Realizations

I was lucky that I got to have in-depth chats with a lot of people while in India, both the locals and European travellers. Coming back to cold cold Scandinavia, chats with colleagues are kept at a superficial level; making new friends is again difficult. I am grateful to have a roommate to socialize with, but at the exact same time, I wish I were living alone so I could get more quiet alone time with more personal freedom (my roommate doesn't quite get the concept that sharing accommodation with another person doesn't mean that we have to entertain/socialize with each other all the time).

I am still quite lost in terms of what to do about my future. I no longer have ambitious plans for achieving a great career. I just want a job that pays the bills and will let me living relatively comfortably. Compared to my Indian friends in South India, I am definitely fortunate in that I can travel the way I do, and my standard of living is very high. On the other hand, I am kind of jealous of their tight connections with their families and friends, then I remember that these are guys I had been interacting with. The women in India are tied to their housework and children and do not have nearly as much freedom as men. But still, I wish I had a tighter network of friends/community support. I guess that's why I went back - the servers on the beach were always happy to have a chat with the customer who's also a lone traveler.

On this trip I learned that I enjoy being over-dramatic about nothing; I act like a spoiled brat sometimes. I like excitements in life, but I act like the most boring person you'll ever meet at a party. I crave a lot of attention but I don't like to work to get it. I have a tendency to want to please other people at the expense of displeasing myself, and then I complain about being forced to do something I don't want to do. One of my Indian friends got really sick of this and told me, "If you want to do it, go do it. If you don't want to do it, don't go." It's so simple that this advice appears to tell nothing. Yet this sounded like a major wake up call for me. I realized that I cannot distinguish the times when life circumstances do not allow me to make this kind of call, versus situations where I do indeed have the freedom to follow my own desires. I have long chosen to give up my rights in choosing what I want in so many life situations in order to try to please other people, but end up failing regardless. In other words, I am often unhappy because I make myself unhappy. I let other people bully me and I get angry about it. It was a tough lesson for me to learn, but a lesson that made the expensive plane ticket worth its cost.

Where's my yoga practice headed?

Ever since I've returned from India, I feel like I haven't been the same. Surprisingly, I feel a lot less attached to my asana practice these days. When I first started practicing asanas, the physical attributes really got to me. I sweated buckets within a few minutes into a yoga practice. My muscles couldn't stop shaking as I held a pose; bunched up fascia were being opened up. I felt dizzy from breathing too deeply or getting up too quickly from a standing forward fold. I have been steadily gaining strength, balance, flexibility. I begin to be able to observe my thoughts, reactions, and feelings from a third party point of view. It has been an amazing journey. But while in India, the asanas just didn't seem to do it for me any more. I still tried my best, and all these shaky sweaty dizzy stuff still happened to me; I got stronger, and learned lots, but the practice felt more like a chore than something fun and magical.

When I think about the most precious moments I had in India, I think about the times when I sat quietly with an Indian friend. This happened with a few different people actually. I wasn't really thinking about anything, nor was I bored. I was just short on words that was all. Back home this would be considered as rude / socially inappropriate. Usually people would get bored or anxious; they would immediately pick up the conversation by nervously crack a joke or change topic. One or two people would even take out his or her smart phone and do something with it to divert anxious attention. Then I would feel bad about myself, the fact that I made the other party uncomfortable. I have such terrible social skills. I'm a horrible person. I felt incredibly grateful and relieved that these Indians were allowing me to just be, whether I was happy or moody, confident or confused. It's possible that these were merely a cultural misunderstanding (they didn't know what to say either so they just smiled quietly instead). Nevertheless, these moments of comfortable, shared silence felt like what yoga and meditation techniques aim to achieve. For so many years, I have been feeling like I lack the skill of picking up the last sentence of another person's line and say something funny back to keep the conversation going non-stop. I've been subconsciously feeling deeply inadequate for way too long.

People ask me what I do these days. Many assume I would be doing a ton of yoga (asanas) - come on, this girl went all the way to India to take an entire month of yoga class. She must be signing up for yoga teacher training any time now. I really did go to India with the intention to get stronger and improve my asanas. I had no idea I'd end up in this weird mental place where I don't feel like going to yoga classes, or do my own Ashtanga practice, or apply for a job, yet I'm not depressed either. I don't completely understand what's going on with my mind right now. I guess it's a shift from focusing on the physical to the mental aspects of yoga. Seems that my Chinese upbringing has tried to teach me how I should act/feel in each social situation and ignore/suppress the feelings/emotions that naturally arise in a human being. North American culture has emphasized the importance of staying positive and doing whatever we can to get rid of negative feelings right away (retail therapy, exercise, go to a spa, drink a beer, make a joke; just feel good and be happy!). Too many years of schooling has made my brain stuck in constant analytical mode.  Maybe it's time for me to let go of some of these culturally conditioned constraints and get back in touch with myself again. Maybe asanas are not as important right now, at this stage of my yoga journey.

