 Why I’m Not Coming Back
Harvard Magazine, July/August 1998
Thanks, but I won’t be coming back to Harvard for our 10th reunion. I’d like to tell you it’s because none of my closest friends are coming, and the cost seems excessive for a couple of cocktail parties and a Brazilian barbecue. A slightly more honest answer would be that I dread running into my first love (the one I was going to marry and move with to Vermont), who’s coming along with his sweet, lawyerly wife. But really, I’m not coming because I’m not sure I’m living an Ivy-colored life anymore. Despite the fact that I’m far happier than I ever was at Harvard, I secretly feel I haven’t lived up to my crimson-coated potential.
I wonder what the world would think if I offered my honest submission to the alumni magazine: Claudia Cummins recently left Washington, DC, where she worked in the White House and then served as a journalist, to return to her family in Mansfield, Ohio. She works part-time at her family’s hinge factory, teaches yoga in area banquet halls, and babysits her brother’s children on Tuesdays and Thursdays. She’d love to hear from anyone passing through north-central Ohio -- contact her at her parents’ home, where she still lives.
The truth is, I wake up most mornings with a happy heart. I’ve crafted a life full of the people and places and creative explorations that I love. I write endlessly, and practice my happy yoga, and many mornings walk through the sky-filled meadows behind our house. My part-time job, in an office I share with my two brothers at our (utterly unglamourous) business, offers me ample time for around-the-world travels. My siblings, my parents, my cousins are also my best friends. I’ve found in them that safety net of unconditional love and laughter so desperately missed in my years away from home. And I’m beginning to feel I’m an important strand in this web of helping hands as well. I have a growing circle of yoga students who say I help them live fuller, happier, wiser lives. All this means more to me than any of my Harvard honors.
Why then, am I still not coming? A Harvard diploma is a heavy load, I’m learning. It’s quite a responsibility, being told endlessly that you are among the best and the brightest -- and being offered medals and honors and diplomas as proof. Unto those whom much is given, much is expected.
I spent my 20's striving to live up to that promise, filling the shoes I’d been trained for. The White House sounds good, never mind the fact that you could have at best called me a "low-level aide." Still I have enough pictures of me standing next to George Bush to know that working there is really No Big Deal in the grand scheme of things. It may end up sounding like my career highlight -- "Executive Assistant to the Deputy Assistant to the President for Policy Planning," but honestly, my being there didn’t change the world a whit.
I spent a year earning my masters at Northwestern University in Chicago and returned to Washington as a business reporter, first at a banking newspaper and then at Bloomberg News, an up-and-coming media empire run by an ambitious Harvard grad. I had my share of scoops, several little stories in the New York Times, a cover in the Boston Globe. Once I was named one of the top young business journalists in the country.
But you know, I wasn’t really happy. I knew I was climbing the career ladder I’d been primed for. I began to ache somewhere deep inside. Perhaps I’d been faithful to my training, my ambition, my pedigree, but somewhere along the way I’d lost my self. When I’m 80, I said, I’m not going to regret not writing another telecommunications story, but I am going to regret not climbing a mountain. I made a New Year’s resolution.
And then I left. I moved back home to Ohio, where my roots are deep but where I once swore I’d said my last goodbye. Now here I am, feeling full and free, well-traveled and inspired. I’ve spent a summer on a Greek Isle in the Aegean and helicoptered over lava-spuming volcanoes in Hawaii. I’ve run a marathon, with friends cheering me through Washington’s endless, monument-lined streets. I’ve lived for a month under a thin blue tarp while climbing mountains in Colorado and I’ve swum with dolphins in the turquoise Caribbean.
And still I’m afraid to come back. Maybe I’m courageous enough to chart my own course but not yet liberated enough to give up caring what you think of me. Somewhere along the way I got stuck on this idea that success Harvard style means following the well-worn yellow-brick road to Wall Street or Random House or Carnegie Hall. What I really want to believe, though, is that the true value of a Harvard education is that it liberates us to take that risky leap into more dangerous, uncharted paths that we can call our own. Into lives lived truly, directly and whole-heartedly, where small acts of service and care matter far more than society’s accolades. As a comfort, I repeat my favorite quote by Mother Teresa: "We do not great things, we do only small things with great love." That’s the kind of potential I would like to live up to.
And so here I am, living either a really small life in a little town in Ohio, or, as I would like to believe, living a far bigger life than I could have ever fathomed. As I recently wrote another Ivy-leaguer, I am in paradise as long as I don’t think about the future. Maybe by the time our 15th reunion -- or 25th -- comes around, I’ll feel okay enough about all this to come back. Hopefully by then I’ll be old enough not to care so much about how my life reads on paper. Maybe I’ll be wise enough to remember that words and titles and addresses can never capture a life well-lived. And that this big world is so much more vast and varied, bigger and more brilliant than any Ivy-covered promise could ever foretell.a Basics: Mindful Movement
Yoga Journal, September 2003
In the classical yoga tradition, movement and breathing practices are considered mere preludes to seated meditation. Asana and pranayama are offered as tools that cleanse and heal the body, preparing a practitioner to sit quietly for long stretches at a time.
But you don’t have to be sitting in Padmasana (Lotus Pose) in order to cultivate a meditative state of being. When practiced mindfully, yoga asanas themselves can nurture many of the same gifts as more formal meditation practices: mental calm, balance and clarity. Explored in this way, yoga postures are transformed from mere stretches into meditation in movement.
How can we infuse our daily asana practice with a more mindful quality? Try a few of the following strategies to help you wake up to the present moment while moving through your favorite yoga postures.
Practice what the Buddhists call “bare attention,” attuning yourself to the raw sensations coursing through the body during your daily practice. While in a particular posture, take a moment to notice where you feel muscles stretching, where in your body you sense resistance and tightness, where you feel tension and where you feel spaciousness. Notice the warmth or coolness within your joints and organs, the firmness or softness of your muscles, the smoothness or roughness of your breath. Break the ingredients of the moment into their simplest elements, focusing not on judging the sensations but on simply witnessing them.
Use the breath as a resting place for the brain. In many schools of meditation, students are trained to quiet the mind by continually returning their awareness to the breath. You can use this strategy while moving through your daily yoga practice, too. Notice when you’re inhaling and when you’re exhaling. Notice which parts of the body move to the tune of the breath and which do not. Notice whether the breath feels smooth or jagged, hard or soft, enthusiastic or half-hearted. When your thoughts begin to stray beyond your body, gently coax them back to awareness of your breath. Over time this practice will teach you to maintain one-pointed attentiveness for longer stretches of time.
Intersperse your practice with periods of stillness. Begin and end your practice with restorative postures that enable you to experience both the benefits and challenges of physical stillness. In the middle of your practice, insert a resting pose between more demanding asanas, and use this as an opportunity to nourish quiet attentiveness. Or try holding a familiar pose for a few moments longer than usual, simply asking your mind to be a witness to the shifting sensations within. Over time you’ll learn to cultivate an inner oasis of quiet tranquility even amidst the most demanding yoga asanas.
Ask questions. Stay curious and engaged by continually challenging yourself to articulate your inner experience. As you explore a particular posture ask yourself what benefits it offers. How does it change your breathing? How does it alter your mood? Does it calm or energize you? And what can it teach you about yourself and the world around you? You may be surprised by the answers that bubble up from within as you move through your daily asana practice with mindfulness, attention and curiosity.
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