Category Archives: compassion

WTFWJD: The True Meaning of Christmas is Namaste

Posted on by Emily
2

Namaste.

I bow to the divine in you.
The divine in me honors the divine in you.
We are all divine.
We are all the same.
We are all one.
Namaste = reason for the season.

This isn’t some hippy bullshit I saw on a calendar in a food co-op. This is real.

Let me explain….

The day after Christmas, my husband took our dog for a walk while I stayed home. When he returned, he brought a woman into our home and said, “Em, this is G— and we’re going to help her.” Without knowing who she was or why she was in our home, I hugged her and let her cry. She cried like I have never cried in my life.

While my husband ran to the store for food, we sat together. She slowly unclutched the papers she was holding that proved her veteran status and began to talk between bouts of intense crying. After 14 years of service, including active duty in Desert Storm, she was injured in an accident that put her in a coma. Six days later, she woke up in a hospital bed with a medical discharge and a brain injury that gives her seizures. She was transferred to our town to get medical aid but the transition had a three-day gap in housing that happened to fall over Christmas. She was 24 hours away from having a new home on the base, flat broke, and lost in a strange town with her 14-year-old daughter.

Her Christmas was miserable. She went from shelter to shelter in the rain looking for assistance. Some could not help because she is not on welfare. Others said she and her daughter could spend the night, but they would have to leave all their belongings outside the shelter. A Catholic church denied them shelter on Christmas Day because they aren’t Catholic. After all this, a staff member at the Salvation Army took them into her home until she could move to the base. Trying to keep it together in front of her daughter, she endured tremendous judgement. She was exhausted, hungry, broke, and ready to give up until she met my husband on the street near our home. She was embarrassed and humiliated by this experience.

After we parted ways, my husband asked me, “What would you like to do today?” I thought of Jesus taking on the moneychangers at the temple and responded: “Find that church and give them a piece of my mind.”

Around this time of year, people like to talk a lot about Jesus. The story goes that Mary and Joseph were mandated to travel to their hometown right as she was about to deliver. They were denied a play to stay inn after inn. Finally, someone let them stay with the animals. Mary gave birth in a manger – that’s where animals eat. I really doubt it was clean and beautiful like in a crèche. It probably stunk. The animals probably freaked when she cried out in pain. Yes, pain. I’m sure even the Virgin Mary had a painful birthing process. Being a pregnant virgin, she probably had to break her hymen in childbirth – double ouch.

What’s the real moral of this story – Star of Wonder or namaste?

Did the person who denied G— and her daughter shelter on Christmas Day tell this story to parishioners? Did the people who judged this woman sit in a pew, communion in their belly, and tsk the inn keepers who turned away Jesus Christ the Son of God? I wonder if they sang “Away in a Manger”?

WTF do would Jesus, Mary, and Joseph do?

Jesus lived namaste. He showed kindness to people who were regularly treated like garbage – lepers, prostitutes, etc. Jesus teaches that we are all the same. We are all people who need love and are all capable of loving. We are all human beings separated by choice, opportunity, and circumstance. We are all one brain injury away from being a woman looking for shelter on Christmas Day.

For me, the real reason for the season is a reminder to live namaste all the time. We are all people in need, just in different ways with different capacities to help each other out. This year, let’s really go out and do good things – radical love. Take it to the streets. Smile at strangers. if someone in need asks for money and you have some, give. If you pass a person spare changing outside of a grocery store, come out with a sandwich. Sure, some people exaggerate their need, but don’t we all sometimes?

How many times do we yogis say namaste in a year? Let’s start to really live it, just like Jesus.

Yoga Rage

Posted on by Emily
Reply

When I was in college, I had a friend who I loved to hang out with but did not enjoy playing music with. He was a total stress case when we played in orchestra – he would cuss, fuss, and (in my opinion) play too loud. I would spend two hours sitting next to him hating it until we could pack up our horns and music to decide where we were going for beers.

I brought it up to my teacher because I felt his behavior was affecting my performance in the section. As always, my teacher got quiet, thought for a moment, and offered up a solution I have kept with me my whole life:

“Sometimes, you have to imagine there’s a really big steel cone around you – but it has a filter. You choose what can make it in and what has to stay outside. Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and turn on the force field.”

I was reminded of this lesson when I was practicing the other night. The teacher was mellow, but encouraging us to work hard and had an all-U2 class. Fifteen minutes into class, the woman next to me started cussing like a sailor. Not “Fuck! Can you believe how long we’re holding this! lol!” No. This woman was banishing demons one pose at a time, tossing them off her, throwing them all over the room:

Teacher: Warrior one
Woman: Fuck!
Teacher: Vinyasa through to downdog
Woman: Shit!

