The Puzzle of Home

The following piece was written by Kathy Hartsell, a fellow yoga instructor and mind-body practitioner who studies alongside the Mind Body Dancer® community. She writes from Boston, MA.

For me, the notion of home takes the form of a puzzle. This puzzle teeters on a rickety shelf in my heart, cozied up next to a variety of other mysterious heart contents that ask for attention from time to time. A jolt to my chest has always been enough to shake this puzzle from its resting place and into my lap, where it has many times stumped me with pieces that wouldn't quite fit together.

Having moved to boarding school at a young age, I’ve grown accustomed to the low ache that drifts in with homesickness now and again. As I am sure many people do, I sometimes even feel this ache arise

in the very places and with the very people that I recognize as home.

For a while, I tried on different zip codes, convinced that the right match would surely dissolve the disconcerting tug of longing that kept showing up uninvited in my gut. But as I searched for the "perfect place" to unpack my work and stretch out my soul, I couldn't shove away the gradually growing awareness of chasing a kind of stability that our world does not offer. At tortoise pace, I began to register that my outward quest, while wonderful in its own way, would never satisfy the longing to

move into my own being

. Of course, I discovered that certain spots beneath particular skies built a welcoming space for my life, but it wasn’t until I was willing to inhabit my own housed experiences that I could understand the messages encoded in that longing. I’m sure that I am not alone in these mindful circles when I say that, despite this understanding, I forget said lessons often. I have found that the push-pull of life will quickly sweep away things I thought I had already learned, slyly granting me some kind of “insight amnesia.”

Remembering

 requires not only that I practice on my mat often, but that I find ways to also practice beyond the safety of designated space, and in the context of real life.

The puzzle of home has landed in my lap quite a bit in recent months. As my husband and I search for a house with a little extra room for our growing family, it’s amusing to see the long list of conditions we have created for our supposedly simple abode. Every third day we consider whether laying thicker roots down in the city even makes sense, or whether “home” might actually be somewhere else entirely. Officially waiting to adopt, we fret over how our future child will adjust to the new home we offer, and how we will best help her learn to trust this home.

As we work through these steps, I have been grateful to have Ethan Nictern’s

The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path

for a companion

.

Thanks to Audible, Ethan has been reading his witty, compassionate and timely wisdom to me as I take long walks in Boston (and ironically resist the expression of impermanence provided by September’s air!) In the book's introduction, Ethan relates a conversation between his father, David Nichtern, and the lama Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche:

My father (who loves small talk) decided not to ask a question about the Buddhist teachings. Instead, he asked Rinpoche a small-talk question: "Where do you live?" It was a simple enough question, a little dose of chitchat to blend with all that profundity. "Where do you live?" Dad asked. "When you aren't on the road--traveling, moving around, teaching---where do you live, Rinpoche?

When he heard the question translated, Khenpo Rinpoche raised the brows above his wide eyes and said something in Tibetan to his translator... "Rinpoche says to tell you that he lives in the center of his awareness!"

In a million different ways, Ethan inspires me to return to the hammock in my own heart. From his teachings, for both the literal and figurative suitability, my meditation anchor these days has become “easing home.” I can’t say that I “live” at the center of my awareness (like the Tibetan monk in Ethan’s book), but I’m quite grateful to have become a frequent visitor who can find my way there.

-Kathy Hartsell

Photography by Kathy Hartsell.

Off the Grid: Into the Dark

I’m writing this now from the comfort of my parents’ home in central Indiana, where I’ve been spending the bulk of my time the past week resting, reading, and spending time with loved ones. What I love about being here, especially this time of year, is the very real sense of light and dark.

