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The Thinking Yogi by Kerry Maiorca March 2005: Chasing Spring Growing up in the Chicago area, the feeling is familiar - it’s March, it’s still cold and flurrying, but the calendar says spring is just right around the corner, and everywhere people are saying “I’m sick of the cold,” “This weather is terrible,” and “I can’t wait until summer.” Yes, it’s frustrating when the weather fluctuates and you don’t know what to expect from one day to the next, but it’s also a great way to practice being present. The complaints we have about the weather are actually complaints about our expectations. We expect that in March it should be moving towards spring, because in some parts of the country it is. But year after Chicago year, it’s not spring in March, and yet we don’t change our expectations. We just find ourselves more and more angry and sick of our winter bundling. For our first winter back from California, I did a little experiment: I never looked at temperatures or weather forecasts. Once we were really in the thick of it, the bitterness of January, I knew it was cold out - cold enough to require a warm coat, scarf, hat, mittens - but I never knew if it was 30 degrees or 3 degrees outside. I tried to separate myself from the labeling of the cold, and just let myself experience it. Many of us like to look at weather forecasts because it gives us the illusion of having a handle on a situation that is entirely out of our control. I found that when I didn’t know it was 3 degrees outside, it felt just a little less cold. As soon as I overheard someone mention the temperature, I found it almost impossible not to mentally cling to that number. Even if you’ve been practicing yoga for a long time and can get yourself into some pretty impressive poses, it all becomes gymnastics unless you can find a way to bring it into your everyday life. Each time a teacher encourages you to observe your breath or notice how your leg is positioned in triangle pose, you’re moving beyond the physical; by starting with something concrete, you're gradually teaching yourself to focus and disconnect from the constant whirring of the mind. When you notice that you're daydreaming about summertime, grumbling about the snow on the ground, or wishing for a sunny rather than a gray day, you are observing yourself in the moment, observing your mind’s desire to flee the present, much the way you might observe that same desire in a particularly difficult or challenging yoga pose. So start by considering the fact that the weather itself isn’t good or bad, but rather your ideas and expectations of it make it something larger than what it is. Even in the midst of the most gorgeous summer day, you might still feel sad or wish you were elsewhere. The practice of yoga teaches us to become comfortable or at least to be present through our discomfort, wherever we are right now. Because that is the only thing we have. The other stuff, the thoughts about a warm beach in Hawaii, the memories of last summer’s late night barbecue on the back deck, those are all just things that exist in the mind. And meanwhile, this day, whether it’s a dreary winter one or a sunny summer one, is ticking by and we haven’t really lived in it. Instead, we’ve lived in our minds. |
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