Things to think through over the holidays

So I successfully defended my thesis, finished the revisions, submitted the final draft to the libraries. Yay me! People are totally curious (or sympathetic, because I don't have a job lined up): what are you going to do now?

Um.. learn some life skills that are actually practical to life(!), try to undo some brain damage caused by fitting my square brain into the spiral-shaped academia manhole, as well as hoping to heal the neural pathway stresses from constantly shoving massive amounts of useless information (the info are only useful if I keep working/studying in the same narrow field, which I'm not exactly sure if I'm going to do) into my brain. All these years of education have killed so much creativity, caused so much mental trauma, and took out my capacity to socialize like "normal" people, pay attention to every day life details (my home looks like it got burglarized multiple times, because I just haven't had time or calmness to reorganize everything). Practically every other thing that comes out of my mouth is either related to yoga or my area of research, because my brain does not have space to process stuff that normal people care about, like jokes, small talk, culture, movies, books, arts, technology gadgets, fashion, sports, entertainment, relationships, etc etc).

So, the plan is to watch a lot of cool movies, read a lot of books, learn about a bunch of topics that I have not had time to learn about but I think are of huge importance to know a little about them, and of course, do a lot of yoga. Oh yah, and go on a Vipassana retreat if I get the chance - clear the brain, hope some of the neural pathways will heal or at least take a break from being over-stressed. Below are a list of topics I am suddenly interested in blogging about, but then realized I know next to nothing about the issues:

- War against "evil": what the heck is evil? How can people be so sure that they themselves are the "good guys" while the others are the "bad guys"? Why do I feel like whoever tries to launch a war against evil are the most evil people themselves. Perhaps my definition of evil (hurting and killing innocent people) is off with other people's definition of evil (Those who try to hurt me or my kind of people are considered as evil; their life circumstances and childhood/cultural history does not matter at all, at least not to me).

- Religion: I'm not talking about those who were raised to follow a certain religion. I am talking about adults who voluntarily choose to follow or study a religion. What kind of people are drawn to Christianity? What kind of people are drawn to Buddhism? When I try to read the Bible, I don't know if it's the way it's written or what, the ideas are just words; they don't really speak to me. When I read Buddhism ideas, specifically Buddhism explained by some westerners (and not the Chinese version of the same material, strange eh?), the teachings seem to verbalize ideas I already strongly believe in. My cousin is the opposite. A girl I know was introduced to Christianity in her 30s, the teachings totally spoke to her. She now reads a passage of the Bible every night before bed and always find it insightful, comforting, inspirational, and/or educational. This came up while chatting with a friend. A preliminary response is that this girl is the type of person who feels unloved, who suddenly felt a need to know the purpose of life, who thinks it's important to obey authority, and to please other people. So believing in an all-loving God who has a set of rules for her to follow for the rest of her life which will lead her to heaven fits her personality/original set of personal beliefs. For me, I used to obey parents, teachers, and adults/authorities until their logic didn't make sense, until I realized nobody knows exactly what they are doing and the ones who know the least love to give strong orders/suggestions the most. I have also suppressed intuitions and tried so hard to be analytical all my life, thinking that I can reason my way through everything. That has worked up to a point and then failed for a significant aspect of my life.  I am very attracted by the Buddhist idea that looking within will help me find the answers I am looking for (I guess authority figures have lost my respect and trust). These ideas are specific to me and this girl though. A broader understanding is needed.

- Economics: our economy is very broken obviously, and politicians keep applying patches + quick fixes that work for a short period of time and then fail again. Gone are the days when you can hold 1 job from school graduation until retirement at 65 years old and then live comfortably on a pension until death. I've had the fortune of hearing honest talks by a good number of medical and (bio)chemical Nobel Laureates, successful professors as well as industry scientists who work in giant pharmaceutical companies. So, supposedly my training would lead me directly to one of these 2 paths - academia or industry. Their presentations as well as my past years of experience in grad school make me not want to jump at the first job opening available anywhere. If you talk to scientists who do research on drugs and vaccines, their intention is to come up with a new drug that will cure or alleviate suffering from diseases (this was my intention too when I decided to study biology as a major). When I talk to the average people or read the media, the public seems to think that the purpose of developing drugs is to make big money (evil big pharma). Some even go as far to say that pharmaceutical companies can actually cure diseases, but they purposely only sell drugs that temporarily suppress symptoms but keep you sick for a long time. I think this misunderstanding exists because people vastly underestimate the complexity of biology and over-estimate the abilities of scientists (these drugs are less than ideal because they are already the best effort that teams of brilliant researchers can come up with, not simply a money-making gimmick). Anyways, I need to teach myself a bit about economy and try to think things through.

- Dualism: again I know very little about this topic, but it's central to yoga I believe, and possibly the source of so many problems in the world.