Nighttime feels different to me in the winter than in summer. There is something more permeant about it, as if the darkness can actually penetrate your body. Instead of the warm, luscious movement that I feel in the air of summer evenings, nighttime in winter seems to beg for stillness. When I visit the rural countryside of my childhood home near the winter solstice, the time of year when night is longest, I am always struck by how different I feel here than in the constantly lit atmosphere of New York City. With nighttime gently wrapping itself around the house from all directions, I don’t seem to have the stamina or the desire to disrupt the natural order of night and day by staying awake long after dark. It might just be that the chance to relax and recover from the fatigue of my normal life is all too needed, but I deeply relish the opportunity to turn in early, to lay awake in bed for a few minutes in a completely dark, still room, allowing the night to swallow me up until I fall asleep. It feels both luxurious and simple at the same time.

When I think back on my childhood, especially on memories of holiday celebrations and rituals, this sense of light and dark is very present. While I wasn’t a child who was particularly afraid of the dark, a sense of reverence for the mysteries of the night were common themes in my world, and indeed, I think many stories that people are told in childhood reinforce this idea that late night hours are magical, mysterious, or sometimes even cause for fear.

For instance, take one of the most basic tales of contemporary childhood: Santa Claus. Children are told that they must go to sleep in order for Santa Claus to bring them gifts and that if they don’t, if they try to stay awake to see him, he won’t come. Now, for obvious reasons, parents need their children to be asleep in order for “Santa” to do his work, but this is just one example of reinforcing a sense of magic or possibility that only occurs in the deepest of night, when ordinary humans are fast asleep and unable to disrupt the mystical transformation that takes place between night and day. When we wake up the next morning, somehow the world is different than it was before. Transformation happens.

One of my favorite childhood memories is of Christmas Eves spent riding in the car late at night, when my father drove us home from my grandmother’s house or sometimes, from a candlelight church service. This was one of the few nights of the year that I was allowed to stay up until midnight, and I truly loved it. It was thrilling and mystifying. In the backseat of the car, I would press my nose to the cold, slightly foggy window and stare up at the sky. I could see twinkling stars and moonlight shining on snow. The world seemed both old and new. We would go home and often sit in the living room in the dark, with nothing but the lights of the Christmas tree on. Eventually, I would happily go to bed, not wanting to risk my chances with Santa Claus by trying to stay awake. That was our ritual, and while some details have changed, Christmas Eve to me is still very much about honoring the night.

I held on to my reverence for the night for a long time, and I remember very clearly the first time I stayed awake through the night until the sky began to brighten with sun. Looking back, a teenage slumber party seems hardly worthy of the occasion.

As we grow older and eventually stay awake at all hours of the day and night, we begin to lose this sense of mystery about the dark. As adults, we push through our bodies’ natural biorhythms, pull all-nighters in college, travel across time zones, experience that 3am back spasm or sudden illness, and then the uniqueness of each daily cycle of light and dark begins to fade.

Not typically one for New Year’s resolutions, my hope for 2015 is to attempt to regain a glimmer my childhood appreciation for the dark, and in so doing, bring a better sense of balance to my life. From the practicality of needing regular, good quality sleep in order to be healthy, to the spiritual dimension of honoring nighttime rituals, inviting darkness into our lives and yoga practices is especially necessary when we live in the City that Never Sleeps.

As adults we run the risk of becoming jaded and cynical, immune to the mysteries of the life that we once thought magical. We experience disappointment and heartache and stress and worry that keep us up at night, and on top of it all, we bombard our senses with nonstop input in the form of the internet, smartphones, incessant email and texting, and the never-ending glow of artificial light upon our eyes. In short, we don’t often give ourselves over to darkness. This darkness, while sometimes frightening, is also a necessary part of healing, learning, and the creative process. The contemporary FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) has overridden our instinctive sense of when to turn off and rest. Our desire to learn and do and constantly input information has led us to forget how to lean on ourselves for comfort, for inspiration, for the simple satisfaction of being on this planet and being alive. We fear silence and solitude because we don’t trust our minds to go somewhere that might be uncomfortable to us.

I am an only child, so my best friend growing up was my imagination. I had an insatiable belief in possibility and hope for the adventures of my future life, and while of course I have matured into my adult self, I am beginning to wonder if honoring the cycles of night and day, of darkness and light with greater rigor can return a bit of this magic to my daily life. Winter is the perfect time for reflection, rest, and ritual. In the heart of winter we can prepare for the blossoming energy of spring where we can produce, create and teach with renewed energy that we found in the dark of the previous months. We just have to invite the natural darkness of the season to run its course.

