The Stones We Throw.

I used to be an angry child. At some point I picked up Guru Swami Sivananda’s book on Anger and that was my start to managing and understanding my anger. I’m not angry anymore, even at Delhi drivers. I do still get angry but it doesn’t last and it doesn’t consume me the way it did, nor do I carry it with me, for days or weeks or overnight.

The other day I went into a rage about something quite small and it brought a sense of unease, because I’m more self-aware and I thought I’d left that behind me – apparently not!

The sequence went like this- I responded to something said to me with buckets and buckets of anger, I boiled and responded with anger and after the fact  I felt hurt and upset about what had been said to me.

I’m smarter now, so I have some fabulous books that help me to have an outside or different view on a situation when all I can do is see it the same way. So I picked up this book by Rohini Singh where she talks about emotions that hold us hostage. She talks about our pet-emotions, our “Achilles heel” of  emotion as it were- worry , anger etc.

I found myself looking to read her observations on my age-old nemesis Anger and opened up to Hurt and Resentment instead. She likens hurting someone or feeling hurt to the throwing of a stone – pelting someone with a stone basically- and she looks at it from both points of view.

Rohini says when people throw a stone at you ,they’re not at their best and when you’re Affected by someone’s well-aimed throw you’re not at your peak either. That is things have power to hurt us if we let them! And when people throw a metaphorical stone at us , it’s an attempt to grab at our energy or to have our attention in a very twisted way.

She gives this example:

“Consider this scenario: I insult three people. One of them reacts by insulting me back, the second demands an explanation, and the third seems unaffected. Extend this scenario further; Three weeks later, I ask each of them how they remember the incident. The first is seething and has decided that he’ll neither forgive nor forget. The second has dealt with it, although he retains some indignation. The Third finds it hard to recall what happened!”

Rohini goes on to quote Eleanor Roosevelt : “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

Ouch.

When I go back and re-trace what was said and why this fight occurred; this makes complete sense to me. If I was upbeat and positive and my “energy system” both physical and mental was at it’s peak, I would not have allowed myself to be so affected. It would have been like water off a ducks back. Not this duck apparently. The things said  were clearly  an attempt  to get attention and to “grab my energy” and I allowed it to happen. Sigh. Old Habits do die hard.

One can hope.

🙂

I’m not the only person who goes nuts when angry.
Check out what this lady wrote to someone who’d parked on her property. Bad Park You indeed.

You.

Music in the soul can be heard by the universe.

Yoga – practice and chatting.

hot chicken

Back in 01 when I started doing yoga – I was often asked by curious people what it was all about and I found myself fumbling for answers because I didn’t know much about yoga than the little we practiced in class; I didn’t know what the yogic texts were, why there were different schools, if it was separate from religion, where it fit in the scheme of things – questions you get asked in the regular course of conversation. This was before yoga became the catchword that it is now. And much before the time a ‘yoga’ search would bring up a 1000,000 results on Google. Yoga evangelists had yet to hit television screens and Bikram’s attempt to patent ‘Hatha Yoga’ was yet to create international furore. I was 19, fresh out of high-school and had grudgingly agreed to join a nearby yoga institute with a couple of college friends.

In the hazy periphery of my mind yoga had been linked with our grandparents generation. My memories of doing yoga as a kid had to do with being bored and resenting being forced to practice while my siblings were either sleeping or playing.
Despite my initial reservations I found myself enjoying the class and engaging with the idea. The teacher managed to retain our interest and we liked her a whole bunch despite her natty floral pants.

Apart from having to account to other people the how’s and why’s of what we did, I wasn’t all that interested in studying the philosophy
but people were super-curious and I felt foolish not knowing so I read our instruction manual from cover to cover.

I read through the names of the poses in Sanskrit, their correct pronunciation, why they were done in the order they were, benefits and a bit of the history of our school; I imagine I would have been pretty set to handle a lot of questions.

Its been ten years and I’ve had cause to define and re-define my definition of yoga many times. I’ve read a few books, many articles, attended talks and studied with some fabulous yoga teachers; this is my fourth year teaching yoga and I’ve realised that the philosophy is great but it amounts to very little if you don’t practice for yourself. The understanding that you get from practice and then committing to practice, day-in and day-out, is different from the understanding you have from reading.

