“On a very practical level, a focused drishti is essential for stability in postures… If your gaze is steady and focused, your mind will be too, and you can effectively maintain your equanimity… When you feel stuck or frustrated, it’s a sign that you are caught in a clouded vision of observer….the path through enlightened vision is through drishti.”
A few months ago, Laurel suggested I read “Perfectly
Imperfect” by Baron Baptiste. She knew
how much I loved reading Rolf Gates’ books, so she thought this one would also
be good for me. Truth be told, I wasn’t
thrilled to do this, I’m not a big fan of Baptiste Yoga, but I decided to read
it anyway. And then I read it
again. I loved the book, there were so
many incredible sections to it, in some ways about yoga, but in many ways,
about life itself. I still go back and
reference it, it has been so meaningful for me.
One area that is yoga related that really struck me was the
chapter “Steady Your Gaze” that talked about your drishti. Your drishti becomes your focal point, where
you steady your gaze to help you balance in a posture or in a transition from
one posture to the next. As I too often
do, I tend to become obsessed with something, and I became obsessed with
finding my drishti at the beginning of every class, and as I flow through class
I “mind the gap” between one posture to the next by steadying my gaze. I have found that if I’m really focused on
being present in yoga, I find my drishti naturally, and easily, and I can keep
the distractions to a minimum.
In the past couple weeks, I haven’t been able to find my
drishti. I said the one day at the
beginning of class to Laurel, “I’m trying to find my drishti”. Her response was, “You keep looking too far
out, you need to have your drishti right in front of you, it’s not supposed to
be so far away.” I got frustrated with
her, and said, “It’s my drishti, not yours!”
And while this could all be as simple as that, I tend to
believe that many aspects of our life have a metaphorical meaning. My spidey senses were telling me that there was
something much deeper going on, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I had lost my drishti, and I needed to figure
out how to find it again.
As the year ended at work, I sent an e-mail to our managers
and supervisors, reviewing the year, reviewing all that had happened, the
difficulties, and ultimately the successes we had had. I laid out the various goals we have for
2022, and as I noted, they are pretty daunting.
I believe we can achieve them, but I noted, most likely, along the way,
we will have setbacks, and we will have to figure out how to overcome
them. Little did I know how quickly that
would all happen….
When everything went to shit in the first week of the year,
I thought to myself, well, that happened sooner than I imagined, but I thought,
we can overcome this. Over the past few
years, I’ve grown in my ability to not allow work issues like this beat me
down, and I figured I had these ones handled too, even though they were pretty
significant.
Last week I went to Boulder to visit our facility there. Each day, I had early morning meetings with
our parent company in Germany, so I was getting up somewhere between 3 and 4 am
every day. On Thursday, I had back to
back to back to back meetings starting at 6 am, so I set out a plan to
accomplish everything I needed to that day.
As I’ve started to do over the last few years, I wanted to
start the day with my physical and mental health. I’ve developed a good morning routine to take
care of me each day. I wake up, and I
read and I plank. When I’m home, I walk
with Laurel, and when I’m on the road, I usually run on the treadmill. I’ve come to finally realize that I need to
take care of myself before I can take care of anyone, or anything, else.
On Thursday, I set the plan to get up at 4:30, go to the
treadmill, go down and get coffee, come back and call Laurel, read, do my
planking and then shower before the 6 am call.
In between the first and second call, I would go to the office and take
the rest of the calls.
The first thing that went wrong was when I went down to get my coffee, I forgot my room key in the room, so I had to get a new one made. The next thing that went wrong was I forgot my power cord for my computer in my hotel room, and had to borrow one before I lost power. And the final, and most embarrassing, was that I realized about two hours into my day that I had never zippered my pants in the morning.
If those three things didn’t tell me that I had a problem,
my readings that morning were pretty prophetic.
I’ve recently started reading “The Yamas and Niyamas” and the section that
day was about Creating Balance. As the
one section notes:
“Like the body, the mind and soul
need time to digest and assimilate. Like
the body, the mind and soul need time to rest.
We create this rest by allowing space that we can breathe in. Not more clutter, but more space, space to
reflect, space to journal, space for closure, space for imagination, and space to
feel the calling of the life force within us.”
And then from Rolf Gates:
“How do you know you are
confronting a classic ‘hindrance’ on your spiritual path? Just ask yourself: am I losing my sense of
balance, my sense of priorities, and my sense of what’s really important?”
What probably struck me the most though, was a little
comment Laurel made in the margin in “The Yamas and Niyamas”. It said “just space”. I had confused doing stuff for myself with
creating time and space for myself. While
I was still doing my morning routine to take care of myself, really, it was
just creating more stress for me, because I wasn’t really doing it, I was going
through the motions. I was reading,
running or walking, and planking so I could check the box to say I took care of
myself that day.
I’ve found, in my life at least, human nature tends to kick
in and leads us back to what we are comfortable with in times of stress. As I noted, I had grown in my ability to
balance my well-being, my family with work demands. I’m still not anywhere near perfect, but I’ve
grown and gotten better. But once the
stress levels hit too high a point, I reverted back to my true nature.
I never realized how much the shitstorm of the beginning of
the year impacted me. My mode of operation always in the past had
been when the stress levels get high, I use brute force to deal with
everything. I take on everything, and I
work my ass off to make it happen. I had
reverted back again. I was back in beast
mode, take on everything, do everything, check the boxes, get it done, work
until you drop.
And it worked so well in the past….
Yes, I had lost my drishti, and I’ve lost my balance. I couldn’t find my focus. And maybe, yet again, Laurel was right, I had
set my drishti much too far in the distance.
I wasn’t patiently dealing with life one day, one moment at a time, I
was miles down the road and missing all of the important details along the way. Like fully dressing in the morning…
“I excite myself with my incompetencies”
Yogiraj Achala
The good news is this is simply a part of the journey. I spent the vast majority of my adult life
believing that working myself into exhaustion was the way to “success”, whatever
the measure of success really is. It’s
only been a few years now since I’ve figured out I really missed a lot along
the way, and there are much better ways to be successful and the definition for
success can be pretty broad. Luckily, it
didn’t take me too long these last few weeks to figure out I was out of balance,
and I needed to reset.
Am I being too hard on myself? Well of course, that’s what I’m best at. But I do accept that I’m simply
disappointingly human. I can recover,
adapt, adjust, and I will find my drishti and balance again.
Editor’s Note: The next blog post will continue on this journey, and yes, it will be fun.
