if you think you're enlightened...

Here's why blogging can be so difficult: being honest is hard. Right now all I want to do it hit my cat because he won't quit howling and jumping on the computer. It's been a long night. Lots of little irritating shit keeps happening. All my computers, both at home and the studio are going at 1995 speeds. Even though there was a lot of traffic through the studio today, we didn't come close to sales goals. Then there's the pesky cat, and a conversation with someone that made me realize that I'm angrier than I thought at an important person in my life. I realize that if you read this blog at all, you're well aware that I'm not perfect, but it's still hard to admit publicly, even if I've done it a bunch of times before. I really care what you think. Yes, you.

I didn't hit the cat. I did hit the chair near the cat, which scared him away for a few blissfully quiet seconds, but he came right back. I'm sure all he wanted was food and love, but shooing him away felt like the solution to the immediate problem, which was an annoying cat. I was in a hurry. He could wait.

So as all of this was happening, I was typing away that my amazing job as a small business owner consists mostly of being nice to people, data entry and trips to Ikea. And here's the corollary to the "being honest is hard" problem with blogging: being surface-y is boring. What's really happening is I want to kill my cat for being a cat, and I'm pounding away at the keyboard thinking that will somehow make the computer go faster. I feel knotted and weird and angry. I'd rather write about my awesome yoga practice and how great the business is going. But that is definitely not what is happening for me right this second.

There is a Buddhist saying that if you think you're enlightened, look at how you behave in relationships. To be honest, I don't know if I'm behaving well or not. Definitely not doing that great with George, the cat. I do know that there are hurt feelings and confusion and anger in a couple of my human relationships, some of which I am probably responsible for.

Part of what happened tonight was that I looked at teacher stats, and there are a handful of teachers that I have been worried about, and the stats confirm my fears. They're not retaining students. Originally, part of the concept of the Collective was that the teachers would be totally autonomous and teach however they wanted. Looking at it squarely, I think that was my way of ducking the fact that at a certain point I need to offer unsolicited feedback, which I hate and dread. In the early stages of the business, I was constantly scrambling and trying new things to keep the studio afloat, so I would just take teachers off the schedule when their classes weren't doing well. I didn't offer feedback or give them a chance to improve. There are lots of problems with that. What I know now that I didn't understand then is that the primary reason a class is successful is that the same teacher has been teaching it for a long time. That's just been my experience. So I haven't fired a teacher in a long, long time. I keep them around, but I don't say anything either, even when there are simple, clear things I see that they could do to be more effective. I want to be liked too much, so I actively avoid conflict and confrontation. This particular pattern is as old as I am. Changing it won't be easy.

One of the problems with saying nothing is that I get resentful because they don't understand something that I haven't told them yet, and the relationship suffers anyway. Then I go home and want to kill my cat.

(Note credit where due. There's a Bob Dylan line that I'm sort of poaching: "You keep expecting me to remember something you forgot to say." That's what I'm doing. Like some crazy woman Bob Dylan slept with for awhile.)

There has to be a better way. My job is more than data entry and trips to Ikea. There's toilet cleaning and screwing together the Ikea crap I buy. And I have to do a certain amount of work to make sure the quality of instruction at the studio is high, which will mean having a few difficult conversations.

 I haven't opened the Bhagavad Gita since the last time I blogged, which was like a million years ago. (I guess I'm not as spiritual as I was in early July.) But as Krishna tells Arjuna, we have to show up and do what we're supposed to do. That's yoga. So here's my plan: I'm going to take at least one class from every teacher on the schedule and offer everyone some feedback as well as a look at their stats. Most of what I have to say is actually really positive, so a lot of the conversations will be fun.

As far as my other relationships, all I can say is I don't feel particularly enlightened when I'm alone, but in certain difficult relationships, I can feel particularly un-enlightened. The Buddhists, as usual, have it right. I usually feel like most of us are just bumbling along doing the best we can, but mostly thinking of ourselves and mostly blind to how all of our old habits and fears are directing us. That's me, anyway. As I get older and work at it, I get slightly more skilled at bumbling with some direction. I know better what I want now, and I'm more apt to vocalize it than I used to be. I guess the modern psych term for that is boundaries. I've set some boundaries in my personal life that not everyone involved is comfortable with. I think I'm offering enough, but it's less than what they're used to.

But at least I got clear and said it. At work, it's time to do a better job of getting clear about what the studio and its students need and vocalizing that to my teachers. I've done it, however ungracefully, in my personal life, in really weighty, important relationships, so I should be able to do it here. One would think.

After that, I will clean the toilet. Or maybe before. I'm sure it needs it.

fear

I'm on vacation, and for whatever reason, I decided to use my time away from work to go around looking for ghosts. Ghost towns, actually, but it seems like I what I found is my own ghost, irritated without cause, unable to sit still for any period of time. I have an antsy, agitated ghost living in my brain, and it may be causing more neurosis than I realized.

