From Comfortable Distances (31 page)

Tess pulled the door open
slowly, trying to avoid the creaks, but it was no use. The room full of teacher
trainers turned to see who was walking in. She held up her hand and mouthed “sorry.”
Dale, seated up front, motioned to her, pointing to an empty back jack and
cushion beside her. She knew that the mentors seated at the back of the room,
adjacent to the stacked yoga mats and blankets, were watching her moves. In the
past few weeks, she and Dale had been getting called out during yoga classes
and lectures for talking and laughing. As she liked to tell herself, she was a
paying customer. She was allowed to have some fun—wasn’t that the point of the
program?

The speaker paused while
Tess made her way to the front of the room, where Dale was sitting. She had
forgotten that they had changed around the schedule for the weekend—the lecture
was to take up all of Saturday with no yoga class and Sunday they would do a
two-hour asana practice followed by practice teaching. She smiled at the
lecturer in apology, and held his gaze for a moment before the recognition set
in. Luke? Was that Luke from Woodstock? He nodded and smiled back at her. It
was Luke, only with his head shaved and a slight goatee. He continued on,
pacing the platform. He was wearing jeans and a white t-shirt that outlined
broad shoulders and a well-defined chest. Like the rest of the teacher
trainers, he didn’t have on any shoes or socks and Tess smiled—a slight memory
surfaced of her and Luke and the others running around barefoot in Woodstock
late into their teenage years. What in the world was Luke doing here, in New
York City, lecturing to her teacher-training group?

“You made it,” Dale said,
taking her bag off of the back jack that was beside her. Before teacher
training Tess had never heard of a back jack. Now they were a necessity. She
loved that she could sit upright on the floor and have her legs out in front of
her while her back rested firmly against the canvas.

“Overslept,” Tess
whispered. She imagined that it had been well after 3:00 a.m. when she had
fallen asleep. At first she had tucked herself in a corner of the living room,
trying to meditate, thinking that would make her ready to sleep. When that
hadn’t worked, she had sat up in the kitchen reading
A Path With Heart
before she had made her way back to her bedroom and took down her mother’s
remains from the high up perch where she had rested them. She had taken the urn
carefully out of its velvet case and held it close to her chest before she put
it down on the wooden closet floor across from her as if it was the most normal
thing in the world to sit across from her mother in this manner.

“I miss you each and
every day, mom. I think that the yoga is helping me. I can’t say exactly how,
but I feel better. Happier.” Tess had smiled. “I met someone I like. I’m sure
you know that. I don’t know what it will lead to. You told me to follow my joy,
though, and that’s what I’m doing. I know you’d tell me that you’re always here
with me, so I’m going to try to remember that and listen for you more. You once
told me that I have two options in life—to think my whole life away or to live
it. I’d forgotten that until just now. I want to live my life. Sometimes it’s
hard for me to get out of the way of myself, but I’m going to try.”

Tess had held the urn
close to her heart again before she had packed it up and placed it back on the
top shelf. She remained leaning into her clothes for a few moments longer
before drowsy eyed and exhausted, she had made her way into her bed and tucked
herself in.

When she had woken up
again, it was 8:30 am. Her lecture started in Manhattan at 9:00. Even with
skipping a shower, no way she’d make it to the studio earlier than 9:30.

“If you’re going to
evolve,” Luke was saying, “you need to learn to let go of your personal
desires. Dissect your ego—the root of your personal desires—from your true
consciousness. It’s not an easy job. If it was just about detaching from the
distractions that come into your life in the here and now, that’s not so bad.
Now that you’re becoming conscious, that’s doable. But what about the desires
that you’ve been living with for 10 or 20 years? The desires that you’ve been
programmed for—success, whatever that means, right? Maybe earning a lot of
money, living in a nice house? That’s where the struggle comes in—the
reprogramming of your brain. You need to let go of the desires that you’ve been
living with for however many years if you want to liberate yourself. Those
desires, or impressions—
samskaras
, as they’re called—are deep-rooted.
They are what come up while you meditate or do asana—samskaras are what make
your hips tight, or your knees ache.”

“I thought that was the
onset of middle age,” Dale whispered.

“It’s up to you to grant
yourself freedom. Samskaras are what keep you from true freedom. It’s not until
you let those go that you can truly find peace and joy, and really get to know
what you’re all about. You’re going to reside in no man’s land for a while
before you clear all that up. And trust me, when it comes to letting go,
there’s a big difference between detachment and running away, or as I like to
think of it, denial.”

“What’s the difference?”
Kim asked. She was seated on the other side of the room, as close up to the
platform as possible, her notebook and pen poised, ready to take notes – the
perpetual good student.

“When you run away,” Luke
said to Kim, and then addressing the group, “you’ll always end up back where
you left, because you didn’t resolve anything. We’re not talking about
indifference when we talk about detachment. We’re talking about an active
choice to move past something, but only after you’ve fully dealt with it,
examined it, accepted it. And remember that you need to be attached to
something before you can detach from it. For example, when someone that you
love starts blaming you for doing something or other to them, then you need to
find that strength within or that switching point that says to you:
What
you’re saying is not about me. I didn’t do this to you. I’m not responsible for
your actions, your feelings
. You need to find the strength to know that the
person is choosing to feel that way and that by blaming you, they are not
getting to what is really the problem. Detachment is the tool that enables you
to let that person reflect—it’s a ricochet in that respect. By refusing to be
the scapegoat, you in turn are empowering the person to take a closer
look—figure out what is really going on. Detachment is like saying:
No, your
issues are not about me, they are about you.
It’s giving people ownership
for what’s going on in their lives while at the same time giving yourself the
freedom not to become burdened with issues that are not your own. In that same
vein, detachment requires you not to displace your issues or desires onto other
people or events or life outcomes. It requires you to own your issues and
desires—to in a sense accept that you’re your own priest. Detachment isn’t
about putting up walls, it’s about ownership, acceptance, and examination. Ultimately,
it’s about moving on, flowing. The more you keep projecting your stuff on other
people, blaming this one and that one for things that only you can control, the
further away you travel from your core.”

