Peddling Happiness

Every other day, someone in the wellness industry will put something up about being happy.  It’s usually one of those cute little word poster design things, like the one below.

This is the world that I am a part of and I do love the people in this community but today, I’m going to play Devil’s Advocate to the ‘be happy,’ mantra.  I suppose since this is an ‘industry,’ one would need something to sell, but I do wonder if selling happiness could be dangerous to the public.  The way it is portrayed, it looks like being happy is the be all and end all of your purpose to life.  You eat well, you exercise, you smile, you pick happy friends and that’s what life is supposed to be.

What about the other emotions that we, as humans have the capacity for? It seems to me that as we push the ‘be happy,’ mantra, we alienate the rest.  Sure, the rest is not as pretty as being happy, but pushing things under the rug is just not healthy.  At some point these emotions will bubble up in an eruption, and like larva flowing out of a volcano, it will burn everything in its path.  Also, with the rich array of emotions that humans are capable of, happy seems to be a bit trite, and dare I say it, ‘fluffy.’

And what about the people who are going through a tough period? What if this whole idea that we are made to be happy just makes them feel like there’s something wrong with them? I have met so many people who go through a tough time and the first thing they do is think themselves ill, seeking psychological help, and medication.  As the world reaches for this concept of ‘happiness,’ it is like being unhappy every once in a while is just not normal.  (Note, I’m not talking about prolonged periods of depression here, but the times when one could be a bit down on energy due to any number of things including work, relationship or even physical health issues) Or worse still is the person who just doesn’t feel like going out, but with all the YOLO and ‘be happy,’ going around turns to party drugs. Why? Well, because according to the hippy trippy stuff, not being happy is somehow wrong.  Because we are meant to be happy all the time. And when we are not, we are somehow lacking or unwell.

On the other side of the spectrum, there is this issue with surrounding ourselves with happy people.  Sure it’s great. Happy people make other people happy, but what about that person who stuck with you while you were down in the dumps and is perhaps going through a prolonged period of misery. What if they just got divorced or if they just lost a parent? They have every right to be miserable and even angry for a while, but does that mean that you walk away because being with them makes you miserable? Does that mean that they are mentally unwell?  Time is relative.  Some people get over things in a month, others take a year, and it might cramp your happiness vibe but time is what a lot of people need.

I know most people mean well when they tell other people to be happy, but perhaps the message needs a bit of a revamp.  Happiness is not a permanent state.  It is balanced off with periods of disappointment, sadness, grief, anger, exhaustion and a myriad of other feelings.  Life is like the ocean while we are this little sand castle on the beach.  Sometimes you just don’t know what the waves will bring in.  It can just tickle you or completely destroy you. These experiences and feelings, even though they might not be pleasant, do enrich our lives in their way.

Pushing happiness the way we do, is not honouring this fact that there are things greater than us.  Actually, sometimes I feel like it’s the opposite extreme of drumming the Seven Deadly Sins in someone’s head. Difference is, the mantra, “you must not blah blah blah,” is replaced with, “you must be happy.” This idea of, “must,” “should be,” or “shouldn’t be” anything is always a dangerous one to have.  It is too black and white, and if anything, as teachers, we want people to accept the greys in between.

Perhaps in this world where people come searching for something more, our message should be a kinder one, like acceptance, compassion and most of all, peace.  To be happy all the time is to deny or even fight other emotions but to be at peace is to calmly accept any feelings that come with a lot of compassion and allow them to stay as long as they need to.  It has an element of surrender and softness, but also a lot of strength. It is not denying or burying things in order to ‘be happy,’ but entering the space that is not happiness with a sense of acceptance.   Because being human is feeling a range of emotions and we need to accept this in a way that is healthy and compassionate.

Smart man, Rumi was

The Terror of My Own Universe

Live for a few days in the meditation,
“I am immersed in the flame-
The flame of time,
The flame of love,
The flame of life.
The universal fire flows through me.

It took me almost two and a half years of regular practice before I even attempted sitting in meditation on my own. Even with my eyes closed and no mirrors, and although I have been celibate for a while now, I know I look nothing like the picture of the monk meditating on the mountaintop.  And I sure as hell don’t feel like it most of the time.

Sitting Still with a Storm Brewing Inside

Every meditation is different.  Some days I am on this cloud of euphoria, others I would be in tears, then are the days when conversations go on with the 50 people living in my head, or worse still, conversations with people in my life, played in BluRay on the canvas of my brain. Other days reining myself in is akin to trying to tame a dragon.

There are days when there is this dance going on inside me and it reaches a climatic point of ecstasy, followed by a long exhale and total bliss. An internal orgasm, where the universe inside me is fucked into a state of euphoria.

Sweating.

Hot.

Wild.

Then there are days where the thoughts just pass by like clouds and my attention is centered on the sensations over and under my skin and the steady beating of my heart.

Calm.

Quiet.

And occasionally, I fall asleep.

Because no two times are the same and absolute stillness and focus almost an impossibility, I though that I was meditating wrong.

You can have a million meditation guides but truthfully, nobody has the roadmap to what goes on inside you.

Then last weekend I spent some time with meditation guru, Dr. Lorin Roche http://www.lorinroche.com/.  With Lorin’s playfulness and sense of mischief, we explored the teachings of the Vajnana Bhairava Tantra.  Lorin’s approach to meditation makes you feel like there is no need to become a poster, that meditation, like yoga is something completely personal and that you are free to explore what works for you.  You welcome every part of you into the seat of your meditation, even the ones that you might not be overly fond of.  It is a place where you find love for yourself and perhaps even send love to others.  He made me feel like I had not been failing the meditation exam after all.  There was so much acceptance and security that for a while, I even forgot myself and danced with the words of the texts.