As you can see, I've got a lot of reading to do. I feel like a bit of self-education will help me navigate through life better, rather than just conforming to current moulds of society: find a husband; have 2.3 kids; take up any job that's stable and pays the bills, who cares if you like the job or not; raise kids to 18 and your responsibility is done when kids make it to college;  constantly compare yourself with your peers regarding your salary amount, the size of your house, the niceness of your car, the maintenance level of your external beauty, the achievements of your kids, etc. Make sure your kids do what you want them to do, or else argue with them until they run away from home. Constantly worry about money. If you have extra cash, spend it on luxury items like yachts and jewellery, and then complain you don't have enough money. Make sure to find issues to worry about if finance isn't your biggest worry.

I don't think I can change the world, but I'd like to gain insight and perhaps modify a few biased beliefs that I was brought up with. I'd like to figure out some stuff that are society norms but are not necessarily the right way to do things. I'd also like to get an idea of how to navigate myself through this imperfect world and not turn into a permanently bitter person.

Why I can't seem to stop blogging (even though logically I should)

Logically, I'm really supposed to put this blog on hold and instead focus all my efforts on my thesis projects so I can graduate and move on with life. However, I find myself having this uncontrollable urge to dump all my miscellaneous, entangled, trivial thoughts from my brain into this blog. The irrational part of my mind (for a lack of a better label) seems to find this thoughts-sorting process more important than my thesis.

I didn't really have this problem before. I used to dread any sort of writing, even if it was a personal diary. My personal diary entries read like an unimaginative child writing  pieces of assignments to be handed in to the teacher. "Today I went to the zoo with my mommy and daddy. The giraffes were pretty. We took lots of pictures. I had a wonderful day." And I would get an A+ for entries like this (hmm.. I guess they weren't personal diaries at all but actual assignments). I blame my elementary school teachers for encouraging me to write in a non-expressive and uncreative way. Actually, I don't even blame them. I don't know how they can read through 60+ of these every week. Maybe the formulaic writings were easier to mark than the ones that tried to be different but failed in terms of sentence structures, diction and character correctness (I went through my elementary school education in Taiwan in Chinese only, no English).

In high school (I had moved to Canada by then), my worse subjects were English and Physical Education. By "worst" meant I got C+'s in the beginning when I hadn't fully grasped the language and then from grade 9 and onwards I got B's. I really disliked these two subjects because of the grades I received (this way of thinking was imposed by me not my mother). Obviously (to westerners at least) this is not a healthy way of deciding what you like or dislike, but I hadn't realize this until recently. In fact, I probably got B's because I wasn't expressive enough. I remember always having trouble meeting the minimal essay length, which was usually something like 500 words. I spent a lot of efforts trying to make each sentence as wordy as possible because I didn't have much to say. I'm really regretting that practice because now I have the opposite problem: I now tend to ramble on and on in all my writings and have trouble keep my sentences concise (as you may have noticed in my blog entries ;-) .

In college, I went into science because #1: I wanted to be a scientist ever since I was a little kid. I think I imagined a stereotypical "scientist" to be a combination of an astronaut + CSI guy + The Crocodile Hunter. That would be a pretty cool job, actually. #2: My favorite teacher in high school was my biology teacher, and he said microbiology had a great future outlook so that was what I chose to major, even though I hated my 1st and 2nd year biology courses. #3: There was no paper or essay writing for any of the classes in science! So I got my Bachelor's degree without needing to write a single essay, besides the few I had to write for a mandatory 1st year English class.

And then comes graduate school, where suddenly the entire process is all about writing: statement of purpose, scholarship applications, thesis proposals, progress reports, the thesis itself, research papers, poster abstracts, formal emails (I never needed to write any formal letters to people back in undergrad either). Considering the fact that the majority of my undergraduate education consisted of memorization and regurgitation on exams, and considering the fact that I can remember hardly any of the knowledge that are not useful for my current project (sometimes even the useful info have been forgotten), I'm seriously questioning the usefulness of my education up to this point.

Seeing that I've invested almost all my efforts on my education my entire life, and realizing that it has been mostly pointless, perhaps my subconscious decision-making center is making me sort out my thoughts out before I'm allowed to use my brain power to complete my degree (or maybe I just get easily distracted. Excuses excuses). My apologies to my blog reader that my entries are often long-winded and seems to go in too many different directions without a main point. I wrote them without really having my audience in mind (sorry), bur rather to sort out my personal confusions.

Does this have anything to do with yoga? Hell yah! I just know I always have a strong desire to blog after I've done a yoga class. This was never the case with any other activities. Because of all these "limbs" of yoga that I'm supposed to read up about and associations with Buddhism and meditation and bodily sensations and yoga history and so on, I find myself needing to sort out all the rush of information of this new realm of subject that I think are so important to life yet I knew nothing about before. This gets me to thinking about the purpose of life, and what have I done with mine so far, etc etc. Damn you Yoga for opening up a whole can of worms!!!!


(Just kidding. Yoga got me through my most depressed stage of grad school. Please don't get mad at me, Yoga. I hope my future practices of You will still be enjoyable.  Amen.)