The magic of yoga comes from trying it out on your own. It’s like “sleeping”. The rest comes from sleep not from reading about it.
This is something we were told on our first day at the institute and it is published on the brochures at the institute and it was what inspired a Swami Vishnu. (then a young recruit in the army) to go seek the illumined sage that said “an ounce of practice is worth tonnes of theory “.

Practicing yoga changes my life, not hugely that I’m an enlightened being but in small ways that make a difference to my life and to my everyday. The first benefit I had was of “awareness”. In cities, our senses are continually bombarded and in turn seek stimulus and titillation. Think about having the gift of awareness when driving in Delhi's ghastly traffic. Quite soon, I stopped dreaming of letting loose with guns and wanting to shoot people for driving like "idiots" in our congested streets. The traffic is still hectic but I'm less likely to explode – which matters to me if not to anyone else.

I return full-circle to what I knew at 19 couldn't articulate – Yoga is about practice and how it makes you feel.
Inverting my head and chanting Sanskrit shlokas – makes me feel good. And I stick with it because it makes me feel closer to the earthgrounded and calmer and I like that I want to shoot people less.

I love Butch girls and How!

I met this very cute ‘Butch’ girl the other day. She was stunning really – muscles, tanned skin, pearly smile. She was kind of offended though that I said Butch. I think she thought I meant that she was a “tractor lesbian” or that she’d forgotten to wax her moustache. I didn’t. She’s a gorgeous woman, both when she’s being a tomboy or when she’s perfumed and coiffed. What I really meant that she had that elusive appeal, that ease about herself that made me want to hand out my telephone number as my heart did somersaults in my chest.

Apart from the anguish about being lost in translation, I started to think about ‘Butch’ and how it has so many different connotations how we understand it differently depending on how out of the box we’ve allowed ourselves to be.

For me Butch is completely about personality and an attitude to life versus a ‘Look’. Somehow, in the media and socially ‘butch’ has come to mean that if you dress a certain way you are a certain way. Dressing in a way that’s out-of the box isn’t equatable with thinking of feeling out of the box; Looking like you don’t conform isn’t the same as non-conformity.  And I mean not conforming in a purer sense, not to be contrary but because you know no other way to be.

So I don’t think being butch is about being a “diesel dyke” or a “tractor lesbian” or all the other words we have for girls who dress differently; I don’t think being butch is about wearing men’s jeans than it is about your attitude and personality,

I think what’s common to both Butch men and women, is that they’ve found intuitively or through trial and error that the good old boxes of male, female, gay straight don’t fit so well and so they go on to make their own. So I met very manly men who won’t shirk from acknowledging their soft side, who’ll allow for their creative side and who’re not scared to pretty-it-up. Or women who’re assertive, active, confident about their sexuality or sex without caring  what other people think. That to me is definitively Butch!

Butch people have an ease and self-confidence about them that makes them irresistible. It’s hard not to like someone who likes him or herself the manly parts the chick parts, maybe not the moustache but whatever floats your boat.Whether you’re a guy or a girl being ‘butch’ it’s about allowing for all aspects of yourself; for the strong, for the soft and for the shades of grey.

These lucky people are a tonne of fun to be around because they don’t apologize to you for who they are and in turn inspire confidence in you to be who you are.

So to all those Beautiful butch men and women out there, who switch between manly men and womanly men and between manly chicks and womanly chicks and all the shade of Tran – you make my heart race!

Changing People In A Relationship.

Have you ever been drunk-dialled?  The calls can be maudlin but sometimes entertaining .

My friend Sam called the other night and told me how much she liked me and could we date each other? She blustered on to say that ofcourse for it to work I would have to change things about myself and she in turn needed to be in better place in her life things. I eventually got her off the phone and the next day she was suitably embarrassed, enough for me to not give her a hard time- her unique proposal did get me thinking about change and how we want people to change especially our romantic partners.

