A Path with Heart: Sasha Papovich

Sasha Papovich

First came the workshop, entitled The Path With Heart, an inquiry into yoga and meditation and psycho-spiritual work as taught by Sasha Papovich, my beloved teacher who first introduced me to yoga, meditation and Buddhism.

One of the best things about leaving teaching four years ago meant that I could take Sasha's Tuesday and Thursday morning yoga classes. Sasha has an intellectual curiosity and a bright mind as befits the daughter of college professors. Once I interviewed her for a writing assignment, which unfortunately I never completed. But she shared some of her fascinating story: the way one thing led inexorably to the next, calamities becoming blessings, always nudging her towards a life as a teacher and seeker of truth. For instance, a house fire which destroyed everything she owned meant she was free to up stakes on the East Coast and move to California - where she took up yoga; a serious back injury put an end to a very active, strength based yoga practice, leading her to meditation and restorative yin yoga.

Pigeon Pose

By the time I caught up with Sasha on those two weekday mornings, her main focus was yin yoga. Yin yoga means you hold a pose anywhere from three to five minutes in a specific sequence designed to open the meridians, the lines of chi, energy, running through the body, stimulating the deep connective tissue. In the beginning, a hip opener like Pigeon, held for five minutes, filled me with angry tears, not of pain, but of frustration. When we learned that emotion is held in the hips, and at that point I had so much that was blocked, the discomfort became something to grit your teeth through, turned tolerable and eventually disappeared. Sasha would talk us through the long poses: she would read us poems or excerpts from whatever book she was studying, or she would simply talk about how the practice was affecting her own life. Since she is a brilliant off the cuff speaker, her voice alone could hold you to the mat.

But something else she often repeated in those early days resonated with me. Occasionally a beginner would wander into Sasha's class, not knowing about having to hold the poses. Inevitably, they would wriggle and groan and sometimes even leave the room to go to the bathroom or get a drink of water, but really to escape. Whenever that happened, Sasha would point out the parallels between the difficult yoga pose and life itself. She would ask us, "What do you do when life gets hard? Do you get yourself something to eat? Go watch a movie? Or ... can you stay with it?"

How do you distract yourself?

Staying with it. These are the words, the key instruction that is so hard to follow but is so vital. It has become an imperative in my life. We must stay present to our life, whatever it is throwing at us, if we are not to sleepwalk through it, doing the usual thing we do, have done for years,  to distract ourselves from paying any attention whatsoever to what is really happening. Pema Chodrun says, "The central question of a warrior's training is not how we avoid uncertainty and fear but how we relate to discomfort. How do we practice with difficulty, with our emotions, with the unpredictable encounters of an ordinary day?" (from The Pocket Pema Chodrun) Yoga practice turns out to be an excellent training ground for staying with it in the bigger picture.

Sasha's life turned another corner when she decided to pursue graduate studies in Integral Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. In the three months before she moved north, her Tuesday and Thursday morning classes became intense workshops in which she tried to pass on to us, her loyal students, everything she had learned so far, about yin, about Buddhism, about meditation. She urged us to find a place to meditate on a regular basis, that it was too hard to do alone, at least in the beginning. Which is how I found Long Beach Meditation and a very different sort of teacher in Victor Byrd.

It has now been a year and a half since Sasha moved to the Bay Area. Periodically she returns to Long Beach to gather her former students together and teach us whatever she is currently learning. Her passion is still there, stronger than ever, deepened now by her own experiences as a student. She lives and breathes this work and it shows.

And that is how we came to be together once again, on a Saturday and Sunday afternoon at the beginning of November, with Sasha guiding us as competently as ever. The workshop contained only a little yoga, just enough to stretch and open the channels between belly and heart and throat and head. Mostly we sat in guided meditation or worked individually or in pairs, looking deeply within.

To begin this work, Sasha had us think back to a recent time when we were upset. Not an 8 to 10 upset, because then we might get lost in the content and become upset all over again; but something around a 4 to a 6. When we had the upset in mind, the next step was to consider what was the underlying feeling that was so upsetting, and finally, what did we do to avoid feeling that underlying feeling. All this was done silently in our own heads, but then we went around the room and people shared the two feelings: the initial hurt, anger, fear, whatever, which they then covered up by distancing themselves, getting busy, being perfect or super happy, and so on. By the time it got to me, most everything had been said, so I grinned and said airily, "All of the above!" and everyone laughed and Sasha moved on. We had run out of time, another class was waiting to come in, and there was a flurry of activity getting out the door. On my way home, I started to laugh. I realized that what I had done was itself a perfect illustration of what I do when I am on the spot. I was feeling anxious, not having anything clever to add to the discussion, so I came up with a comment to make people laugh - and get me off the hook.

