What is it that you ultimately want in life?

Nobel blogged awhile ago about about his idea of an ideal life, which is to be a yoga bum, ie. get paid big bucks to practice yoga every day and to blog about his yoga practice. Now, Nobel, do you want some third party to pay you to live life however you want, or do you wish you were born into a rich family so you can be a yoga bum, or do you wish you married someone with a massive bank account, or win the lottery, or obtain a large sum of money by some other means (eg. find a bag on the street containing $10 million)? I kind of assumed that you were wishing for the first option, ie. somehow someone out there would consider your yoga practice as beneficial to the world and pay you money for doing it. Hmm.. I don't know about $100,000/year, but for countries with universal health care, I think governments should encourage people to choose a healthy living, which would minimize the overall cost of medical care budget, by providing incentives such as bonus cash for those who do eat healthily and do yoga (and other forms of exercises in general). Yah I know, wishful thinking (but not completely impossible).

I joked that my dream life is to play dress up every day, party lots, and occasionally do charity work, you know, the Princess Di, Duchess Katherine, or Paris Hilton life (Paris actually does get paid to show up at various clubs to party). Nobel pointed out that my concept of a "bum" life is "interesting". I got a bit confused there, and then I looked up the definition of a bum: person who avoids work and sponges on others; loafer;idler. Hmm, I guess I am too chicken to be a bum forever, because I'm paranoid that the world would progress and I would fall behind. I've been an obsessive compulsive knowledge / skills acquisition freak all of my life. I'll read almost anything that's in print. Every time I try a recreational activity I dream about becoming extremely proficient at it. I practice yoga as if the teacher's going to beat me with a cane if I don't try my hardest. I feel like if I don't push myself to my limits, I'm not living up to my life's full potential, and somebody will be disappointed in me.

So now you know my greedy desire for wanting to acquire all possible skills that humans can do and all knowledge of human beings (like in the movie trilogy "The Matrix" where I can upload all of Google's databases and all encyclopedias ever written into my head). Does this make me weird? I think the typical dreams of people are to become billionaires, own multiple servants and a giant mansion, luxury cars, fancy yacht, and travel the world on their personal cruise ship while being served with gourmet French cuisine, or something along that line. My biggest desire is to acquire skills? I gotta step back and do some self-psychoanalysis here.. does this suggest that I'm deeply insecure about my intellectual worth?

I guess we're generally seeking to live a long and healthy life, feel safe and secure, satisfy our senses, feel a sense of control (of ourselves and of the environment around us), connect with other beings (but at the same we like to be better than other people, Darwin's theory at work on Earth), and of course to satisfy our endless miscellaneous arbitrary desires. An ideal life would be to become better than everyone else, have everybody adore and admire you, and have all your endless desires satisfied one after another. Sorry I'm not very poetic about it. I started writing a list of things I wanted: travel, a sexy, smart,  understanding and loving life partner, charity projects I want to do, pet science projects I want to do, and then I realized the list could go on and on forever, because of my insatiable greediness :P  The bottom line is, being a bum forever is not an ideal life for me. Maybe my dream life is to become Superwoman, but without having the responsibility to solve every problem in the world. I would only work on the problems I'm interested in. Hmm.. so a selfish Superwoman then :D

I think my ideal life is to have endless possibilities in what I can do, and to have the freedom to choose to do a subset of them, with minimal troubles and obstacles. I think I've got the first 2 parts down, which makes me a very lucky person. The skill acquisition part I guess is my attempt to be able to deal with these troubles and obstacles. I should also add that I am working towards feeling comfortable about occasionally being a bum. The practice of yoga aids with achieving equanimity, which means I better keep doing it then!

What about you? What is your dream life? Can you narrow it down to a few specific things that you absolutely must have, or are you like me, greedily wanting to keep all possibilities open but have the freedom to choose what you want? Or would you want to be a bum (in a fancy palace of course)? :)

You can re-program any dog

I went on a camping trip with friends this past weekend and got to hang out with their dog, who is the most anxious dog I've ever met. There was one time when I had to watch the dog while my friends went away for about an hour. This dog wailed, whimpered and shivered pretty much the entire time they were gone, no matter how much I tried to pet, rub and reassure the dog that its owners would come back soon. When we went hiking, whenever it sensed a presence of another species of its kind it would go berserk, eyes bulging, barking aggressively, ready to launch at that other dog. We would have to take turns holding our dog down, either holding a death grip on its leash or sometimes even grabbing its snout until the other dog walked out of sight.

