Gardening Metaphors
Completed my second week of training! The first book she had us read was so amazing--How Yoga Works by Michael Roach and Christie McNally (get it here). It's a great and easy read, a fiction novel that explains the more esoteric concepts of yoga. The main discussion of the book was the concept of seeds.
Each thought you have, word you speak, or action you take is a seed. If you act with love, from a place of calm, understanding and kindness, you plant good seeds. If you act with anger, meanness or selfishness, you plant bad seeds. Sometimes, those seeds will bloom in strange orders, and it may seem like a good result comes from a bad seed (making extra money after lying) or a bad result from a good seed (going to jail after telling the truth). But the way the world really works is that good things can ONLY happen from good seeds, and bad things can ONLY happen from bad seeds. Good things happen to you because you have stored up good seeds from your good behavior (earlier in life or perhaps in a past life).
I LOVE this metaphor. Your boss is yelling at you because you yelled at someone earlier in life. You are experiencing someone as annoying because you annoyed someone in a similar fashion. When you experience anything in your life, it plays out as a response to your mindset. People are rude because you expect them to be. People are angry because you are angry. Every single moment of your outer life is a reaction to your inner life, a mirror to where you are unhealed.
Most of our society does NOT love this metaphor. It took me a long time to get to where I could accept it. We like to blame others for the things that we are less than excited about in our lives. We are a pop-a-pill society--gimme a diet pill, a depression pill, a sex pill and pill to fix the side effects from all the other pills. People don't want to do the work to fix themselves through diet and lifestyle change, because they don't want to admit that they are the cause of their misery.
I'm also reading Jesus, Muhammad and the Goddess, a Girl God Anthology (get it here). There's a piece by Andrew Gurevich called In Goddess We Trust, where he talks about how when white settlers came to America, the natives recognized the signs of a disease called wetiko or 'malignant egophrenia' (coined by Dr. Paul Levy).
"Researchers are suggesting that our species is in the midst of a massive psychic epidemic, or what Levy calls "a virulent collective psychosis that has been brewing in the couldron of humanity's psyche from the beginning of time." Like a fractal, he explains, wetiko operates on multiple dimensions simultaneously--intra-personally, inter-personally, as well as collectively. Like cannibals, those people or societies afflicted with wetiko will consume the life force of others for private purpose or profit...Over time, the patterns become so pervasive, so reinforced at all levels of the culture, that they become the norm. The lunatics forget they are hallucinating..."One of the most important characteristics of both memory, neural issue and of development," claims child therapist and psychological trauma expert Dr. Bruce Perry, "is that they all change with patterned, repetitive activity. So, the systems in your brain that get repeatedly activated with change and strengthen and develop and the systems in your brain that don't get activated won't. This 'use-dependent' development is one of the most important properties of neural tissue." Although each of us is born with a unique set of genetic instructions, according to Dr. Perry, "we enter the world as a work-in-progress and await the deft hand of ambient culture to sculpt the finishing touches."
I think this is SO INCREDIBLY INTERESTING. Modern science is finally catching up to what yoga has taught for centuries--that our brains change with repetitive activity, and our perspectives are unique to our personal experience while being influenced by our societal values. This may seem sad or scary at first glance (maybe we can't do anything about how our children will experience society) but I think it's crazy empowering.
WE CAN RE-WRITE OUR BRAINS.
If all it takes is repetitive activity, then we are in control of our outcomes. We have the final say.
We can begin to recognize when our brains are lying to us, if we can remember we are hallucinating.
And each time you come back up against an old, outdated belief that you know is a hallucination, it gets a little easier. This is another thing I've come up against in my gardening. I've had to clear out some spaces that have been long run over by St. Augustine grass--that shit is hardy. If you're unfamiliar, as you're digging it up, it's all connected and intermingled across the top, and pretty hard to initially tear through. Once you make a little headway, and get to dirt, the roots are pervasive. They spread and tangle and are pretty hard to break (at least for me). But the most amazing thing is that if you leave behind even a tiny little piece of that broken root, it will sprout. From the smallest of remaining root the entire plant can return--but only if the space is untended long enough. Go back a few days, even a week, after you originally rip up the roots, and the ground is looser, easier to sift through, and the little sprouts fall right out into your hands. The plants at the edge of what you've already cleared start to send out little runners to try and recover the ground, and in doing so give away their deepest roots--making the second round of clearing out easier.
So, when we start to step back and take an honest look at our lives--what frustrates, upsets, infuriates or saddens us is a mirror of our own behavior. When we recognize this, we can begin to stop ourselves from responding in kind, preventing the planting of more seeds that will result in more of the same. When we regularly do this, it gets easier in the area most tended, but it also begins to reveal the places that other, similar beliefs are trying to creep in. We begin to work backward, finding where the roots go deep and tearing them up. Sifting through the loose soil to find the little sprouts and preventing the beliefs from silently taking hold again.
This is why we practice. Whether its yoga or dance or meditation or music or art or whatever it is that you do to better know yourself--we have to keep going. We have to keep deepening our practice.
If you don't, then the roots will creep back in. The things you think you've learned will choke the growth of the new beliefs you've planted. The self respect you've gained, the peace you've found, the love you feel will slowly suffocate if you allow the anger, sadness, ego to grow back in.
And it will grow back in, unless you practice. Patterned, repetitive activity will strengthen those areas of the brain, and the parts you stop using will weaken.
Tend your garden, cultivate the plants you need and want, and tear out the weeds at the root. Steady, small actions over an extended period will do.
This is how we change our lives. It's how we change the world.
