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#94: Body as an instrument

I was recently unwell in a way where a concoction of things, chronic and acute, had me in bed for a few days. Eight punishing issues were cropping up at once. I tried not to add value judgments, which helped reduce mental chatter and made it easier for me to go with the flow. I alternated work-in-bed, Netflix-in-bed, reading and rest based on what my body could handle. By the second day, the observer in me starting seeing each issue as a thread of human experience: gastric distress, back spasms, inflamed adductor, twisted pelvis and grief just to name a few. I thought of people who had dealt with these threads at one point or another. I examined the threads that were new to me.

For example: When people had back problems, I understood theoretically but not until this experience did I really “get it”. I felt from inside how completely debilitating a back spasm could be. How all bodily movements, not some, are silently supported by our core. I knew that our core includes our back and not just the abdomen, and that true abdominal strength comes from deeper muscles and not just the surface-level 6-pack muscle. Yet, not until this event did I patiently isolate and feel the firing of different layers of core muscles. I finally played with the exquisitely designed jigsaw puzzle made of bones, muscles and tendons from inside my animal.

There is sometimes a struggle in spiritual practice about whether it’s more important for us to nurture the spirit or the body. The body is seen as temporary while the spirit more lasting. And I absolutely get this wisdom; I’ve personally benefitted from feeding my spiritual wellbeing in dark moments. But…we are clothed in this earthly bodysuit till our dying breath. If we don’t have a body, we are literally not alive. Like all animals, we have sophisticated abilities for functional activity, growth, reproduction, and continual change before eventual death, and we also face periodic glitches. I have come to see that this glitch-ridden experience inside our frequently painful bodysuit is how we unlock our spiritual practices. Body is where the nuggets of insight, wisdom and empathy live.

We can’t each go through the countless human experiences to be had. But we can go through some. Some of us will face cancers, heart attacks, severe burns, while others will face chronic migraines, irritable bowels and weak bones. Some will have the ache of untimely loss, addiction, and postpartum depression, while others will have to care for a parent with Alzheimer’s or a schizophrenic sibling. Between all of us, we cover the entirety of human experience.

Modern tech would have you believe that intelligent life can operate without a body, while simply simulating the predictive capacity of the brain. What we completely miss is that true intelligence isn’t just prediction, it’s also compassion and resilience birthed from painful surprises. This is the valuable journey that a human body allows. Over time, we can become instruments of all that is tender and powerful at the same time. Like a tree that filters environmental toxins and releases oxygen.

“It is not our job to remain whole.
We came to lose our leaves
Like the trees, and be born again,
Drawing up from the great roots.”― Robert Bly, poet

#89: Beginner’s mind (forced)

I randomly tuned-in to the US open tennis tournament while at the gym. Not having followed tennis closely for a few years, these players were new to me so I didn’t know their styles and strengths. I wasn’t connected to the audio so could only see the score and the body language. I had chanced upon the tail end of the match; the final set and match point. The player in the lead was leading by a lot and had to take her match point serve. She kept starting the serve but not taking it. She would toss the ball but then decide to let it drop to the ground instead of hitting it. She did this several times, enough for me to pause and notice. She looked calm, she was ahead, she looked very strong, she could win the match in under 60-seconds. What was hard in that moment? And then I realized: she has the weight of expectations on her. I thought, wouldn’t it be great if she could erase any internal chatter and noisy history and just serve with a beginner’s mind? Shortly thereafter, she served, she won. This match was over and the screen moved to another match. 

While this was happening, a story was unfolding closer to me on my elliptical machine. While I was watching, my run was picking speed. I was starting to break sweat, feeling fluid in my body after having taken a break. I glanced at the speed and distance to see if I was actually building stamina again and then the machine stopped. I was distracted by the match and had pressed the wrong button. I had done about 10 minutes, so not my full planned time. “No problem” I thought and started again with a clean slate. I tuned in to the body, checked for alignment and pain. My body felt good after a long time. Then I tuned-in again to speed and distance. Distractedly, I hit the same button after another 10 minutes or so and the machine stopped. I lost track of my speed and distance once again. This time I noticed…what I wished for that player, I was getting in a very forced way. I was getting unplanned fresh starts. I kept having to let go of my agenda and tune in repeatedly to the here and now, to my beginner’s mind. By the third set, I had stopped monitoring speed or distance as a gauge of my health. I was just feeling the increased stamina in my body compared to the last few times when I felt absolutely sluggish. In the first set, I was having my own micro moment of success and perhaps the pressure to outdo my past self. But the unplanned pauses and erasure forced me into a beginner’s mind repeatedly. I had no clue about my distance or speed, I just got to savor my strength that day.

