The Last Human Freedom

Freedom is an interesting word. It can mean physical freedom, such as not being in prison or enslaved. It can mean emotional freedom, as I wrote about three years ago. It can mean political freedom, which we are watching unfold around the world, but particularly in Egypt and Syria right now. And that is what we in the United States celebrate on July 4^th every year.

There are all sorts of arguments we are not free in our lives. We are expected to work and pay off debt. There is no country in the world without a government. And certainly there has been a lot of discussion about freedom when our phone logs are being watched by government agencies. But as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, governments “deriv[e] their power from the consent of the people.”

But as I have said many times before, I am not publicly political. What I think of the revolutions happening in Syria and Egypt, and what I think of Edward Snowden and the NSA, is not really important. But I think all these situations reflect perfectly what Jefferson said. We have to consent to any limitations on our freedom.

And that includes limitations on any type of freedom. Our deepest freedom, however, is one that we should never consent to limit, though many of us (including myself) often do.

Viktor Frankl, who was a holocaust survivor, said, “The last of human freedoms - the ability to chose one's attitude in a given set of circumstances.” We get to choose how we respond to any situation. We can respond with anger and revolt. We can respond with acceptance. We can respond with fear. We can respond knowing we have joy and contentment within ourselves, and nothing external can change that. But we have to remember to consciously choose that response. Frankl further stated, "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."

I think it is important to look at the larger, political freedoms, not only for ourselves but for others. We live in a world where child prostitution and human trafficking occur. We live in a world where Google and Facebook are not allowed to exist in certain countries. But even if we had all of our political freedoms, how many of us consent to our own lack of personal freedoms? How many of us forget that space between stimulus and response to get to our last human freedom of attitude? 

Lawyers can be great at helping people obtain political freedoms as well as keeping people out of prison. But law does little to help us break free of our personal freedoms. Yoga, however, helps us there. It is not always easy. These are the limitations that are much harder to see. There is no whisleblower inside us to tell us when we are limiting ourselves. We have to learn to listen. And in that listening we have to ask if we are reacting or responding.

I notice when I am getting caught in my limitations when I am driving. Even after more than a decade of yoga and trying to learn to let go of my anger, when someone cuts me off on the road, I sometimes go into a fit of rage. Some days I can let it go quickly, but other times it boils inside of me even when I know it serves no purpose except to drain my energy. I know I am not alone in this. Road rage is a pretty serious issue and sometimes leads to death. Thus, driving is my teaching time as well. And I do a lot of driving.

Another common area of limiting freedom is our response to our physical bodies. We often feel defined by them rather than our higher Being. I cannot tell you how often I hear people say, “I’m too fat,” “I’m not flexible,” or “I’m in too much pain.” We let our bodies limit our souls. There is no doubt that our bodies have limitations at times. But look at the amazing examples of people who have done so much despite their limited bodies. Stephen Hawking, Roger Ebert post cancer, and all the stories you have hopefully heard of people on their death beds with a smile on their face and love in their hearts.

Our Being is bigger than our bodies and bigger than our road rage. No matter how limited we feel, we have to consent to giving up the freedom to choose our attitude. We can also choose not to consent. We can choose to feel that freedom regardless of external consequences. So, while people are celebrating a revolution over 200 years ago with barbeques, parades, and fireworks, how are you celebrating your internal freedoms?

Are you remembering to breathe deeply? Are you taking the time to ask if you are doing what you were put on this planet to do? Are you letting yourself forgive others as well as yourself? Are you finding gratitude in moments that at first are difficult? Are you choosing an attitude to serve your highest self or one that makes life more difficult? As Viktor Frankl said, this is the last of human freedoms. Nothing external has the power to effect us without our consent. It may seem difficult, or even impossible, to choose a different attitude in the face of adversity, but the choice is always there. What attitude will you choose?

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2013, all rights reserved.

The post, The Last Human Freedom, first appeared on Is Yoga Legal.

Remembering the Tools

I remember the moment I decided I needed yoga and meditation in my life. I was 19 years old. It was the summer between my first and second years in university. I was having a rough summer, and I needed a way to relax. I had always been interested in yoga, but I had only tried it once myself. Yoga was becoming a big deal in America, but by no means was it yet the multi-billion dollar industry driving yogurt ads it is today. I just knew I needed something different in my life, and yoga seemed like the way to start.

Soon yoga just took over my life. It kept me sane, or at least saner than without it. Yoga became my refuge, both as a practice and as a way to connect to community. And I found a way to bring it into my world as a lawyer, not as a separate thing I did after work, but as a way to further create a professional community. My first teaching experience was at a family law conference, and for a brief time when I was "self-employed" I taught Stress Management Workshops focusing on yoga and meditation.

I attempted to fill my yoga bucket with practice and various tools, hoping to have a reserve for when the going got tough. And for awhile, I did. But then it got tougher.

For whatever reason, I am not recovering correctly from my surgery four months ago. No one seems to know why that is. But the words have begun to change from recovery to chronic pain. My life has gone from one of hiking the self-proclaimed most beautiful trail in the world to wondering whether I will be able to take a 10-minute walk home from Starbucks. And with the change in life circumstances has come the fear, the panic, etc.

I have said it before, and I will say it probably many more times. Something hit me during yoga teacher training. I was not necessarily destined to be a full-time yoga teacher, but somehow I had to bring yoga into some part of the legal profession, and perhaps to other professionals as well. The reason? Working a lot can be hazardous to your health, but it can also be rewarding. We just have to find the place where those two meet and remain healthy.

I made sure to make yoga a part of my life when I started my job in December 2011. Then there were weeks I did not go to classes, but I (usually) practiced in the mornings. Well, sometimes. And then began the nagging hip pain that eventually traveled down my leg and into my foot. That landed me on an operating table. And now I have an excuse - I cannot do yoga. But what does that mean exactly? I cannot do most asana. That is true. But everyone can do yoga. If you can breathe, you can do yoga. I often write about yoga and meditation, but there is no difference. They are one and the same.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine gave me a CD called Mindfulness Meditation for Pain Relief by Jon Kabat-Zinn. In it, he reminds us that mindfulness is not something that happens overnight. He reminds us that mindfulness is an ongoing process, a training system really. And something about that is difficult. All the tools in the world but somehow they feel beyond my grasp. I understand stress that comes from work. I have never done anything in my life except school and work. I can work with that stress. I do not understand the stress and fear that comes with a body that seems to be failing. I could always push through the pain before. But now I have to deal with it.

