Tag Archives: asmita

Letting Go of Me

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I’ve spent 45 years cultivating my “self.” I’ve developed pretty strong understandings of my characteristics and beliefs. I’ve established standards for my own behavior and defined what is and is not acceptable for me.

And yet, as a student/researcher of communication, I’ve long believed that the “self” is a socially created construct, which arises from our interactions with others. I’ve thought that standards of behavior, my own or someone else’s, are arbitrary and developed through culture.

More recently, as a yoga student, I’ve refined my notion that the attachment to the story of self (asmita) must be released in our process of becoming more connected with that which is universal. It makes sense to me that the emphasis on the me, the I, is counter-productive in cultivating union.

But… isn’t there always a but? But, it’s hard. It’s hard to let go of “me.” And I look around and see many other yogis having the very same problem. It’s hard not to attach to the stories you have built over time that explain the self. It’s hard not to feel and attach to a sense of personal accomplishment about what you can do (even in a yoga class, which has it’s own irony) or guilt/shame about what you cannot.

It all becomes more tricky, because there is an infinite regress of places where the “me” can pop up. Let’s say that you get comfortable with letting go of attachment to your sense of personal accomplishment regarding asana. Then the next level is to let go of the sense of accomplishment over having let go of the sense of accomplishment. Ouch. And it just goes on from there.

We also live in a world that will require you to create stories of you (what is a resume, after all), and will certainly create stories about you. That doesn’t mean you have to attach to the stories, but it does mean that you likely have to participate in them, and commit to enacting them, which makes it harder not to attach to them.

To some degree, the development of an understanding and set of beliefs about self is part of our humanity. Some scholars would say that the ability to abstractly understand and evaluate the self in relation to others and the world is what makes us human. Letting that go completely may not be possible, or desirable.

Maybe a more reasonable goal is to cultivate awareness of when the story of me is cropping up in a way that prevents us from seeing our unity with that beyond, keeps us from opening up to other possibilities, stands between us and our ability to truly experience the present, and blocks us from being able to understand and empathize with the reality that others are living.

Namaste,

L

Got Me? – Asmita in the Age of Accomplishment

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So, as I have mentioned, I spent the past few days at an academic conference in my field.  These conferences are always an odd experience for me.  I wouldn’t say that are bad, because I enjoy the things I learn, the time spent with friends and colleagues I don’t get to see much, and often (though not this time) exploring whatever city I’m in.  But, they are odd because they bring up a wash of not-so-pleasant self-evaluations every time.

Even though I don’t logically really expect or want a lot of attention, at conferences I always find myself feeling a little disappointed or ashamed that I have not accomplished more with my career.  It’s funny, because some people would probably say that I’ve done plenty.  Yet, in those moments, I feel like I should have researched harder, published more, made more of a name for myself, struggled more diligently to rise in the leadership of the organizations, etc.

It would be tempting to say that this is about career, but that is not true.  I get the same way about other things.  I have a favorite band that I adore.  In the past decade, I’ve seen many shows and even gotten to see several shows on one tour in the front few rows.  Eventually, I started to feel that I had to be close to the front.  And then, someone in the band acknowledged my presence and that became the new standard of a “good show.”  Over time, even that didn’t feel like enough.  What did I really want?  To meet the band?  To have my picture taken with them?  I don’t know.  Again, logic tells me that I’m not going to suddenly be their very best friend, and I’m not even sure that I want to.  But that vague sense of needing to do/be more crept in and started to rob each concert experience of the joy in the moment.  I had to take a step back from my attendance at shows and following the band’s progress to shake myself out of it.

I don’t think I’m the only one that gets like this.  It can happen in work, in family life, or even in “leisure activities.”  It’s easy enough to lose track of the general benefits of yoga, running, swimming, playing music, and get overly involved in the winning or recognition.  I’ve seen it in others, and I’ve seen it in myself.  Certainly in blogging, the competitive and recognition driven “me” can rise to the surface extremely easily.

Thinking about how this manifests itself in my own behavior and the behavior of those around me makes me wonder… Do we, as a culture, encourage this focus on recognition by the way that we interact and raise children?  Does the giving of awards for everything from finger painting skill to being on the t-ball team to “most improved science student” create people who have trouble being satisfied with where they are but instead yearn for the 15 minutes (or 15 months?) of fame that we think we are due?

Perhaps the way to change this is to put our focus, from childhood on, onto the experience itself, rather than the external outcomes.  Maybe we can’t completely get away from the desire for external motivators, but at least we might be able to reduce the stifling of the intrinsic value of our actions, and of our being.

Meanwhile, I may never be the band’s best friend, the foremost scholar in my field, a yogi rockstar, or the biggest vegan/yoga blogger evah, but my life is pretty darn great and I’m going to try to keep myself in a headspace where I can remember that!

Namaste,

L

The Story of Me

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Image by The Hanner on Flickr

In yoga teacher training last night, we discussed a chapter of the Michael Stone book The Inner Tradition of Yoga.  The chapter dealt with klesas, or “poisons.”  The klesas are states of mind that we all experience, which keep us from reaching our natural state of happiness and enlightenment.  Different traditions identify different klesas, but the focus for our discussion was those identified in of Patañjali’s Yogasūtra.

 
These klesas are:

  • avidyā – ignorance of the way things really are
  • asmitā – egoism, the construction of a self around which we organize understandings of everything
  • rāga – attachment to things or to how we believe life should be
  • dveṣa – aversion to things/situations we see as bad or wrong
  • abhiniveśa – fear of death or of endings

The particular klesa we spent the most time on was asmitā.  I find this concept particularly interesting because it fits so well with the writings of many of the philosophers that are seen as foundational in my field of study.

We spend a lot of time constructing a story of the self.  We define ourselves using categories that, in and of themselves, come with stories: sex, age, relational status, job, and so on.  So, I might say that I’m female, in my 40s, a mother, a wife, a daughter, a dean, a professor, a yogi, and a vegan.  All of those labels imply a whole series of cultural stories, and my identification with the labels then makes those cultural stories part of my story of me.  In addition to the obvious labels or categories, we also create stories that describe our behaviors or characteristics, provide rationales/causes for them, predict the future, and explain the past.

To some degree, I think all of this is part of our natural humanness, as symbol using animals.  We are storytellers – it is what we do.  And that suggests to me that it isn’t a bad thing; it’s just a thing that is.  But, from a yogic perspective, it is important to see that these stories not only explain us, they also constrain us.  The veritable wealth of stories I have connected to my being not athletic could fill a large volume.  These stories not only provided a rationale for my reluctance to engage any new sport-like activities, but they also created a barrier that prevented me from doing so.  It was only by getting around that barrier a little that I found yoga.  How much sooner  might I have been able to do so if I didn’t have that story of self?  The story of me also focuses our attention on the division between self and other.  What is “not me” is other, and other is rendered less-than.  These false barriers we create between the energies of the universe, or between the “things” of the physical world, enable us to more easily ignore the needs and experiences of other beings and things, because they are “not me.”

Because we are storytellers, being able to completely drop the story of me is, at the very least, difficult and maybe even near impossible.  But, we can make steps toward understanding that the story is a story.  That the I is not separate from the You.  That the me is not the Self.  Through that knowledge, we can better investigate why it is we construct stories of the self, what needs they serve, and where it is that they separate us from the universal.

Namaste,

L