This dog came from an animal shelter and my friends suspect that it had a rough time on the streets with other dogs. That's probably why it had abandonment issues and had to act all tough to fend itself against other dogs. My friends take a patient but firm approach raising the dog. Sometimes they get frustrated but they never give up. So far they have gone through a few dog trainers and are starting group lessons for problem dogs soon.  Apparently the dog's behavior has already improved since they first brought the dog home, but they still have a long way to go. One of the trainer told them (paraphrasing a bit here), "With the right techniques and patience, you can re-program any dog."

Source: thedogtrainingsecret.com 

I felt like I got smacked in the head by an imaginary hand when I heard this. I realized this is what I've been doing to myself the past few years - all these physical exercises that altered my body shape, yoga asanas and pranyama to alter body alignment, tendon/ligament/fascia arrangement, breathing patterns, etc; meditation to alter brain waves/thinking patterns, eating differently to alter the physical body, madly reading yoga/Buddhism philosophies to change the way of my thinking, all of these efforts have been attempts to reprogram myself because I disliked the old me. I hated the way I was brought up, since the upbringing shaped me into someone I despise despite my endless struggles not to obey what my parents ask of me. I have years and years of post-secondary and post-graduate education under my belt, yet I feel I possess about as much self-confidence as a confused teenager. The book knowledge I acquired helped me pass courses and get through exams, but they taught me nothing about real life, society, and humanity. I don't know why I seem to be stuck in an endless personal development vortex, never satisfied about my physical, mental, social, intellectual or professional self. This whole yoga thing seems to be my latest effort in re-programming my negative behavior/thinking patterns and my neurosis. I was kind of hoping it would just help me breath more smoothly, calm my nervous system, and then I could get on with life. But apparently yoga will not fix my broken life. Luckily my life itself is not actually broken; I'm just confused about why I hold so much angst and how I got myself into the position I am in today. Michael Stone describes it much more elegantly than I ever could: I've been living my life with my eyes closed, thinking doing well in school is all I am responsible for, while ignoring how the education system, my parents, relatives, old friends, and my culture have been shaping my way of thinking and acting in a direction that's different from what I intended. With tension in my body released through yoga, and meditation practices getting past my habitual thinking loops, older memories that I have suppressed or thought I have forgotten would occasionally surface at random times of the day, causing emotional turbulence. Sometimes I would burst into tears for no reason in the middle of the day, while going to get groceries or on my way to school.

When my friend's dog is around its owners and other human beings, with no other dogs around, it acts completely happy and relaxed like a normal dog. You cannot tell there is anything psychologically wrong with it. When another dog shows up, it's as if the dog is programmed to go into anxious attack mode. Kind of like how some innocent phrase that my mother says in a casual conversation will send me into an automatic defensive/anger mode, with me scratching my head afterwards at why this is the case. Or how I automatically cower at the presence an unfriendly, rude, and demanding person when I ought to be able to defend myself now as an educated, informed adult.  Looking at the dog, I see that deep-seeded behavioral patterns are deeply ingrained and will take a lot of patience and persistence to be re-programmed. I must have faith that with my eyes now open, my efforts in re-programming myself will help me get past the emotional wounds that I didn't even know I've had.

Time to get un-stuck

Happy Super Moon day!

Step 1: Clear brain of negative, turbulent and anxiety-causing thoughts with sound therapy.
Step 2: Get myself a massage appointment to build some happiness and positivity.

These were both unplanned but they happened in that order anyway. An acquaintance of mine is studying to be a massage therapist so I volunteered myself to be practiced on for a discounted price. Super tough favor, I know.  What an awesome friend I am to agree to this arduous endeavor :-) I was expecting nothing more sophisticated than a superficial swedish massage, maybe even some awkward pressure applications that would be more uncomfortable than relaxing. Turned out only a few month into his studies, this friend's skills have already surpassed some of the licensed massage therapists I've previously visited. Score for me! And I want my money back from these licensed professionals, because some of them really didn't put what they learned at massage school into use at my sessions!

After my surprisingly awesome massage session (in which some of my muscles/fascia might have been rearranged/realigned.. so sore right now), I went out and bought myself a meditation cushion set, in preparation for the Vipassana retreat that I plan to do right after I graduate (an odd grad gift to myself, I know). I was planning to get a zafu at this well-known all-things-spiritual store, but on the way there I stumbled upon this other nice little Thai shop where the price of a gorgeous zafu + zabuton set was the same as just a plain zafu at the bigger store. However, I didn't leave empty-handed at the all-things-spiritual-mother-ship store either. I came across a book on-sale called "Stuck - Why We Can't (or Won't) Move on" by Anneli Rufus and bought it immediately.

