Category Archives: Self-Care

Day of Rest

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When Eric and I were coming to the end of our walk with the dogs this morning, he asked if I wanted to stop at the grocery store on the way home, “or are you going to still try and make it to yoga?” I told him, “I haven’t decided if I’m going to yoga or meditation at the Shambhala Center.” He asked, “How do you decide which one you are going to do?”

This is my dilemma every Sunday morning: 9:30 – 11 a.m. yoga class, or 10 a.m. – 12 p.m. meditation. Sometimes, I go to yoga and sneak in late to meditate at the end, but I’m usually a little sweaty, not dressed for it, feeling kind of gross and tired, and really want to go home, shower and eat, so usually I don’t. I usually pick yoga, since it’s one of the only classes taught by one of my favorite teachers, and because I sit whether I go to the public time or not. If I skip yoga, I skip yoga for the day, but if I skip the public sit, I’ll still meditate on my own.

I explained to Eric that yoga is intended to synchronize body and mind, is sometimes seen as preparation for sitting practice, and as a writer/reader/thinker who spends so much time in my head, as a disembodied mind, that what I usually need more is to mindfully move my body.

But if my brain is especially discursive or troubled, when I’m avoiding thinking about something, denying some reality, yoga can end up being a way to avoid, a method of denial or distraction. It’s times like these when I need to meditate, to calm and train my mind, to face reality, to connect with what’s really going on, to work with it on its own terms, as it is and as I am.

That’s what I needed today, to work with my mind, meet it where it’s at, try to give it some space. I’m thinking, or rather trying not to think, about someone I love who is suffering–more than one someone, actually. I woke up last night and worried instead of sleeping, and feel sick to my stomach, heartbroken about it. Each update about the situation feels like a knife, a sharp cut, and yet I can’t seem to look away. My mind rushes between “what should I do? what’s going to happen? what should I do?!” and “I’m not going to think about it, just ignore it, numb out, avoid it,” neither of which is a healthy state of being.

 

So today, my mind needed meditation, more than it needed mindful movement. And it also needed writing and dog (both of which I got plenty while I sat in the back yard drafting this post, a dog lounging in the grass on each side of me).

I’m not having an entirely restful day of rest, but I am doing the best I can, and that’s really all any of us can ever do.

Y is for Yoga

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image by lululemon athletica

I am embarrassed to say it happened again. I didn’t know what word I was going to use today, even though yoga is one of my four primary, regular, spiritual practices. I started brainstorming a list: yawn, yesterday, yes. I got as far as opening my dictionary to “y” and as soon as I saw that first page of words, I thought “yogi” and immediately after came the next thought: yoga. D’oh!

So again, I suppose it’s that thing about fish and water, it’s such a part of your world, your life, your environment that it becomes oddly invisible.

Yoga grounds me in my body, centers me there. As in other practices, the act of doing it regularly teaches me a lot about myself. I learn how I spend too much time comparing myself to others, judging and evaluating, and I realize that the practice, the experience isn’t about competition at all, with anyone. It’s about the reality of what is happening on my own mat, about cultivating compassion.

Some days, I move fluidly, am flexible and strong, can balance in tree for a full five minutes, can hover in crow or hold a headstand with confidence. Other days, I come to the mat shaky and raw, irritable, stiff and weak, one side works but the other needs extra understanding and gentleness.

image by lululemon athletica

And other times, I can trust my body, but my mind is a mess, a wreck, a wild animal. It won’t stay with me on the mat. It keeps wanting to rush off or draw me in to long conversations or even arguments. I stay with it, stay on the mat, and hope it will settle, be still. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t and instead spends the whole practice in another room, another moment, another universe.

For me, yoga is meditation in movement. I expand the breath focus of sitting meditation to include my whole body, moving my awareness as my body moves from pose to pose. It expands the practice of training my mind (as in sitting meditation) to training my body and mind to be in the same space at the same time, moving together.

I’ve been struggling a bit with my yoga practice lately, feel a bit stuck and bored, but more importantly I have been struggling with my body. As it ages, I have entered a new phase of being that is utterly confusing. I haven’t quite learned how to care for my 44 year old body. It’s needs are so starkly different. It feels fatigue in a way I have never experienced. I work to be gentle with my Happy Buddha belly, trying to see it’s roundness as lucky, rather than stubborn and ugly. I try to be compassionate towards this body’s need for rest. I really want to understand what it needs from me, I want to not just love it, but to care for it in a way that allows it to thrive.

I contemplate impermanence, cultivate gratitude for the chance to get older, a chance so many others will never have. I also remember that this “old” body will be the “young” one I remember later, maybe even mourn, and that my sense of age is relative.

image by lululemon athletica

And I practice, strong in warrior pose one day, needing to rest in child’s pose the next, accepting whatever my current reality might be, and when I am done, I dedicate the merit of my practice, offering it so that suffering might be dispelled.

Namaste, kind and gentle reader. The divine nature within me perceives and adores the divine nature within you. I honor the place in you in which the entire universe dwells. I honor the place in you which is of love, light, peace and joy. When you are in that place in you and I am in that place in me, we are one.