Sometimes, when he walked close to us, she would utter a curse and then kind of blend it in with singing a song: “FUCKI stilllll haven’t found what I’m looking for…” I opened up too much on balancing half moon and scooted a little off my mat before recovery, laughing at myself, and I thought she was going to hit me. Instead got a Goddammit hurled at me.

Throughout the practice, I remembered the words of my teacher from all those years ago and tried to build a cone of serenity around me. I decided to find this funny, my first experience with Yoga Rage/Agroyoga.

We can all lighten up a bit – seriously, it’s just yoga.

compassion is hard

Posted on by Emily
1

I had a real mind#$%@ yesterday. Sorry, but that’s the best way to describe it. I came home from work and checked Facebook. One of my friends from middle school/high school posted an article from the Knoxville newspaper about a man arrested for soliciting minors online. “Wasn’t this the band director at our middle school?” her post read.

Ugh. I felt sick to my stomach.

I knew this man was a damaged human being 22 years ago when I was 11 years old. He was a horrible teacher with disturbing anger issues. His face would turn bright red while he screamed insults at the whole class. He threw music stands and mallets at students. His podium was dented because he would use a heavy metal mallet to beat the time…and stand really, really close to it. I saw fellow students who enjoyed playing music quit because of his abuse in class. I loved playing music and I hated the way he treated people around me. I knew this was wrong and told my parents. I told them over and over again. I’m sure I nagged them.

My parents started asking around and found others who were also concerned. Unfortunately, they found more who were not. The principal did nothing. The high school band teacher said, “Aw, that’s just how he is, you should talk to him.” They talked to him and he took it out on his class. The school counselor did nothing. The parents who were bringing the complaints were treated like overly concerned parents of hysterically overemotional children. But they kept raising the red flag. The principal retired and a new one stepped in. She saw the flags, checked it out, and immediately took him out of the classroom and put him over the in-school suspension program. I’m sure the bastard had tenure.

Several years later, my mom was managing the community youth orchestra. A woman called and asked how strict they were on the policy that kids in youth orchestra had to be in a school program. “My son loves playing his instrument and it has been so good for him, but his band director is terrible. He screams at the kids and even throws things at them. The school won’t do anything about it.” My mom asked and it was confirmed: he got a job at a different school as a band director. He had that job until this past January.

I called my parents to tell them and their reaction was the same as mine. “I knew there was something wrong! I knew it!” my mom exclaimed, feeling initially vindicated for being right and immediately sick for being right because the whole thing is so incredibly wrong.

I sent a message on Facebook to several people who were in the program. Other women responded saying the same thing: why didn’t anyone listen to us?

When I was talking to my parents, I thanked them for all the times they stood up for me. He wasn’t the only teacher my sister and I complained about. While we were talking, a perv parade of school teachers walked through my mind. Mr. Craft (lecherous old man with bookshelf full of Bibles – disgusting human being), Mr. Redmond (famous for dropping pencils and asking girls to pick them up), Mr. St.Clair (paddle happy, anger issues), the swim coach who was assigned to teach sex ed when allegations of sexual harassment were made….Then my parents told me that a man came forward and said he was abused for several years by a priest my protestant family loved. More men came forward to confirm. They told me another popular teacher from the high school lost his job for relationships with male students. All that in a little town in the Bible belt.

I hung up the phone and sat on the front porch with a glass of wine and my bigass mind$#%&.

Why didn’t anyone listen to us?

There is a dialogue going on in my head. One voice is saying, “How those men must be suffering to live a life so miserable and to take it out on others,” and another one saying, “How can you feel sorry for them? What about the people they hurt and disrespected? Eff them – don’t drop the soap, boys!”

I watched a documentary this week about Fred Phelps called Fall from Grace. It was difficult to watch. I was in tears in parts of it watching these people celebrate ignorance and hate led by a very sick man with a very disturbing definition of righteousness. At the end, a pastor said something so powerful – he said Fred Phelps is an example of a man who needs love the most but deserves it the least.

That sums up why it is so hard to be truly compassionate in this situation. I condemn their actions. I condemn the decisions they made. I don’t want to be sympathetic or turn the other cheek. Yet I know these men are damaged to their core in ways I could never understand. Compassion leads to forgiveness – but forgiveness is not forget. I can’t forget, but I hope I can find a way to forgive.

I’m finding it harder to forgive the people who enabled the behavior. Truly, shame on all those people who simply moved these men around just to get rid of them or waited for them to retire. People are more willing to talk openly about sexual harassment and verbal abuse now than they were 22 years ago. I sincerely hope that the kids who are coming forward and the parents who are fighting against popular sentiment on behalf of their kids are more supported than all of us were at my middle school.

This whole mind#$%& is teaching me that I have a lot to learn about compassion.

It also empowers me to stand up to what I know is wrong deep down in my heart – even if it takes 22 years to be validated in public. I will not be one of those people who ignored the 11-year-old kids asking for help.