trying to prove myself, I had proved myself. The more I let go of trying to be something specific, and was receptive to what was there, the more I was to able to offer and soak in. 

It is not possible to get rid of ego (Unless you are enlightened, I hear. And then, well, congrats). The more I berate myself for this part of me, the part that puffs up in front because of the insecurity it hides, the smaller I feel. But if I can look gently at that part of myself. If I can acknowledge and hold space for, rather than judge, the insecurity and the bravado that springs forth, then I can offer that to others.

The most valuable advice I got this past week from one of my teachers (who got it from one of his), was, "Get on the cushion and love the sh** out of yourself." He meant this for all parts of ourselves, and particularly those that we have not made peace with, the scared parts and conceited parts. I like to imagine those parts as muppets (a la Inside Out) who have their own agenda and don't need to be taken too seriously nor held too harshly. They just need a little space and some love.

I started with a fairly critical view of those trying to inflate themselves in the spiritual community. In fact, we have seen the heavy consequences of this with guru-types who have built themselves up for a big fall when their fallibility becomes obvious (John Friend took out my favorite style of yoga, Anusara, on his way down. Now it's hard to find people who teach it because no one is willing to affiliate with it anymore). However, it does me no good to begrudge them for their overinflated sense of importance, nor their fears that they are likely hiding underneath that. The more work I do to reconcile those parts of me in myself, the more I can hold others with that kindness. Likely the disgust I feel for them has much to do with the disgust I feel for that part of myself, and toning it all down may help open me up.

So can I be like the trees? Can I hold all the parts of myself, and all the parts of others, without acclamation or condemnation? With compassion? Even this Spiritual Egoist? I sure hope to learn.

Keeping life in three dimensions

As a teacher, I relied heavily on my computer. I used my computer as a tool to collaborate with other teachers that were in the same room with me, or supplemental to late night phone calls. I had it connected to the smartboard, and used it to organize class periods and share information with my students. I communicated with families and other staff throughout the school in great volume through this amazing tool. 

But I also spent the majority of my time interfacing with my colleagues and students face-to-face.  I hugged their bodies, ranging from pint-sized to ginormous, as they entered my door each morning. I absorbed their joys, sorrows, and frustrations as they grappled with the challenging task of learning. I smelled the sweet middle-school funk each day as they crowded into my room after gym. Everything was loud and vibrant and tangible. 

Since starting my new career, I have found myself staring at my screen for hours at a time. I understand this is not radical for many people. I understand this is "normal." But my recent conversion to this role of Computer Worker has given me insight into what it means to be facing a computer for hours at a time. 

I am staring at a glowing screen and communicating through my fingers pressing plastic keys. Conversations are silent. Emails never quite capture sentiment, emoticons and all. I can't feel the people to whom I'm "talking," nor smell them (for better or worse). Everything it, literally, flat.  It is amazing how much time one can spend in two dimensions. 

And on top of the work elements, there is so much socialization that happens through my computer and phone. Text messages, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter (I just signed onto that and it's completely overwhelming). What a beautiful curse to be able to share everything in our lives with others. What a strange compulsion to want to. I read once that we get a dopamine hit from our pleasure center every time we get a like, an email response, or a comment on our wall. I definitely notice a little rush from these electronic affirmations. 

The crux of this is that, however good it may feel, it is nothing compared to the hit we get in the three dimensional world. And when we limit ourselves to our screens, we limit our ability to absorb the energies of others, to smell the salty breeze that flows in through our windows, to taste the sweet and tart juices of the apple as we take a bite (I am embarrassed to admit the number of times I've eaten while futzing around on the computer). I don't again want to miss one minute of the awe-inspiring sunset as we cruise across the gentle waters out to Peaks Island because I had to send one final email. 

There's nothing evil about the electronic world, and many of us have to learn to work with it. In this strange new world, I know that I need to be intentional about time away, about leaving my phone in my purse or (gasp) at home. I need to stand up from my computer and chat with the person next to me at the coffee shop every so often. I need to be intentional about when I engage, and when I put it away. 

Because this world is too rich to spend all my time in two dimensions.