(This blog is going to be a challenge to illustrate! I may have to draw.)Welcome to the first official post of this new blog. It's spring, Passover, Easter, the season for starting new things.
As always, I start with something casual in mind. I'm not composing a draft of this in Word—I'm typing right on the screen. Usually things proceed to get more complicated.
What's on my mind today is that my shoulder hurts, which is alarming given that soon I'll be going off on a yoga retreat, and I think I better try to take a break from yoga for a few days.
I'm going to try some herbal patches from my acupuncturist, who says they may ease inflammation and circulate qi. Once I might have been inclined to dismiss such remedies, though that now seems kind of dumb.
This morning my neighbor K. said, "I get more and more open to alternative methods as the years go by. What do we really know about the world?" I agree.
K. also said of my shoulder: "As we get older we really have to face that our body can't do all these things any more. It's hard to get used to."
I still don't think of these stresses and strains as age, though I probably should. I never did these things before, so I don't generally sense the fall-off in performance.
I've spent the week thinking about athletes, and how incredibly hard it must be to have your entire fortune resting on your body. One pulled hamstring and you're out for the year. (It's the first day of baseball season, by the way.)
This is one thing that fascinates me as I go ahead with yoga: the fact that I'm always leaping from the specifics of what happens in class or to my body to larger thoughts about the world.
That seems appropriate, in a way—yoga isn't just about physical poses, I gather, it's about using the body to get to a mental state where you can appreciate the great Oneness, or God. So moving off the body into the realm of ideas makes sense.
On the other hand, what about that body? My mind or will is definitely involved in my practice, telling me to stay still when I want to move (or vice versa) or directing my attention to one area or another.
What about that body? When she teaches, C. often talks about how yoga is about learning to feel our own bodies. And really, it is. I'd never appreciated the way my joints moved, or even known about certain muscles. I've been living here all this time and I had no idea!
How do you talk or write about this? I've only begun to look at the yoga literature, but so far I've seen on the one hand books that offer instructions on how to get into the poses and on the other books that talk about the spiritual results of the practice.
Is there a way to monitor what happens in between instruction and enlightenment? Is it too hard to put movements into words? Are physical experiences too individual to translate broadly?
Is it boring to talk about what happens in our bodies?
For the most part, I'd guess, we talk about the body largely in the context of growing old. My 85-year-old friend R. calls this the "organ recital." She talks about this dismissively. I feel embarrassed when I talk about how I can't read subways maps and menus anymore—that wasn't supposed to happen to me! Do yoga instructors go mad with the tedium of students complaining about their various strains and injuries?
What about the whole universe of physical sensation that accompanies the aches and pains? I remember when I first started developing callouses on my feet. For some reason the sheets on my bed felt so wonderful and luxurious on my hardening soles. I didn't want to forget it, because now I don't notice that any more.
I have felt that something is happening with my circulation. One day I talked to my friend G. about caffeine and alcohol, how suddenly I could feel it actually moving through my system, the rush of it. Was my body more sensitive or was my awareness heightened. Was it yoga? It turned out she was experiencing the same thing.
I've spent a lot of time just trying to feel my heart. It hadn't even known where it was in my chest—like a lot of people, apparently, I thought it was on the left. What about connecting that metaphorical "heart center" with this genuine organ? What's that heart going to feel like six months from now?
G. also remarked that lately she was in touch with a very young part of herself, and she thought perhaps it was because she'd been caring for an aging parent. I've had that feeling, too—but I have a sense it connects with yoga.
The other night C. was describing happiness as petting a cat, among other things. Someone else laughed, "You sound like you are five!" It made me wonder if my own deepest pleasures have really changed much since that age.
I often feel about five at yoga—for me, it occasionally feels like play, and that induces a feeling of physical delight that I think I also experienced as a child, but had almost entirely forgotten. This is a joy that seems to operate under the radar of my mind.
I've been reading lately about attachment theory, and how some of our first experiences are somatic—might yoga have a role to play in getting us back there? I wonder.
And then there are the asanas themselves. I did my first handstand, albeit with my feet resting on the wall, last week—hooray! (And maybe that's why my shoulder hurts!) The truth was, for the first time in doing a pose, I felt scared—not when going up, but on coming down!
When I arrived on my hands and knees, I felt shaky. I felt as if I'd fallen off a horse and better get back on before I could never do it again. Why did that happen? My friend K. broke the handstand barrier that week, too. What was it like for her? I could ask these things. Track the course of handstand, and all those other things.
Anyway. No such thing as a short item for me. Ideas for a half-dozen posts in here, I guess. If anyone got this far and has ideas about any of this, comments welcome. Have a lovely day, whenever you read this.
P.S. What's with the weird initials? Where's the blogger book of ethics? Don't want to steal quotes or quote people by name without their asking, but it's hard to imagine asking everybody first...what to do? Assign all new initials? Don't do it? Don't be lazy and get the okays? Input welcome here, too. This kind of writing offers so much pleasure and freedom precisely because it doesn't have to abide by all the rules that some "professional" writing does, but there's no escaping the issues....
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