Every day I make the same mistake.
Namely, after jump roping in the morning (I’m doing a 21-day challenge), I never remember to restore my Spotify settings back from SHUFFLE.
You see, when I’m jumping rope, I like the playlist skipping around and surprising me.
Whether it’s Beyoncé or Lady Gaga or my favorite gospel group, I’m always delighted by the unknown next song.
But when I’m teaching later in the day, I want those playlists to follow the exact order I’ve designed them in.
I’ve very specifically planned each transition as well as an overall one-hour arc for the class.
In one area, I appreciate randomness.
In another, I require predictable structure.
I’ve been thinking of this a lot lately because I’ve been dealing with a recovery rescue situation where I also need to switch modes often.
In a newsletter a few years ago, I shared my friend Joshua’s sage advice:
Sometimes, you’ve got to be the Coast Guard.
Sometimes, you’ve got to be a Lighthouse.
This particular situation has required a lot of Coast Guard level activity, including an intervention in Vegas (of all places) for a grad school classmate.
That all felt terrible and exhausting, but also active and engaged, with the possibility of effectiveness, ie hope.
Yet I also realize that there are limits to this Coast Guard Mode of being.
You can’t, for example, ever save someone who doesn’t want to be saved.
Sometimes, you really do have to switch to Lighthouse Mode: being steady and consistent in stormy times, offering and illuminating a path without sweeping in to rescue.
My favorite summary of that is a quote from the great Anne Lamott:
“Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island
looking for boats to save;
they just stand there shining.”
This concept of different approaches––standard play vs. random shuffle or coast guard vs. lighthouse––is fundamental to yoga.
In the very oldest yoga text, it’s summarized in three Sanskrit words: sthira-sukham asanam.
Asanam is pretty straightforward: it’s the physical pose.
But the other two are translated differently, depending on who you talk to.
• Sthira can mean firm, strong, steady, even hard.
• Sukham can mean easy, gentle, happy, or soft.
Essentially, we’re told that all poses need both qualities, firmness and easiness, strength and gentleness.
Life doesn’t work, in other words, unless you vary your approach.
Especially in these unique and challenging times, I’m finding it helpful to realize that even on my iPhone, every day I have to switch back and forth between shuffle and regular play.
Even more to heart, it’s the same thing with taking a deep breath and reminding myself I need to take my coast guard cap off and just be the lighthouse.
I find it comforting that this truth was known and revealed 2,500 years ago in the sutras.
Finally, I want to share perhaps my favorite translation of sthira-sukham:
Courageous and Happy.
Those are definitely the shifting modes I’d like to spend more time living between.
Namaste for Now.
P.S. Last week’s newsletter prompted an awesome set of responses re: Pokeweed.
Recipes from grandmothers and from southern lifestyle magazines.
So many delightful anecdotes were sent my way….
Thank you for all of that!
And…my own pokeweed has been uprooted…but…
Like most challenges in life, I’m sure it’ll reinvent and resurface…and now I’m all the more ready to make something beautiful (and perhaps even delicious out of it.)
