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Trust your goodness

I listened to a refreshing interview with meditation teacher Tara Brach today, and she mentioned this in passing.

Trust your goodness.

Do you??

If you’re interested in Buddhist psychology, Tara’s work is a perfect place to start. This year is the 20th anniversary of her book Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With The Heart Of A Buddha, and it’s a game-changer.

I’m always amazed by how revelatory and mind-blowing a statement like this feels for folks who grew up in religious traditions that emphasize original sin.

Trust your goodness.

It’ll change your life.

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Begin again

This is the heart of yoga and meditation.

You can start over in every new breath. You’re brand new every time you inhale. Every exhale, a letting go.

Doesn’t have to be the new year. Doesn’t have to be January 1st.

So don’t get tripped up on the New Year’s resolution bullshit. Every inhalation can be a new year. You can always just leave that last one behind, and begin again.

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Let’s weave it together, breath by breath, pose by pose

I hope my yoga and meditation classes might bring you back home to the truth that your childhood religious experiences may have taken from you: that, at heart,

🪷 You are whole.

🪷 Your body is good.

🪷 You can trust it.

🪷 Your spirit is wise.

🪷 Your heart is vast and spacious, far beyond any particular tradition.

🪷 Our lives are impermanent and fleeting, and we’re all gonna die, so we might as well cut the crap and learn how to really do this thing well while we’re here.

🪷 You and I and all of us are caught up in an interconnected interfaith web of being that no toxic patriarchal theology can take away.

Let’s weave it together, breath by breath, pose by pose.

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Just notice

I say this about a million times per class. It’s the key to everything. 

Yoga and meditation are all about learning how to FEEL. Staying with discomfort — whether that’s an emotion or a tricky pose — without freaking out or running away. Making friends with all the very human feelings that arise within the course of an hour or a day or a lifetime.

Which is hard in a culture where, from little on up, we’re told things like “Stop crying!!” or “Nice girls don’t get angry!” or “Why so serious? Put on a smile.”

Your anxious thoughts or difficult moods aren’t good or bad; they just ARE.

See what happens if you can start to just notice them (“Huh, isn’t that interesting, I feel completely pissed off right now”) and stay with them without judging (“Oof, my hamstrings are SCREAMING in this pose!! I’m gonna DIE!!”).

Sit tenderly, and turn toward the discomfort. Breathe into it. 

Over time, slowly, surely, you’ll be less likely to get tangled up in your thoughts and feelings — realizing they’re temporary, and you’re steady, and spacious, like the sky.

It’s deeply psychological. We’re re-wiring, re-learning what it means to be fully human. (So much more than just poses.)

And that’s only a good thing. 

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Chop wood, carry water

Wash the dishes, fold the laundry, clean the toilets, make the bed: all of those unsexy, stereotypically “women’s work” kinds of household chores. Ugh, right?

Well, Zen Buddhism says: f*ck yeah!! Scrub the toilets! That’s what it’s all about!! Enlightenment is never anywhere but right here, in our breathing, heaving, sweating, scrubbing bodies.

These menial tasks can be a pain in the ass, or they can be moving meditations. You decide.

Most importantly: our bodies are central to the whole deal. White patriarchal Christianity encourages us to leave them by the wayside. Don’t.

Let these Zen perspectives remind you that embodiment resides at the heart of everything holy — where everything sacred begins.

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You understand suffering. That’s why you should teach.

Like many of my colleagues, I’ve been reading (and loving) Susan Cain’s new book, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole.

In one chapter, Cain tells the story of how renowned meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg helped to bring Buddhism to the West, finding refuge in meditation practice after suffering profoundly in her youth.

The young Salzberg’s teacher in India, Dipa Ma, tells her she’s ready to teach — not because she’s done some 200 hour training, but because she deeply understands suffering.

I love this and believe it to be so true. 

Sure, there are countless 22-year-old Instagram yoga teachers performing all kinds of athleisure-clad stunts while spouting New Age clichés about positive thinking and the Law of Attraction.

But the only teachers I am really drawn to these days are those who have truly known suffering and loss and have come out the other side. People who have been *through it*.

Who cares what they look like in yoga pants, or whether they can touch their toes?! 

Yoga and mindfulness colleagues, this is where we really have something to offer; a reminder that can keep us grounded when the pressure to do superficial bullshit (like making those cringe-worthy reels to keep up with the algorithm) feels overwhelming.

This practice is all about relieving mental and physical suffering. We can dress it up in athletic poses and expensive mala beads, but those are just trappings of the profound soul lessons — and potential for true ease, relief, and liberation — that all lie underneath.

So don’t worry about the damn reels or the washboard abs. Stay true to the teachings and just say real things that help people deal with their toughest shit. That’s what folks need the most right now, anyway. ✨

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Gentle

And I don’t mean gentle yoga. (Love me an athletic, ass-kicking vinyasa class.) Gentle with your body. Gentle with your heart. Gentle every time you blow it or run into that meeting sweaty and late or fall out of the pose or say that super awkward thing that makes you cringe every time you think of it for the next ten years.

Gentle with your whole self. Gentle with the world around you. Gentle with not knowing what comes next.

Buddhism gave me this word. As an early twentysomething, I was very good at being hard on myself; most of us are. Especially when you grow up in a religion that proclaims you destined to fall short of the glory of God, sinful and unworthy, broken, “a wretch like me” (thanks, Amazing Grace. You kinda suck.)

In such stark contrast — compassion lies at the heart of meditation and yoga practices. Compassion for self; compassion for your suffering, very human body; compassion for all beings; compassion for the world.

And when your heart begins to spin on the axis of compassion instead of confession, gentleness instead of guilt, everything softens; everything opens.

Try it. Just try being gentle with yourself. Nobody ever got where they wanted to by beating themself up. I promise.

Maybe, just maybe, compassion will get you there instead. 

(PS — if you want to dive further into this, check out the wonderful work on self-compassion being done by Kristin Neff. She’s setting the standard in so many graceful, life-giving ways.)