I also seem to have stumbled upon a haunted hotel, where I booked a room for the night. I'm in the lobby now, and I think the night clerk has just left for the evening. The lobby is one of the supposedly haunted spots, where another desk clerk, long ago, was killed after hitting on the wrong woman. I am in room 205, right next to the elevator that they say goes up and down with no passengers all night. Room 212, down the hall, is said to be haunted by a couple who died there. Buddy refuses to walk to that end of the hall. I tried to drag him, but he leaned back on his haunches and let me tug hard at his leash. He just won't do it.

Am I scared? Yes, a little creeped out, I have to admit. It's an old hotel, very quiet, and I am very alone.

I've been scared a few times on this trip. The first ghost town I found was beautiful. Just off the road, shuttered up, unmolested by historians, not made into a state park, completely overgrown. The town, Chinese Camp, still has a population of 150, and there are houses nearby that are occupied. Run down, with too many old cars and junk in the yard, but occupied.

Main Street, where the ruins are, was quiet. It was just me and the dog peaking in between boards while trying to be mindful of "Posted. NO Trespassing" signs. I heard every creak, every animal scurrying, every branch swaying, every noise, especially the ones I couldn't quite identify. It was quiet though. Too quiet, too empty, too still for noon just off a main highway into a National Park the day after the Fourth. And then someone started yelling. Incoherently. All I could understand was "fuck" and "Goddamn." Whoever it was was angry and crazy and no one was yelling back, so he was either yelling at me or he was yelling at himself. Either way, I was getting the fuck out of there.

I got back in the car and drove through Yosemite. All of the drives this whole trip have been way longer than I anticipated. All the good ghost towns are on long, winding mountain roads off a long, winding mountain highways. Ten miles takes many songs on the iPod, a whole chapter of This American Life, and meanwhile it's just me. Me and the dog and the road and my thoughts and this rising, low-key irritation with life.

The next day, I went looking for Old Mammoth City, which is just outside the recreation mecca of Mammoth Lakes. I found the road, but it was closed for whatever reason, so I parked the car and started walking. My Ghost Town book said that the ruins were behind some thickets, off in the pines, so I took the dog and headed off the road a bit, looking for a way through the brush. We walked around for awhile, and then I looked down. We had been walking for several minutes through lots and lots of  plants with three jagged leaves. Poison oak. My dog, with his low belly and thick fur. Me, with my ankle socks and shorts. We were fucked.

Back to the road where I saw the sign: "Point of Historical Interest. Mammoth City." The State of California says it's so. It must be, even though there's nothing but the marker and a few logs from the foundation of an old cabin. I knew there was more. I just had to walk south a bit. I found a path, and I started down it, but I stopped.

Bears. I'm in bear country. Everywhere I go, there are signs, "Don't feed our bears." My pulse rose and I felt sort of clammy. Did I want to be some bear's lunch? And Buddy, his afternoon snack? I thought about it for a minute. I really wanted to see those ruins. I'd come a long way. But there was no one, nothing around. One bicyclist had come tearing down the road in the whole hour that I had been walking. That was it. I knew that eventually someone would find my car parked on the highway, and they would start piecing it all together. Again, I got the fuck out of there.

Later that day, I asked a local about poison oak. "There's no poison oak around here. Too damn cold." Ok. What about bears? Should I be worried? "They don't care a thing about you. Just yell. They'll walk away. They don't want you. Not if you don't have any food." I didn't have any food. Other than me and the dog.

Hmmm. I had a long drive ahead of me, and when I wasn't getting irritated by myself and my lateness (late for what?) or my dog who was restless and squirming and insistent on being in my lap, I was thinking about fear. I've had some experiences with fear lately. Real fear. I was very, very scared that I had cancer. I wrote about that here. I was really sure that I was almost certainly going to die. Turns out, half the women I know have had the same tests, the same procedure, the same thing exactly. It's really, really common. No one dies, or statistically very, very few die. It's really not that big of a big deal.

I never really knew this before now, but what I'm learning is not to believe anything that I tell myself when I'm scared. I will always eventually end up believing, and then living in, the absolute worst case scenario. When I thought I was going to be eaten by a bear, when I thought I was going to be hospitalized because of an internal poison oak infestation (brought on by drinking water from a bottle I had touched after touching my dog, who clearly had lethal poison oak oil all over his fur), when I was sure I was going to die or -- very best case scenario -- get extremely sick and debilitated by cervical cancer, I was absolutely unable to see any of the infinite other possibilities that could occur. There are so many ways that life can go. Infinitely many ways, but in fear, I only see one, and because of that, I think I know what's going to happen. Sometimes I even call it intuition. It's not intuition. It's narrow, fear-based thinking.

It is biological. I mean, when we were cave women or whatever, I'm sure it served us really well to think about, and then to prepare for, the worst things that could happen, the biggest threats. But now, it's not so useful. It keeps me blind. I miss opportunities. It keeps me from doing things that I really want to do.

