After a few false starts, it’s officially spring here in Bellingham. Even though I’m on record as being a January 1st/New Years Resolution defender, spring really does feel like the true and natural start to the year. So this month in my classes we embraced the early spring energy and dug into all things cyclical, orbital, and spiraling.
The class playlist this month:
What is your life orbiting (and why)?
To start the month I asked students to think about their habits, their feelings about these habits, and — particularly if those feelings skewed toward the negative — if it was possible to step back and see what underlying need that habit was serving. When our actions and values are aligned, it’s really not a problem that we keep doing the same thing over and over and over. That repetition may be serving us really well. But when there’s a disconnect it can lead to compounding pain and grief.
One way of viewing habits that’s been particularly helpful for me over the years is to think about what central needs my life is orbiting. The Artemis mission gave me a nice excuse to pull this space metaphor into class and ask students to inquire: What’s at the center of my solar system, my life? What is it my life is orbiting? What’s the thing with so much gravitational force everything else revolves around it? What gives it so much pull?
I first came to this when I read The Mindful Path Through Worry and Rumination as part of my research on yoga and recovery for my 500 hour YTT. In it Sameet Kumar says, “If you try to get away from stress, you make it the center of your existence. Stress becomes the reference point of your life’s compass, because your life is about moving away from it.”1 (Replace “stress” with your vice of choice.)
This helped me see that if my life was all about resisting it became almost entirely a question of will power. And eventually will power fatigues. And when that happens there’s nothing to do but surrender to gravity and fall back toward the thing at the center. This fall, this surrender, can be blissful or painful: texting that person you know you shouldn’t, sneaking a smoke, talking shit, spending money you know you don’t have, turning down an invite so you can bed rot and call it self care. I’m sure you could rattle off you own list of habits you just can’t seem to break. And then we go, wtf is wrong with me, why do I keep doing this?
But what if instead we asked, How can I understand this as an attempt to move toward contentment and wholeness, even if it’s having the opposite effect? What need am I ignoring that this habit is trying to meet? What pain is it trying to protect me from? When we can understand more clearly what purpose our habits are serving (or trying to serve), when we see more clearly what’s at the center of our lives, we create a little wedge of compassion and understanding.
Too abstract? An example: I used to love cigarettes. Just loved ‘em. They’re my favorite ex and I still think of them fondly. Partially this is because I was physically addicted, but it was much more than that. Smoking helped satisfy a whole host of social and emotional needs for an anxiety-ridden introvert such as myself. They gave me something to do with my hands, they gave me an excuse to step outside at a function, they gave me an easy ice breaker, they helped me flirt, they put a timer on any given conversation.
I knew they were bad for me. I knew they were an expense I couldn’t afford. I knew they made me feel like shit. I knew in the abstract they would lead to health complications (to the extent that you can know this in your early 20s). But none of that was enough for me to quit. I tried and failed many times. They weren’t at the center of my life but they were an influential part of my solar system — a beautiful, smoldering, stinking, heavenly body.
For me, their gravitational pull wasn’t really about the nicotine. It was all the other things — social bonding, connection, relaxation — and their pull gradually faded as I learned how to actually take care of myself and meet those needs in other ways. These alternate methods didn’t carry all the baggage smoking came with, they made me feel good, and eventually smoking became a deterrent to them. And that’s when I was able to stop smoking. My life was no longer about resisting the urge to smoke because the urge itself dissipated. That makes it sound clean and tidy and easy. It wasn’t! Or, it wasn’t for a long time, and then one day it was.
The same thing happened with drinking (granted it involved a lot more tears). The same thing is happening now with my phone, and sugar, and caffeine (sigh, it never ends). Whatever it is, when I’m feeling friction around a particular behavior, I find myself coming back to this picture of my life as a solar system. The behavior that’s causing me grief itself isn’t the thing with the gravitational pull. The behavior is serving the thing with the gravitational pull. So what is that thing?
I find if I look at it this way, it helps me adopt more compassion for myself. When I’m compassionate I have a better chance of setting the blame and self loathing aside and seeing things more clearly. When I can do that I have a better chance of finding a new perspective, finding better ways to meet those needs, and an understanding that the way I meet those needs will likely change over time. And if I’m lucky life becomes less about resisting the things that cause me pain and more about letting myself float and drift and twirl, effortlessly, toward contentment.
Orientation
After thinking about what our lives were orbiting we shifted and spent the rest of the month thinking about spirals. Spirals, in common vernacular, have something of a bad rap. When someone says, I’m spiraling, they don’t usually mean they’re like…whirling around a dance floor having the time of their life. They mean their on a downward spiral. They’re circling the drain. They’re spinning out. The spiral deserves better!
Part of this, I think, is because there’s something to the spiral that implies momentum that’s out of our control. Things are maybe getting a little too fast and loose for comfort. And sometimes we do need help reigning things back in and getting our bearings. But there’s a reason the spiral shows up, again and again, as potent symbol of the spiritual journey, and I don’t think it’s unrelated to this idea of being involved in something that’s beyond your control. It can be scary and dangerous. It can also be ecstatic.
Maybe that downward spiral is leading you deeper and deeper and deeper until you’re really plumbing your own depths, getting to the root source of a behavior or belief that’s causing you so much pain. Or maybe you feel like you’re just trudging your way up an endless spiral staircase, going through the motions and walking in circles. But each time around you’re ever so slightly higher than you were last time. The differences may seem imperceptible, but they’re there. In their conversation on the Star card of the tarot, Phil Ford and JF Martel put it this way:
If I’m on the spiritual path and making improvements to my life and being a better person and all the rest of it, then why do I keep making the same fucking mistakes over and over again? Or why do I keep feeling bummed about the same stuff? Why do the same personal issues keep biting me again and again? And the realization is like, yeah, but it’s not the same because each time you hit that point, that station on the circle, you can imagine a spiral that’s going upwards like a spring that’s being stretched out. You’re hitting the same coordinates on the map, but you’re higher up the hill. That kind of metaphor can be quite helpful, I think, in times when we feel that we’re stuck and realizing that actually maybe we’re not.
I also love this idea from eve morgan’s essay, from the edge of the spiral, of spirals pulling us outward and inward (in addition to upward and downward). I put the question to my students this month: Are you on the chaotic outer ranges of a spiral path right now, with a little more freedom than you’d like, looking to move toward a more control rotation? Or are you feeling confined and restricted, needing to vibrate around and around and around until you carve out a little more space for yourself to breath, in search of a more expansive freedom?
![POEM] I live my life in widening circles - Rainer Maria Rilke : r/Poetry](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Jk5A!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2ce6c8af-e540-42fc-911f-77ef9070c2bb_1000x894.png "POEM] I live my life in widening circles - Rainer Maria Rilke : r/Poetry")
Asana
We worked with a mandala flow this month, going a full 360 on the mat. Going round and round and round. Gathering momentum and then reigning it in.
Mantra
Om gate gate
Om para gate
Parasamgate gate
Bodhi So Hum
(loosely:)
Gone, gone to the other shore
We’re all going to the other shore
On the other shore: Enlightenment
Until next time <3
This book may have changed my life, tbh. It also gave me the concept of “miserable stability”, ie clinging to painful ways of living because at least it’s stable and known to you and we’re not wired to run toward instability, even if it will ultimately lead toward a happier, healthier life.