I had an ex-girlfriend who wanted to change things from the start– from giving me a makeover so we’d look more alike, to telling me what to eat and changing my exercise routine. I decided I didn’t want to morph into ‘matching couple’ and we split.  I remember telling her that in a relationship the only person one could change was oneself.  I think I’d go back and qualify that, it’s very hard to change even yourself, so it’s not fair to  give your respective other a hard time about it.

Think about how hard it is to actually change things about yourself?  Even something as uncomplicated like a diet plan or an exercise regime- you can do it for a month but beyond that it’s an uphill task and few stick with it.

And this is easy tangible stuff like diet and lifestyle-they’re trimmings. How hard is it to change fundamentally things about yourself? Can one become more courageous, fun or funny or more caring? How long does it take?

I’ve wanted to start writing in the last couple of years. But it’s taken much dallying back and forth and some false starts to get going. With the writing I’m trying to take it a day at a time. I guess that’s what one would do with other resolutions- Small steps, discipline and an insane compulsion to want that change.

For someone who doesn’t exercise to say  “I’m going to exercise everyday” is unimaginable”. Or for someone who has skewed eating habits to eat healthy is a daily task. To change things takes effort and a lot of people decide that the effort isn’t worth it.

So anyway back to changing yourself and how hard it is to stick with those changes. I’m not saying it’s impossible to change yourself , on the contrary . Just that to change something about your inherent personality takes persistence and time which a lot of people are not in for.

I think the difficulty is compounded by the fact that we have a lot of external suggestions from girlfriends, boyfriends and from tv about improving ourselves and so we’re in the unique situation of not knowing what we really want to change about ourselves. Do we even like ourselves? we don’t know. What parts of us are likable? We’re often so worried about if people will like us , love us, we don’t know what bits to keep and what needs improvement.

With the explosion of television in India and allied technology as well as with the growth of the internet, a current of homogenization of wants and aspirations seeks to sweep us in. Popular culture as defined by the tv and magazine is starting to define what we aspire to, atleast till we wake up from the dream. For an increasing section of the population it determines lifetsyle- tells you what kind of kitchen to have, where to holiday and what to buy. If TV want to decide whats passé and what’s not where is the room for individual expression?

Fortunately for us ’15 minutes of fame’ isn’t a universal dream, however much we’re conditioned to believe. What the dreammakers don’t realize and often we don’t either is that we’re at different points on the graph- human effort as defined by Artha ,Kama ,Moksha, Dharma chart our lives in different permutations and combinations.   Even if we do come to , we’re in a harder position still because we  don’t know what to want anymore and if we do, we don’t where to begin.

The problem also lies in this biraadri /log kyaan kahenge mentality.  It’s scary to be different and we do want to keep up with joneses. I recently spent some time with my nieces in Pune and they just couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to be on TV like Deepika Padukone. “But Masi you’re so pretty”, sadly being an unglamorous yoga instructor didn’t cut it with them. I can play guitar and sing, so that scored serious points.

I was reading Agatha Christie’s autobiograogy where she says it was easier back then i.e. in a family of three it was decided by the parents which of the kids would a) have a career b)be of no good c)be the quiet one. I thought this was incredibly funny and wholly appropriate. This was ofcourse a time when schooling wasn’t as uniform and one didn’t automatically go to college; also it was the time of independent incomes where you weren’t as worried about getting a job. I agree with the thinking – that children were unique and had different talents and should not all be brought up to want the same things. Agatha was slotted as “the quiet one”  and with no formal schooling and a largely free and unregulated childhood she went on to become the best-selling author of all time! Hugely successful,  she has single-handedly her sold more books than other author till date (apart from the Bible). Kudos to her parents and her two husbands on letting her be!

So back to the point, exercisers will switch from exercising three times a week to daily and back to three, dieters will diet and continue to, dreamers will dream, procrastinators will procrastinate and whiners will whine.

Self-improvement is a good goal but not if it comes at the cost of not accepting yourself  and at the cost of not living your life in the present. The time for  “when I’m more perfect” is now, not  in the unforeseeable future.

Changing yourself is hard enough  why would one put that expectation on a spouse, partner or mate?

Please someone remind me of that the next time “I’m completely I’m fed up” and want someone else to change.