And there’s that word – Bhairava, meaning “terrible.”. It is that place where you want to go forward but you are petrified.  I realised that a lot of times, this is exactly how I feel when I’m in yoga class – being upside down was it for me for a long time, and then meditation.

Not everyone is but I am – Scared.

Petrified.

Terrorised.

The Image of Bhairava

But it’s perfectly fine to be.

Step into that fire wholeheartedly,
Starting with the big toe,
Then surrendering everywhere.
Only the not-self,
Which doesn’t exist anyway,
Burns away.

And I am not doing it wrong after all.

Meditation is not the celibate monk on the mountaintop.
Shit comes up in meditation because we have a life.  The monk on the mountaintop has renounced all their connections.  We have not and in meditation is where we can deal with the emotional drama, separate the stories from the reality.  Like a massage where the therapist needs to dig in to the tissue to release it, so meditation sometimes allows us space to dig into our emotional tissue in order to release it.

It is a limitless exploration of our universe which includes all of us – our thoughts, bodies, emotions, the parts we like, and the parts we might not. Ever pulsating. Ever changing. A vortex of instances that are occuring. Atoms and particles forever moving. Light and dark, eternally dancing. Sometimes slow and gentle, sometimes wild and free.

It can be utter stillness or an internal pulsation, or even a dance party under our skin.

Just like there is more than one path to life, there is more than one path to meditation.

It is an exploration, looking inside with wonder and finding our own journey to ecstasy.

It is the burning away of the not-self.

For me, meditation is sometimes like stepping on a cloud and sometimes stepping into a flame.  I never know what might come up.  It is a continual exploration. I now go into this state of terror with the question, “what have you got for me today?”

Attend to this continually,

And awaken into tranquillity.

Your essence is renewed in the flame,

For the flame knows itself as flame

Since the first heartbeat of creation. 

Verses from the Radiance Sutras, Verse 29.

In the Silence

“The silence is your canvas, that’s your frame, that’s what you work on; don’t try and deafen it out.” – Keith Richards

When I was reading Keith Richards’ biography, Life, the sentence above really stood out for me.  For one thing, it was really ironic that someone whose living consisted on making sound would say something like that, and on the other hand, it sounded very “yogic.” Outside of yoga studios, I suppose the understanding of yoga takes on two meanings, either the physical practice which we call asana, or the meditation practice.  Logically, you would think that there is no way that the asana practice could lead to silence.

Originally, I thought the same.  I mean, how could it be any different?  You have this instructor speaking to you through the class, and then you’re moving, and then there’s that infernal dialogue between your brain and your body and your body and your brain and everything that’s trying to happen at the same time and then you put one foot forward, and then the other, and then you’re on in a push up, then a back bend, and that bloody downward dog.  How could there possibly be so much going on at the same time when you’re just balancing on your palms and the balls of your feet? And who has time for silence anyway?

Well, we all should.

I personally had forgotten the importance of silence until last weekend. How? Well, I was hit by the most insane headache, the kind where you just want to throw up to relieve some of the pressure in your head.  It was like a pressure cooker in there, and the only relief I had (being someone who doesn’t take painkillers) was to shut the lights and sit in absolute darkness.

You know what I had done to myself to get into that situation?

Easy answer – overstimulation.

I had forgotten to honour silence.  In trying to do all the stuff I felt I had to do, my senses were constantly being stimulated. Of course for others it might be a legitimate illness, but sometimes, the solution need not be complicated.  In my case, I was pushing it. At any point in time, I was reading or watching television, or both, or reading and listening to music.  Add to that the stuff that just goes on during the day. Even walking up the street, our eyes, ears, sense of smell, sense of touch, sense of taste even sometimes, all of them are going.  And the thing is, whatever we perceive through our senses, the brain automatically process.  Although I meditate about 20 minutes a day, how could that be enough to offset the other stuff.   Through my lifestyle, I was making my brain process a lot more than was necessary at a given time.

What did that do to my nerves? Well, it fried them.

Then on Sunday, the 18th of November, I attended a talk on the effects of bass music and the effects of yoga.  Do you remember those nights? You’re there just riding this beat and you’re dancing like the world meant nothing, and then there’s the silence and your whole body is vibrating in this space of silence.  Inside there is no worry, there is only bliss, in that silence.  Of course, for some (myself included), there were drugs involved, but they weren’t really necessary.  That was a quick step to ecstasy when we are wired to produce these chemicals on our own anyway.  The thing with chemically induced highs is like anything else in extremes, an extreme high will be followed by extremes in the opposite direction.

I am often very guilty of trying to deafen silence out. Most of the time, it’s either because there’s something I don’t want to hear in that silence, or because I have gotten myself into a cycle of ‘busyness’.  But what teachers are trying to teach us in yoga classes is that there is silence and stillness in movement.  When the yoga instructor is coaxing you into these places where your body is trembling and your mind in screaming, the invitation is to find silence there.  When the music is shaking us up like crazy, can we ride it to that place inside which is just silent and still?

There is always silence.  Sometimes though, it takes a bit of work to get there.  Sometimes, we just need to face the ego, the blame, the conscience, the have tos and the musts, and everything in between and just sit.  It is there, in the spaces between our thoughts.