I’d like to end with a poem I discovered through one of this community’s favorite podcasts, On Being. Enjoy, and Happy New Year.

The Winter of Listening by David Whyte

No one but me by the fire, my hands burning red in the palms while the night wind carries everything away outside.

All this petty worry while the great cloak of the sky grows dark and intense round every living thing.

What is precious inside us does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence.

What we strive for in perfection is not what turns us into the lit angel we desire,

what disturbs and then nourishes has everything we need.

What we hate in ourselves is what we cannot know in ourselves but what is true to the pattern does not need to be explained.

Inside everyone is a great shout of joy waiting to be born.

Even with the summer so far off I feel it grown in me now and ready to arrive in the world.

All those years listening to those who had nothing to say.

All those years forgetting how everything has its own voice to make itself heard.

All those years forgetting how easily you can belong to everything simply by listening.

And the slow difficulty of remembering how everything is born from an opposite and miraculous otherness.

Silence and winter has led me to that otherness.

So let this winter of listening be enough for the new life I must call my own.

-Katherine Moore

Monday Mantra: Need

"I already have everything I need."

Inspired by Brianna Goodman's Sunday post on the Brew, "Observing Our Losses and Our Gains," I recalled this mantra. I do not know the exact source but it was a mantra I received years ago from a friend when setting off on my dream to build our creative teaching and research community. I knew there would be major sacrifices as I left my six-figure corporate salary to start something new. The mantra kept me sane during that transition. I can say the risk was well worth it but, boy, it was scary!

I think it goes without saying that this mantra is not solely reserved for financial or material situations. These six words still soothe my nerves during anxious moments of anticipating a new opportunity, pathway, or adventure, or when holding on too tightly to a fully-imagined hope I have placed far off into the future. Yet daily life remains the best source to recognize when to apply such wisdom. Brianna gave us some great examples to ponder.  Here is one of mine:

Recently, I moved apartments and I have to admit I have not fully unpacked. I am living only with the bare necessities and a few neatly stacked piles of cardboard boxes. While I realistically need to unpack a little bit more to at least make my new place function like my home, I admit I have slipped into appreciating the sparse quality of having very little to distract me in my environment. Minimalism and simplicity in my home is incredibly appealing and comforting. I tend towards white walls, clean lines, and no clutter. Here I have created a whole new level of minimal, even for me!

Lately, I have begun to wonder what would happen if I never unpack? Would I lose a part of me by never glimpsing the contents of the boxes? Life has been going on. I have been eating, sleeping, and working just fine without the contents of those boxes. Yes, some of my beloved books and favorite dishes are stuck in hiding and it will feel more like home to have them out in the open. But for the time being, I am curious what I could part with because I can no longer remember it.  Out of sight. Out of mind.

Do you have any uses for this mantra in your life?  How do you define a "need"?

- TaraMarie Perri

Home

image-3

This week The Perri Institute for Mind and Body officially opens the doors to our new home at Gibney Dance Center at 280 Broadway. The opportunity to really have a “home,” a place of stability, structure, and support, is a new and exciting step for our student and teaching community, one that will hopefully allow us to grow in new and exciting ways.

The idea of home has been creeping up in my thoughts lately. As winter slowly turns to spring, I find myself itching to throw open the windows of my apartment and purge my own home of some clutter, cooped up energy, and let’s be real…some dust that has accumulated during the winter months. Gone are the instincts to hunker down and seek comfort in the warmth of my four walls; replacing them is the very present urge to spring clean and transform my home into something fresh and new.