But we all reach these moments in life, these moments we are faced to deal with our lives and not run and hide. For some of us, many of the people I see, these moments happen as a result of work, especially in a stressful profession like law, but not only. For some it is the result of an illness, a divorce, the death of a loved one, but we all know these moments. They bring us to our edge. And if I have learned anything from yoga, it is that the edge can move. We can expand and grow. Sometimes it feels like it is impossible. Sometimes we push too far and cause ourselves more pain and suffering. But we learn to read it and understand it, and when we use the breath and mindfulness and awareness, we slowly begin to see we can handle more.

I would love to say I have had that moment of insight seeing my edge expand. But the truth is that there is not necessarily a moment. As Kabat-Zinn reminds us, it is a process. And no, it is not necessarily an easy one, even when you have all the tools. In that sense, it is sort of like practicing law - law school can only teach you so much, but then you have to practice to learn to really do it.

Practice. That's the word. Practice. No matter the endeavor, practice makes us better at it. And no matter the endeavor, there are days (or months, perhaps years) we do not want to practice. But the difference here is that practicing yoga makes all the other endeavors, including a body that does not work, easier. I am honestly not sure what has kept me off the proverbial mat/cushion. But I know that the only way to handle this is to utilize the tools I began learning when I was 19. Ironically, I'm back in the same location I was that summer, at least for another few days. Perhaps that is just the inspiration I need.

How have you gotten back into practice after a long stint away? How does your life change when you do not practice?

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2013, all rights reserved.

"Remembering the Tools" first appeared on Is Yoga Legal.

Thanksgiving Year to Year

One year ago, I was at the US Ambassador’s house in New Zealand celebrating Thanksgiving in summer. And without realizing it, I actually put the same clothes on today that I was wearing then (I looked at photos). And yes, this should tell you how a summer in NZ is very similar to a winter in Arizona, but I digress. One year ago, I was grateful for the 10 months I had spent in New Zealand, from an earthquake, to new friends, to beautiful adventures, to finishing a thesis.

And that thesis looked forward to this year. The thesis was all about representing children, and that is what I currently do, though I do it in a slightly different context than addressed in the thesis. But this year has been about integrating my years digging deep into yoga and the law and emerging with some semblance of a future. And this year has been hard. It has been a struggle to finally integrate theory and practice, in law, but also on and off the yogamat.

Law school is an interesting theoretical adventure. Traditionally, law school is learning the theory of the law, and some would argue we spend too much time on that in school. We spend our time reading cases of situations gone awry, and sometimes tragically so, but cases become stories, and the people are safely behind the pages. We are protected from their stories similarly to how we are protected from the stories of the protagonists in a movie. 

But the practice of law is anything but peoples’ lives on a page. Instead, the practice of law is about peoples’ lives in your face. Crisis after crisis arises, and lawyers are expected to stay rational and calm. Human nature wants to send us into screaming fits of rage and fear, but that is not our role. Instead, we are asked to answer with calm rationality and turn the theory into practice – look at the situation from a purely legal standpoint. There are, of course, advantages to this. But it throws our systems off if we do not pay attention.

Yoga is quite the opposite. Most people in the modern world come to yoga through the practice first. In fact few of them have any idea about the theory behind it. Some want some exercise, while others want to stretch after their own exercise. But the theory creeps in. Yogis begin to act with more compassion towards others after learning to act with more compassion for themselves. Yogis learn to respond rather than react to the crises that inevitably arise in their lives.

But that flow from theory to practice and back is anything but smooth. The day after Thanksgiving last year I was not at a Black Friday Sale. Instead, I was on a boat between the north and south islands of New Zealand and who should I see but the Ambassador? I said hello to him and then sat back down. Then I started crying. I was so grateful for all that had transpired that year in New Zealand. And I knew I was coming back to the United States to a job I had, in many ways, worked my entire life to have. How amazingly lucky could one person be?

And here we are at another Thanksgiving. I have spent this month finding things for which I am grateful, from my breath to the wonderful people with whom I get to work. Being a first year lawyer is one of the most difficult things I have ever done in my life. But it is also one of the most enlightening and inspiring.

And while I was doing tree pose from the tops of mountains in New Zealand last year, this year, my yoga practice has struggled through a sprained ankle, hip pain, and simply too little time. But I have started attending classes again, meditating in the mornings, doing some asana, and even teaching once per week at the courthouse.

But just yesterday, the week of Thanksgiving, I saw it shine through like never before. Someone decided to yell at me about something, and in the midst of the yelling, I sent him a little compassion and thought to myself, “may you be free of suffering and the root of suffering.” That particular phrase is more Buddhist than Yogic, but it was a moment of reflection rather than reaction. And then I walked away from the conversation and did something else. The yoga crept out from where it was hiding and offered me a little solace in the moment - and hopefully the person yelling at me, though the thought was silent.

Theory and practice. Back and forth.

It is tomorrow in New Zealand, which means it is already Thanksgiving. So I am going to celebrate two this year. Today is a deep sense of gratitude for all I have learned this year, the people who have inspired me whether a “difficult” teacher or a friend with a shoulder, and the amazing opportunities to understand the ebb and flow between theory and practice in law and yoga.

Whether celebrating Thanksgiving in a country far away from the United States at the US Ambassador’s residence or in central Tucson in the midst of being a first year lawyer, the sentiment is the same. I think Lionel Hampton said it best, “Gratitude is when memory is stored in the heart and not in the mind.”

Our hearts go with us wherever we are, and gratitude can arise in any moment. We can find all the quotes on the internet we want about gratitude, and learn all there is to know, but then it is about practicing that gratitude and feeling it deeply in the heart. That is the moment when theory meets practice. Can we take the sentiment of this day, this week, this month and carry it forward into our daily lives?

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2012, all rights reserved.

Finding Gratitude in Difficult Places

This post has been percolating in my mind for months. But this is gratitude month, and it is time to finally write it out in full. I have tried to write it numerous times, but it just sits on my computer, awaiting the words that never come. But the universe has sent enough my way that the words are ready to flow.

We all have our “difficult” teachers. They come in many forms. They are the people and experiences that test our practice. They are the people that pull us out of a reflective mentality into clenched fists and anger spouting. They are the people at work who gossip about us behind our backs, our friends who betray us, and our family who is just so close they know how to push all our buttons.

Usually our difficult teachers are people who know us best. While there is a lot to be gained while practicing deep breathing while driving and not getting mad at the people who cut us off, the real practice is sitting with the people we see all the time when they have done something we do not like. The practice is learning to engage with them. And it is also learning to see our experiences and our pain in new ways.

