Colleen Leonardi

Yoga for the Creative Class: See Your Beauty

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My yoga teacher keeps saying this after class each week at the end of savasana: "May you see your beauty so you can see the beauty in others." Each time she says it I feel beautiful. And I see how I'm more likely to see beauty in others. It's a flash insight, gone once I walk home for dinner, but it's an insight I give birth to with the help of my yoga teacher nonetheless. 

A few weeks ago I finished Thomas Moore's Care of the Soul. I was drawn to many things in the book, but the chapter on narcissism drew me in in a particular way. I started reading it thinking - I'm not narcissistic but I'm curious about the quality and how it works in others. Moore talked about one particular cycle of narcissism, a sort of inverse narcissistic attitude where one is never satisfied with ones work, where your creative efforts never please you and even when people congratulate you or see something in your work that inspires them you're always shirking their compliment saying something like, Yeah, but I never manage to get... and I'm not successful because...

Sound familiar? 

It did to me. I put the book down and realized I'm a bit of a narcissist in this way. Whoops. Crap. Never wanted to or intended to be that way but geez, there it is.

Sometimes when I make something or achieve something I can never be satisfied, never quite see my beauty in the work and in my effort. It's true in yoga class as well when I can't do a bigger, better pose and have to sit to listen to what I can do. These patterns can make me self-involved in a destructive way.

I realized that these strains in me are not self-generated. I wasn't born with this sense of deluded dissatisfaction. It's a part of an artistic culture (and also society) to walk around self-deprecating yourself. When I was in arts school it was embedded in the training in order to make me a better, more competitive, hard-edged dancer. It was the path to perfectionism and by golly, I was going to take it to be the best. 

But I'll never be the best if I can't see my beauty. And I want to see my beauty so I can see it in others. 

And I want you to see your beauty. I want you to come round to the qualities in you that are singing right now. Sure, there is shadow stuff. But beyond the shadow is the place where my yoga teacher and others are praying, chanting for you to see your beauty. 

Watch those qualities in you that sing. How do they engage with the world? How have they changed your life or someone you love? What do they give rise to in small and big ways? Where in your own creative work is the shadow and where is the beauty? Where in your yoga practice is the shadow and the beauty? 

Because seeing your beauty might also require that you see your shadows. To know one thing you must know the other. But know that in seeing the shadows you'll be that much closer to seeing the beauty. 

Seeing is a quick process. Your eyes won't get stuck for long. They'll move on. Like seeing a bird in flight or your husband's smile, things move and your seeing moves with them. So don't worry about having to work or prepare to see your beauty. Just open your vision a bit to finding it wherever it lands and watch for a moment. And then move on with your day.

Venture into yourself and see. And as you see your beauty - here and there and look, over there! - you start to build the muscle for seeing beauty in general. And this is a good muscle to build, one that I'm building as I write and work each day. I hope you'll join me. 

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Yoga for the Creative Class: Do Your Yoga

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Do your yoga, which is another way of saying do your thing. Never had this become so clear to me, the connections between being your creative, searching self and doing yoga, than in a dharma talk with yoga teacher Doug Keller at Yoga on High last weekend. 

I love dharma talks. And Doug gives really good talks. He actually talks for two hours and cites all sorts of sources and has a thesis and touches on philosophy while still keeping it light and engaging with anecdotes and stories. He started with the history of Hatha yoga and its transformations over time, but then he said something like, "When you join your focus to a discipline that is yoga," and I was hooked. 

He told the story of a yoga teacher he knows who told his students that sometimes yoga for him is taking a walk. That's his yoga practice for the day. The teacher's students were flabbergasted. That's not yoga. That's just taking a walk! How could something so simple as taking a walk be a true yoga practice? 

Well, I'm with the yoga teacher. Sometimes I take walks, a breathing, walking meditation, and that's my yoga for the day. In this way yoga becomes whatever works for you, whatever discipline you focus your mind to for a period of time, as Doug said, whether it be washing dishes, gardening, helping your grandmother walk down the stairs, playing with your grandchild in the living room. That's your yoga. 

Where does creativity come into this? Well, what I realized for me personally is that my studies in yoga are what have allowed me to do the creative work I do. I edit and write for a food magazine, make dances, teach yoga and choreography, keep a blog - all of this is my yoga. And I'm able to do all of this because I practice yoga and all it contains. 

Doug spoke to this idea so eloquently over and over again. He talked about how your work in this lifetime is to live your dharma and how "your own dharma is your sacrifice" to the world, your personal offering to humanity. He talked about how the yogis of old were rebels in society. They realized that "in order to write your own destiny you have to step outside of the box." (Writing your own destiny and stepping outside of the box is what creative people do, again and again.)  

And he parsed out the layers of the personal transformation that can take place when you begin writing your own destiny:

\ Layer one: Affirmation where you confirm, "This is who I am."

/ Layer two: Purification where a "cleaning away of the ideas that keep one from having that experience" of affirmation of self takes place. "As you peel back the layers," he said, "there's that divine spark... that moment of grace."

