Because this is the month in which a whole day is dedicated to love, and because our world seems to me to need as much love as possible, I’ve been contemplating “love” in all its forms and ways. The kind of love I’ve been contemplating is the kind that sees into the flawed notions and diseased places and still rises to show up and be present there. The kind of love I’ve been contemplating is the kind that sometimes demands action. This kind of love must listen longer and deeper than it may want to without pulling away, rushing ahead, or reacting. This is a kind of actionable love that is a way of being with our self, with others, and with the world. That means we have to be willing to stop and rise to whatever occasion is before us during each given moment. The world needs this kind of love. And I have witnessed, in myself, the ways that my yoga practice has given me the skills to grow my edges to meet this kind of love.
I started thinking about this kind of deep love after listening to poet and translator Joanna Macy speak with Krista Tippett in an episode of “On Being.” She speaks about her great love for this world, her deep and passionate love for the world that has called her to act on behalf of this world, not despite its sickness and flaws, but along with those diseased places. She says, “You’re always asked to sort of stretch a little bit more, and actually, we’re made for that. But in any case, there’s absolutely no excuse for making our passionate love for our world dependent on what we think of its degree of health, whether we think it’s going to go on forever…say you’re taking care of your mother, and she’s dying of cancer. And you say, ‘I can’t go in her house or in her room because I don’t want to look at her.’ But if you love her, you want to be with her. If we love our world, we’re able to see the scum of oil spreading across the Gulf. We’re able to see what it’s doing to the wetlands and the marshes, what it’s doing to the dolphins and the gulls. When you love something, your love doesn’t say, ‘Well, too bad my kid has leukemia, so I won’t go near her.’ It’s just the opposite.” This got me thinking about how often it’s not the opposite–that when we love something or someone, including our self perhaps, that is diseased or painful in some way, we don’t pull up closer, but choose instead to draw away, hide, react. It’s when we pave this grief or pain over with distraction, with distance or disgust, that this same grief and pain will push its way through again and again making us recognize and see it. It’s only in the learning to stop, to look and to listen, that this grief and pain becomes transformed. And this is the kind of actionable love, I think, that can change the world–or at least your own lovely heart.
How did I learn this on the mat? One practice at a time, over many years of sustained dedication, taught me that the work that I’m doing, whether in active movement or contemplative stillness, always brings to light some level of pain or grief for what or who I am or am not. Hips are tight? That long held pigeon pose makes me want to scream. I can choose to pull away, to cross the proverbial street away from this moment, or I can stop exactly where I am and look and listen a bit before I move on. What might I discover, what have I discovered? There has grown in me the ability to love these wounded places in myself that, though they may stir some grief, some anger, some desire to detach, have given me the ability to also heal some of these wounded places and to then expand my capability to love not only myself with more compassion, but the wounded places in the beings around me and the world at large. Sometimes that kind of love feels even worse than the tight hips in pigeon for sure and often I have to remind myself to stop on that side of the street over and again. This is an actionable love, though, that, when I allow it to, gives me all the tools I need to not grow hard around the painful and diseased places, but instead to soften. It’s the same on the mat–softening always leads to a deeper, richer, less frustrated experience of the poses. And in life, it’s the action of working on softness that will lead to the greatest transformations of love for all.
In the interview, Joanna Macy said, “The landscape of my life, that dance with despair, to see how we are called to not run from the discomfort and not run from the grief or the feelings of outrage or even fear and that, if we can be fearless, to be with our pain, it turns. It doesn’t stay static. It only doesn’t change if we refuse to look at it. But when we look at it, when we take it in our hands, when we can just be with it and keep breathing, then it turns. It turns to reveal its other face, and the other face of our pain for the world is our love for the world, our absolutely inseparable connectedness with all life.” This sounds an awful lot like the words I’ve used in teaching, both students and myself, about this practice of yoga. If we can breathe into what we’re experiencing there is always a turn that reveals the other side. And yes, the other side of grief and pain, even anger and deep hatred, is love. An actionable love that calls us to stop so that we can listen more deeply and find a way into connection.
Macy is known as a foremost translator of Rilke’s poetry. Included in her interview were several of his works that she translated. Among these poems, I contemplate this one:
Dear darkening ground,
you’ve endured so patiently the walls we built,
please give the cities one more hour
and the churches and cloisters two.
And those that labor — let their toils
still hold them for another five hours, or seven,
before that hour of inconceivable terror
when you take back your name
from all things.
Just give me a little more time!
I just need a little more time.
Because I am going to love the things
as no one has thought to love them,
until they’re real and worthy of you. ~Rilke
There is an optimistic desire expressed here, for a kind of love that makes not only the world more real, but our tattered selves more together and real also. That doesn’t, however, mean that we have to be optimistic all of the time. There is a Buddhist teaching that expresses the wisdom that having to feel hopeful all of the time serves to only wear us out. I’d say this applies to having to feel optimistic all of the time, or having to feel excited all of the time, or having to feel “in love” all of the time. Love, when it’s a way of feeling, might leave us disappointed when life is just plain old disappointing. But when love is a way of being, then all we have to do is show up. And if we keep showing up with our eyes and ears open, if we stay on that side of the street long enough, eventually a way to crossing deeper into connectedness will reveal itself.