The question is, how do we learn to be grateful for these people and experiences and learn what we need from them?

The first iteration of an attempt at this post was a post called, “When the Body Does Not Behave.” But what I left out of that post was the underlying truth. I am, and have been for several months, in physical pain. And this is different than my hamstring injury during teacher training. This is ongoing pain. It is pain that interferes with doing yoga. It interferes with teaching yoga. It interferes with a lot of things, actually. It has become my teacher.

Living in the world takes some give and take. America just had a major election, and since Tuesday, my facebook feed has been full of people lamenting the anger and vitriol that remains post-election. Social media is an interesting experiment. Perhaps we say things there we would not say directly to a person, but we are willing to just spew whatever comes to our minds. But the people with whom we share it are ostensibly our friends. Apparently a lot of my friends have unfriended others, or been unfriended, because of their political leanings. It sounds trite to mention facebook, and I feel a bit silly for doing it, but it is a perfect example of these difficult teachers.

It is far easier to unfriend a person than face our deepest selves. But that is where the beauty lies. It is in those deepest places, when we are forced to see them, that we are able to connect the most with other people. But first we have to face the difficult teachers.

And that is not easy. That is why they are difficult. Most of the time I just get frustrated. All the yoga goes out the window, and I get annoyed, my breathing gets shallow, and the physical pain gets worse. But this month, November, I invite you to try something new along with me. I invite you to find a sense of gratitude in these experiences. They are leading us to something greater.

It is no easier to deal with an email from opposing counsel than it is to deal with intense physical pain, but both of these experiences are opportunities in our lives to stop, reflect, and practice. They are opportunities to ask ourselves what we could do differently and what we could learn from one another. It is much easier to be calm and reflective when we are away from the world. But the truth is that we live in the world, and that means we face these issues.

One caveat: I have heard a lot of people say that our greatest teachers are those who are the most difficult in our lives. Until very recently, I sort of blindly agreed with that statement. Now I see it a bit more nuanced. We need all sorts of teachers, and difficulty teachers play a significant role in how we interact with ourselves and one another, but we need supportive and loving teachers as well. That can be a post for another day, but that is why I did not start this post with comments about our greatest teachers being our most difficult. They are necessary, but so are so many others.

We may not be able to make the difficult situation disappear, but we can change our reaction to it. And what if we just said thank you? Thank you for allowing me to see where I still need to work. Thank you for bringing me closer to my humanity and compassion. Thank you for opening my eyes and heart to the full extent of the practice.

How are you grateful for difficulty in your life?

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2012, all rights reserved.

Clearing the Air

In the last post, we talked about the reasons to avoid gossip and its control on our society. While writing it, however, I kept thinking to myself, “but what about the times we need to talk about others?” I like to think of this as the “clearing the air” caveat to the problems with gossip.

Every day, I realize more and more how large the capacity is for humans to harm other humans, whether physically, emotionally, or spiritually. From sibling rivalries to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, pain seems to be the modus operandi of the human race these days. Perhaps it is a reflection of the news we hear, but it seems to be getting more and more intense.

And as it gets more intense around the world, it gets more intense in our daily lives. Have you ever had one of those days where a family member, close friend, or even coworker did or said something that hurt you? If the answer to that question is no, count your blessings and stop reading here. And while you are at it, post in the comments about how you have managed it.

If you have felt that, what is the first thing you want to do after being hurt? Me? I want to tell someone. I want to shout from the rafters how wronged I was. And of course, I never want to accept how wrong I was. So the conversation becomes, “so-and-so is so mean, I cannot believe s/he did that to me.” But is that true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?

It may feel necessary in the moment, but if we handle the conversation like that, it becomes gossip, and leads to all the negative effects associated with gossip, that eventually only hurt us more. I think there is a different way to handle the situation. A more yogic approach. A way that could potentially nip the downward spiral of email in the bud.

There are all sorts of teachings about using “I” statements. So, instead of saying, “Johnny hurt me,” we say, “I was hurt.” Instead of bringing the negative energy of gossip into the conversation, we can honestly look at a third party, explain our pain, and potentially ask for help in dealing with it. While in the moment, it may feel better to shout from the rafters what a terrible person Johnny is, at the end of the day, that solves nothing, the pain gets worse, and in addition, we have gossiped.

This step requires those attributes we learn on the mat – awareness and reflection. On the mat, we learn to be aware of our bodies and our minds. We notice when we take the body to a place of pain, and we think to ourselves, “ow, that hurts, I should stop.” If we do not take that step, we pull a hamstring (or whatever). Taking that moment also helps us find reflection. Learning to breathe, we learn to reflect and not react to life as it happens. “I” statements are similar. The reaction is the shouting and the blaming and the gossip. But we can own the hurt we feel without perpetuating the pattern of gossip and all the negativity that brings to ourselves as well as to others.

The second step of the process is a wee bit more difficult, and by a wee bit, I mean it feels impossible. The second step is owning our piece of it. As someone who works with abused and neglected children and sees a lot of domestic violence victims, I find myself saying, “it’s not your fault” a lot. And I always believe it when I say it. But outside of purely abusive situations, we often do have a part in the pain we perceive is caused purely by someone else. This is where an outside observer can be helpful.

Of course, we want someone to say, “you did nothing wrong, and Johnny is just a jerk.” (For the record, I have nothing against anyone named Johnny. I think I only know a few, and I have always had wonderful interactions with them. It’s just a name here to stop saying so-and-so.) But in order to clear the air and truly move forward, we need to get out of the gossip mode and into the healing mode. And that requires looking at our own part in the pain.

Did I say something I knew would make her angry? Did I want him to react that way to validate my belief about who he is as a person? Did I want to make her angry because I was still mad about our fight last week?

To be clear, owning our part in the process does not minimize our pain. We can still be hurt. We can still reflect and tell someone else, I feel hurt. But we can do it in a way that is true, kind, and necessary. The necessary comes when we realize that we need to get this off our chest or it will stay there forever. But we can have the conversation in a true and kind way and not simply as gossip.

Easy? Absolutely not! But when we actually take these steps, we begin to see the difference between gossip and necessary air clearing, and we also begin to see that when all is said and done, we can make a choice as to how to move forward. A choice determined by reflection and awareness and not one made in the heat of pain. And perhaps this process can even lead to forgiveness.

How do you clear the air of your pains?

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2012, all rights reserved.

