Tending the weeds

June 28, 2018 Becci Curtis

Yesterday I was listening to the environmental writer, Emma Marris, talking about how little we value nature unless it’s pristine, beautiful, and untouched by humans - unless humans have positively impacted that beauty, of course. It struck me that this is often how we approach our lives (or, this is often how I approach my life anyway).

My antenna clearly tuned into this theme, I started listening to Michael Stone’s Dharma talk ‘Buddhas on Blades of Grass’. In it, he discusses the Buddhist monk, Dongshan, telling his students to ‘go to a place where there are no weeds’. Spoiler alert: there is no such place.

On the surface, we value moments of hardship less than we value moments of comfort and security. We dismiss (and try to forget) the people who negatively impact us, and we move closer towards (and hold in our memory) the people that offer us support and have failed to disappoint. This is a safe and logical strategy. We want to repeat good experiences, we do not want to repeat bad ones. We would always choose comfort over discomfort. We would always choose to tend the flowers and not the weeds.

However, when I start to dig deeper into this thought, I realise that the times when I have been the least comfortable have held the greatest personal meaning for me. Hard times have paved the way for growth, wisdom, resilience, and humility. Moments of crisis are perhaps the times where we are the most easily intimate with our thoughts and feelings, precisely because we cannot escape ourselves, no matter how much we would like to.

New Year, New You, and other nonsense

December 28, 2017 Becci Curtis

Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash — Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash

If you are thinking of setting any New Year's resolutions (especially of the yoga kind), my unasked-for advice is to keep them simple, long-term, and bullshit free. There is room for improvement in all of us, but nobody is getting an overnight transformation. We don't suddenly need a different 'bod' to the one we had yesterday; we don't need to punish ourselves for indulging in too many mince pies, and we certainly don't need to pay for a service, object, or miraculous foodstuff that claims it will sort our lives out for us (especially if an amount of days is specified).

I'm not trying to downtalk New Year's resolutions; sometimes a change, or a challenge, is exactly what we need. New Year, like the first, crisp, blank page in a fresh, new notebook (who doesn't love that?) can be useful for garnering the energy to take action. It's the pursuit of being somebody else, somebody we idealise as being 'better' than we already are, that I take issue with. Our 'goodness' does not rest on a conditional and projected sense of self. We can all be better, sure, but we don't need to defer our wellbeing to the completion of a self-appointed task.

Instead of "When I lose weight/drink less/quit smoking, I will be happy", we could think "I am going to lose weight/drink less/quit smoking because my health is important".
Instead of "When I can meditate for an hour, I will be content", we could think "I'm going to set aside some time to meditate because I am curious about my state of mind".
Instead of "When I can perform Pincha Mayurasana (forearm stand), I will be good at yoga" we could think "I'm going to practise [insert challenging posture] because I am interested to see if I can redefine the limits of what I believe to be possible at this moment in time."

Perhaps this can be viewed as a lesson in self-marketing trickery - glass half-empty, versus glass half-full - but I can't shake the thought that a month spent 'detoxing' compels us to spend a month believing that we (or the lives we lead) are toxic. I struggle to see how this belief could help any of us in perpetuity. (Been there. Done that. Got the T-shirt.)

Turning 30

July 23, 2017 Becci Curtis

My life didn't magically become easy when I discovered yoga.

I did not suddenly become wise, or at peace with myself. I do feel more at ease, more wise and more at peace with myself than I did at 15, but I expect that most people do - with or without yoga, we grow up.

"Isn't yoga supposed to make you a calm person?"

February 24, 2017 Becci Curtis

Is growing supposed to make you a tall person?

Yoga enables me to create a space in which my feelings at any given moment are valid, whilst reminding me that the way I feel now won’t last forever.

My broken collarbone: weeks 2-3

May 3, 2016 Becci Curtis

In comparison to a painful but restful week 0 and a slower than expected week 1, this week saw the healing of my collarbone injury catapult. Over the course of week 1, I was able to start moving my shoulder and slowly regain my ability to do some normal activities like brushing my teeth and washing my hair. By the start of week 2, I felt sufficiently comfortable (and confident that I wasn't going to break myself further) to begin some self-directed physiotherapy, following the exercises recommended by the good people at the John Radcliffe Hospital - you can find these exercises in the hospital's extremely good 'Helping your clavicle to recover after a fracture' leaflet by following the link.

If you have broken your clavicle and have been able to take off your sling, I can't stress enough how important it is to start moving your shoulder in order to redress muscular tightness. It is amazing how quickly the muscles of the shoulder girdle start to stiffen up, how painful this can be and how long it will take to return back to normal. From talking to many other people who have had the same injury as me (let's just say I know A LOT of cyclists...), those who left their sling on for a prolonged amount of time (2+ weeks) not only took the longest time to recover, but suffered from discomfort on the side of their injury years (and in more than one case, decades) later. From my own experience, the muscular pain I felt when starting to move my shoulder after a fortnight was already quite enough. However, by diligently following the physio exercises prescribed, not only did the pain reduce by half each day, but my range of pain-free movement increased by half each day too.

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