Lazy Man Yoga

Archive for October, 2009

Ariel, The Fearless Man

We passed an old fellow on our trail walk today hobbling along slowly, leaning on his aluminum cane, but seeming to enjoy every uncertain step he took. I mentioned to Jan, as we passed him and said hello, that he seemed to be really enjoying himself despite his age, handicap, and difficulty walking. Not everyone we encounter on the trail is out for pleasure and enjoyment. Maybe half of the people we do encounter are out for exercise and either whiz speedily by, hunched over their bicycle, or else are dripping sweat from running. Many a grim and determined look appear on their faces. This is not a picture of enjoyment and pleasure but rather the look of extreme effort, will power in action, and grim determination. To each their own torture, but if that is exercise I want no part of it.

Jan and I usually sit at the half way point of our walks, and today we sat for an extended period of time, maybe for half an hour. The sun was warm and the scene was particularly beautiful with the autumn colors before us while leaves were tumbling down in a gentle breeze. We relaxed and merged a bit with the scene we were viewing. With some effort we began our walk back and again we encountered that old fellow with his aluminum cane. Feeling friendly and quite relaxed, we engaged him in conversation. Here was an old warrior. He told us about his combat experiences in the Korean War. He was a member of the 82nd Airborne, a very hardened combat unit. (His name is Ariel and I thought that more than appropriate for someone in an airborne unit.) He had spent 18 months in real combat, parachuting into hails of bullets and raining a few down on the enemy at the same time. He had taken a bullet in the belly and shrapnel to his arm. He had led over a hundred men into combat many times and took a bullet in the gut for his troubles and delivered quite a few to their targets besides. And even at what must be 80 years old or better he seemed more than ready to do combat again, if the need arose, and he showed me how he would wield his cane if the opportunity presented itself.

I told him he was a fearless man but also the happiest and most contented fellow we had met or seen that day. Maybe being fearless helps. Here was an octogenarian, missing a lung, missing part of his colon, leaning heavily on his cane and hobbling along this sunny autumn trail with a big, broad smile on his face. He had obviously seen it all and so much that was brutal and ugly in his life. But, on such a day as this, there was only enjoyment and pleasure for Ariel, the fearless man.

Americans don’t bathe much. Oh, they stay plenty clean by showering and showering may even be a better way to get clean. A bath is not so much about getting clean but more about soaking and getting relaxed, maybe very relaxed, and that might be why Americans don’t bathe. Just today, in a conversation with a lady friend, she admitted that the last time she took a hot bath she couldn’t lift herself out of the tub she was so relaxed. It is a fearsome thing to get that relaxed, and many of us are in no shape, both in body and mind, to dare it.

The ancient Romans loved their baths and plunked down elaborate bathhouses wherever they conquered. The best way to civilize a barbarian is to get him to bathe or so those ancient Romans must have thought. Their baths were as large as swimming pools and came in varieties from very hot to tepid to cold to suit every mood and temperament. Business and politics were conducted at the baths and they must have discovered that after a hard day of conquering or cheering the blood spectacles at the coliseum, there was nothing like a hot bath to soothe and calm the nerves and muscles.

The other famous bathing culture is the Japanese. They don’t usually wash in the bath just soak and socialize and relax. It is something of a mystery to me how the Japanese can be so technologically advanced, hard working, and industrious and at the same time be a bathing culture. Perhaps one of the keys to their success is that they have learnt to enjoy and indulge their need for relaxation in their baths and it has proven to be the renewal they need that allows them to work hard, when they must, and to succeed at what they do.

A shower can happen in a few minutes. A bath should take some time, maybe a half-hour or more, in order to obtain the benefits it can offer. There is almost nothing that I can think of that is more relaxing than a warm or hot bath. It is almost impossible to stay tense when immersed in pleasantly warm water. Muscles will inevitably have to relax, tensions melt, and even the cares and concerns of daily life start to melt away in a warm soak. It is almost impossible to resist and that may be the problem. Do we want to get that relaxed? Will we ever recover enough to function again? It is a real fear.