The Gossip Effect

Two posts ago, we talked about the issues associated with negativity at work and ways to move beyond it. But there was a glaring elephant in the post I neglected to mention – Gossip! Ok, the truth is that I wanted to give gossip its own post. I think it warrants that. 

There is little question the modern workplace is a bastion of gossip. The water cooler is more than just a metaphor for hanging out and not actually getting work done. Gossip has hit the places I work in ways that have truly opened my eyes to how we choose to communicate with each other and about each other.

While teaching English in France, I heard the teachers gossiping about the students and their families. Long before yoga became a daily practice for me (though I had already started practicing), those days in the teachers’ lounge were painful. While working at another job, I was struck by the amount of gossip that permeated the office. It was painful to hear and even more painful that I found myself getting caught up in it.

I have found it very, very difficult to escape the gossip mill anywhere in life. It is an easy way to connect with people – to talk about mutual people we know or to whine about someone who has harmed us. But gossip is harmful to us. It brings negative emotions to the front of our consciousness, and for me, it always leaves a nasty feeling in the air.

And yet we continue to gossip despite the plethora of teachings “against” it. As kids we are told, “if you cannot say something nice, do not say anything at all.” The Golden Rule teaches us to “treat other people as you would like to be treated.” These are great ways to think about gossip, but perhaps we need something more specific.

Sri Sathya Sai Baba tells us to ask three questions before we speak, “Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind?” This is a general teaching about speaking, but it is especially important when talking about other people. First, so much of what we repeat is what we hear from others, and we cannot verify whether it is true. Lawyers, especially, must think about hearsay and whether a statement is reliable. We should, at the very least, consider that when speaking about other people.

The second question is, “is it necessary?” Something we say about someone may be true, but it may not be necessary to share with others. I do not need to tell everyone everything that happens between another person and myself. It probably will not solve anything, and it could just make me more upset. And finally, we should ask ourselves, “is it kind?” This gets back to the two teachings above, if we have nothing nice to say, or if we are treating someone less kindly than we would want them to treat us, we probably should say nothing.

This is not easy to do. In fact, we live in a world where gossip penetrates every aspect of our lives. We live in a world where every mis-statement made by a politician is reported for days, and often the statements are taken out of context and made to sound worse than they really were. We live in a world where People magazine and the National Enquirer are million (billion, perhaps?) dollar industries existing solely on gossip about people most of us have never met.

Gossip can only occur because we think the person about whom we are speaking is somehow different than us, and we can say something about them without affecting ourselves. Gossip happens in the moment and is rarely factually complete. By the time the story reaches a point where the facts are known, it has left our attention. It is a reaction to a moment in time that disappears when something more interesting comes along. But its effects on our consciousness remain, and like everything else in life, they get stuck in us until we let them go.

Yoga is about reflecting before reacting. We learn to ask ourselves if something hurts before we do it, and if it does, we find a better way. In that sense, yoga is the perfect opportunity to break free of gossip. Instead of reacting to the partial facts, we can stop and reflect and ask ourselves the pertinent questions – is it true, is it necessary, is it kind? We can have a yogic response to the gossip we hear as well as the gossip we may wish to speak.

If the answer to those questions is no, and we still speak it, how are we harming ourselves. How does gossip affect our beings? How does it affect the person about whom we are speaking? What if we only listen but do not partake? In all of those scenarios, negativity breeds negativity. In other words gossip only harms everyone involved.

I wish I could tell the world I have broken free of the gossip hold. I have not. But more and more I am conscious of the effect my words have on others and myself. It is a first step – a small one, but a first one. Do you notice yourself getting caught up in gossip? What do you do when you notice that happening? Are you willing to walk away? Are you willing to change the conversation? How has gossip affected you?

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2012, all rights reserved.

Starting Fresh for Forgiveness

When I was a child, I was forced to miss school twice a year when my non-Jewish friends went to school (unless, of course, the holidays fell on weekends). And yes, even in elementary school, I hated missing school. Think what you want about me, I can take it. Those two days were Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Rosh Hashanah literally means the head of the year. It’s the new year for Jews. Yom Kippur is the day of atonement, the day we ask for forgiveness for all we have done "wrong" during the year.

As a child, I dutifully went to synagogue every year. Ok, usually I was dragged by my parents, but still, I went. I cared almost nothing about the holidays. Ironically, over the years I have stopped taking these days off from work, but they have begun to mean a lot more to me. I will be working all day today, and I will not be going to services, but the new year has me thinking, especially as it is tied to the day of atonement.

On December 31, everyone talks about resolutions. These are thoughts and ideas about how we are going to better ourselves going forward. It is a very personal endeavor, rarely focused on our place in the world. But the Jewish holidays being together like this are really something different. And it is my yoga practice that has connected me to this difference. The act of asking forgiveness is difficult. Instead of asking us to take a look at what we may like to change about ourselves and then heading out to a party, asking forgiveness requires us to take a look at how our being affects others around us. Some years this is easier than others.

Yoga, similarly, asks us to look at how our actions affect others. The Yamas and Niyamas, the first two limbs of the 8-limb yoga path, are rules for living. The yamas, specifically, address our interactions with others. They are: ahimsa (non-violence), Satya (truthfulness), Asteya (non-stealing), Brachmacharya (just read the link – no succinct explanation), and Aparigraha (non-grasping). As a kid, all I heard was the need to ask for forgiveness for anything I had done to hurt another. A noble endeavor, for sure, but a little tough to grasp at times. Yoga has given me the tools to self reflect enough to examine what that truly means and to reach out with specificity to those I have hurt.

The days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are, in some ways, somber. They are days of reflection, days of meditation, days to think long and hard about how our past year has gone. But first, we recognize the new year! There is something beautiful in the order. Before stepping into that somber world, we remember that no matter what we have done in the past, we can start fresh and renew. This is a new year, and the period of reflection is truly a chance to determine where we need to ask for forgiveness and a chance to move forward from that. 

It is also a chance to forgive others. The new year is a reminder that whatever they may have done to us in the past can be changed going forward. That is a refreshing thought. We need not hold on, another yoga lesson that is sometimes easier said than done. The time on the mat is a chance to reflect. It is a chance to turn inward and notice all the subtle ways we have missed the mark on where we wanted to be. 

But it is also the opportunity to let go, to see all that is new in the world. It is a chance to open our hearts to the possibilities of the year ahead remembering that we may make mistakes along the way, but also remembering that we can both forgive and ask forgiveness. We can also learn to preempt the need. We can set an intention to refrain from sending the nasty email (asking for a tone check from a friend helps). We can refrain from making disingenuous remarks about others. We can refrain from reacting through anger rather than thoughtful reflection.