So I'm still in the lobby of this creepy hotel, but I feel less scared. It's me that I'm scared of.

As it turns out, I happened to bring along a new Pema Chodron talk I downloaded about fear. She speaks about "ubiquitous nervousness." She says we are always, constantly, in low grade fear. It is so constant that we don't even notice it. It's me getting irritated at the dog. It's me flipping through songs after two notes, sometimes before even the first chord. "Next. Next. Next. Next." It's me, unsatisfied, in a hurry, busy. Even on vacation, I'm busy. Even on vacation I'm late. I traveled two days to get to Bodie, which many people say is the best ghost town in the whole country. I arrive at the gate at 5:50, and the park closes at 6:00. Late. Again. I am always five or ten minutes late everywhere I go. Ask my chiropractor. Ask my friends. The reason is that I'm terrified of having to wait for you. Waiting means sitting. By myself. With my thoughts and nothing to do. Emptiness. Vast emptiness and boredom and ME, ME, ME. There's too much unchartered territory. I'm not prepared to show up. I'm not ready. I'm scared.

It's still spooky here in the lobby. Every time the door opens, I jump. A few couples have come back to the hotel from dinner or drinks or whatever. They smile at me and go right to their rooms. The desk clerk is still gone. It's just me. Me and my dog, who's antsy again. And there's the quiet and the old photos and the mismatched antiques.

I'll take these ghosts, and the horror movie distraction of being in a haunted hotel, over my personal ghosts anytime. My ghosts are crazier, harder to identify, more persistent, more pervasive. I understand now why most people are paired away, insistent on being in relationships. I've been very successful avoiding that because I like to drive, if you know what I mean. I am not a negotiator. I don't know how to compromise. I go my way, so being single has always suited me. I'm not so sure anymore. Here's what's true of cancer, ghosts, screaming violent crazy people, bears, what's true of all my fears: I face them alone. It's just me. And God knows I have a hard time with that.

I need to take the dog out for a last pee before bed. We're going out on a dark street in a town I don't know. But the street is so much less scary than the hotel. And the hotel is so much less scary than me alone with my self. I hope the elevator ghost rests tonight. I'm going to need to sleep.

writing (or not)

Success is not what it seems.

Think about getting a yoga pose. I mean really getting it. Getting it so that (barring unusual circumstances like injury and illness) you do the pose 100% of the time that you try. When I started doing yoga, I couldn't get into crow. I just wasn't strong enough to support my weight on my arms. I used to practice it at home. I would practice and fall, practice and fall, practice and fall. I'm glad no one was watching. The first time I got both feet off the floor, I was thrilled. It was so exciting. But it took a long time after that to be able to do it consistently. Now I can always do crow, but I didn't notice the shift from sometimes (gleefully) getting into the pose to always bringing my feet off the ground with no fuss and no excitement and certainly no hopping. The first time is exciting, but really getting it isn't. It just happens.

Success is that way. The first few times we had freakishly good days or large classes, I was so excited. Now we have good days and large classes all the time, but I'm still the same person. Nothing's changed. It didn't make me happier in a lasting way, and I didn't notice the day that it all changed. (Some of you might wonder if it was the day the Groupon ran. Although our classes got really big then, at this point that promotion has little to do with the financial growth of the business. That might change as the Groupon people convert to regular, paying customers.)

So let's not get too attached to success. That's a reminder to ME, because I do. I think being happy and secure rests on whether the business is successful and profitable and supporting me and writing checks to teachers that actually mean something. I'm not going to lie. It helps. But then other things crop up to make me insecure. Security is an inside job.

Sloka 53, Chapter Two of the Gita is: "When your mind, which has been tossed all about by conflicting opinions, becomes still and centered in equilibrium, then you experience Yoga."

It's the same thing I've been talking about for months in this blog, but in different contexts. Judith Lasater's "May you be like the Lotus Flower, at home in the muddy waters." Pema Chodron's focus on equanimity. It's not about the peak experiences, nor is it about the God-awful ones. It's about how we navigate. Getting a yoga pose requires focus and attention and discipline, and we need those qualities in our life, so they're worth pursuing. But for me, looking back on it, it's the process that's useful. Actually being able to do crow pose is almost completely useless in my life. If I weren't a yoga teacher, it would serve absolutely no purpose whatsoever.

I was going to write about writing. As often happens, I got side tracked.

Writing will, no doubt, be like that too. I just keep writing and it will all fall into place. I don't need to worry that the book isn't written (or even started) or that I haven't kept up with the blog as well as I would like. I'm still writing. It's a process. The blog continues to be fun. I can sit down to write about one thing, and end up somewhere else entirely. No one has ever complained. Eventually, I want to add some structure to my writing. I do have goals around it, but I don't need to worry too much about it.

I just have to keep doing it. Like trying to get crow pose. Alone, falling, imperfect. One day I'll look back and realize that at some point along the way, I got it. I won't be thrilled or excited or filled with bliss. But I will smile. Because the process was so enjoyable.