Category Archives: Yoga

The Pleasures and Perils of Competitive Spirit: Doing all the Right Things for all the Wrong Reasons

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Competition is negative when we wish to defeat others, to bring them down in order to lift ourselves up. ~ Dalai Lama

For as long as I remember, I’ve been troubled by competition.  Even as a small child, I felt bad when someone lost, because I believed that it made him/her feel bad.  I also felt guilt for winning.  Yet, even while I have and do experience these conflicted feelings, I did grow up in a culture that places a high priority on competition, individuality, and winning.  And ultimately, at the bottom of things, I am a competitive person.  This has exhibited itself in a variety of ways in  my life, to both my benefit and my detriment.

In one example of the benefit of the competitive spirit, I always wanted to get the best grades in any class that I took.  This drove me to work hard and I excelled because of that.  I don’t know if I would have gotten my PhD without that drive.  In an example of the drawbacks of competitive spirit, 20 years later, I still give myself grief over the fact that my first labor and delivery didn’t go the way I wanted – I didn’t do it perfectly.  And, I won’t even get into the relationship between competition, body image, and e.d.

While there are many things that could be discussed regarding this, this is a yoga/veganism blog.  So, today I consider how the competitive spirit impacts these things for me, and I believe for others, in both positive and negative ways.

I’m a vegan.  I’m working on being a raw foodist.  Being competitive, I want to be the *best* at both of these things.  For me, this has meant an increased commitment to researching options for vegan items, both food and non food, and figuring out ways to adapt my life that I think are ultimately good for me and for others.  But, it also means that I sometimes get cranky when other people say they are vegans or vegetarians but (from my standards) “really” aren’t (i.e. “I’m a vegetarian; I only eat fish and chicken”).  And there are times when I can be a little superior about my diet.  I know that I’m not alone here.  My first foray into raw foodism included reading several books and visiting online forums regarding a raw food diet.  What I saw was a little appalling.  While some good information and support was provided, in many venues there seemed to be more fighting over whose version of raw foodism was the best version, who had the best guru, and whose plan was the most healthy.  Hell, people even fight over who picked the best juicer (and then we get into the juicer or blender debate… don’t get me started).

In yoga, my competitive nature almost prevented me from starting in the first place (“I won’t be really good at it, so why try?”) and, as I noted in my last blog, it still sometimes causes me to steal opportunities from myself because I don’t want to fail and be the loser.  I also find that there are times when I pay too much attention to where I am, relative to other students in the class, instead of just being in the pose and with the breath.  Again, I have seen evidence that others also experience this, when I’ve gotten into the middle of arguments about what type of yoga practice is best, whether props should or shouldn’t be used, etc.  It’s sort of ironic, really.  But, while I generally think that competition should not be a part of yoga, it also pushes me to play my edges, keep improving, not let my practice stagnate at one level.

What’s the moral of the story?  I really think that competition is probably not needed or particularly appropriate in yoga or in raw foodism.  But, sometimes it can be the driving force to get you to do what is right behaviorally, even if it isn’t for the best of reasons.  Then again, I could be wrong… but I doubt it,  because you know that my blog is better than yours ; )

Stealing from Yourself

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During class this morning, Erik, the instructor, focused our attention on the yama of Asteya.  Asteya is the principle of non-stealing.  Now, there are obvious implications to this form of self-restraint.  We should not steal others’ belongings; we should not steal others’ ideas; we should not take more than we need.  But, my thoughts went to the less obvious forms of stealing that we engage in and should avoid.  We should not steal attention or admiration due to jealousy.  We should not steal the self-esteem of others by belittling or degrading them.  We should not steal the good name of others through libel or slander.  And, we should not steal from ourselves.

What do we steal from ourselves?  Well, I know that, in my case, sometimes I steal from myself the opportunity to change or grow.  W.E.B. Du Bois is quoted as saying:

The most important thing to remember is this: To be ready at any moment to give up what you are for what you might become.

But, do most of us do this?  I suspect we do not.  When we are very little, and the world of opportunity seems open before us, we allow ourselves to change and grow with every moment.  As we get older, we start to learn the expectations that others have of us (based on factors like gender, socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity, family role, etc.) and begin to let those expectations box us into a narrow range of possibility.

Over time, having learned to believe that our possibilities are limited, we begin to stop even trying anything new.  But, once we do this, we fall into a rut of being, where the self cannot grow.  Growth requires change, and risk taking. This stealing of opportunity and growth from ourselves may sometimes be about relatively minor things – we refuse to try new food, because we already “know” that we won’t like it – or major life choices – we don’t apply for a job that we desire, because we are certain that we will not be hired.  We may not acknowledge to ourselves why we aren’t taking these risks, and come up with excuses for remaining the same (“I don’t have time to take that art class,”  “yoga classes are too expensive,” “I don’t have enough patience to get a degree”), but often the underlying reason is a fear of failure, because we have learned to box ourselves and our opportunities in, and believe that we cannot succeed outside of that box.

