A lover knows only humility, he has no choice…
—Rumi
Whenever I travel, I set out with the goal of returning with fewer things, a lighter bag, than when I left. Sometimes it’s the food that I packed to eat on the way or while away, or the Christmas gifts I’d been storing for weeks in a corner of my apartment waiting to be received, or the random bits of body products I calculated would last me just as long as my trip and I could discard at the end. I’m usually successful in relieving myself of such items, but inevitably I return with more. More food, more Christmas gifts, full-size replacements of my products because I miscalculated and didn’t have enough so had to buy more.
The physical burden of these travel-add-ons no longer bothers me. Especially now that my body is stronger, I can muscle my way through an airport or Port Authority or up my five flights of stairs with all my stuff without much strain. Nor do I get overwhelmed by failing at my goal, unrealistic as it was to start. After all, travel is all about accumulating: memories, experiences, souvenirs. When we leave home, we get an opportunity to be someone else, or at least to see what it’s like to be ourselves in a new environment. We expand; we spread out into new layers; our map of where “home” is spreads out and occupies new territories.
This aspect of travel has always appealed to me, and is reflected in what I actively bring back with me whenever I go away. Being myself somewhere else, I realize the parts of me that I really like and feel essential. These objects, talismans, ingredients make it into the suitcase despite the limited space no matter how small; these practices and behaviors manage to get done even amidst new activities and schedules. For those who know me, or who have traveled with me, it might seem like about 95 percent of my “normal” life fits into this category. Maybe because I’ve refined my routines and rituals in a way that makes it easy for me to pack them up and transport them; maybe because I am a rigid, habitual person; maybe both.
Even when everything looks basically the same on the surface, doing my normal life elsewhere makes me appreciate the simplicity of what I really need and like about how I choose to live. At the same time, that more radical version of life brings to the fore the (many) things that are not in my wheelhouse, but could be. Waking up a little later, drinking coffee on a deck, trying some delicious local food item that makes even my same-old-same-old meals totally different.
These unfamiliars find their way not into a hidden pocket in my suitcase, but into a pocket of my mind (and, a Note on my phone): what I title the “ways to be better” list. I dutifully write down all the things I feel certain will improve my life once I get back home. It’s an attempt to carry over the vacation vibes, the essence of “away Jennifer,” into my real life. To really allow myself to be changed by experiences, rather than cordoning off the many versions of myself in their isolated locations. In my Brooklyn home, I do X; in my New Jersey home, I do Y, on a yoga retreat, I do Z. Never shall the twain meet.
Like with my physical accumulations, the things on the “better” list don’t always live up to my expectations of them. After coming home from any time away, the overwhelm of getting back into responsibilities—and of confronting the expenses of travel—might put a lot of those things on hold until they’re pushed so far down on the list that I forget why I even was interested in them. The bright-and-shiny attraction of fleur de sel and Rwandan coffee, which I learned about in a documentary I watched while away this summer—ingredients that would for sure enhance my life and help out small farmers trying to save the planet and biodiversity and traditional agricultural methods—faded once I opened my cabinet and saw all the spices, included several varieties of salt and teas and coffee substitutes, that I already have. The old way is fine, my brain said with a sigh. That was a nice idea, but it just doesn’t fit here.
***
The reason I fail to incorporate novelty, to change in general, isn’t a flaw in my personality. (Not in yours, either.) It’s not because I’m too rigid or habitual, even if those things are true. It’s because I have a human brain designed to prefer what’s familiar. From a very early age, we recognize patterns and recurrences as a way to save energy. Imagine if every morning we woke up, we had to actively choose to get out of bed, to brush our teeth, to take a shower, to put on clothes (and re-learn how to do all those things) … We’d need to eat a lot more calories, and we probably wouldn’t make it to the closet until 6 pm. Our brain’s ability to go on autopilot with certain decisions, to make habits, frees up space for more important tasks. Not only the small things, like what body oil to use before I shower or what clothes to wear, but also how to spend the rest of my day—and the rest of my life—in a way that’s productive and satisfying.
We can see how this works very clearly when we lack habits, and every element of our day feels new and unpredictable. “Decision fatigue,” as modern psychology describes it, settles in quickly when the mind burns through its resources by working morning to night on things that could be on background mode. Multitasking can also contribute to this state, since trying to do more than one thing simultaneously simply forces the brain to move back and forth rapidly. What happens when you do that on your phone or computer—flipping between tabs or windows or apps when one takes too long to load, like longer than one second? Freezing, the rainbow wheel of death, shut down—that’s what happens.
Habits put our brains into low-battery mode, background app refresh toggled OFF. With habits, we have enough energy to notice how our behaviors actually affect us, when things are going well and when it’s time for a change, a new groove. It’s similar to when you pack up your habits, take them somewhere new, and evaluate if they still work in this new place, or at all.
