Self-Aggression & Self-Friendliness

In the physical practice of yoga, balance poses have always been among the most challenging to me. It’s not that I can relax into every other pose with ease. I’m not insanely flexible or strong, I struggle with many of the poses. But balance poses have been among the most frustrating to me because they feel like they should be easy – if only I could just stop falling over.

At one point, when working with balance, I noticed my mental process was something like this: “I’m here, and I need to be there. The weight needs to come more to the center of my heel. Right now it’s all at the outer edge, and I’m tipping over.” Implicit in that thinking is, “Until I get there, I cannot be balanced!”

At some point I realized that the pose became lighter and easier if I stopped thinking about it that way and started thinking, whatever state I was in, “Can I be balanced here?” I’d be standing in Tree pose looking horribly unbalanced with the weight all on the outermost edge of my foot, waving my arms around, and instead of thinking, “I need the weight to move back! I need to compensate, to fix!” I thought, “Could I stay like this forever? Can I be here and still not fall over?” It turns out I can stay upright in even the most awkward of contortions.

Yoga is an eight-limbed path, with asana, the physical practice, only one of its limbs. The very first limb are the yamas, the “restraints.” The very first yama is ahimsa, familiar to Buddhists as “nonviolence.” My very first yoga teacher made a point of emphasizing that nonviolence isn’t just about not harming others; it’s about avoiding self-aggression, too, being aggressive inwardly. This is significant in yoga because the temptation to self-abuse is easy in public settings where we’re all being asked to work with difficult challenges while others watch, and it’s very important to maintain loving-kindness for oneself through all of that and not give in to self-abuse. I’ve spent many hours in a room with other people capable of stretching or balancing or pushing in ways that my body cannot, and I’ve spent a good portion of that time angry at myself, frustrated, depressed, or disheartened about wanting to be more flexible, wanting to be stronger, wanting to have better balance, and experiencing shame and embarrassment when I’d spectacularly collapse out of a balance pose with a series of loud thuds.

Most of the time when that happened I’d laugh and put a good face on it, but even this is self-aggression: I don’t feel happy or light-hearted when those things happen, and my urge to “put a good face on it” is motivated by feeling critical of myself for being upset. “I would be a better person if I were easygoing about this.” Fundamentally, when I act on the desire to be how I am not, it’s self-aggression, and it manifests as frustration, self-loathing, insecurity, anger, despondency, and irritability.

Every morning when I shower, I practice Padangusthasana: standing on one foot with the other leg extended forward, or to the side, as I wash my legs. It’s just a habit I’ve gotten into over the years. It’s a good opportunity to notice that self-aggression arising, as I tip from side to side and get frustrated – “I’m just trying to wash my legs, why can’t I just stand still?” The other morning in such an occasion of irritability, I saw that self-aggression creates an artificial duality. It’s very concrete with physical balance: when I am being self-aggressive, I perceive two forces at odds: the motion “away from balance” and my often-frustrated efforts to move “towards balance.” In this way, I fight myself. And the reality is there are not two distinct motions happening, just the one.

When I’m doing this I can sometimes feel it as a frustrated tension, and when I feel that, I think to myself, “Am I fighting myself? Can I try to be friends with myself instead?” With that, I feel a strong sense of relief wash over me and then the swaying and dynamism of true balance is easier to feel, and my effort can be in confluence with that dynamism instead of a futile resistance. This “self-friendliness,” to coin the term, is incredibly important to my practice. Often the challenge is finding the right way to do it.

Self-friendliness is a balancing act all its own, for me. It’s a careful balance of discipline and compassion towards myself. On the one side, discipline turns into self-aggression, a near-enemy, and the equanimity is lost. On the other side, the compassion turns into indulgence, a bit of a near enemy, and the discipline is lost. Conveniently, physical balance provides a great hint when I sag into indulgence and lose discipline: I fall over. Not all practices give such clear hints, though, and so working to stay disciplined but compassionate is tricky for me in other realms.

I have a long-cultivated habit of daydreaming. I have some of the most spectacular daydreams, scenes out of the best superhero action movies or spy flicks or martial arts movies, where I’m generally the star and capable of amazing superhuman feats. For years, I’ve done this, and I’ll catch myself fantasizing in the middle of the work day about being able to set cars on fire with my mind, or about terrorists storming our building and me defeating them single-handedly with my telekinesis.

These are challenging to me because they’re entirely consuming: It’s hard to remain mindful for the duration of a daydream, because the nature of a daydream is to consume the attention entirely. I also have long suspected that my idle daydreaming is providing me with gratification for some unmet needs or assuaging some self-loathing, and so I’ve long wanted to understand them more, to see what’s behind them.

This is where the balance comes in: giving in and letting myself be absorbed fully into my daydreaming is not disciplined, it’s torpor, it’s just numbing me, but it’s been very difficult for me to work with them skillfully without falling towards self-aggression. It’s incredibly subtle, too; I can tell myself I’m just curious about my daydreams, but then feel that frustration that suggests non-acceptance. I’m not just curious about them, I’m wanting to change them. I see them as a problem. I wish I were different.

For a while, though, it hasn’t been clear to me how to find balance between those two. What’s the compassionate but disciplined approach to working with such powerful, consuming daydreams?

Last night I was walking home from sangha and listening to Sigur Ros and it was a beautiful, crisp night out and one of these daydreams came up. I tried to just be mindful and let it do its thing, imagining things being this way that they aren’t, and then instead of getting aggressive towards myself, trying immediately to dig in, I thought, how can I bring some self-friendliness to this? And in that moment instead of tensing and resisting I just smiled towards my daydreaming mind and thought, with compassion, “That would be great, wouldn’t it?” Not in a dismissive way, but with a sense of acknowledgment, some validation and affirmation for whatever need I was trying to meet with the daydream. And in doing that, I felt that same sense of lightness and relief, and the false duality I create with resistance started to melt, and I could glimpse some of the desires I resist that lead me to daydream.

It’s always been a bit of a paradox to me that in meditation we have to do a lot of work to realize that there’s no work to be done. Or, in this case, its corollary: In order to effect change, we cannot be trying to effect change. I only find positive change when I reach a place of acceptance, because positive change, for me, is always just a surrender, a doing less, resisting less.

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