Finding My Drishti

 “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.