Watch your breath

Saturday night, I had trouble sleeping. I woke up in the earliest morning hours feeling irritated about soccer of all things. Not professional soccer or the World Cup. I am not a fanatic about any particular sport or team. No, I was irritated about the American Youth Soccer Organization (AYSO) and our local region and the recruiting politics that persist year after year despite the organization's claim to fairness and balance. As I lay awake, I composed countless e-mails in my head to the assorted guilty parties with the intention of exposing bad practices among coaches and restoring some integrity to the bylaws of the youth league. When I had begun to exhaust myself with this mental exercise, I realized that I had already waged a version of this campaign via e-mail only a couple of seasons ago. Nothing had changed. Lying there in the dark, I asked myself whether another volley of e-mails--composed at some expense of time and energy on my part--would make a difference. I understand all too well that the difference one sets out to make does not always come to pass. Nevertheless, sometimes we have to stand up, outcome be damned.

Yes. I get that sort of defiance in the face of certain defeat. But here, despite my good intentions and my efforts at fomenting best laid plans, is where I realized that my daughter, the intended benefactor of my indignation, did not care. This was not a matter of apathy on her part. Rather, my daughter understands the inequities of the organization she has belonged to for much of her childhood. She understands them and has chosen her own path around them. In a conversation the afternoon before, my daughter explained to me that she prefers not to be a part of a team that must win at all costs. She likes the game of soccer too much and has managed to play in the face of what she knows to be unfair practices. The memory of this conversation worked its way back to me while I lay there in the predawn stillness, and, in its place, I watched my irritation subside. I let it go, breathing it all out in a long, relaxed exhale. Here, I thought, was flexibility restored, and I learned it from my daughter, and not in some pretzel pose while on my mat.

In the fading black-blueness of the night, I remembered my literature and thought of The Great Gatsby. I thought about Nick Carraway, the story's narrator and, ultimately, its conscience. I remembered Carraway's epiphany about the wealthy, how in the end, he discovers that they are careless. And this, at the end of my poor night's sleep, is how I thought of the soccer coaches--and the administrators who look the other way--determined to pack their teams with the region's top players. They are careless. For some strange reason, I found this a comfort. Not in the sense that it was right or fair. Instead, I realized with sudden clarity that this was a battle I was no longer meant to fight. Not, at any rate, positioned at the keyboard with another round of well-considered e-mails. I accepted that I had other work to do, that it was all right to say "No" to this battle in the way that my daughter already had. I was letting go. I was willing to let things be.

Sunday morning eventually dawned, and I made my way to practice. The class was packed; the buzz of energy in the studio palpable. At the end of class in savasana (corpse pose), the place where we are reminded to let go of our practice, to let go of control, to let go of our breath even, our teacher told us to watch our breath. "Breathe without controlling your breath," he instructed. With eyes closed, senses drawing inward, we were instructed to watch the energy we created during practice; see where it goes; listen to what it might have to say. Crowded as we were, squeezed together, literally, mat-to-mat, I felt expansive. It is a beautiful sensation, surrender. Lying there, I felt the earth had my back. The battle I had attempted to wage during the early morning hours floated through my thoughts and did not linger. I did not reach up to hold it in place for further scrutiny. I watched it come in, and I watched it recede as light as a cloud on a breeze.

After American spiritual teacher Ram Dass suffered a life-threatening stroke in 1997, he managed to write a book three years later with, as he might admit with his trademark twinkle of the eye, a little help from his friends. The book is entitled Still Here. In it, he talks about how "the perspective of the soul can help a lot with the little things...." What he means is that we are human, so we are good at struggling against what is inevitable about life: birth, living, changing, growing old, dying. But we are also divine, and according to Ram Dass, it is our divinity--the wisdom residing in our being, at rest, at peace within our souls--that has the potential to offer us another perspective on what we think of as big obstacles. In other words, life's inevitable struggles. If we can find another way to consider our obstacles, Ram Dass writes, we can deal with them "without having to be dragged through the drama."

Shakespeare was right to say that all the world's a stage. The dramas of life are inevitable and will continue. Soccer dramas will persist long after our youngest decides to one day put away her cleats. Of course, other dramas, too, will come and go. But, we have a larger place in the universe, and it's probably a whole lot simpler than we realize, and at the same time much more profound. Like the birds who suddenly took up their song in the trees outside the yoga studio Sunday, singing their hearts out, as we lay watching, as our teacher instructed, the energy of our practice fly about on the air we breathed.