We have a whole nervous system devoted to rest and relaxation and it is called the parasympathetic. Those nerves oppose the sympathetic nerves that give us the fight or flight response. And it is fight or flight that often defines how we feel and react most of our waking moments. Stress, tension, drive, ambition, identity, ego exist in this realm of the sympathetic nerves. It is where we often feel we are centered and from where we derive our essential being. But there is another realm of existence, expressed through the parasympathetic nerves, as natural to our being yet often smothered and rarely heard from. And yet it is quite natural to indulge this other side of our being, to rest, relax, release, and to feel easy, peaceful, and pleased, but how much of that do we ever really see in the world? It rarely seems to happen. There is a real hesitation, even fear, of peace and ease and rest. It may appear too sweet an indulgence, a dangerous surrender and too very seductive; that it will drain us of will power, drive, ego and ambition and that we cannot let happen. No, not ever.

So we avoid the bathtub and soaking in it. There is real danger there and it is to be avoided at all costs. Our very identity, our sense of self, can melt in the tub and be washed away and that we cannot let happen. So shower, get on with your busy life, and don’t look back. But if your racing heart, tensed muscles, and fevered brain have ever had enough, then slip into a tub and find out, at last, what you have been missing.

I pulled this article out of my files today and reread it. Perhaps I thought about this article now because I have been seeing my wife, who is recovering from surgery, in her bathrobe lately. I must have copied this article out of a magazine a few decades ago because I really liked it and, if you read it, you will see why. It is right up my lazy man alley. I am having trouble finding the author, Barbara Holland, to ask her for permission to include this article on my web site. I think she is living in a cabin in the back woods of Virginia (and probably in her bathrobe) and may not want to be found, but I’ve included her article here and this is her web site:
www.BarbaraHolland.net

She has this web site but, when I requested permission to use this article, the email I sent to her was returned. I will have to continue looking for her. She is a well known author with many books and articles to her credit and here is the one I found twenty years ago that I particularly liked:

NOW IS THE TIME FOR BATHROBES, THE CLOTH OF SLOTH
by Barbara Holland

I do my best thinking in a bathrobe. I’m ashamed of it, naturally, and if anyone catches me at it I fake a sneeze; when you’re sick you can wear a bathrobe. Otherwise you’re supposed to be dressed for action.

America has never been a nation of bathrobe wearers. Paul Revere, Annie Oakley and General Custer all slept with their boots on. We’re a frontier people and proud of it. Even now we feel we ought to be clothed to fight off Comanches at all times, and if the mailman catches us bathrobed we mumble and blush.

It has nothing to do with modesty, since a bathrobe covers us generously. It’s the shame of being thought inactive. Bathrobes, the cloth of sloth.

Everyone says we live in an age of increasing leisure, defined in the dictionary as the “state of having time which one can spend as one pleases.” But we shouldn’t please to sit around in a bathrobe. We should go skiing. We wouldn’t apologize to the meter reader if he caught us in our ski pants, but wearing a bathrobe isn’t a proper use of free time. To be decent, American leisure must be vigorous. If we were out jogging we’d be considered a useful member of society, but in a bathrobe we’re a leech, a slug, a parasite.

Bathrobes restrict activity. You can’t mow the lawn or do aerobics in them — that’s their charm and their shame. In the full-length female model you can’t even walk up the stairs without tripping, though most male bathrobes stop at the knee, no one knows why. Perhaps men are thought to have more need of their legs: if a fire starts, they can carry their swaddled wives to safety.

By limiting movement, the bathrobe releases the mind, like going into the lotus position but less painful. Enfolded in fabric, unable to bustle about, we can still read the Sunday paper, listen to music, sort old photographs or paint watercolors, absent-mindedly wiping the brush on our laps. We probably won’t muse over the budget deficit because you need proper clothes on to pay serious attention to current events. That’s why the Sunday paper should be read in a bathrobe; it softens the hard edge of happenings. We can contemplate the arms race and a recipe for asparagus souffle with equal detachment. Bathrobes encourage the long view and a sense of the durability of a civilization more likely to include souffles than the arms race.

