2011: A Good Year

I have had a good year. The fact of it keeps surprising me because I am so used to problems. And recently I have been experiencing longer and longer stretches without problems. Life just seems to be unfolding without them. In their place have been a lot of things to appreciate. Not only have things felt really fun and worthwhile, I have also not had the sense that sometime soon the other shoe will drop and life will get all crappy again.

This “fun goodness” is so noticeably different from much of my experience that it has forced me to consider its cause. As far as I can tell, there are two basic reasons my problems have been replaced with worthwhile opportunities.

I have stopped thinking in terms of problems. I wake up, there is stuff that I have to do, and that is pretty much that. It happens every day and shows no sign of stopping until my last breath. My mantra for the stuff that comes up each day is “What else did you have planned?” The long version would be “I thought you were here to have a human life. You know, one where you have stuff to do for 70 to 80 years, then you are done doing stuff. What else did you have planned?” When did having a life become a problem?

Since becoming a parent and a dedicated meditator, I have developed the habit of considering my motivations before taking an action. The most important questions seem to be ”Am I about to take an action based on faith?” and “Am I about to take an action based on love?” If I am, the action seems to contribute to “fun goodness.” If not, the action seems to create problems. It really matters why I am doing what I am doing in terms of how the results affect my life.

My teachers suggest that we not make a burden of our duties. Who needs problems, anyway? They just create a negative charge around something we have to do and might learn from and profit from, if we don’t expend all our energy making life a problem. The energy we don’t waste having problems can be poured into actions taken from a place of faith and love, and life can start feeling sacred and sweet.

For more information on how to optimize your health, visit RolfGates.com.

Photo credit: Alex Bartok

The Missing Link

The connection between compassion and human happiness is woven into all of the great spiritual traditions. The Buddha, the Yoga Sutras and Jesus Christ were all quite specific about it (to name a few). The cultivation of gentleness and compassion for others and ourselves has the capacity to set our minds and our hearts free. Wow. That’s big. Unfortunately, it also appears to have been buried in the fine print of human civilization. Or maybe I just did not get the memo.

In the world I grew up in, we became happy by being successful, usually at others’ expense. It was not that we wanted others to suffer, it was just that for every Lance Armstrong there has to be thousands of losers, and we were OK with that. Growing up with those odds, the point seemed to be to get really good at something and fight like hell to get your share. True, we were supposed to have compassion for those near and dear to us ? you know, like family, a friend or, at least temporarily, a teammate. But that was the extent of it, and, as a guy, compassion really was not much of a priority.

That began to change for me when I became the grateful recipient of some world-class compassion from some people in not so world-class circumstances. In order for me to get sober from my addiction to alcohol, a number of people had to go out of their way to help an unsavory stranger. This not only had the effect of saving my life; it touched my heart. I have spent the last 21 years attempting to emulate the kindness of the strangers who worked together to save my life.

Despite their example and my own sincerity, it has taken the entirety of those 21 years to understand the role compassion plays in our experience of the world. Consider the experience of judgment, the mental and physical experience we endure as we hold another in contempt. No one considers this to be a good time. It might create a temporary relief from negative feelings we hold toward ourselves, but it is no day at the beach. Now consider the experience of compassion: the moment you went out of your way to perform a kind action; something as simple as giving someone on the side of the road a jump, cheering for the victory of someone you’ve never met or a kindness you extended when no one was looking. Feel what just the memory of kindness does to your whole body.

A wise man from Sri Lanka was asked what would spell the doom of humanity, and his answer was “the separation between you and me.” Compassion heals that separation. The cultivation of compassion is the cultivation of the mental and physical underpinnings of health and well-being. The effect it has on our bodies is no different than the effect it has on our relationships and our communities.

Compassion is an appropriate response to life’s complexity. It works and it’s infectious. If we offer it to those around us, we increase the likelihood that they will do the same.

For more information on how to optimize your health, visit http://rolfgates.com/.

Photo credit: hurleygurley

How Meditation Changes Your Life

“The ego is a dysfunctional relationship to the now.” Eckhart Tolle

I did not start meditating in earnest until my daughter Jasmine was born. Twelve years before I had bought a book on Zen meditation and began a seated practice on my own. The results were dramatic. A few weeks after I started, a friend of mine asked, “Rolf, what happened to your car? It’s clean!” I smiled and said, “Meditation.”