What I have come to love about the Jewish New Year is that, like a yoga practice, it is both deeply personal and community oriented. The reflection is deep, but the need to engage others through forgiveness brings us together. It is somber reflection but also a chance to come together and celebrate the newness, not only of the new year, but also of the clean slate produced through forgiveness.  

I may be at work today, but these are the lessons my yoga practice has taught me about all those days I had to miss school as a kid!

And don’t forget the apples and honey! May your year be sweet and full of peace, light, and love.

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2012, all rights reserved. 

Willing to "Fail"

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – Mark Twain

Ironically, I learned an important lesson similar to Mark Twain’s quote about twenty years ago. It was shortly after Ricky Henderson broke the record for most stolen bases in baseball. I lived near Oakland, and at the time, he was something of a hero to me.

I loved baseball so much as a kid that I attended a baseball camp. I was one of about three girls there. Every morning was trivia time where if you answered a question correctly, you got a pack of baseball cards. The question was, “who has been thrown out more times than anyone stealing bases?” I raised my hand, sure I knew the answer, and (I think because I was one of so few girls) was called on first. My answer was simple – Ricky Henderson.

All the boys laughed at me. How could I be so stupid?!?! The guy asking the question gave me a look and asked something similar to, “is that your final answer?” I remember shaking, but sticking to my convictions and saying yes.

I got a new pack of baseball cards!

Today, all my baseball cards are in my mom’s attic, only because they are so worthless I cannot sell them, and I know nothing about the current state of baseball, though I learned a lot on my recent vacation with my cousins. But obviously that lesson about trying has always stuck with me. Those who succeed in what they do will only get there by “failing” many, many times. We have to be willing to risk something in order to make it somewhere. And as Mark Twain reminds us, looking back on our lives we are going to be a lot more frustrated by what we chose not to do than any of the mistakes we made.

But the bigger question is, “what does it mean to fail?” In sales, it means you are willing to hear no many, many times. In stealing bases, it means you will be thrown out many, many times. In lawyering, it means losing an argument in front of a judge. But those are the nouns, what people think of as failures. They are not. They are truly teachers and opportunities to learn to listen more, tune in to how to do it better, and make another attempt.

In other words, what we think of as “failing” is really a moment to reflect and learn. And that is the yoga.

Asanas (yoga postures) are great reminders of this. What better example than Vrksasana (tree pose)? Asanas mimick life, and vrksasana mimics trees. One leg is rooted firmly into the ground, and the arms lift up to the sky. At times it feels solid, at times it feels as though you are swaying in the wind, and at other times it feels as though you are in Windy Welly, and you will be uprooted at any moment. It just depends on the day. But none of those are failures and none of them are right. They are all moments to reflect and moments to be conscious.

On the days when I feel solid in balance poses such as tree, I try to make them more difficult by closing my eyes (try it, it is fun!). On the days when I just cannot keep one leg lifted I try to laugh. But some days it is frustrating! Why is it on some days the pose is not steady? Why can I not be steady every day? That moment of frustration, of feeling like a failure, comes in. And that is the moment of reflection.

At least I tried!

It is those moments when we learn the most about ourselves. If we were always steady on the mat, we would not learn that it is ok to falter. If we could do every posture the first time we tried, we would learn nothing about our bodies and through our bodies about our deepest selves. If the first time we sat to meditate, our minds emptied fully we would never learn to watch our thoughts and recognize them as simply thoughts and not as what define us.

It is these moments of what we sometimes see as failures that truly teach us who we are and give us our strength to move forward. And it is these moments of what we see as failure that make us break records.  And it is these moments of what we see as failures upon which we look twenty years later and think, “I am glad I gave it a shot and learned something.”

Perhaps our "failures" are really our moments of perfection and yoga.

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2012, all rights reserved.

The Honeymoon vs. The Learning Curve

Yoga starts with a honeymoon phase. It seems that people who really start yoga (as opposed to those who go for one class and decide it is not for them) simply fall in love with the practice. It begins to define their being. There was a great article about that honeymoon phase, and the end of the honeymoon phase, over on Yoga Dork last week.

The author notes, quite correctly in my experience, that there will be days we just do not feel like doing the practice. There will be times we need to take a break, sometimes because the practice has lost something and sometimes because we ignore the practice so much we hurt ourselves. But her point is that like any relationship, there comes a point when the magic feels like it is gone. But it is the initial bliss that sets the stage for the continuing relationship in the future.

The legal profession, from the day we set foot in law school, is sort of the opposite of the honeymoon phase of a yoga practice. From that very first day, we talk about the steep learning curve, about learning to “think like a lawyer” (which, as someone pointed out to me recently, is grammatically incorrect). But those first few weeks and months in law school are nothing compared to the first few weeks and months in practice.

I have now been practicing for almost five months. I have been studying how to be a lawyer for children for the past 5-7 years. I taught kids English in France, and I was a camp counselor for years. My dad is a child custody evaluator, and discussions about family law and juvenile law issues were the topic of many a dinner-table conversations. In other words, I had quite a solid foundation for this work. And yet . . . The learning curve is steeper than anything I have ever before experienced.

And at times, it feels overwhelming . . . overwhelming on the grandest scale.

Interestingly, the cure for both the end of the honeymoon phase and the overwhelming nature of a steep learning curve can be the same – returning to the passion of what brought you there in the first place. This can be extremely difficult when we are stuck in a rut. It can seem pointless when the honeymoon phase has ended. The greatness that was the beginning of the practice might be nothing but a distant memory, a memory you can barely rely on as truth anymore. The exhilaration that brought you to a legal practice (or any profession) that now seems so maddeningly overwhelming can feel like nothing more than pipe dreams of a distant age.

But the good news is that neither of those is the truth. Those belief structures are the rut and the overwhelm speaking for our true understanding. The joy and exhilaration of a practice are always there. They are sometimes more difficult to find than at other times, but they always exist.

Sometimes we just have to look from a new perspective. And what I have learned this weekend is that the new perspective can be that place of rut / overwhelm. The difficulty of the path, wherever that path began, is what deepens the passion that brought us there in the first place. The honeymoon phase, while perhaps exciting, is not the fullest and most complete part of a relationship. The overwhelm of the steep learning curve eventually goes away and first year law students and associates eventually become mentors.