\ Layer three: The breakthrough where you open to your true nature and heart.

/ Layer four: You move that true nature and heart out into the world to interact with others into "living a life of compassion because it's the truth." It's your truth. 

These layers can unfold on both the micro and macro level. A yoga class can mirror these steps, or a life can mirror these steps. Either way you must commit yourself to cracking the shell of ego and ideas of who you think you are and what you think you want in this lifetime to open to the breakthrough - your true nature, your heart. 

"To be truly passionate is to be a yogi," Doug said.

Isn't it when we are the most creative, in the act of making something we love for ourselves or someone else, that we are truly passionate? What are you most passionate about? And how can you join that passion to a discipline, a focus? How can you practice being passionate? 

Do your thing in this world. Come back to the mat. Come back to your life. Come back to yourself. Just come back, again and again.

Don't spend too much thought on who you think you are. Don't worry about the labels "artist" or "entrepreneur" or any other label you've acquired in this lifetime. They're like broken wings, those labels, keeping you from flying towards your truth. 

Practice passion. Come back. Practice more passion. Come back. Practice even more passion. Come back. Flow with your light, not against it. 

That is doing your yoga. And a big, bright namaste to Doug Keller for helping me see that on a Friday evening in May.  

(If you want to hear Doug's talks, hop on over to his website where you can find multiple audio CDs for purchase. His voice is so soothing and he is so smart. If it isn't clear by now, I highly recommend his teachings! Namaste.) 

Yoga for the Creative Class: Finding Freedom, Finding Gratitude

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I didn't go looking for the little yellow bird in the redbud tree. And yet I did. The day was full of commitments. It felt as if I had no time for any sort of creative pursuit. To not have a spare moment to write in my journal, do my yoga practice or cook a meal felt like a light punishment, one I was not willing to accept.

I took my camera in hand and decided that in the 20 minutes I had, while I waited for someone to get ready, I would take a walk. 20 minutes is not a long time to allow creative thinking to emerge and evolve into something, or at least that's what I thought when I decided to walk the two-block radius around my house. I'd seen a particularly wild patch of violets, dandelions and green clover rising up a few days ago and I wanted to note its progress and take some pictures of the violets.

When I approached the place where I remembered the violets to be a dart of yellow flew from the redbud tree to the ground below. It was the little yellow bird, which I now know to be a Yellow Warbler, Dendroica petechia. What beauty! What brightness! For a moment, it felt as if I'd never seen the color yellow before until I saw the little yellow bird. Some duet between the way the springtime sun met its feathers redefined the color to me. 

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I was glad to have my camera ready, to have the zooming lens I do and to be able to have a moment with the little yellow bird. I was grateful he stayed on to dazzle me. Even now as I look at him in the pictures his presence hangs on my heart like a little star. He's become some sort of muse to me, for when I'm musing at work he flies to mind and reminds me of something. 

What? Well, had I not decided to grant myself the freedom to take 20 minutes to walk and bring my camera I'd never have found the little yellow bird. What's more, had I not accepted with some sense of gratitude the 2-block radius and all its splendor, particularly the singular violet that I wanted so badly to better understand, better know its violets ways, than I would not have found the little yellow bird in the way I did, with a sense of quiet awe and careful attention. Had I been walking much faster I probably would have scared him into stillness and he never would have flown down to meet me. 

Do you have a creative desire or project that you want so badly to manifest and make into something but you find you don't have the time? Do you want the time but feel like you can't claim it, for whatever reason? I'm writing this to tell you there are little yellow birds to be found in 20 minutes, a long time for creative thinking and inspiration to emerge and evolve if you are present and go with a sense of openness. 

It's in accepting what we have that creativity emerges. I know, gratitude gets a lot of talk these days. It's another thing to practice when you have lost a job, your family can't hold onto their mortgage. Times are difficult and it's not easy to be grateful for difficulties. But the more I struggle in this present day the more I feel how gratitude releases me from the struggle into a certain freedom that I wouldn't have been able to find otherwise. And I don't go looking to be grateful for the difficulties all the time, either. I go looking to be grateful for beautiful, good, good things in my life. It's hard, but I go and I do it. 

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When I was a young girl growing into a young woman my grandmother taught me in the most relentless way to say Please and Thank You to everyone all the time. When we ordered out at a restaurant, when one of her friends gave me a gift (and then came the lesson on thank you cards), when someone opened the door for me that I did not know. The list goes on. 

Now I see why she did that. She knew how hard life was and she knew if I had a stream of Pleases and Thank Yous running through me it might not be so hard. For to say Yes in these ways is a creative act, gracing the moment or the person with a sense of appreciation and reception, acknowledging it has transformed something in you, turned a key to the door of your most beautiful self. Finding little yellow birds and violets all around to be thankful for allowed for greater creative freedom for me, even if I only had 20 minutes. 

So thank you, little yellow bird. And thank you, grandma, for whittling away at the groove in me that makes my river of gratitude flow.

Here's to you, dear reader, finding little yellow birds to hang on your heart like a star. Go!