by Swami Vimalananda

“Can you hold the door of your tent wide to the firmament?” asks Lao Tzu in a poem.

Are we firm in ourselves? Or does it feel like we are holding onto a pole with our arms while our legs are dangling in the wind? It may even feel like our arms have lost their grip, and we are barely holding on by our fingertips, living in constant fear and pain as the hurricane winds rush by.

In contrast, what freedom and strength to be wide open to the wild winds of the world and still have a strong sense of wholeness and wellbeing.

How can we be strong with the wild winds, the uncertainties in our lives? Most of us try to control the externals, feeling that if we can control things according to our wishes, we will feel safe internally. I have often noticed that people who feel out of control seem to love to give advice. 

Trying to control people and things is a very tenuous position at best. It seems like the more we depend on outside stability, the more fear and pain we experience.

I feel there is also an added component, not only do we feel out of control but also if we were really known, we would be found unacceptable. 

I remember quite well when it occurred to me that I was unacceptable to people, mostly men, because of my unaccommodating nature. I have a strong personality, which is fundamentally rebellious. My knee jerk reaction to someone making a bold statement is, “Oh, why?” I also am an extrovert and love being with people and feel quite comfortable taking charge. I learned quite early this didn’t work, and found many men steering clear of me, along with some women too.

But compromising myself didn’t work well either. I knew I was an impostor. I was not really loved for who I truly was, nor was I accepted for my perceptions. I longed to be independent, yet I was still seeking acceptance and love. I didn’t see a way out.

I remember very clearly that every time I felt tired, when my defenses were down, a feeling of aloneness and isolation would descend upon me.

I said to Sri Gurudev thinking of my dilemma, “You know me better than I know myself,” and he nodded his head. He then told me to be the strongest person I could possibly be. It was the first time I received that message. I actually felt a warm feeling of strength flow through my veins. After all these years his words still mean so much to me.

I remember very clearly when I asked Sri Gurudev, “But why am I still so angry, even experiencing rage at times?” I felt that I was very capable of getting into physical altercations, thinking that my rage made me strong. This was occurring at the same time that my life was outwardly easeful.

He whispered in my ear, “You constantly betray your own self.” I felt that he stabbed me deeply with a barbed knife in my gut, twisted it, and added more injury as he pulled the knife out. 

I hated him for saying it. It took days before I was able to look at what he said and to see if it had merit. After looking at my past, I realized that I have betrayed myself many, many times. I am very humbled, and ashamed to this day when I look back on the many times and ways I betrayed myself.

I now see why he stabbed me so deeply. It is a constant reminder to never betray myself again.

The way out is to change our perspective. We are in control of our own thoughts.

We are not the victims of fate. Even though our external environment can be one of depravity, we can become warriors for our own selfhood. We are capable of living in a place where we can maintain and grow in our inner strength and open our tent doors wide to the firmaments. We can be stable, act with integrity and courage, and happily watch our crazy world go by. We can be loved for who we truly are. 

We can begin to do the daily work of changing our thoughts from the negative to the positive, from the selfish to the selfless. As Sri Gurudev said, “It is our first and foremost duty to analyze all our own motives and try to cultivate selfless thoughts.” It is the way out of pain and into the inner realm of peace, surrounded by love.

It is a commitment and a discipline.  It is not one insight, it is not one and done. The realization is the first step. As Pema Chodrin stated, “I have become very wary of breakthroughs.”  It is like every other discipline — slowly, change occurs with practice. Practice as Sri Gurudev stated, with “patience, devotion, and faith”.

It is a commitment to the dailiness of replacing the feelings of victimization and powerlessness to one of inner strength. It takes vigilance to analyze our thoughts, accept what it is that we feel and acknowledge the hurt. We then take the next step knowing the way to healing is through expressing positive and selfless thoughts to ourselves and others.  As Sri Gurudev stated, “Leaving others feeling better about themselves using the discipline of speech: Pleasant, truthful, and beneficial.”

As we begin to feel encouraged by the development of inner strength and love, we will continue on to the fullness of freedom.

“Come, come whoever you are, wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving. Come, this is not a caravan of despair. Come, even though you have broken your vows a thousand times, come, come again, come.”

—Rumi

Swami Vimalananda Ma, RYT500, is an Integral Yoga sannyasi – monk. She has been involved with Integral Yoga since 1971 and Director of the San Francisco Integral Yoga Institute from 1992-2011. She specializes in teaching yoga philosophy and spiritual counseling.

by Saeeda Hafiz

The day I understood that I was a spiritual being who had selected the body of an African American woman to have this experience in this life at this time, I was deeply empowered to participate in the healing process of my present lifetime trauma and my intergenerational trauma.

 This revelation started when I began practicing a holistic yogic lifestyle.