The bathrobe keeps us home, excused from dealing with the world. Feet on the coffee table, we are draft exempt from the battles of business and daily life. “I’m not dressed,” we reply when people suggest that we drive them to the airport or put up the storm windows. Outside, time grinds through its endless events, large and small, but we can’t be expected to take part: we aren’t dressed.

The bathrobe keeps us gentle. It’s possible to sulk in a bathrobe, but not to rage. A furious person in a bathrobe would be a joke, commanding neither respect nor fear, and when we feel a fit of temper coming on we instinctively go put on street clothes in which to have it. Habitually bad-tempered people never wear bathrobes — in order to stay prepared. You can make love in a bathrobe, but not war. Statesmen should wear bathrobes at all times.

Statesmen are probably afraid of them, though. A lot of people are. They won’t admit it, but they think the bathrobe mindset, once yielded to, might weaken them forever. The soft folds, the easy sleeve, would soak through to the muscle and decay it. The taut bow of their determination would be quite unstrung. They would — perish the thought — relax, and this would be followed immediately by chronic unemployment and beer for breakfast.

You can tell bathrobe phobics because they never oversleep, and always dress and tie their shoes before they drink their coffee. They often say “I like to keep busy.” They say this whenever they see someone in a bathrobe.

Accomplishment means scurrying around with your shoes on. The prophets tell us about a future in which the modern executive will stay home and do it all by computer hookup, but I don’t believe it — the American people would never stand for it. I mean, what’s to stop him from getting through an entire day’s work in his bathrobe? What would Daniel Boone say?

A friend of mine has cleverly replaced her bathrobe with a sweat suit. She’s still lounging around over coffee at noon, but she doesn’t look it; she looks as if she got up at 5 to jog. People in real clothes see her and feel guilty, instead of asking scornfully if she’s sick. Still, a sweat suit just isn’t the same. It doesn’t impart the same peaceable viewpoint. Sweat suits are involved, bathrobes are detached.

Besides, you can go outside in a sweat suit, so it doesn’t get you out of doing things. True, I’ve driven people to trains in my bathrobe, but it isn’t decent and I always hoped the robe would pass for a coat. I tried to put a coat expression on my face instead of a bathrobe expression. The brisk, dressed expression.

Surely, surely, it’s time America packed in all this booted-and-spurred business, barging out to shoot buffalo or clean the gutters. Must we always stay dressed to chase cattle rustlers? Can’t we put on our bathrobes now?

Bathrobe wearers of the nation, stand tall. Open the door freely and proudly, even to your in-laws, and let them see what you’re wearing. The frontier is closed. It is time now for philosophy, for contemplation, for bathrobes.

Perhaps even for an afternoon nap.

Here is a quote from one of my favorite books, Breath, Sleep, The Heart and Life by Acharya. It suggests a relationship between our breathing and our mental state. The smooth, cool breathing he alludes to I take to be the diaphragmatic kind and the smile he refers to is not the kind you see on magazine covers or what people put on their face when they have their picture taken. It is called “the inner smile,” an indication that you are peaceful and pleased and you feel it in your body and face.

Two Yardsticks of Breathing

Catch yourself at any given moment and see if your head is hot or not. If it is, smile and drop the load of thoughts and anxiety from your head with a smile.

Yes, just break in a smile until the head has become cool.

While your head is hot, you will notice your breath is interrupted. You will also notice, as you are dropping the load from your head and neck, your breath has become normal again.

These are the two yardsticks which will enable you to bring health and happiness in your life. You will live to be a real person.

We do not care what is your life, what is your faith, that is, what is your occupational consciousness or your attitude toward other fellows and God.

One law you must obey. Flow along with cool breath and you will live. Stumble along with jerky breath and you die.

Smile and you live. Drop the smile and you die.

From: Breath is Life in the book Breath, Sleep, The Heart and Life by Acharya.