Sunday afternoon, we reconvened and we began where we had left off. I raised my hand and shared my revelation that I had used my coping strategy in the doing of the exercise itself. Sasha said, "Great! Now let's narrow it down. Let's get one word to describe what it was you wanted to avoid." I could feel my face start to crumple, and I raised my arms in a cross, as if warding off an inquisition. "Yes, we do have to go there," she said gently. And to the others, she said, "Can you see how Alison would not want to go there? She has spent a lifetime building up a defense precisely so she does not have to visit this core wound, this vulnerable place. But we must name it in order to move beyond it."

Rumpelstiltskin

Parenthetically, it has dawned on me that this is the meaning of the dreadful fairy tale of Rumpelstiltskin. I have never understood it until now. The little man who so frightens the young miller's daughter turned Queen, demanding her new baby as payment for having helped her spin straw into gold, can only be vanquished when he is named. The naming causes him to lose all his power. Similarly, we can only be set free of our deepest fears when we have the courage to face them head on and name them. Exposed to the light of day and staying with the knowledge, means that every time it rears its head, we can (hopefully) recognize it as 'that thing we do.' We're not trying to get rid of it, we're not ashamed of it, we're just - staying with it. And in the staying with it, it loses a little more of its hold over us.
(For a funny illustration of this very serious point, check out the YouTube video, Mr. Ramesh).

So there I am, tearful, and getting quite lost in that small vulnerable self who can barely whisper the shameful feeling that lies at bottom of it all.
"Is it a deficiency or an insufficiency?" prompts Sasha. "Deficiency, meaning you don't have it at all, or insufficiency, meaning you don't have enough?"
"Insufficiency," I mumble. "Not good enough." And there you have it. Another piece of it, at any rate. (I do wonder how many pieces there are!) Three little words that contain a wealth of buried hurt.

There are several points Sasha stressed here. That this is not about blame. This is not pointing a finger at parents, especially mothers (poor mothers!), and accusing them of bad parenting. They did the best they could, being wounded themselves. We're all wounded! The point is, a human baby requires so much love, so much constant attention. Its needs are enormous, they cannot possibly be met and therefore no-one escapes this core wounding: it is the tragedy of the human condition. We are born into this human life beautiful and whole and complete in ourselves.  Only, as babies, we lack the self-knowledge to recognize who or what we are. Instead we take our cues from those around us. They hold up a distorted mirror in which we dimly see the way life is and who we are. We grow armor around those places where we are vulnerable. We have to! If we did not, we would die. A human baby needs to be loved above all.

Compelling research on this very topic has been carried out by British psychologists into children hospitalized for long periods during the Second World War. The prevailing wisdom of the time decreed that parents should drop their sick children off at the hospital entrance and not come visit, sometimes not for months on end, until the child was 'cured.' Too often the child would not get well, would die, supposedly of pneumonia or some such, but the doctors on duty knew better. They believed the child died of a broken heart.

The Hospital for Sick Children 1940

The problem is that the necessary armor we develop around the site of our hurt eventually imprisons us. We continue to hide behind it for the rest of our lives, believing this is who we are. We act and react in life on automatic pilot, based on those earliest impressions that once served us, but ultimately are flawed. What does a child understand of the world? Only that she must remain part of the tribe in order to survive. If I carry my own feeling of "not good enough" to its conclusion, this is how it plays out: if I feel I am not good enough, I will not be loved. If I am not loved, I will be cast out. If I am cast out, I will die. In the case of the small child, the fear is of literal death, I believe (think of those hospitalized children). Later on, the ego hijacks the child, and the death it fears is the death of self. Who am I without my burning coals? Even though they burn me, they are mine, they make me real. In fact, they do the opposite. They bolster an illusory self and make her seem three dimensional when in fact she is as real as a child's imaginary playmate. (This was the wonder and the relief of the Voice Dialogue work, experiencing for myself that the vulnerable selves and the primary selves are ultimately insubstantial; that there is a place of central awareness that is none of the above, that transcends all the various selves.)

