Lean into the Sharp Points

Zen masters advise us to “lean into the sharp points” and to practice walking the “razor’s edge”. Ride the rollercoaster of life with your eyes wide open and your arms thrown up in the air, they say. Let go. Jump out of the nest. Surrender to the moment. Just be with “what is”, right?
Here’s the problem. It is our natural instinct is to run from pain. It's in our genetic code to avoid uncomfortable situations. We don’t want to feel uneasy. We spend our lives trying to escape from painful moments. We don’t want to walk the razor’s edge and we certainly don’t want to lean into any sharp points!

Over the past several years, I have experienced a universal truth that the divine works in paradox. What seems big is really small and what seems small is really big. What we want to do we shouldn’t do, and the places that scare us are exactly the places we need to go. “Even if every inch of our being wants to run in the opposite direction, we stay here,” writes Pema Chödrön “There is no other way to enter the sacred world… It’s all raw material for waking up. We can use everything that occurs to show us where we are asleep and how we can wake up completely, utterly, without reservations.”

The practice of Zen and the practice of yoga train us to stand in the center of our lives with our eyes wide opened. No matter what comes up, we learn to stay with “what is”. In order to live large we need to fully see, touch, smell and taste every morsel of fear, anger and disappointment. “When we protect ourselves so we won’t feel pain, that protection becomes like armor, like armor that imprisons the softness of the heart”, writes Chödrön. Overtime, the armor gets thick and heavy. We become separated from others and we close down. Leaning into the sharp points is simply about penetrating the armor that surrounds our heart. And in so doing, writes Chödrön, “the armor begins to fall apart and we find that we can breathe deeply and relax.

Once again, our yoga mats provide us with the perfect setting to practice this. Every down dog and every up dog is raw material for waking up. Every deep breath can help to dissolve the armor that surrounds our heart. Every time we lean into the sharp points we break down the barriers that separate us from the world. In this openness, we discover the awakened heart, or what the Buddhists call the bodhichitta,.

Over these next few weeks during your yoga practice, try to lean into the sharp points and you may just discover a pure, uncensored state of joy and connection. So throw your hands up in the air, keep your eyes wide open and get ready for the ride of your life.

Abandon All Hope

Over the past several years, I have immersed myself in Buddhist teachings. What an incredible journey inward it has been. There has been one teaching in particular, however, that I don’t think I fully understood… until now. That is to abandon hope.

In her book, When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chodron wrote:

If we’re willing to give up hope that insecurity and pain can be exterminated, then we can have the courage to relax with the groundlessness of our situation. This is the first step
on the path.

My western mind and my sort of type “A” personality has always twisted and turned around the notion of not hoping, not improving or not striving… until now.

I have had my leg cast on for over seven weeks. As I continue to practice the Stationary Sequence, my poses continue to be extremely modified and simple. There is not much that I can do to change that. I cannot heal my foot any faster and I cannot take off the cast. For the past few weeks, I have abandoned the hope that I would soon be able to balance on my left foot or take a deep Warrior 2. It’s not happening anytime soon. I have had to “relax with the groundlessness of my situation”. I have had to learn to let go. This has been a tremendous gift.

Chodron continues:

Hope and fear come from feeling that we lack something; they come from a sense of poverty. We can’t simply relax with ourselves. We hold on to hope, and hope robs us of the present moment.

In abandoning hope in my yoga practice, I have relaxed with my body, my left foot and my black cast. Since I wasn’t so busy fixing myself, I have allowed myself to hang out in the present moment and observe. Wow. I have really felt my poses perhaps for the first time in my life.

Maybe this is what my Buddhist teachers have been saying. At some point, we need to just let go of the need to push, tweak and fix ourselves. We need to let go of the hope that a teacher, an assist or a fancy pose will “improve” us. We should relax with ourselves now, with all of our issues and experience the poses of our lives. I am learning that at some point we need to abandon hope, let go of the control handles and cruise for a bit.

Perhaps I can learn to do this in my life “off the mat”. Perhaps I don’t always have to fix things, improve things or have things be perfect. Perhaps I can abandon the hope that something or someone out there will “fix” me. Perhaps then, I can start experiencing my life more fully.

Peace.