On falling into ditches

I am not a fan of exercise. At school I hated games – the P.E. teachers who made us run cross country in the freezing cold, and the hockey games where I was always one of the last to be chosen. This has led to a lifelong antipathy towards anything involving moving my body because it would be ‘good for me’.

Earlier in the year, Kaspa & I miraculously started doing yoga. We followed videos online and found ourselves spending half an hour on the mat most mornings. I started to notice changes in my body – more flexibility, a little more strength, and a feeling of spaciousness. There was less tension in my shoulders, and it was easier to walk up the hundred steps from the supermarket to the temple. I even began to feel like I might be enjoying it…

That was many months ago now, and my yoga mat has returned to the cupboard where we keep the cat food. It sits there, rolled up and unloved. Until this morning, when I managed to coax myself into doing fifteen minutes of gentle stretching.

This afternoon I did some weeding in the garden. I worked hard and was tempted to push myself into finishing a particular bed, but I managed to stop myself. I wanted to leave myself some energy to put the tools away, which I usually fail to do.

In ‘A Still Forest Pool’, Ajahn Chah tells this story:

“A Western monk at WatBa Pong became frustrated by the difficulties of practice and the detailed and seemingly arbitrary rules of conduct the monks had to follow. He began to criticize other monks for sloppy practice and to doubt the wisdom of Achaan Chah’s teaching. At one point, he went to Achaan Chah and complained, noting that even Achaan Chah himself was inconsistent and seemed often to contradict himself in an unenlightened way.

Achaan Chah just laughed and pointed out how much the monk was suffering by trying to judge others around him. Then he explained that his way of teaching is very simple: “It is as though I see people walking down a road I know well. To them the way may be unclear. I look up and see someone about to fall into a ditch on the right-hand side of the road, so I call out to him, ‘Go left, go left’ Similarly, if I see another person about to fall into a ditch on the left, I call out, ‘Go right, go right!’ That is the extent of my teaching. Whatever extreme you get caught in, whatever you get attached to, I say, ‘Let go of that too.’ Let go on the left, let go on the right. Come back to the center, and you will arrive at the true Dharma.”

With the yoga, I pushed myself (go right, go right!). With the gardening, I did the opposite of pushing (go left, go left!). In general, my tendency is towards pushing myself too hard, like a car that veers towards the right when you take your hand off the steering wheel. Easing up on myself is more of a challenge than pushing harder. We are all made up of these bundles of tendencies that need correcting in one direction or another. Good teachers don’t use a ‘one size fits all’ model. They can see these different tendencies in us, and encourage us back towards the middle by various means. When do you treat others in this way? Do you need to go further to the left or further to the right?

*

Yoga mat from Pexels.com with gratitude