In the moment of the rut and overwhelm, hearing that is difficult. Deep down, we all know it, but stepping on the mat, or into a courtroom, can be difficult in those moments. But the new perspective on the passion and inspiration that began the path and the practice can be our strength to step back in the game.

What I find most interesting about this dynamic is that regardless of how the practice begins – either a honeymoon or a steep and difficult learning curve, the bump in the road is the same. But the bump is just a bump. It is not a brick wall. And that is a lesson both yoga and the law have taught me, and continue to teach me when I’m willing to listen.

How have you seen this play out in your life?

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2012, all rights reserved.

A Very Simple Lens

“This issue should be viewed through the very simple lens of a crime having been committed.”

This sentence was uttered by a lawyer at a conference I attended this past weekend. The context is not important, and this blog is not the place to discuss the particular issues associated with the context. But it is absolutely a place to talk about the phrase, “a very simple lens.”

If I have learned anything by studying the law and yoga together, it is that the only simple statement I can make is that there is no simple lens of anything. There is no simple way to see the issues we face every single day as lawyers, nor as people generally. And our interconnected world is making this evident on levels and in situations we have never before experienced.

As I have mentioned before, there is rarely, if ever, one truth. We all see the world through our own concepts of our subjective truths. Most days I wish there were a single, simple truth that we could view through a single, simple lens. Life would be easier. This is why we hold our communities of like-minded individuals close. We preach to our own choir, and we forward emails with which we agree and delete those with which we disagree. I do it as well sometimes. Often it is with a pang of regret, but I tell myself it is because I do not have enough time for those emails. I will talk to people with whom I disagree, but I do not read their emails apparently. That is a line I have drawn many times.

But that is no longer an option. We can no longer live in the bubbles in which we would sometimes like to hide. We can see the entire world too easily. Lawyers meet yogis and realize they are not all chanting and meditating on a mountain (though the thought is nice at times). Yogis meet lawyers and realize they are not all money-hungry, corporation-protecting monsters. The CEO of Starbucks, a gigantic corporation, says we should take corporate money out of politics until the politicians get their acts together. The simplicity of putting people into a box becomes impossible the moment we open our eyes to all that people can be.

Unfortunately, the more difficult it becomes to actually see the world through a simple lens, the more some people attempt to do it. I actually think this is why we are witnessing such polarizing political worldviews today. We are becoming overwhelmed with the information overload, and we are not taking the time away from that overload and giving ourselves a break. No one, without serious practice, can be expected to jump into seeing issues from all sides. It simply, pardon the phrase, does not fit into the biological structure of fight-or-flight. It is evolutionarily safer to put people into a box of good or bad because then we know whether to allow them in or to kill them to save ourselves.

And it is also difficult and scary on an emotional and psychological level. What if the way I view the world is wrong? What if the way I see my truth is not real? The simple lens is so much easier, less time consuming, and immediately safer.

But in a more and more connected world, it is no longer a possibility. We no longer live in a world where everything must be viewed as a threat. Instead, we exist in a world where we must learn to see each other fully, or we will destroy ourselves. Albert Einstein once said, “I do not know with what weapons World War Three will be fought, but I know that World War Four will be fought with sticks and stones.”

We can no longer afford simple.

Lawyers are trained to cling to one truth or another, to find the simplest way to explain a situation, and this causes us, at times, to start to see the world in black and white terms. This does not mean all do; in fact, most lawyers I know see nuance and context more than simplicity. But the training is there, and the vestiges remain. Yogis, by contrast, are trained to open to new possibilities, whether in a physical asana or in a mental practice. Like lawyers, not all yogis do as they are trained, and many turn into fundamentalists convinced their way is the only way.

Do you notice yourself seeing the world through a simple lens? Are there particular areas you notice it more than others? What do you do about it when you notice it?

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2012, all rights reserved.

Crisis Management: A Changing Perspective

While many of the recent posts have focused on the similarities between yoga and the law, today’s is about one of the biggest opposites. As I have mentioned before, lawyers live in a world defined by disaster. Whether in litigation and responding to the disaster at hand or in transactional work preparing for or trying to avoid disasters, the legal world moves among disasters.

Yoga, by contrast, is about simply preparing ourselves. While disasters are about the external world, or our definition of the external world, yoga is about preparing our internal selves for anything that happens in the external world. This is, of course, much easier to do when the external world in which we find ourselves is fairly simple and not one disaster after another.

So what do we do when we find ourselves surviving in crisis management? What do we do when we feel as though we are barely staying afloat, and if one more event occurs that requires our attention, our entire being is going to explode? That is when the yoga bucket is so vital. That is when the five minutes per day of internal practice help give us the strength to respond with our full awareness to these external forces rather than react with our immediate reactions, unsure of whether we are actually doing what is necessary.

Living in crisis management is dangerous on many levels. We harm ourselves because we live in a state of constant stress. The physiological effects of long term stress are well documented and include the inability to sleep, inability to digest, decreased immunity, etc. In addition to our own physical health, we harm our relationships because we are less capable of interacting with people from a place of heart. How often have you snapped at someone you love simply because you were too tired and stressed to speak to them differently?

Finally, living in that state of crisis management means we can never be in control of our professional lives. The irony, of course, is that we become less effective lawyers (or whatever) because our jobs require us to live in that constant state of managing the crisis du jour rather than preparing ourselves internally sufficiently to respond from a place of compassion and understanding each time an issue arises.

I think there is more to doing this than just having the de-stress bucket filled by doing a practice. I think it also requires a shift in perspective. The reason so many of us believe we live in crisis management is because we view so many parts of our lives as crises. What if we changed that perspective? What if we saw these moments as just another step along the path? What if we saw them as opportunities?

In my personal life, I have seen crises become the greatest moments in peoples’ lives. In my cases, I have seen what I thought were crises become non-issues simply by getting all the facts. And when I change my initial perspective, I find that I have a lot more to give to the situations that truly are crises because I have no used all my energy on the parts of my life that do not require such an intense response.

Unlike finding five minutes a day for a practice, which is simple but not easy, this change in perspective is not very simple either. At some level it requires a complete reprogramming of our responses to what we see as our external world. That takes time. But if I found one thing in New Zealand, it is also possible. I have been back in the United States now for just over a month, and I still find myself “looking right” half the time before I cross the street.

We do not have to choose to be in crisis management mode at all times. Sometimes it feels as though the world has not given us the choice to step back and step out of it, but with each new “crisis,” stop and take a breath. What would happen if you chose to stop and evaluate before going into crisis management immediately? How would that look different?

