Letting go of the ground underneath

A few days ago I quit my office job. I’ve been practicing yoga regularly for the past couple of years, and I’ve started teaching yoga recently and now I decided to quit my job and dedicate myself to my practice. Everyone wished me good luck but at the same time they kept looking at me with worried eyes, and asking me questions about how I will earn a living doing this. “There’s no guarantee in this, and you never know what life will bring. There is no specific amount of paycheck at the end of the month, no set time to work, no specific office space to go to. Nothing is certain”. I could see how this uncertainty, and unknowing scared and worried many who love, and care for me. However, I wanted to tell them that one can never know anything, and that there is actually no guarantee in corporate life either. There’s just the illusion of it.

More than half a year ago some changes started happening at work. They let go of my boss and hired someone else as the Head of the Department. They let go of most of my colleagues, and then two of my managers quit. The office environment turned into something completely different than how it was when I accepted the job offer. The new environment didn’t suit me. I didn’t like my new assignments. My workload had exponentially increased due to the lack of resources, since there were only two associates left in the whole department (including myself) with no managers or directors. Did I choose any of those changes? No. Was I in charge of any of this happening? No. Was any of it under my control or happened due to my actions? No. It was all based on the decisions of the higher management of the company, and I had no say. Even though none of this was in my control, it was affecting me on a personal level. What did I have any control over? My behaviors, attitudes, emotions and actions.

You are not in charge of every single incidence happening in your life. Even if it seems as if you are, it is just an illusion; an illusion that lasts only until you experience a happening of life that wasn’t among your plans, such as losing your job, being fired (not due to poor performance but financial crisis or reorganization), or losing a loved one, or finding out that you have cancer. You feel like the ground has been swept under you all of a sudden, and you are just floating in air. You feel groundless. Only then, you realize how much is actually not in your control.

At those times, we usually want to hold on to something. Get the ground under our feet again, and feel in charge again. Because otherwise we feel very much out of control, and we feel lost. We feel as if we’re thrown here and there by life, and we fear it. However, instead of trying to find something to hold onto, or put a ground under our feet again, we can take a minute, and realize that it was all an illusion in the first place. That there was never a ground under our feet, and that we were never in control.

You never know what life will introduce to you every single day. You make assumptions and based on those, you make plans. Making plans is not such a bad idea, because we assume that we have a future. However, it is better not to hold onto those plans so tightly, because then you’ll feel miserable when the events of the day prevent you from realizing your future plans, which happens often than we anticipate. At the end of the day, you may need to roll with what happens in life in the present, today.

Everyday we wake up, and we roll with the day. What we do with what we face each and every          day is our choice, but what we come to face everyday may not be. We don’t have control over every single thing that happens in life. We only control and choose our actions, and attitudes towards those occasions.

I don’t know what’s waiting for me in the future. However, I am realizing that I actually never knew. I just thought if I made plans for the future, I’d know what future holds for me. Not knowing what future holds scares us, and that’s why we keep making plans, and we think that by making plans we have some control over the future. We think we know what we want to do, where we want to go, and we work for it, and push ourselves to make those plans come true. However, we just deceive ourselves by thinking that we know what future holds, and what future will bring. Unfortunately, that way of “knowing” is just an illusion.

We make those plans based on the present. We assume that with what today holds, we can plan our tomorrow. We think that if we continue what we are doing today, that it will lead to a specific point or place. It may, but also it may not. Our actions are only one of the factors that will play a part in those plans coming to life or not. Regardless, we rely on those plans, believing that if we do everything we can, we can make things happen.

Now, all I know is that I don’t know what future holds. I will take a step, and see how life unfolds in front of me. Life keeps unfolding under our feet everyday. Don’t try to focus on the delusional footsteps you have created for yourself by making plans, and miss noticing the life itself unfolding in front of your eyes.

Surrender… Accepting that you are not in control; breaking that illusion of having a solid ground under your feet; quitting the struggle to hold on to something; accepting everyday as a new day and accepting what that day brings to you; having plans to follow through, but acknowledging the fact that your day may always turn out differently; being aware that nothing is certain and nothing is set in stone… Not by knowing, but actually by feeling this within, and not struggling to pull a ground under your feet again will free you. It feels like you are sliding over the rocks and obstacles. Obstacles don’t seem like obstacles anymore. Each one of them is just an experience. Once you feel that groundlessness without the fear, you feel free.