Unlike most of my peers who moved to New York City, I somehow have managed to remain in the first apartment I moved into over 3 ½ years ago. In many ways, I love this because it means that a space that was, at least initially, truly just a space to hold me while I slept on a second-hand mattress in an empty room, is now a meaningful home in every sense of the word. I have bathed, worked, overslept, cooked, cried, decorated, redecorated, painted, thought about moving, practiced yoga, danced for joy around my bedroom, and done a million other things to make that apartment a meaningful place for me to come home to at night.

And yet, there are times when the memories and experiences that now come loaded with the idea of my apartment, even the happy ones, just seem like extra stuff that perhaps no longer serves me in the present moment. Sometimes we need the comfort of the familiar in our living space, and sometimes we need the freshness of something new. The beauty about homes is that while we think of them as something stable, they are always changing, always developing. People move in, people move out. Paint goes up, covering what once was visible. Chipped coffee mugs in the kitchen cabinets are replaced by new ones. Children grow up, and adults grow up even more.

I recently finished a book by Bill Bryson entitled, “Home: a Short History of Private Life”. In addition to learning about everything from the history of wigs to who discovered that Vitamin C cures scurvy, this amusing yet thought-provoking book has really brought my attention to what kind of rooms we live in, and even more interestingly, what type of stuff we put in them. In thinking about the nature of our homes, two ideas have stuck out to me: first, that the design, structure, and utilities of the building in which we live greatly affects how we live in them, and second, that our idea of what makes a home is changeable, fluid, and entirely different from one generation to the next.

For example, Bryson says that the idea of a “withdrawing” room, also known throughout time as a salon, parlor, or living room, didn’t exist until the late 1700s simply because the idea of “comfort” that it was intended for (found by sitting, reading, or making conversation) didn’t exist in the way we know it today. At the time, “comfort” meant to console someone in distress, and the idea of actively making a home “comfortable” would have been ludicrous. Well into the 19th century, a common practice among the English aristocracy was to keep a chamber pot hidden in a cupboard in the dining room, so that men could pull it out after dinner to use when the ladies left the room. According to Bryson, even after toilets were invented, it took years before people began building bathrooms in their homes and even more years before people preferred to relieve themselves in bathrooms instead of in chamber pots, or inside of stairwells, or outside of windows. Intriguingly, English dining rooms in the 1850s commonly had 3 matching casters on the table: one for pepper, one for salt, and as for the third, historians today have no idea what went inside that caster.

While some of these features may seem silly or trivial to us now, these were items and utilities and customs that people, or at least the aristocracy, considered necessary for optimal living in their home. Just as styles of hair and dress change from generation to generation, what people consider necessary aesthetic and practical choices for their homes also changes. Thomas Jefferson apparently detested the sight of staircases, so he built them in his home at Monticello in such a way that they are not only hidden from view, but extremely dangerous to climb. The concept of the dining room didn’t even exist in the Western world until a little over 300 years ago (people ate instead at small tables in any available room), and Jefferson was apparently quite bold to include a dining room in his plan for Monticello. This means that an entire stretch of human history lived, breathed, ate, loved, and died without ever sitting down to dinner in the way we do now.

Obviously, a “home” for business, practice, and study is an entirely different ballgame than people’s living quarters, but I think we can take some lessons from acknowledging our unique place in modern history to design and mold a space to suit our purposes. As we establish our new home at 280 Broadway, I’m excited to see how our environment and what we put it in will affect the work and study that we do. I’m certain that our community of mindful and talented teachers will treat the new space with the care, respect, and attention to detail that it deserves, and we will establish our own comforts and traditions in such a way that our home feels familiar and specific to the yoga tradition.

Even so, I think we can expect the power of change to infiltrate even our most careful choices. After all, the average family home today, that basic physical container that defines how most humans live out their lives, looks radically different than it did 500 years ago. The aesthetics and practicalities of our space for this current generation of teachers and students may be entirely different from what our future communities need, depending on how they work, what they read (or don’t), or even what they eat. Ten years from now, maybe even 50 years from now, the space at 280 Broadway will feel like an entirely different home for mind/body studies than it will to us during our first classes there this week.