After my yoga practice today, I reflected that I often steal from myself the opportunity to grow in my practice by assuming that I cannot succeed at a particular pose.  This was true of wheel pose when I first began yoga.  I wouldn’t even try it, because it seemed impossible.  Now, having prodded myself into taking the risk, I still feel remnants of the

Image from yoga-guru.info

“I can’t” belief every time the pose comes up in class.    More recently, I struggled with forcing myself to give inversions a try.  I practiced yoga for a few years before I ever tried to get into handstand or headstand, even with the help of a wall.  While I’m still working on those poses, and still feel some degree of fear about them, I also have learned that I love inversions.  If I had continued to steal that opportunity from myself, I never would have realized this.  Now I need to work on arm balance… I have a tendency to immediately go mentally to a “I’m not strong enough” place when arm balance poses appear in the practice.  But, I know that I have to give myself this opportunity or I’ll never know what may happen, so I’m working on pushing those negative and constraining thoughts away.

What opportunities do you steal from yourself by assuming you cannot succeed?

You are Awareness

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In my yoga class today, the wonderful Micki quoted from Ramana Maharishi to start and end the class.  I found the quote very moving and have been contemplating it (between some stressful work tasks) today.  So, I thought I would share…

You are awareness. Awareness is another name for you. Since you are awareness there is no need to attain or cultivate it. All that you have to do is to give up being aware of other things, that is of the not-Self. If one gives up being aware of them then pure awareness alone remains, and that is the Self. ~ From Be As You Are: The Teachings of  Ramana Maharishi

What does this quote mean?  Many people think that meditating or doing yoga is about attaining a state of awareness.   Awareness then becomes a goal, a state of being that we work and effort toward.  Ramana Maharishi tells us here that this is a faulty and limiting way of thinking about awareness.  Awareness is our natural state of being.  It is only because we have limited ourselves (through what we learn as we grow up) that we do not experience this awareness.  If we can let go of these limits, awareness is there.  We don’t have to “do” something to reach it; we have to stop “doing” something.

So, what is it that we need to let go of?  I think, and this seems correspondent with the teachings of R.M., that what we need to let go of is our tendency to evaluate/categorize/separate/individualize.  When we are tiny babies, we experience the self only in the sense of being the self.  As we grow and learn the expectations of the culture, we start to assign labels to the self.  We go beyond the “I am” to the “I am a woman,”  “I am smart,”  “I am fat,” and so on.  In doing this, we also create the false dichotomy between self and other, “I am not you.”  Now, here is where it gets fun.

One of my favorite communication theorists is Gregory Bateson.  Bateson (and others) make the argument that, in Westernized thought, we tend toward dichotomy in our understandings.  This means we think in terms of opposition (as a nice example, consider how few words we have for the states between too opposites – if it is not dark nor light, it is?  – if one is not tall nor short, one is?  – if one is not fat nor thin, one is? – if the food is not great nor horrible, it is?).  We do this in our understanding of self as well.  What is not self is other.  What is other is not self.  And, we tend to think of the skin as the boundary line for self and other (anything in is me… anything out is not).  Small children, before they learn this dichotomy, do not see the skin as the boundary of self.  A toddler is not disturbed at the notion of drooling into his cup and then drinking it, but an adult would be (you can think of all the other examples of this…. I won’t disgust you by writing them here).  This bifurcation of self and other causes us to see our own experiences as “my successes,” “my failures,” “my problems,” rather than understanding the fully systemic nature of being.

Ok, I’m going to depart from Ramana Maharishi here (because there is a lot to be said about his ideas – much of which I only loosely grasp – and I’m too “pragmatic” to be able to fully embrace the theoretical idea that reality and suffering only exist in the mind and that the only reality is the self… when I start to go there, I want to curl up in a ball in the corner)  and talk about what all of this means to me, rather than in terms of his particular teaching.

  • I need to stop continually evaluating myself – I am.  I am.  I do not need to label myself as good or bad or smart or stupid or thin or fat.  I need to just be as I am.  This is particularly good news and a difficult task for me, because I am a constant self-critic.  Even after hearing this beautiful quote and thinking how right it was, I found myself thinking (during yoga) – “boy, I am a crappy yogi… I am never going to do Pincha Mayurasana, I should give up now.”  How nice, very yogic of me, huh?  Let go… Let go. I am not the body. I am not the body. I am. But, this doesn’t mean that I get to just selfishly ignore everyone else to be whatever I want, because of the next point.
  • I am other, other is me, there is no division.  This is a way of thinking and not a physical state, because clearly the things that happen to the physical bodies of each of us do not happen to all of us (though RM would say they do not happen to any of us, really, but our experience of them is what it is, so let’s just go with that for now).  But, if I stop thinking about myself as something separate from others, individual, distinct, it pushes me to more carefully and fully appreciate and consider the world community, and to realize that what is good for others is good for me (because it’s not “someone else’s problem”).  When people all over the U.S. have adequate healthcare, this is good for me as part of the universal community.  So, why would I not want that?  If I treat others with disrespect, I disrespect myself.  Why would I want to do that?  When I help others, I should not do so as a way of being proud of myself (“Look at me, I donated money and I built a house for someone in poverty.”).  I should do so in the understanding that I am the other, and the other is me, and I act to help the self, which is both of us.  It is not something to feel egotistical and proud about; it is just a responsible part of being the universal self.

Whew. There is certainly much more that can be said about this, and I haven’t even been able to fully explain what I’m thinking here, but it’s a nice start.  I am. You are.

LBA