These brain grooves are also a protective mechanism. When a little baby learns to recognize their mother, by her smell and voice, and other members of their family and community, they can spend less time in sympathetic mode, assessing if these people might encounter often are threats each time they show up. Throughout our lives, among familiar people (and non-people, and places and objects), we can relax into parasympathetic mode, which allows our bodies to grow and develop even as our minds open up into their capacity for creativity, imagination, and deep thinking. If we travel with friends and family, for example, the novelty of those places doesn’t register like a threat because of the comfort of being with our people. It’s okay if we don’t know our way around, where to get food, how to speak the language—because we’re not alone.
What’s familiar, the behaviors and relationships we don’t have to actively decide to engage in, allow us feel more at ease, more like ourselves. But like with all things, there’s an upper limit to the benefits of living a life in autopilot. Habits might prevent exhaustion from decision fatigue, but if you’re never making decisions, the brain becomes soft and a little lazy. With one well-worn groove instead of many moderate grooves, we might feel intense overwhelm or anxiety when we find ourselves having to make a decision, even a tiny one. Or, when we wake up one day and realize that the things we’ve been doing out of habit have actually taken us in a direction that doesn’t feel so great, and we have no idea how we got there—or how to get back to that sympathetic mode where we’re curious, creative, not afraid and not alone. If we’re too habituated, we might find ourselves not only isolated from our people, but from ourselves. It’s hard, if not impossible, to make decisions in that state because we have no idea if what we did before, or if something new, would feel right. We’ve wandered far away from home with no map and no people to guide us back.
***
Summer is a season of expansion and growth in nature, and combined with our cultural tendency to travel in this season the general direction of our energy tends to be outward. When we let go of our normal routines, whether it’s enjoying a summer Friday at the beach or a two-week sojourn in another country, we eventually have to re-integrate those experiences back inward, into our home-selves. Sometimes it’s easy or exciting—the trip might be more low-key, and you fall back into old and healthful rhythms refreshed (this is more my speed; I like to go places that I already know well, so the ratio of novelty to familiar is something like 20:80); maybe you’re excited by the things and ideas you accumulated away from home and check off lots of items on your “ways to be better” list. Or maybe you come back home and feel lost. You’ve ventured away from your well-worn grooves, realized you don’t know what you’re going back to and why, and have to wipe your habit slate clean and start new. And it’s terrifying. How—whom—do I choose to be?
Summer isn’t over yet, so maybe your travels and moments of expansion are still on the horizon. But I’ve just landed after several mini-trips over the month of July, and as I unpack my new stuff and assess my “better” list, I’m realizing that there are also a bunch of things I left at home, that I didn’t pack and couldn’t leave behind somewhere else, and now need dealing with. These many selves aren’t necessarily in conflict, but there’s some doubt in how they might live together if they all stayed here. Some things are small: Do I invest in a new coffee routine and fancy salts, or am I okay with my existing supplies? Some are not small: Do I take a risk with my business and jump into the vast and vulnerable unknown, or do I stick with the safe, predictable, time-filling work I already have and know I’m good at? I probably wouldn’t have encountered these bristlings if I just stayed home. Now that I’ve met my expanded, summer self, I don’t quite fit into all my old grooves, and it’s scary and exciting.
While I know that my personal experiences are a result of unique circumstances, there’s also something in the air that I recognize from summers past and seems to be contributing to my state of unrest. The vibe of August has always been tinged with the sense of endings for me. Summer is ending soon (culturally if not weather-wise)—and too soon! It just started. There’s a desperate, grabby energy as I try to soak up the last breaths of a slower pace and more acceptable OOO time. As much as I looked forward to school starting as a kid, I always felt in August a creeping fear of a new schedule, of not meeting my own expectations for my studies, of not fitting into my old jeans or hating all of my sweaters. It’s like I’m sitting for a test I knew was coming, but I spent two months laying by the pool instead of studying.
***
How do we get back on track when we’ve gone through a growth spurt like this over the summer? Do we even have to? In my classes this month, I’ll be exploring these questions through a unique, and perhaps unexpected, embodied practice. We’ll be focusing on the side body: strengthening the lateral lines of the legs, hips, trunk, and arms, as well as creating fluidity and space in these channels.
From an Ayurvedic perspective, opening the sides is a tried and true strategy for releasing excess pitta. And boy, do we all have some excess pitta. The water and fire elements have been surging since early June in my neck of the woods, and around most of the country, so even the most mindful of us are probably packing some extra heat this year. Since the torso is the home of pitta in the body, the sides can act like a kind of ventilation system for releasing that excess heat. Consider what you naturally do when you’re overheated—you lift your arms out to the side or overhead to air things out; when you can’t expand laterally, like on a crowded subway or when you try to pull on jeans that just don’t fit anymore, the heat builds up quickly and we feel frustrated, irritable, inflamed. Ready to explode.