There is one important link that can tie past to present here, and that is, despite changes in habit and taste and convenience, the actual idea of “home” as place of origin, as a place to return to each day, that idea has existed for a very long time. While having a material space at a specific geographical location for The Perri Institute for Mind and Body will help us grow in exponential ways, our supporting structures, the roots of our community, are not only located within the architecture of the building, but also within our minds and hearts. As such, our sense of community, tradition, and growth, all significant elements of a healthy home, are pieces of the Perri Institute that will develop and change over time.

When we practice at 280 Broadway for the first time this week, we can be completely certain that the cycles of time, people, and ideas will create a home for us there that is both familiar yet always changing.¬ During this exciting week ahead, let’s remind ourselves that our true place of origin, our real sense of home base, is actually not located in the external world, but in the yoga practice itself. Home is in our minds, our bodies, and in our breath.

- Katherine Moore

Photo by Sophie Kuller

Monday Mantra: Demons

A favorite story of mine to start your Monday (and perfect for Halloween week):

“One evening Milarepa returned to his cave after gathering firewood, only to find it filled with demons. They were cooking his food, reading his books, sleeping in his bed. They had taken over the joint. He knew about nonduality of self and other, but he still didn’t quite know how to get these guys out of his cave. Even though he had the sense that they were just a projection of his own mind—all the unwanted parts of himself—he didn’t know how to get rid of them. So first he taught them the dharma. He sat on this seat that was higher than they were and said things to them about how we are all one. He talked about compassion and shunyata and how poison is medicine. Nothing happened. The demons were still there. Then he lost his patience and got angry and ran at them. They just laughed at him. Finally, he gave up and just sat down on the floor, saying, “I’m not going away and it looks like you’re not either, so let’s just live here together.” At that point, all of them left except one. Milarepa said, “Oh, this one is particularly vicious.” (We all know that one. Sometimes we have lots of them like that. Sometimes we feel that’s all we’ve got.) He didn’t know what to do, so he surrendered himself even further. He walked over and put himself right into the mouth of the demon and said, “Just eat me up if you want to.” Then that demon left too.”  - Pema Chodron

Everytime I read this story, I laugh first. Then, I pause.  I look around at my present life, choices, and surroundings. Who are my demons at this moment? Who are the demons who have been my companions since youth?

No matter how many times you hear a story like this and label your demons, noticing they are there is only the first step. The fact that they are there with you in your space is not the issue. But if they have started to "take over the joint", you must engage with them.

In preparation for colder months and Winter nesting, I am using my Fall energies to reorganize my home.  After a Summer of outdoor adventures and a Fall schedule that has made it rare for me to be here unless I am working late hours at my home office or sleeping, unfinished projects and unfiled paperwork have begun to accumulate.  There used to be a time when I was able to organize more regularly and it alarms me that I might have created a work/life imbalance in recent years to make this task so periodically monstrous.  Then the cycle of frustration with my childhood desire to attain perfection and control my surroundings begins. I have learned to recognize the cycle so I can see it clearly when it begins to get too much power. Last night as I lamented the situation and contemplated my plan of action over a cup of tea,  I noticed that many of my demons were sitting right there on the sofa with me. Some of them were crushing me by sitting on my lap, and others were calling me names and prodding at me. They were spilling their drinks and getting crumbs on the floor. They were like unwanted house guests.

As I meet the discomfort of reorganizing my home, this story reminds me that I can't just open the door and sweep the demons out or shred them away into the recycling bin.  Somehow the image of my demons being put to work in helping me to engage in my home life to prepare for Winter makes me feel a little lighter about the whole process.  I imagine Frustration is dusting, Fear is cleaning windows, Anxiety is finishing home projects, and Control is decluttering to make space for me to nest comfortably.  The visual of my demon workforce alone makes me smile as I embark on this mission.

So, while I realize it is important to let my demons crash with me on the sofa from time to time, they know I am definitely not looking for steady roommates.

Does the story of Milarepa help you notice your own demons? How do you plan to engage them so you can work with their presence?

- TaraMarie Perri