Here's an excerpt from the book:

"In lands of plenty, in the lap of luxury, in the fast lane, we're stuck doing -- over and over -- things we do not want to do. Stuck in places we do not want to be. Stuck with people we do not want to see. Stuck with stuff. Stuck without enough. What irony. You and I will almost surely never be sold into slavery. Those days are gone. We will not become indentured servants, will not be shanghaied and dragged off to sea, locked in the hold, hands chained to oars. We were not betrothed at age ten. That's stuck.

In all of history, no population anywhere has ever been so free as we.

And yet -- somehow we all feel stuck."

That's what I was feeling half way through grad school, then I came across yoga, was happily distracted for awhile, until I got obsessive wanting to absorb all these new information that I was completely unaware existed before: theories behind each yoga asana, anatomy and psychological effects, the Bhagavad gita, Yoga sutras of Patanjali, etc etc.  When I accidentally came across Tibetan Buddhism, that just opened a whole new can of worms. Given I don't plan to become the next John Friend or Sadie Nardini (I'm not even 1/10 as charming as these yoga super stars), nor do I have the faintest hope of ever coming close to becoming nearly as awesome as Pema Chodron, so why the hell am I trying to perfect my knowledge of all these spiritual teachings again?

I'm trying to get un-stuck. That's why I dove into all this yoga and meditation stuff. Except I got into my old pattern of hungrily trying to absorb all information for the pure sake of acquiring information. I've completely forgotten my original intention and purpose.

The same thing with the Japan nuclear power plant. I got obsessive with information gathering, reading up on experts' explanations of how a nuclear plant works, closing following the progress of the Fukushima workers, as well as all the conflicting analyses of the situation provided by various so-called experts from various countries, patting myself on the back for understanding the basics of nuclear reactor diagram, forgetting that I will neither be able to build a nuclear reactor nor come up with a solution to solve the problem at hand even if I fully internalize every single detail of the over-simplified layman's diagrams provided by the media.

I got stuck and I lost the point of why I do the things I do.

I think that accidentally getting a brain-cleansing and subsequently gaining happiness + positivity with awesome body work provided me the foundation to thinking clearly again. Some fresh ideas came into mind and I've re-gained some motivations.

1. As much I absolutely enjoy reading all of your blogs (they have been the highlights of my day for the past few months), I'm going to have to refrain from reading yoga blogs for awhile. Initial goal = 1 week. Let's not get overly ambitious here :)

2. I'm going to stop blogging for 1 week too and see if I can get more done at school, as well as freeing up more time to do some home cleaning.

There's no way I'm going to cut back on yoga.  3 times a week seems pretty minimally acceptable for maintaining my basic fitness, my prana, and my meditative mind. I will however attempt to eliminate reading any yoga-related writings or watching any yoga-related videos for a week. I will also give my pretty meditation cushion a try.

If this little experiment works out, I will report the details of my success here. If I can make it for longer than a week, more power to me. If it completely fails (ie. I accidentally find myself 1 hour into reading Elephant Journal articles Monday morning), um, I may or may not admit my failure here. We'll see :D

Adios for now and see you all very soon. Best of luck with your yoga practices and your pursuits for liberation/enlightenment :) Please keep on blogging though (I will enjoy going through your posts again when I succeed in getting un-stuck), unless you also feel that taking a break from blogging will benefit you somehow.

Holding grudges for how we were raised, and how yoga and Buddhism can help

(Sorry about the length of this post.  I just can't keep seem to keep my posts succinct.)

Arturo mentioned about an article by Amy Chua, a Yale Law professor called Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior, which fueled a lot of online and media controversy.  Some readers felt bad about their own parenting skills after reading it; others call Chua's parenting style child abuse or human rights violation. Some Chinese readers got defensive and pointed out that not all Chinese parents raise their kids in this extreme way, while other non-Asians stood up and declared their parents were just as tough as what Chua had described.

Below is a partial list of things that Chua said she did not allow her daughters to do (the whole list looks pretty tongue-in-cheek to me, but generated outrage and shock for many people nevertheless):

- be in a school play
- complain about not being in a school play
- play any instrument other than the piano or violin
- not play the piano or violin

For me, one group of responders of the article really caught my attention: people like Lac Su, who have achieved success on the surface but have below-average self-esteem and struggle to find peace within themselves. Now my mother is nowhere nearly as strict as Ms. Chua. In fact, I'm one of the few rare Asians of my age who has never taken a single piano lesson (gasp!).