From a TCM perspective, the side body offers a related but somewhat counter emotional and energetic action (I love pairing these systems for that reason—they often seem contradictory until you drill down into the root of the philosophy, and discover the mycelium network of intelligence connecting them). The gall bladder meridian runs along the side body, from the eye along the side of the head, down the neck into the torso, all down the leg and ending at the fourth toe. Most of us don’t even know where the gall bladder is, let alone think about its energy, but we work with it all the time: it helps us with decision-making. Consider the colloquialism of “having gall,” which implies someone with confidence and gumption, a bravery to do or say what would embarrass or scare others. Such behavior might seem rude, but it might also be what everyone else is thinking too but lacks the—well, the gall—to put into action.
Gall Bladder Meridian
Image: https://yinyanghouse.com/theory/acupuncturepoints/gallbladder_meridian_graphic/
Physiologically, the gall bladder holds and secretes bile, a fluid of transformation. Gall is an amazing substance that has had a bad rap for a long time. In ancient Greek medicine, two of the four “humors,” or constitutions, were bile: yellow bile, which expressed as anger, and black bile, which expressed as melancholy. These types were both personalities and patterns of disease—those who leaned toward yellow bile were full of rage and inflammations, whereas those with black bile were depressive and chronically fatigued or weak.
But bile—as a substance and emotion—is actually critical to our health. Produced by the liver, bile helps us digest fats (it is basically pitta, the fiery liquid that digests things). When we eat fat, our gall bladder gets a signal to squirt some bile into the small intestine to support the digestive process. In other words, it gives direction to pitta that makes it functional, rather than destructive. Without bile, hard-to-digest foods go undigested and accumulate in the body as ama, which leads to disease. We also don’t get the nutrition from fat that our our brains, our bones, our whole bodies, need to function, so we draw on our reserves. If the indigestion continues for long enough, those reserves might get used up, and we start to shut down.
The relationship between the liver and gall bladder—the yin-yang organ pairing in TCM—is key in understanding how this dynamic supports our physical and mental health. If the physiology of the liver organ is overwhelmed (by hard-to-digest foods, like fatty or processed foods, alcohol, or lots of excess hormones from stress, the environment, modified food items, or medications), it won’t be able to produce enough bile to digest those excesses. With an empty gall bladder, digestion halts, and ama builds. Energetically (which is more how TCM looks at these organs), this system is all about the mind, specifically emotions and how we “digest” them. The liver, known as the “free and easy wanderer,” helps to disperse emotions throughout the body, the way it distributes nutrients throughout the body via blood and helps process and eliminate the waste products of digestion. It produces bile—or “gall”—which winds up in the gall bladder, to digest those emotions, breaking them down and integrating them, eliminating them, or storing them. If the liver builds, plans, and accumulates the elements of our lived experience, then the gall bladder decides how to take action on those experiences.
When we have intense emotions, or hold onto them past their time, the liver “astringes” or constricts, and the flow of emotions is neither free nor easy. This also disrupts the production of energetic bile. There might be too little bile, resulting in timidity or inaction; we fall into our old grooves with an “it’s fine” attitude, even when it’s really not fine. Or, the excess of the liver spills over into the gall bladder, and we have to release that surplus bile somehow—in the form of rage, outbursts, frustration, and irrational behaviors.
The conditions of summer naturally put a strain on this system, physically and energetically. Between the foods that tend to be served at parties and on vacations—fried, frozen, spiked—and the tensions around travel, abandoned and altered routines, competition for having the most fun and coolest summer stories, and frustrations around having to return to our regular life before we want to, there’s a lot to digest. We might be producing more or less bile than usual, and our gall bladder just can’t do its job. When we can’t digest our lives we forget what it feels like to be well—to be us—even when we’re at home again. Making decisions from this place is never a good move, since they tend to lead us farther and farther away from our energetic center. The changes we make when we get home aren’t choices, but reactions.
***
I’m not claiming that doing side-body openers in a yoga class is going to reveal the “right” decisions to make in your life right now, or prevent you from making rash, reactive ones that you regret in a few hours, days, or weeks. What I am claiming, though, is that we have the ability through movement, and more so through our attention, to redirect our flow of energy from outwards to inwards. Doing so makes space and relaxes the liver and gall bladder, releases accumulated bile and heat, and restores proper digestive function. With a more grounded nervous system and well-fed body and brain, the hard-to-digest emotions, decisions, and “fats” of our life can be processed and transform into something else entirely. Rather than a toxin—ama, phlegm, biliousness—those substances become our life force; they become love. One of the words for oil in Sanskrit, sneha, actually translates to “mother’s love”—a reflection of what this substance gives our body. When we pay attention to our gall bladder, circulating prana through that channel and making sure it is clear enough to hold whatever bile the liver produces, we create the conditions for receiving the stability of love we associate with good, healthy habits—decisions we don’t need to actively make, but that flow freely.
