These words landed in my inbox a little while ago, from poet David Whyte:
“Discovering what is good for us and then, each day, doing a little of it, is one of the great foundations for a healthy human life; above all, when we drink from and become energized by that flow of self-generosity, we become more generous to others and to our world.”
I like how he says discovering what is good for us, which is shades different from knowing what is good for us. You might “know” that yoga is good for you, but if you’ve never experienced its benefits, I wouldn’t say you have “discovered” it.
You might even go to a number of classes without really discovering it; Sometimes you keep going for no other reason than you bought a package of classes so you might as well use them but you don’t get much out of it. (This happens when the teacher and student aren’t a good match, for example.)
But then — and who knows when it will happen — there might be moment or a collection of moments when something clicks and you know, on a visceral level, that you are getting something out of the practice. You know in your bones that this is good for you.
At this point, many of us have the thought, “I want to do this every day!” That enthusiasm is both beautiful and vulnerable. We can get disappointed when we want to do something every day but it turns out to be hard to do.
Our present world doesn’t tend to support quiet practices like yoga and meditation. We are, in many ways, swimming against the current of our culture when we carve out time for these practices.
But take heart. Keep in mind that “swimming against the tide” is a metaphor, not a physical reality. Although many of us feel society’s pressures, when we are doing the practice, we can let go of that metaphor and be “in the flow” instead, a different metaphor that I’d rather focus on when I’m practicing, not focusing on the struggle to make time for it, etc.
Another metaphor that I often hear is that “obstacles” get in the way of practice. There aren’t literally objects in our way (well, maybe sometimes there is furniture in our house that has to be moved to make room for yoga), but it feels like there are. There are metaphorical obstacles that tend to be in our schedules, not our physical world.
I have found it really freeing to realize that metaphors are at play in my mind. When we bring our metaphors into the light of conscious awareness, we might be able to use them to our advantage.
Take the obstacle metaphor, for example. It feels like “banging one’s head against a brick wall” to dwell on our “obstacles” and curse them for being so difficult to remove. But if I drop the brick wall image/metaphor and bring a water metaphor to mind, I can get a different image… I picture obstacles being more like rocks in a stream: the water flows around them and they don’t need to be removed. I feel less angry at obstacles when I think of them that way (and I tend to go easier on myself too).
Let’s look again at the David Whyte quote, which uses a different water metaphor; he invokes the image of a well that we drink from.
This is not the first time I’ve seen this image used as a metaphor, but I had never thought of “self-generosity” as the contents that are flowing like water. I feel a little more calm when I let this image sit with me.
Neither is the idea of doing a little bit of something every day new to me. But by putting it in the context of a metaphorical “well,” I got a nice image of taking little “sips” of something nourishing from a source that is naturally flowing.
Practicing yoga and/or meditation every day is, for me, like taking sips of something nourishing.
I felt a little freer when I realized that I had been, somewhat subconsciously, telling myself that I wasn’t practicing enough (the metaphor would be that I wasn’t drinking enough water). But little sips every day? That sounds easier. Doable. And tasty.
Granted, it can be a challenge to trust that a short practice is nourishing enough to sustain me until the next day if I only have much time. But isn’t this better than not “tasting” the practice at all today?
Perhaps these metaphors serve you, perhaps you will come up with your own. For a deep dive into the world of metaphor, check out the book Metaphors We Live By, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. If nothing else, it will wake you up to just how ubiquitous metaphors are and how deeply they are embedded in our language and our thinking.
If you don’t have time to read the book (and it is rather dense, if not terribly long), you could check out this (irreverent) podcast episode from Very Bad Wizards that sums it up nicely.
I’ll leave you with an excerpt of a poem by Rumi, who used lots of metaphor. It is translated by Coleman Barks. Enjoy.
The Guest House
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.