Attachment

            Yesterday I woke up with an excruciating knee pain. I couldn’t bend my knee, I couldn’t put any weight on my leg, I was hardly able to walk, I couldn’t climb up the stairs. I was in so much pain that even when I was just standing still, it hurt. My eyes got watery. I tried to push through the pain and went to the office, but I realized there’s no way I could sit there with that pain. I was so upset and frustrated with myself and with my body. The doctor at the office building took me to a hospital. I got a shot to ease the pain or relieve the muscles. I was sent home to rest for two days.

            During this time, many thoughts came to my mind, running one after the other, and I went through an emotional roller coaster. The first thing that came to my mind was that I wasn’t going to be able to practice yoga. I didn’t know for how long, but just realizing I wasn’t going to be able to practice asana hit me hard. It hit me so hard, that I couldn’t control myself and started crying. I was feeling devastated. What if I could never practice asana, what then? Then I realized how devastated I was feeling, and that got my attention. Why was I so devastated? My knee pain was not a life changing experience. I was in a lot of pain, and yes it did look like it is going to take a while for it to heal and get better, but it was going to get better. So, what hit me so hard that I felt so beaten up? That’s when I realized how much I was attached to my yoga practice…

            I had come to define myself through yoga. A practitioner of asana and Yoga. People define themselves in many ways: a banker, a doctor, a wife, a husband, an athlete, beautiful, handsome, strong, rich, poor, etc. Many people define themselves with what they do, or what they have in their lives. What happens when you lose the things that you defined yourself with? Let’s say your company was downsizing and you were let go, what if you get old and you don’t have your good looks anymore, what if you loose all your money because the goverment takes it all from you, then what? Who are you then? If you have defined yourself through what you do or what you have, then when you can’t do those things or have those things anymore you lose a big part of the definition you had made up for yourself. Without that part, who are you?

             I realized today that I define myself as a yoga lover, and a practitioner. It’s a big part of who I am. I live by it, I talk about it, I really made it a big part of my life and who I am. I define myself through it. I see myself that way, and since there are not that many people interested in yoga and its teachings in my social circle, people now know me that way too. They come to talk to me about it, ask  questions, want advice. So, today, when I woke and I wasn’t even able to bend my knee without feeling an excruciating  pain, it got me thinking “if I can’t practice yoga, then who am I?”

            I realized that when I was trying to practice non-attachment, I was actually still practicing attachment, just not to the things I used to… It’s as if an addict gives up one addiction, and picks up another one. Just because practicing yoga is healthier on the body and mind, doesn’t mean that it can’t become an addiction. If I feel devastated that I can’t practice yoga for a few weeks, than by definition, it has become an addiction.

            When there is addiction, there is a fear of losing. Fear of losing my health, fear of not being able to practice, fear of not getting better. Fear of not being able to regain my self-concept, the way it used to be. The ground is pulled under you all of a sudden, and I wanted to get it underneath my feet again, to feel secure, like it was the day before… But that’s where I was wrong. As if the day before the ground was still underneath my feet….

When things are fine, we buy into the illusion that we are in control, and life is going the way we want it, and as long as we stay in control we can assure to make things keep going well for us. And then one morning, you wake up with a pain that you don’t even know where it comes from, the way I did today. And you realize that you actually never had that ground underneath you. You never had the control. You always live in uncertainty but it is easier to believe that we stand on a secure ground. Otherwise living knowing that all is uncertain and impermanent and changing constantly is tiring, and gets us to rush to hold on to something. Why is there fear of uncertainty? Why is there constant desire to control things, when we know that we can’t? My department in our firm had 17 people only 14 months ago, and now there is only 2 associates (including myself) working in my department. The rest was either let go by the company or they quit. My grandmother died only a few weeks ago, after a very successful surgery. I woke up with a knee pain that prevented me from even walking or bending my knee without even presenting any signs recently. We are not in control; we just like to think that we are, because then we feel safe somehow…

Today I realized that I had to let go. I had to accept my pain. I had to accept that my grandmother passed away and there is nothing I can do. I had to accept that having fear of the unknown future would not help me. I had to accept that I defined myself through yoga. By attaching myself to my yoga practice, I was disguising my “attachment” need from myself. This incident brought it up to daylight. I had to accept that this incident today hurt me a lot, more emotionally than physically actually, because it brought me face to face with the inner workings of my mind. It wasn’t pleasant to see that side of me, and how much I wasn’t practicing spirituality. However, maybe it was about time that I face it, and acknowledge it.

Once you come to accept yourself as who you are or your situation the way it is, you feel calm and at peace. Maybe not for long, but definitely long enough for you to have a taste of it.

            “What we habitually regard as obstacles are not really our enemies, but rather our friends. What we call obstacles are really the way the world and our entire experience teach us where we’re stuck.” (When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chodron).