“How are you supposed to
detach from your desires?” Kim asked.

“Good question. By
staying awake. Aware. By getting to know your true self. In your truest state
of self, there are no desires. There’s just being. Desires are delusions. You
tell yourself if I get this, then that—if I had a million dollars, then I would
be happy. Think about that. Can a million dollars touch your soul? Can it make
you feel complete inside? Sure, it may make it easier to pay the bills and
allow you to be worry free for a while, but it’s not the actual money that is
making you worry. You see a dollar bill and it doesn’t make you anxious, right?
It’s the way we think about money, the relationship that we have with it that
creates anxiety. We have the power in our minds to choose how we react to
money.”

“Detaching from our
desires is really about getting rid of all that limits you, and your desires do
limit you. There’s an inherent expectation imbedded in our desires. Once we
start expecting things, then we are no longer acting with pure intentions. It
becomes all about us. For instance, if you are so caught up on getting a better
job, chances are that you are letting other things in your life suffer. If you
can let that desire go, focus on what is, take note of everything and everyone
in your life in the present moment, focus on what you’re grateful for, live
your life with that knowledge, that acceptance, fueling you, then chances are
the better job will come to you because of the fact that you are a better
person—but when it's your only focus, you are putting obstacles in your path
and most likely you’re keeping yourself from getting the better job. It’s all
about balance, right? Yoga is about merging sun energy and moon energy. The
three Gunas. Satvic is a balanced state. That’s what we’re always aspiring to.
You’re a little tamasic one day, all tired and lazy, and then the next day
you’re a little rajastic, or manic. And while each state is helpful in some
respect, the goal is to attain balance, to be satvic. It’s when you let go of
the expectations that society ingrains in you, then the expectations you place
on yourself, that you’re on your way to attaining balance.”

“Make sense?” he asked
looking at Kim.

She nodded.

“We can go on with these
discussions forever, but what I would like you to remember from today, if
nothing else, is that enjoying happiness from external things is short lived.
Your attachment to your desires and subsequent attempts to fulfill them will
always keep you in a needy state. Once you detach from your desires and connect
with your true self—the you that’s free from expectations— you’ll begin to
enjoy a steady happiness. And trust me, once you experience that selfless joy,
you’re going to keep going there. The question is how do you get started?
There’s meditation. A little each day really helps you to begin to connect.
Then there’s asana practice. Paying attention to what goes on when you’re on
your yoga mat is a great way to start taking ownership of your life. When do
you start to struggle? What do you do when you struggle? Do you stick with
yourself, or do you run away from yourself and start thinking about what you
need to do later that day, what your plans are for next week? Do you start
planning what you’re going to eat for lunch, dinner? The eight limbs, what
you’ve been studying all along—yama, niyama, asana, pranayama, pratyahara,
dharana, dhyana, samadhi–that’s the route.”

There had been so many
attachments in Tess’s life—to her husbands, to her child, to her business, to
her evolving needs and desires. She had told her mom so many times that she was
wrong about attachments, that it was healthy and good to need people. Only now,
she didn’t know. There was a way to look at anything and see it in the right
light. She didn’t want to be needy. She didn’t know what it was she was
attached to now, what she clung to—power, she supposed. Looking to the past,
she was able to view her attachments objectively, to see how the objects of her
desire confined her. The more she had tried to control things, they more they
had controlled her.

“One last idea I want to
leave you with. I grew up practicing Buddhism,” Luke said. “When I delved into
yoga, I would get asked a lot what the correlation between Buddhism and yoga
was.” His eyes were on Tess’s as he spoke now. “For me, the connection was
palpable. The yogic endeavor as I see it is about dealing with duhka, or
suffering, and transcending it. Yoga helps us to move past the small stuff that
we tend to obsess and identify with. Both yoga and Buddhism, when it comes down
to it, are about moksha, or liberation.”

“What were you two
talking about after class?” Kim asked. Tess had just met up with them at The
Bakery. “Should we grab this table?” Kim asked, pausing at a table for four
that was about to be available, as they made their way toward the salad counter
in the back.

Dale tossed her sweater
and bag onto the chair, and the rest of the girls followed her lead.

“His eyes were stuck on
you,” Dale said. “If you ask me, someone has a crush.”

“I know him—he grew up in
Woodstock. I ran into him when I was up there taking care of things with my
mom.”

“Old love?” Dale asked.

“Childhood friend. He was
always at my house,” Tess said.

Dale winked. “Always at
your house and just a friend?”

“I never said he was
there to see me—he was one of my mother’s clan,” Tess said.

“He’s pretty cute,” Kim
said.

“He’s bald and slimy,”
Sara said.

Tess filled her salad
bowl with spinach leaves, almonds, and chickpeas.

“No tortilla soup for you
today?” Dale asked.

“What’s wrong with bald
men?” Tess said, and to Dale, “I think the tortilla soup phase is over.”

“Nothing is wrong with
bald men, if you’re into that. In the summer, their heads get pink from the
sun. I couldn’t get passionate with a guy with a pink head,” Sara said.

“I think we should try to
practice what Luke talked about today.
Non-judgment,
and detaching from
simple gratification,” Dale said. “I reject your statement. I won’t be swayed
to think Luke is unattractive by what you call his summertime pink head.”