I have always loved meditation. When I take the time to sit quietly and do nothing, I feel as though the world reveals itself to me in its true beauty. This has always been the case with me; I love being silent and still. I love the space people create around the practice of meditation and the application of spiritual principles. It feels to me like the phrase from The Lord’s Prayer, “On earth as it is in heaven.” I loved meditation, but I lacked a compelling reason to do it instead of going for a jog or to the gym. Jasmine gave me a reason.

In the 39 years before Jasmine was born, if a relationship did not work out, it felt to me as if both parties would be OK. We were all big boys and girls, so to speak. Jasmine presented me with the first relationship I had ever had that simply did not have failure as an option. Not only was my relationship with Jasmine without an exit clause, its failure, should it occur, would be my responsibility entirely. Jasmine was six pounds and eight ounces of blamelessness. This would be mine to make or break. Parenting would require that I inhabit the space between me and another human being, with skills I had not yet even dreamed of.

There was a get-ready phase in which I just felt the pain of inadequacy as a parent and a husband. Initially, I could not figure out how this could be. I felt as though I had prepared to be a good parent my whole life. In this phase, the carefully designed life I had lead since getting sober competed with the messy, chaotic, sleepless life of my family. On weekends, I wanted to practice yoga poses for a couple of hours in the morning and take a nap in the afternoon. My wife wanted a break from her 18-hour days, a little of my attention and for us to tend to countless errands. It was hectic and tiresome and had no end in sight. My professional life was not getting easier and my body was not getting younger. My saving grace was that I had anticipated the unanticipated.

I had chosen to be a full-time yoga teacher years before, knowing that consistency in practice does not happen often, and when it does, special care has been taken. I chose teaching yoga because I knew it would keep spiritual practice alive and relevant in my life. At the end of my proverbial rope, I acted like a yogi and went on retreat. Intense meditation practice was exactly what I needed.

Ramana Maharishi was asked, “What causes human suffering?” His answer was, “The habits of the mind.” With the cultivation of inner space through meditation, I was able to see how my life had outgrown the habits of my mind.

Meditation has a unique role in the unraveling of human suffering. Most of the time, we are so caught up in our suffering that the cause of it remains entirely obscure. We think our suffering is caused by everything and anything, except the workings of our own mind. Humanity has a genius for getting it wrong. A few days of silence and we begin to see the pattern our thinking weaves over reality. This pattern inhabits the space between us and everything and everybody else. This pattern drifts about within us, obscuring our very relationship to ourselves.

As I began to see my thinking as a habitual reaction rather than the truth of the way things were or the truth of the way I am, I began to be free to make new choices. Noah Levine, the meditation teacher, taught me to “Reflect on my mind rather than to react from it.” What a freedom! Einstein called the habit-bound mind a “sort of prison.” My experience of the effect of meditation has been a new sort of freedom: the freedom to choose to be the person I wish to be, unencumbered by the person I have been.

Photo credit: daz smith

What We Heal in Ourselves, We Heal in the World

Over the last few weeks I have had the privilege to participate in two remarkable conferences. The first was a military conference whose aim was to find innovative ways to address the array of challenges nine years of warfare has posed to the community it serves. The organizers were expecting 200 military medical professionals to attend and over 400 showed up. It was my particular honor to present on the day devoted to the exploration of how asana (yoga poses) and meditation can be integrated into the services the military is providing its recovering men and women and their families. The second conference was hosted by Esalen, that remarkable institution in Big Sur, California. The focus of the conference was to provide a place for people in recovery from addiction to explore the practices of yoga and meditation.

I hope the simple fact of the existence of these conferences raises your spirits; it did mine. Each of these events captured the beauty of the human spirit so profoundly that being there far overshadowed presenting. My role as a yoga teacher was a humble honor like being asked to participate in someone’s wedding. And each in its own way was a wedding. It was the beginning of something new.

What struck me about both of the conferences was the human capacity to learn. In each case communities had been built to handle the fallout from the most extreme human behavior. It takes no imagination at all to understand the darkness the military medical community must somehow turn into light day after day. The same is also true for the communities that serve those suffering from addiction. It would be completely understandable if these two communities were set in their ways. The sheer tragedy and trauma both communities bear witness to is literally unfathomable. And trauma tends to make us hypervigilant and distrustful. Despite this, over the last few weeks I have witnessed a capacity to grow and change within communities under extreme duress.

