The Wisdom in Blinking

Happy Labor Day weekend! It feels so good to be back teaching my full schedule. I am very blessed to love teaching so much after almost 20 years!

My daughter is a reminder of how long I have been teaching because she was 9 months old when I completed my first teacher training and began teaching. Last weekend I left that same daughter in North Carolina to begin her sophomore year at Wake Forest University. 

In my mind I thought it would be easier to leave her this year… it was certainly easier for her… but my heart had another plan. The feeling of loss and emptiness was strong, arguably even stronger this year as she moves further along on her own journey and away from mine. As with most things, this brought with it a range of emotions; a mixture of joy, gratitude and sadness.

The practice is to honor all of those emotions without getting too swept up; to hold them lightly. I definitely found myself working hard (at times unsuccessfully) to do just that. But that is why it is called “a practice”.  In processing all of that this week I remembered the passage The Wisdom In Blinking by Mark Nepo and it became my message for my classes this week. 

Here is an excerpt:

We blink a thousand times a day. A thousand times a day the world goes dark. A thousand times a day we wake. We can’t escape this opening and closing. It’s a reflex we can’t control. Even as you read this, your eyes, along with your heart and mind, are blinking– opening and closing repeatedly, no matter what you do. It is part of being human.

Yet so much depends on what we see as home– being open or closed. Do you see life as one stream of light interspersed with nights of dark, or as one stream of darkness interspersed with days of light? Though there will never be an answer, what we believe about the nature of life matters. 

Obviously there are times we feel one way and times we are certain it is the other. There are even times we know it is both. But how we allow for both– how much we make the light our home and how much we settle into the dark– determines the personal alchemy of our hope and despair, our optimism and pessimism, our belief and doubt. 

Perhaps the wisdom in blinking is that it keeps us in the middle, keeps us from drowning in the dark and from burning up in the light. Perhaps this is the reflex that lets us make sense of being human. 

Yoga also offers us a path to the middle; cultivating both strength and flexibility in the body helps us find balance. So whether it is off the mat or on, we get to chose the balance of light and dark. It is within our power and our practice to acknowledge the challenges, the sadness, the fear but not wallow in them and at the same time to acknowledge the joy and gratitude but not cling to them with such ferocity that the fear of losing them creates suffering.

Remember, if it were easy we wouldn’t need to practice but it is in the practice that we find peace. I wish you a week of powerful practice. I am practicing right along with you.