“We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” – Joseph Campbell
Nothing like an impending move to make you question why you own what you own. I spent most of the past two weeks packing up our house. It was sifting, sorting, selling, donating. It was an interesting experience to reflect on what I had been keeping and why, an excellent chance to practice the yama known as aparigraha.
Aparigraha is sometimes translated as non-possession but that doesn’t really capture the essence of this yama for me. Calling it non-possession makes me think I should be giving away everything that I own, and aspire to live the ascetic, possession-less life. While there are certainly schools of yoga that encourage this kind of lifestyle, it makes more sense to me when aparigraha is translated as non-grasping, not clinging so tightly to what we have.
Sometimes what we are holding is a physical thing, like the single sock my husband was refusing to get rid of even though he hasn’t seen the mate in more than a year. Or the six pairs of scissors that I was keeping, you know, just in case one pair got lost.
Or maybe it’s not something physical. Ingela Abbott writes, “Am I attached to being a stiff person or a weak body, attached to my old tensions or old injuries, attached to blaming people for my old pains or injuries, attached to doing a perfect pose or doing the finished pose, attached to doing a pose a certain way, or attached to my teacher’s way of presenting the poses, or just simply attached to that certain spot in the classroom?”
She goes on to argue that releasing the grip on physical things, thoughts, ideas, and even the grip on other people, allows us to connect more fully to our true and most authentic self. “The more we let go in all areas of life, the more life unfolds itself to us."
My friend Naomi Gottlieb-Miller just wrote a great blog post about the stories we tell ourselves and the way we hold on to beliefs and ideas about ourselves, even when those stories aren’t really true.
As for me, I’m busy unpacking. But not in the way I hoped I would be unpacking. Unfortunately, the impending house purchase fell through the day before closing, two days before the move. Unknowingly, we were working with a terrible lender who erroneously pre-approved us for a loan and then wasn’t able to get the loan through the underwriters. After talking to another lender in an effort to save the deal, it was clear that we never should have been pre-approved for the loan in the first place.
The reason we couldn’t get the loan was a direct result of a tenant who lived in the rental property we own. She didn’t pay rent for six months last year, had to be evicted, and left us with a huge repair bill on the townhouse. In other words, absolutely nothing I could do to change that woman’s behavior or the decision the bank made on the loan that we were expecting to get to pay for the new house.
Talk about stressful, frustrating, disappointing! I had a day where I was clinging so tightly to those feelings that I was totally paralyzed.
But then I started unpacking.
I realized that just like the sorting and reflecting and letting go that I did when I was packing up, in order to move on, I had to let go of some things again. I had to let go of my disappointments, and my ideas of success and failure. I had to let go of my anger over how someone else had power over my options. I had to let go of what could have been, let go of the plan I had. Quite simply, this whole ordeal has just been another chance to practice a little more aparigraha and stop grasping so tightly.
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