A major problem with strict parents (I'm going to use "strict" instead of Asian) is that they grant conventional subjects more importance than they deserve (eg. piano, math, science).  Another problem is that some conservative parents are prone to deciding everything for their kids, from which school to attend to what extracurricular activities to pursue, whether the kids like them or not. I was surprised (and jealous) when I heard my Canadian friend lets her 5 year old daughter pick her own outfit sometimes, however funny the result may turn out; I wasn't allowed to pick my own outfits until I was quite old, like 14 or something like that.  Kids raised this way get so used to not being allowed to decide what's best for themselves that they don't feel comfortable about making their own major decisions when they are finally allowed this freedom at adulthood. Because they haven't had much practice, at this point they don't really trust themselves any more, so some people try to make decision based on what they think their parents would like for them.  I think this is where the permanent sense of inadequacy and self-doubt comes from. I thought my sense of self-doubt and despair came from the fact that I didn't listen to my mom and pick the right major that would easily land me a professional job (like medicine or accounting, for example). A fancy job where the salary matched my education would make me feel much better about myself right? From reading Lac Su's article and some of the comments for Chua's article, I am learning that even with a successful career and a happy marriage, it's still possible to posses low self-esteem and to feel inadequacy with life.

Now some people don't mind having their parents planning their lives out for them.  In fact they're quite thankful while living out the career and perhaps with the companion that their parents had chosen for them. Others put up with it but have already secretly planned out their own life agendas in their heads; the minute they're given the freedom to make their own decisions they proceed happily with their lives according to their own plans. Perhaps it's the ones who disagree with their parents making decisions for them all the time but never did anything more than having verbal arguments with parents who end up holding the most grudges. I'm talking about myself here.

I'm not going to criticize Chua's way of raising children because I think it works for some kids.  For other kids it may cause permanent emotional scars.  The "soft" western way of raising children may bring up some brilliantly creative geniuses, some not-so-highly achieved but happy beings appreciative of themselves + satisfied with their lives, and some under-achievers who wished their parents had given them a push or honest constructive criticisms instead of endless non-constructive praises + euphemisms.

I'm going to try to tie it all to yoga again.  As I mentioned previously my mother is a pretty anxious person and whatever she's worried about would make me concerned as well, in addition to a long list of issues I already worry about. When I finally started choosing my own paths, whenever things didn't work out, I would really doubt myself, like I'm not fit enough to make decisions for myself. Is my life sucking because I didn't follow what my mother suggested? What should I have done instead? If I could turn back time, how should I do things differently? I tried so hard to not waste time; why do I still feel like I'm so behind? Why is everyone else so content with their lives and I'm so miserable for no reason?

So I constantly feel crappy about myself and like to lash out at my family for no reason. My mother even asked me to go see a shrink, but I don't see how it would help, because I can't think of any instances when I was abused during childhood; I'm not suffering from financial hardship or relationship abuses; my grad school experience is comparatively better than so many other grad students I know; nothing's visibly wrong with my life. I'm just a whiny brat who can't stand any sort of setbacks or deviations from dream outcomes in life and should learn to count her blessings. Somehow knowing that still doesn't make me feel better.

... until I encountered yoga and Buddhism philosophies, which RECOGNIZE THE MIND LIKES TO TORMENT ITSELF!   Is this the best-kept secret of the modern world or what? Why don't public schools teach about samskaras and problems with the ego liking to tell frivolous stories? I guess the teaching of "Jesus loves you no matter what" works to heal some people, but just doesn't do it for me.  What helps me is learning that whatever happened in the past, no matter how major or how minor, has formed grooves in my mind (samskaras) and in my body as well. I have a locked-in way of thinking in a certain pattern (feeling sorry for myself, being too critical, etc). There are these yoga and breathing techniques that can help me diminish or "burn off" these grooves, and allow me to learn a new pattern of positive thinking. These emotional imprints are real, not imagined, because sometimes doing certain yoga asanas will cause me to burst into tears for no reason (pretty common in yoga classes actually).  How do I heal? Get in touch with myself by paying attention to body sensations, sensation of the breath. Eventually get back in touch with my intuition, which knows what's the truth, what I want and what I'm meant to do (this has been suppressed for a long time). Recognize thoughts as these things that come and go and not as "me".  Oh and go to yoga classes where yoga teachers shower students with loving kindness and attention.