 It was January 1990. I was periodically adding whole-food dishes to my diet and ready to incorporate something called yoga to my routine. I had always wanted to try yoga in college. I didn’t really know what it was, but I was curious; it seemed peaceful.

The yoga class I signed up for started at 9:00 a.m. on a Sunday. The very first position was a resting pose called Savasana. I lay on my back, legs apart, breathing. We did leg lifts to warm up, followed by a series of standing poses. Quickly, I noticed that I was the only one who could not hold the yoga poses for the instructed length of time.

I stared at my crestfallen face in the studio mirror and watched myself struggle, lose my balance, and have to release a pose before everyone else.

I felt weak while everyone else seemed fine. I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed it earlier but looking around the room, I realized I was the only African-American student in class, and everyone was either double or triple my age. I was pretty sure I didn’t belong.

“Watch me first,” the instructor said, interrupting my daydream. She held both arms straight out in front of her, and began to lower, bending her knees. She looked like a human chair. “We will use the Chair Pose to transition into our next asana.” We all followed her lead, listening to our knees crack on the way down. With our arms out in front, balancing on our tippy toes, we all looked like a row of chairs. The ball of my foot and my toes started to hurt from the pressure. I was happy when she said, “Place your hands on the floor and extend your legs, one at a time, and sit L-shaped.” Again, we followed her lead. I felt my toes tingling.

“Inhale, lift your arms out to the side and then up. Next, exhale. Extend your arms toward your toes and hold your hands anywhere along your legs. Go to a point of a stretch, not strain. This is the Forward Bend pose.”

Wow. I was touching my toes. This stretch felt good. I felt good. Finally, a pose I could rest in. I wasn’t coughing or struggling. I kept on breathing and holding. For the first time since I was a kid, I was enjoying myself as my body and breath opened up. But, most of all, folding forward released something that allowed me to relax, and to surrender.

“You’ll be teaching this one day,” I heard a voice say. I lifted my head slightly and looked around. No one was speaking to me. In fact, no one was talking at all. Then I heard it again. “You’ll be teaching this one day, and get closer to your grandfather.” I stayed in the pose. My head was down and I didn’t dare move. My breathing was slow, but many thoughts raced across my mind. “Am I going crazy? Do I have schizophrenia? Mental illness might run in my family, too. What’s happening to me?”

Weeks later, I followed the instructions from the audible voice telling me, “… get closer to your grandfather.” It was a bit confusing because I had every reason to want to keep a casual distance from my grandfather.

My first step in developing a relationship with my grandfather was to visit him every few weeks, if not every weekend. During this time, I would catch myself thinking, what am I supposed to learn by getting closer to my grandfather? This is still the man who beat Grandma. Isn’t it? When visiting him, I couldn’t help but think back to the day he evicted us from our home due to a disagreement between him and my mother.

This was always on my mind when I visited Grandad, but it didn’t stop me from creating a new relationship with him.

His house was like a time capsule. We sat in his 10’ by 10’ living room and listened to the Pirates playing the Dodgers on his transistor radio. Then he would tell me the story about why he supported the Dodgers over the Pirates. I never grew tired of my black history moments with him. The house still had a Dodgers’ Jackie Robinson souvenir button hanging from a poster of Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Bobby Kennedy.

One weekend, I asked him more questions about his childhood. He explained to me how he moved from McCormick, South Carolina, to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He and his older brother George jumped on different boxcars to make their way north. But what he said next sounded as if it was out of a Mark Twain novel: George was accused of murdering a white man, but he didn’t do it, so we had to leave. He explained how they were going to kill George if they didn’t get out of town fast. His voice faded as he mumbled, We were only teenagers.

When I listened to my grandfather, I was part his granddaughter and part historian understanding the bigger plight of the African American in the United States. When we sat and just talked about his life, I was not mad, but understanding. I understood that we were all victims of victims.

Processing the plight of a black person in America, and having been practicing yoga for about eight months, there was only one place where I could fully trust life. It was at the end of a Hatha Yoga class, in the relaxation pose called Savasana. I didn’t have to be anything to anyone. I just was.

At the same time, I was both everything and nothing at all. I expanded outside of myself while simultaneously disappearing altogether. I was free. And every time I entered a class drenched from life, past and present, I would leave class feeling free because I just experienced a space where the truth of who I was could live without the intergenerational family shame. Every time I would leave class knowing that I was a spirit who has chosen to incarnate into this world as a black woman and role model of how to heal and love this life.

Please join me for a workshop on healing intergenerational trauma with yoga on Saturday, May 15 from 11:00am-1pm PDT. Click HERE for details and registration.

Saeeda Hafiz is a yoga teacher and wellness expert with certifications from the Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centers and the Natural Gourmet Institute. As a holistic health educator with the San Francisco Unified School District, she focuses on sharing her 30+ years of knowledge in physical and mental wellness with diverse groups. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. saeedahafiz.com