The rest of the afternoon was spent in partner work, further exploring our core wounds and how they have affected our lives. For me, a glib "It feels uncomfortable" in the beginning turned to wracking sobs the more I opened to the sensations in the body: the anxiety in the pit of the stomach, the tight throat, so tight it was hard to speak, and the pained heart. I felt quite shattered to realize that in order to avoid feeling 'not good enough,' I have constructed elaborate defenses throughout my life. I have done things I didn't want to do, and not dared do things I did want to do, so much so that who I am and what I want has been so deeply buried I can't guess at the answers. 'Not good enough' translated too often into 'don't deserve better.' Of course! If I am not good enough, what can I expect? Not much. I cringe to remember a pompous so-called boyfriend telling me matter-of-factly in his upper crust English accent, "You do understand that we're not the same class? There can't be any real future for us?" - and me, smiling at him as if it was perfectly normal for someone to tell you you can never measure up, reassuring him brightly, "Of course!"  Ugh. No wonder I cried when my dear Australian cousin told me mildly to "Do what you want to do." What does that even look like, I wonder?

When we regrouped and talked about what it was like to do these exercises, I said how awful it was to realize how long I have believed this basic lie, that I am not good enough, and how shocking to note the significant impact it has had on my life. Something I took on board as a baby!!

Sasha nodded and looked sad. "I wish it could be otherwise," she said. "I wish I could turn the clock back for all of us. But this is the way it is. It seems to me we have only two choices in life. We can either do the work and try to wake up - or not. And knowing what you know, how can you not go on? What else can we do but go on?"

1 year old "Not good enough? " Alison

(Writing this weeks later, I realize it is not even that I have avoided the feeling - worse, it is that I was not remotely aware of it, yet it has run my life.)

Further exercises involved inquiring into what it might be like to accept this part of ourselves we have shunned for so long. Predictably, we moved through fear, distaste, disgust and tears, towards acceptance, spaciousness and calm. I say "towards" - I had only the briefest glimmer of what it might be like to enfold "not good enough" into myself. My partner, although she was not supposed to speak, whispered to me fiercely, "It is a part of you! It is what makes you lovely." And Sasha said later, "Listen to her. She tells the truth.

Yet again, the limitations of working a life within a narrow band of childish feeling are made clear. A child perceives in black and white - at least this child did! Things were either wholly good or wholly bad, no gray areas for me! But this is not only unrealistic with regards to other people, it is also dangerous. Who can live up to those impossible standards, including me? I would so love to see myself as wholly good and life as wholly good and other people as wholly good. The hardest thing for me is to stay with what is actually happening in the moment, especially if it is sad or painful. (Although for whom is this easy?)

So I will try to fold in this feeling of 'not good enough', because there is also this which is true: when we returned to the circle, I shared that for me the flip side of my earlier comment about feeling sad for all the lost time was the realization that I am no longer that small vulnerable child. I am 57 years old! I am old enough, strong enough, to bear what the child could not bear. Sasha added too that I am no longer alone, dealing with a critical mother. Instead I have tremendous support in my own beautiful, fantastic, amazing daughter; my strong, centered husband and so many good people, teachers all, who are also on a similar journey and who offer encouragement and love. Why do I - why do any of us - need to protect ourselves any longer? What was vulnerable in the child is no longer so in the adult - or at least not if the adult brings attention to it, as well as a whole lot of compassion to the child who once needed to erect this defense.

We finished the day with a metta (Pema's maitri) meditation, sending lovingkindness to ourselves and to the world. Sasha gave us a choice of phrases for us to repeat in our heads:
May I be peaceful. May all beings be peaceful.
May I be free from suffering. May all beings be free from suffering.
May I be healthy in body, mind and heart. May all beings be healthy in body, mind and heart.
May I be happy. May all beings be happy.

My favorite?

May I be loved, just as I am. May all beings be loved, just as they are.

We sat quietly in the gathering dusk, repeating our little prayer silently, sending metta first to our own little selves, then to everyone in the room, and beyond, to everyone in the world. Thank you for reading all the way to here. May you be loved, just as you are.

Circle of Women