Do you find yourself living in crisis management? What tools have helped you?

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl, 2012, all rights reserved.

A Future for Others

Today is my 30^th birthday.

Generally speaking, I give no thought to birthdays. I have nothing against them, nor do I particularly care about having a special day. They are, however, a good time to stop and reflect about where we are in life, a time we have to reflect personally rather than big changes we share with others, e.g., graduations, new jobs, etc. Additionally, there are several reasons why this birthday stands out for me. 

First, I am one of the few people I know who is excited to turn 30. I think I was ready to be 30 when I was about 10, so I finally feel my age. It is also happening as I begin a new job and the first one that could be a career if I wanted it to be. It is also a decade birthday, in which we tend to think back on the past decade and reflect. 

My first thought upon reflection was, “what happened to a decade?!?!?!” After getting over the initial shock of realizing that it was ten years ago, not ten weeks ago, that I was living in a dorm at the University of Michigan, I have had some time to really think about what I have done this past decade and what I hope to do over the next one.

Briefly, my twenties went as follows: college, during which I studied abroad in France; teaching English in France; law school; learning to do yoga; working at the Pima County Superior Court; working at the Arizona Court of Appeals; becoming a yoga teacher; and getting an LLM in New Zealand. Of course there are other things, but those are the big highlights. I am struck by two things based upon that list: 1) I have been incredibly blessed, and 2) I have been fairly focused on myself.

Our society has a negative view of focusing too much on yourself. People who focus only on themselves can be seen as selfish and egotistical. One of the most difficult lessons, therefore, for me to learn from yoga was that we must take care of ourselves before we can be of service to others. We must feel secure in our own skins before trying to exist in this world, and we need to fill our own reserves, or we will have nothing left to offer others. As someone once said to me, "the heart pumps blood to itself first."

It was a difficult lesson to learn, but there is no question that I have spent a decade doing just that. All my travels, combined with the yoga, have taught me so much about who I am, what I value, and how I want to move forward. At times I felt too selfish, but deep down I knew I was preparing for something bigger and better. Interestingly, I ended up just where everyone seemed to think I would end up, but now I know I have done it on purpose rather than because someone said I should.

But what does this mean for the next ten years? It means that it is time to turn my focus to the external. This does not mean I plan to stop meditating, practicing, or even traveling; in fact those remain necessary for this next step. But it also means that it is time to use those reserves and all that information for the world. To be totally honest, I am a bit embarrassed by the list of my twenties. I feel like I could have done so much more for other people. But I also know that I can sit with people who have had to call the police on their own children or with drug addicts who have neglected their own children and feel sympathy and compassion without feeling like I have to run for my life. Some days are, of course, easier than others, but hopefully my ten years of selfish can lead to a decade of paying it forward.

And so I make this pledge in public. We all know that the best way to fulfill a promise is to ensure you are held accountable, and the best way to do that is to make it public.

Thirty seems so young and so quick, but also like a turning point. I have been incredibly blessed and have learned many lessons along the way. I know that going forward there will be days I choose myself over others, but I pledge to do it consciously and do it in order to ensure that I can be at my best when others need me. Perhaps this is one of the best ways yoga and the law intersect. It is through yoga that we strengthen our reserves to be of service to our clients and the world. 

Thank you all for sharing this journey with me, for supporting me, and for holding me accountable. I hope this blog can be a piece of my living for others. I hope it provides you with some insights and ideas about yourselves and the world in which we live, and most especially about how to take the time for yourself to be at your best at all times. Many thanks, and hopefully many more celebrations together.

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2012, all rights reserved.

A New Beginning

Welcome to 2012! I am still a bit in shock that this year has arrived. It feels like only yesterday I was writing a post about my intention (rather than resolution) to stay open to all the possibilities New Zealand held in store. Now, back in the United States, it is time to reflect on that and set a new intention for 2012, a new chapter for sure.

I wrote in the 2011 New Year’s post about not knowing where I would be living 5 days after arriving in New Zealand. I ended up being invited to stay where I lived the first four nights, and that home turned into a friendship and eventually a house-sitting opportunity. I tell this story not because it matters to anyone where I lived while in New Zealand, but it perfectly illustrates what being open to new possibilities brings into life. It brings us opportunities we never imagined possible, but that open doors to places the universe wants us to go. My 10.5 months in New Zealand was opportunity after opportunity like that. 

For me, 2012 is full of new adventures, the most obvious, of course, being the new job. As I mentioned in the first post about the new job, I have no idea how this is going to go. The first week was rough, really rough, but it was only the first week. Going forward, however, seems scary and unknowable, and not in the exciting way that was the new possibilities of a new country, especially one as beautiful as New Zealand. But there is a different kind of excitement and opportunity that comes with doing the work I have been preparing to do for nearly half of my life.

So this year’s intention is to trust myself. It was difficult to even type that. It was difficult to trust myself enough to think it possible to trust myself going forward.

But this is where the practice, the yoga, becomes the most important. For years, I have been growing the yoga bucket, filling it with tools that can hopefully work when it really matters. The real test is not whether we can practice when the going is easy. The real test is not whether we can meditate at a retreat or on a mountain top away from life. The real question is whether we can remember to respond rather than react when we feel like life is beating us over the head with a baseball bat. It is in those moments that it is most necessary to have a full yoga bucket.

And as we learn to live in a state of composure in the most difficult circumstances, we learn to trust ourselves. In many ways, learning to trust ourselves is learning to be open to internal possibilities rather than external possibilities. Rather than trusting the external world to present opportunities, we trust ourselves to know what needs to be done. So, I guess this year's intention is not so different from last year's, but the focus, the nexus is slightly different. 

For me, yoga has made trusting myself (and the universe) easier, but certainly not easy. Prior to leaving New Zealand, I had started a daily meditation practice. It was just ten minutes per day, but I can feel a huge difference having let it slide these past three weeks. That is part of my necessary yoga bucket, the refill I need to go inside enough to trust myself. So, while I do not want to make a resolution to meditate every day, I put forward this intention: to trust myself and the path I am on. I'm going to stay open to trusting the universe to present the how. 

What is your intention for this new year? Happy 2012! May the year be full of love and peace.

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2011, all rights reserved. 

Finding Community Across the Pacific

This has been an intense week. A week ago, I was in themiddle of nowhere, without internet, without a phone, even without showers (though strangely the huts had electricity during certain hours of the day). This week, I have been in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city at around 1.3 million people. The contrast was stark and not altogether easy for me to handle. To be totally honest, the thought of going back to the huge United States is a little overwhelming right now, but I am excited to be heading “home” soon. Just 2.5 more weeks in New Zealand. I cannot believe it.