I'm having trouble wrapping this up again.  Basically, I don't think there's a single "right" way of bringing up a child. All the people criticizing Amy Chua - I doubt that they're perfect parents themselves.  Will Chua's children grow up with emotional issues? Who knows. They might be happier if they were given more freedom to think for themselves and make choices on their own. I think the academic and  financial successes or even happiness of offsprings are not the only indicators of the superiority of parenting skills.   I think exposing more people to the philosophies of Buddhism will help save the world more than making your kids get A's at school, but that's just me.

Reality check

Finally saw the movie Inception on an airplane after many of my friends specifically told me that I would be the type of person who would love this film.  It's a movie about a corporate espionage thief Dominic Cobb (played by Leonardo Dicaprio), whose work consists of secretly extracting valuable commercial information from the unconscious mind of his targets while they are asleep and dreaming.

It's hard to discuss this movie because the plot is rather complicated. To call the movie mind-blowing is rather an understatement.  If you have not yet seen this movie, I highly recommended watching it to get your mind opened and stretched farther than it's been stretched in a very long time (brain yoga anyone?).  If you have seen this film, I'd love to hear what are your thoughts about it.  In this blog post, what I wanted to talk about is the concept of dream state vs. reality.

In the movie, Cobb and his team construct these multi-layered dreams and plant them into people's heads while they're sleeping.  It's like kidnapping someone and putting them into an artificial environment, except it all happens in the subject's head.  If you try to rationalize the details, the whole movie doesn't really make sense because the entire team hops around between different team members' dreams.  You just have to put your inner critic on hold and pretend this is possible to enjoy the movie. Since these people spend so much time in people's dreams, each member needs a way to check that if he/she's awake or still dreaming (a totem). What Cobb uses is a top that keeps on spinning in dream worlds and only stops spinning if he's back to reality.

Have you thought you've woken up, but you're actually still dreaming?  I've never had any dreams as elaborate as the ones shown in the movie (my mind is nowhere as vividly creative as the writer/director Christopher Nolan's).  However, I have had the experience of going about in my fantasy dreamland, heard my alarm clock ringing, opening my eyes to see my bedroom and my alarm clock, hitting the snooze/off button, and feeling confused/frustrated that it just kept ringing no matter how many times I tried to press the button or shake the clock.  It seemed so real,  until I woke up again, in shock, but finally managing to shut off the alarm for real. So my reality-check device is my alarm clock.  The good old pinching technique also works quite well. Is it just me, or has anyone else ever tried to pinch themselves  learned that they were still dreaming because it didn't hurt?

So what does this have to do with yoga? Well, for me, to differentiate between sleeping dreaming state and waking state is not too hard; the above mentioned techniques can do the trick.  It's difficult for me to differentiate between zoning out while being awake and being truly in touch with reality.  I spend an abnormal amount of time in my own head, daydreaming with my eyes open.  I'm not always aware of this.  Sometimes hours pass, or a whole day goes by before I realize I've just been sitting in front of the computer and absolute no work got done.

Yoga forces me to snap out of my zoning-out state. Most yoga standing poses place us in positions that require us to exert our conscious efforts in order to maintain still, whether it's a triangle pose, a forward fold, a warrior pose, or even the simple mountain pose.  If I zone out in any of the poses, I literally fall over. Isn't it crazy that I can drive from my home to my school in auto-pilot mode (not recommended, but it happens to me all the time), but not while doing yoga?  I love snowboarding for the same reason.  Even though gravity does most of the work dragging me down a mountain on a waxed board, if my mind drifts off and leave reality, the board could catch an edge at any time and throw me on the ground.

What is it about reality that makes me want to avoid it throughout the day?  It's the obligations, the mundane, the absurdity, the tiresomeness, the impurity, the ugliness, the unfairness, the injustice, the unpredictability, and my profound feeling of utter helplessness.

What is it about reality that I want to get in touch with? The beauty, the vivid colors and images I can't seem to reproduce in my mind, the creativity of others, the unexpected acts of kindness, the warm connections shared among living beings (however briefly each one lasts), the mind-blowing ideas/creations/naturally occurring events I can't possibly dream up with my own puny brain, the intense sensations, the rush of adrenaline, the pleasant surprises, the positive side of unpredictability.

Again, trying to say a whole bunch of ideas in one post.  I am amazed how Christopher Nolan managed to pull that off in 2 hours.  He literally put forth like a million concepts into one movie, and among all the complexity it's still magically coherent, understandable, and immensely enjoyable. I'll keep working on it but until I get there one day, my apologies for not always making sense :)