Practicing beginner’s mind might be the most pragmatic way to experience the full-bodied potential and delight of our endeavors. The measurements and markers, while helpful, then become secondary. When we lead with the markers, we behave like brains on a stick and often exit the visceral experience of being alive. I know beginner’s mind is easier said than done…but it’s easier done after repeated practice.

“But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.

The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.” ― Steve Jobs, 2005 Stanford commencement address

#86: Influencers

According to a 2019 survey of 2,000 Americans ages 13-38, 86% were willing to try out social media influencing for work. Truthfully, at first, this headline fueled my cynical side but a quick look at the motivations cited helped me see people’s underlying humanity. People weren’t just motivated by making money or getting free products, they wanted to make a difference, have flexible working hours and share ideas with others. They also wanted to have fun. Fame ranked lowest on the list. There’s a market for influencers because people trust those that appear to be everyday folk like themselves vs. those with too much celebrity and fame. But there is a bit of a trap here. In the same study, only 12% of people considered themselves influencers.

Influence is the capacity to have an effect on the character, development, or behavior of someone or something. When we think of the term “influencer”, our default is to think in a social media marketing sense given popular jargon. In this context, the influencer’s goal is to typically make us buy something. This is neither everyone’s passion and skill, nor should it be. I would hate to live in a world where every human became a walking billboard. Besides, lets not forget that each of us is an influencer with far more weight than we realize.

My life has been influenced by the everyday presence, words and examples of my parents, husband, aunts and uncles, siblings and cousins, in-laws, friends, teachers, mentors, co-workers, neighbors and acquaintances. I’ve even been influenced by strangers. I’ve absorbed the most profound lessons of love, compassion and generosity, of courage and humility, of patience and sacrifice. These lessons and experiences came silently and without fanfare or observers. When eventually I picked books from wise sages and they invoked these traits, I didn’t have a hard time relating because I had everyday examples. The realization that I was surrounded by exemplary people day in and day out made me more thankful, peaceful and joyous in my existence.

On the flip side, I’ve also been negatively influenced by others when I shrank myself after I was made to feel less-than. We humans have the power to do that to each other. Let’s never forget that our every interaction is an opportunity for influence and that we can choose to be constructive and generative. 100% of us are influencers.

Written in honor of my biggest influencer, my precious Mother. Happy birthday, Ma!

“My daughter is strong. My daughter is brave.”― My Mom, during my weakest moments

#85: Everyday reminders of belonging

When we think of belonging, we often think of a place, people, or culture that makes us feel welcome. We crave kinship and emotionally available humans. The implied focal point is usually the self and we gauge how another may create a sense of affinity in us. If we flip the coin though, we’ll see that the other side of this equation is us. These humans that we crave belonging from crave all of the same things back. If belonging has been a consistent desire across cultures and time, and everyone desperately craves it, what gets in the way?

Our modern lives reinforce a few recurrent themes:

  • We don’t decipher the need: Belonging was easier to achieve when we lived in close-knit collectives and became intertwined with others across generations through biological likeness and cultural shorthands. In modernity, we increasingly bump up against those with different cultural shorthands from us. We can’t always accurately decipher another’s emotional rhythm and don’t realize when we’re drawing inaccurate assumptions and conclusions, often in haste.
  • We don’t overlap enough in terms of time: Connection can happen quickly, belonging takes time. True belonging, the one where our roots go deep into the communal substrate, needs time. A few interactions are great but consistent interactions over a long period are what informs us that we aren’t just fair-weather companions. Belonging then, is a sense of affinity that is derived over a period of time through our seemingly small interactions with others. We now flit around more easily from geography to geography, job to job, relationship to relationship, and context to context. No one context gets enough of our attention unless we intentionally make it so.
  • The relational sheen wears off up close: The more we are with another human, the more sides of them we’ll see. There is more opportunity to witness messiness and sticking points. Every real relationship goes through moments of stress followed by the potential for shared sense-making. Belonging gets unlocked when we show up after these stressful moments for imperfect practice with a committed other. This implies two things: mutuality and showing up despite feeling inadequate. But if after these moments of stress, we turn to the endless online shelf of humans where the next shiny person awaits, we’ll keep repeating loops of shiny discovery followed by heartache without ever learning how to be in relationship.