The actual experiences of attending both conferences were delightful. They were times spent with people filled with purpose and joy. The light in the eyes of these two very different communities was the same. It was the light of a life dedicated to the service of others. To be a part of these communities, if only for a few days, would have been enough. Being in the presence of people overcoming life’s greatest challenges is enough to fill this heart. But what really landed was the willingness to learn.

As a teacher I have had to confront the fact that learning something new goes against the grain because humans identify with their ideas. They don’t just have ideas, they think they are their ideas. And to learn something new is to die a little. Something we once identified with must die in order to experience the birth of something new. This is not easy. Many times we would rather cling to our old ideas. And so it takes strength and courage to learn something new.

These two communities demonstrate what makes us strong, what gives us courage, and what gives life to the living. It is the desire to lighten another’s burden. Each community is infused with a greatness of heart that allows it to overcome resistance to change and continue to be relevant to the populations they serve. The essence of these communities is the affirmation that we are one; our lives are connected to those around us; what we heal in the world, we heal in ourselves; and what we heal in ourselves, we heal in the world.

Photo Credit: Liz Grace

Navigating Middle Age with Yoga

At some point in the last few years I stopped being a young person and became a 40-something. I experience this as middle age, but to say this nowadays sounds defeatist and impolite. So I keep my new place in the world largely to myself. This dutiful silence does not change the truth I now embody. The proof of it is everywhere. My children literally cannot conceive of how old I am. The president of the United States is only a year or two older than I am, and all of the premier pro athletes in all of the sports I care about were born after I graduated from high school.

In addition to causing me to pause bewilderedly at the oddness of it all during conversations with bright-eyed youngsters who do not remember the Vietnam War, my age shows up in places like my knees, my waistline and even the color of my beard. I have hit a wall in time in which I cannot seem to make my body look young. It just won’t. And it seems to have new concerns. I took up surfing this year and have had a great time. Surfing is literally the most fun I have ever had in any sport, and I have found myself being careful. CAREFUL. What is that all about? My body is telling me to be careful. I can surf or practice yoga or mountain bike, but now I have to take care of my body while doing so. I just have never had to worry about my body before. It was there for me, not the other way around. Now if I want to sustain my relationship to my body I have to take care of it.

And that’s not all. As I get older my place in the lives of those around me is changing. I am a parent, I am the husband of a woman who has given me the last 15 years of her life, I am a teacher to many adult learners, I am a friend and I belong to a small town school district. What I say and what I do matters more than at any other point in my life. I am now living with the awareness that every choice that I make is what I will have made of my life.

At times this awareness feels oppressive. When’s recess? When is the responsibility I feel towards those around me lifted from my shoulders? I spend time longing for the few carefree days I had at the end of my twenties after I stopped drinking and before I started trying to do anything besides not drink. I also spend a fair amount of time manning up to the burden of my responsibilities sustaining myself with the illusion I call “going on vacation” despite the fact that my vacations now mean a rented minivan filled with extended family and the smell of vomit — which is to say my mind wanders vainly to the past and to the future for some relief from the present. And then the cavalry shows up.

What comes to my rescue day after day is the practice of yoga. In my case, practicing it is not enough. For it to stick, I have to teach it. And teach it I do. I teach it, and teach it and teach it. What I teach comes down to this: The suffering in our lives is for the most part caused by how we habitually react to life. It’s not life that has to change for us to be happy, it is us. The only time I can change is now, and the only person I can change is me. This places a premium on present-moment awareness and compassion for the human predicament. Yoga cultivates present moment awareness and compassion so that personal growth is not only possible it is sustainable.

And this is where getting older gets better. There are no responsibilities without the people that go along with them. To have a responsibility is to be in a relationship with both awareness and intention. Now that is an opportunity. My experience of getting older has been similar to the process of mapping a new territory. Slowly the uncharted spaces get filled in. As I have gotten older, more and more of my life has been filled up with relationships, relationships that are defined by responsibility. Life itself has filled my days with unimpeachable reasons to meet the moment with awareness and intention. The practice of yoga has made that possible. I claim no greater virtue than the desire to love well and to do no harm; life has done the rest.

Photo Credit: J. Hexner