The anatomy of our side openers reinforces this almost too-good-to-be-true process. Most of the yoga asanas that fall into this category include some kind of arm extension—arms overhead (urdva hastasana), out to the side (triangle), or engaged in holding us up against gravity (side plank). The arms carry an energetic extension of the gall bladder meridian: the heart meridian. While they’re not paired organs, they do relate to one another in that the liver-gall bladder pair “feeds” the pair of the heart-small intestine. In other words, the action of the gall bladder—digesting fats, directing emotions—determines the level and quality of nourishment that our hearts receive.
Heart Meridian
Image: https://yinyanghouse.com/theory/acupuncturepoints/heart_meridian_graphic/
When our decisions are clear and complete, we say that we’re acting in “alignment” with our heart; our spirits are fulfilled and satisfied, and our heart space can give and receive freely. We don’t have to choose between leaving things behind or bringing new things home, because the things we choose have a clear space and function in our world. On the other hand, when our gall bladder is overwhelmed or depleted, our heart follows: it becomes possessed by external forces, depleted as we pursue paths that aren’t ours to take, or overshadowed by doubt, guilt, shame, sadness, or fear. We compete, dominate, and struggle to survive. We fall out of love.
Working with the gall bladder, we have a chance to refine the relationship between the heart and the liver—between the air element and the fire element, between emotions and actions—so we can integrate, rather than be overwhelmed by the growth of summer. With these channels clear and organs nourished, the air of the heart, which houses our true intelligence, is powerful enough to direct the intensity of bile downward, where it can be used to nourish the body, rather than letting the bile build up, ferment, and require an explosive release. The bile then helps feeds the body with love, which reinforces the power of the heart. And so it goes—a contained feedback loop of awareness, energy, and love. A body in this state is content with itself no matter where it travels. It’s stable enough to be curious about trying new things, and wise enough to know what to take back home.
The asanas that will help us find this state of balance between sthira and sukha. While side-body postures can feel rigid and linear when practiced in a certain way—a held breath in—ours will have the quality of a luxurious exhalation. A leaning-into oneself, a playful vacillation between sides that might reveal asymmetries but only to know where and how to use more support. The sides of the body in this kind of practice aren’t rigid and confining, like those jeans that don’t fit. They’re soft and supple like your favorite stretchy pants, which you wear when you’re totally comfortable being you and no one else.
When we move—and live—in a way that encourages lateral expansion, we discover that even our bile is transformed. Instead of the hot, fiery, scalding pitta of the small intestine (pachaka pitta), it’s something more like sadhaka pitta, which resides in the heart and the brain. This is the fire of the mind—cognition as well as passion. It lights the way toward truth and the ultimate wisdom that there are no boundaries or edges between our many selves, or between us and others. We are one heart, one light, one breath.
Decisions made from this state aren’t born of panic or fear or obligation; they’re not a “cutting off,” the etymological root of the word “decide,” where you’re pushed off a cliff into the unknown and only death—of options, of selves—is certain. Instead, decisions made by sadhaka pitta—a heart and mind fed by love, thanks to the gall bladder’s protection and discernment—are the only and most obvious things to do, easy yeses from the whole body. They feel like waking up one day, and realizing you’ve fallen in love. Everything’s changed, and nothing’s changed. You are yourself, and someone you never knew you could or wanted to be. Where you end and someone else begins doesn’t matter. There’s no need to cut anything off because your spirit is so much bigger than it ever was before and can hold it all. And there’s only one decision: love.
***
Unpacking from my most recent set of travels, I sighed at how yet again I’d disillusioned myself into thinking I’d come back with less. The soaps and seashells, the drug-store sunscreen, the guilt over forfeiting to TSA what surely would have been the most amazing lavender blueberry jam (saving small farms and herbal goodness! gah!!) because I was too lazy and cheap to check my bag—all these things would have to occupy the space I call home. Where would they go? But there was one thing I could say I didn’t return home with: my mind isn’t lugging around an endless list of new habits and decisions that I thought would lead me to becoming a better me. Because in the end, there’s only that one decision to make, ever: Does this activity, behavior, object, person, food, book, fill-in-the-blank, make me feel like the me I am NOW? Does it feed and protect my heart? Does it lead me toward love?