In our modern context, everything―except the desire for belonging―has changed. We don’t have overlapping histories, biology, norms and time. We are surrounded by countless potential sources of belonging but they come with bodies, identities, mindsets and experiences unlike ours and with time as limited as ours. We don’t always depend on the same set of people and contexts for both survival and thriving. We rarely get to know all of another, often seeing them in a specific context which is reduced and distributed. We hardly get to see the integrated whole of each other, even when we’re emotionally close. Finally, we encounter a lot more people which cultivates the behavior of “infinite-swipe”. If not this, then there’s always another and then another.

The repeatable outcome is that it’s easier to surf the surface of humanity without dropping anchor. Easier to accumulate judgments and faulty stories about others. Easier to hurt each other and move on without realizing that, in the process, we changed ourselves for the worse. Easier to feel compelled to guard ourselves, and easier for everyone to end up guarding themselves to the brink of isolation.

But tuning back into belonging isn’t overly difficult work, it’s just uncomfortable at times. It requires everyday attentiveness and responsibility. It’s a psychological shift to reorient our focus from short-term material accumulation to the humans in front of us. To bypass the inclination to compare, acquire, and dominate. To remembering that every single thing we get to do, dream about, and achieve is enabled by humans we know and those we’ll never know.

We have rich ancestral wisdom to help us here. While modernity has added layers of complexity, forgetting our connectedness is not a new problem. Our ancestors too felt the need to remember. For instance, versions of the golden rule―treat others as you want to be treated―appear across all cultures. Some additional examples:

  • The African philosophy of Ubuntu is summarized as “I am because you are”.
  • The Zulu greeting Sawubona means “I see you” and it’s common response Shiboka means “I exist for you”. They remind us to recognize each other’s worth and dignity.
  • The same Indian greeting Namaste is used while bowing to the divine and greeting other humans.
  • Ojigi, the Japanese greeting, is a physical bow and a signal of respect, gratitude or apology in social and religious situations.

I’m certain we have timeless wisdom in every culture to remind us of our interconnectedness. These greetings, rituals and philosophies aren’t antiquated. They are psychological reminders and everyday shorthands to break the circuit of self-absorption, fear and disconnection. They help us turn to each other as lovingly and fully as we want to be turned to, to accompany each other as we want to be accompanied.

“There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.”― Edith Wharton, writer and designer

#83: The curvature of dreams

I didn’t have a clear sense of what I could do in life when I was growing up in India. I was drawn to many things, but they were either unavailable to girls or if they were, I opted out because of constrained resources. The desire to be an independent woman capable of taking care of loved ones butted heads with the stark reality of limited resources, options, and role models. We didn’t have internet so I couldn’t think very big, just big enough for me and even that felt overwhelming. I remember moments with my mom as I would inarticulately share my worry and she would quickly see the core of the matter and offer strength-inducing wisdom. I recall that glum teenager’s internal sentiment: “but you don’t understand how hard this is, how different my goals are from my reality”. I also know that after this kid wiped her tears, she made the seemingly limited choices on offer. When I look back now, I did everything that I could imagine doing as a 16-year old. My life and work may not feel like a big deal to the current-day me, after all I created this gradually. But when I pause and look back, I see the massive ground I have covered outwardly but more important, inwardly. I am floored by the precision with which most of my dreams came true.

I came to Los Angeles on a scholarship and frequently drove through the Malibu canyon while living there. As a new transplant and an even newer driver, I paid high-quality attention to the road and the beautiful scenic turns. These early drives left an emotional mark. I would often think that the curve of the canyon roads was like the curvature of our dreams and longings. At any given time, we can only see so far.

So, today when I look up towards the scary future that I’m now capable of imagining, I do so with more patience and courage. The words that my mother shared with me now come from within. I now understand why she had faith in the small steps. We get the gift of seeing further only when we travel the seemingly insignificant path in front of us.

“Again and again in history some people wake up. They have no ground in the crowd and move to broader deeper laws. They carry strange customs with them and demand room for bold and audacious action. The future speaks ruthlessly through them.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, poet and novelist