The Bad Guys

My partner and I should have gone to bed last night, but instead we were sitting around the kitchen table and talking about her job. We were talking about something in regards to "snitching" - apparently this is a bit of an issue with the population that she works with and in particular understanding that sometimes it is actually GOOD to tell an authority figure about what is up and when someone may be in danger.

Anyway, this went around and around until finally we came to an important realization: we have to learn how to see the world in non-absolutes, in non black and white dichotomies.

And then I thought about the movie Crash (we just re-watched it the other day...go watch it if you haven't done so already).

Watch This Scene (to set it up, you have to know that the woman in the car crash was sexually harassed / molested a few days earlier by the cop who tries to save her)

The entire movie plays off this theme of there being no such thing as "a bad guy": the police are good and they are bad, the people who are heros do some terrible things, the people who you think are bad are really pretty decent, and all of us are suffering incredibly at the end of the day.

Usually when I think of themes for my yoga practice, I start with the small picture (what happens to me on my mat) and then zoom out to think about how this is true in my everyday life. But this kind of worked the other way around...I started to notice how easy it is to see my left or right side as the "bad" side, or how this one pose is "the devil pose" or how much I wish this pose would just disappear because clearly it was the span of satan (not naming any names).

All of the stuff that comes up in our practice is neither good nor is it bad, it just IS...we decide to put those labels on and thus frame our experience with the poses, our teachers, the person practicing next to us, our family, the police, our worlds...and consequently, we might be missing out on something because we have already decided what something is. And like in the movie, Crash, that something might just save your life...