I could not have asked for the New Zealand Family Law Society to have its conference. I was lucky to be able to attend, and it was incredible. I hold a special place in my heart for conferences, and it was at afamily law conference in Denver where I first taught yoga outside of teacher training. Conferences are about learning, but more importantly, they are about networking. Actually, I do not particularly like that word. Conferences are about coming together. They are about community.

And conferences on the other side of the world are about realizing (or perhaps realising) how similar we all are. In some ways, especially in a major stretch of metaphors, conferences embody everything I think yoga has to teach us as professionals. On the surface, conferences seem almost the antithesis of good yoga. They are intense, people rarely sleep, and at least at the conferences I have attended, people eat and drink far more than they should. I am, of course, the exception . . . or not.

But deeper down, conferences allow people to step outside their daily lives and take some time to reflect rather than live in a world of constant reaction. For a few days, the “other” lawyers become your friends again. Debates that sometimes devolve into zero-sum arguments in practice become opportunities to ask questions of each other, engage together, and discuss all the possible issues. No final decision has to be made. Everyone gets to be confused together. Hopefully, we can also be inspired and reinvigorated together as well. And this happens because we get away from the downward spiral of email and see each other’s faces, and talk, laugh, and debate together. We get to step away from daily life, and in doing so, we can put daily life into perspective.

But the best part is about building new community and reminding ourselves of the community in which we already exist. In that vein, I saw some friendly faces, both people I first met here in New Zealand, and people I have met in the US from both New Zealand and Australia. I also met many new people. Yoga is not just about asana and meditating and learning stress management techniques. It helps us step outside our lives long enough to realize how much we all have in common, how connected we really are. Conferences give us the same opportunity. This week, I am grateful for having had that amazing opportunity on the other side of the world. What an incredible beginning of the end of my time here. Now I just might need some more “traditional” yoga to recover from the conference.

What do you do to step outside your daily routine and find community?

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2011, all rights reserved.

Ten Years On . . . Holding Community

I know the internet is full of commentary about September 11, and the 10-year anniversary. To be honest, I did not want to add to it. But then my heart told me I must. On my blog about my life in New Zealand, I wrote about the odd feeling of the world coming together for the Rugby World Cup, yet feeling like an outsider as an American in New Zealand on the anniversary of that day. Ironically, the United States Eagles Rugby team plays its first match on 9/11, though I guess it will only be 9/10 back in the United States. Still, something does not feel right about that. Here is an interesting link to two of the players discussing playing on the anniversary.

Ten years ago, I was a sophomore in college. I had never done yoga. I swore I would never be a lawyer. I embodied everything about stress and had not experienced the world outside US borders for more than three weeks. Since that day, yoga and the law have come to dominate my life, and I have lived abroad for nearly two years. I spent 6 months in Aix-en-Provence, France (during which time the United States invaded Iraq) and 7 months in Dreux, France (during which time the United States reelected President Bush), and now eight months and counting in New Zealand (during which time the United States killed Osama Bin Laden).  

So what, you ask? What does all of this have to do with yoga? What does it have to do with law? What does it have to do with living a more balanced life in the modern world? Everything!

The attacks on September 11, 2001 have defined the vast majority of my adult life. The death of Osama Bin Laden showed me just how tense and scared that time has been. Yoga has taught me much over the past 9+ years, but one of the most profound lessons has been that we must recognize the interconnectedness of humanity. On this blog, I have discussed this as community. Ironically, on this 9/11 anniversary I feel more alone than I have ever felt (this is the first time I have been away from the United States on 9/11).

A part of me yearns to be among many other Americans, rather than 2 or 3, who remember that day. A part of me yearns to tell my friends here, whether Kiwi, Malaysian, English, or Argentinean, how confused and vulnerable I felt, we all felt. A part of me yearns to explain how that fear became misguided arrogance, but that I also felt relief, sadness, and again confusion, when Osama Bin Laden was killed.

But I hear the responses before I open my mouth. I hear people remind me about Guantanamo. I hear people remind me about the drone attacks in Pakistan. I hear people remind me about the tens of thousands of civilians (and military) that have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. I do not know how to express that I see both visions to people in each camp. 

I do not know if people are willing to accept that there are layers and layers to these stories and that sharing them does not mean that any other layer is less important. Few people seem willing to hold the many layers. Few people are willing to struggle and see that no single vision is “right.”

I do not remember if I cried on September 11, 2001. I would like to think I did, but shock and confusion may have prevented it. But yoga has also taught me to open, and trust, my heart. It has taught me to truly feel what others feel, from the jubilation of the Rugby World Cup opening to the pain and horror that people describe in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. I have learned to see fear spiral into its own unimaginable consequences of war and destruction. But that does not mean the fear is not palpable and real. The vision of the planes flying into the Twin Towers now brings tears nearly every time. But so does the vision of Iraqis. So does the thought of the soldiers who have died. All of these events are tragic in their own right.

This theme of being “right” has made its way onto this blog before, as a play on words about being careful before crossing the street in New Zealand where they drive on the “wrong” side of the road. But this time the stakes are higher. This time it means understanding that September 11, 2001 was an awful day. It means understanding that other countries experience their own horrors and war on a daily basis. It means understanding that the United States has made many mistakes over the past 10 years.

Recognizing all of these does not undermine any of them. Disaster breeds community. We saw it on 9/11/2001. We saw it after the Christchurch and Japanese earthquakes. We see it anytime some event shocks us out of our sleep and reminds us that we are connected and together. I hope that this anniversary can remind us of the next step in that process. There is no single story to explain who we are and no single story to explain any event.

Some days it is nearly impossible to hold all these stories, to hold onto so many different visions of the world. But that is when yoga provides its most important, and simplest lesson; come back to the breath. Come back to the breath and let the thoughts and craziness swirl around the head for a moment. Then let it settle. At the end of the day, we do not need to make sense of it all. We simply need to remember that we are all in this together, ready to share our stories.

I hope this time of reflection provides you with a feeling of community and a little bit of peace. I hope we can hear each others’ stories and hold them all with a sense of togetherness and comfort. I hope we can remember that when we think we cannot hear another layer that we remember to come back to the breath and remember that we can, and will, grow together.

Namaste!

© 2011 Rebecca Stahl, all rights reserved