Life Is About Adaptability

“I suck at yoga.” 

This thought bubble often hung above me after going weeks, months even, without being a regular on my yoga mat.

I recently lost a battle to a slippery curb in the damp rain and exploded my ankle in a tumble. The resulting sprain and torn ligaments have kept me off of my yoga mat longer than I want. Even prior, my sons were home from school for almost three months, and getting to a yoga class was difficult.

The absence of my physical yoga practice has caused layers of frustration and grief. I attempted to be gentle with myself for circumstances I couldn’t control, but I can think of at least a few times when I looked like a caricature, shoulders sunken, metaphorical rain clouds over my head. 

My self-critical nature isn’t an anomaly. In all ways, we humans are rough on ourselves. As Pema Chodron puts it, “this tendency to be hard on ourselves does not come from the buddha nature, the basic goodness within all of us; it comes from the ego and our conditioning.” Our humanness gets in the way, and we’re critical of ourselves, regardless of the situation. 

Yet, when I frequently hear friends and students express similar self-criticism, I encourage them with a core belief:

our lives are enhanced by our ability to adapt to suffering

But adaptability doesn’t come naturally to us overthinking humans who equate change with suffering. We have to cultivate the practice of being adaptable, particularly when life is extra messy.

In Buddhism, Bhāvanā is an essential concept that means the development or cultivation of something to call it into existence. My layperson’s definition is “fake it till you make it.” We practice being adaptable until one day we realize we are — at least‌ a bit.

Bhāvanā has little to do with the physical, like yoga poses or productivity. Rather, cultivation of a quality like adaptability is an inside job, especially when life is messy and we get sick or injured. So when we are unsure if we’re doing something “right,” or “enough," let's instead reflect:

it is more imperative to practice sincere adaptability, than to resist change

It's impossible to be perfect, and life will continually cause us to stumble. Rather than resist or ignore life's pitfalls, we instead hold ourselves lovingly accountable to cultivate mindfulness and presence, especially in the face of challenges. B. Alan Wallace, a Tibetan Buddhist writer, compares this to cultivating our hearts, minds, attention skills, virtues of patience, forbearance, equanimity, wisdom, compassion, and loving kindness. We tend to all aspects of cultivation as a farmer tends to a field. We may not see results immediately, and we may have a rough season, but we take care of our landscape until we are a bit closer to remembering we were always perfect, complete, and capable of adaptability. 

It’s not what we do, it’s how we live. The way we do one thing represents how we do everything. There is wisdom in showing ourselves loving kindness as we adapt to the ever-changing nature of life.

And we spend this lifetime cultivating a remembrance of that.