Y is for Yoga

Leave a reply

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.

Gratitude Friday

4 Replies

This post is a mashup of The Little Bliss List and Joy Jam, and as such is meant to celebrate: the little things that brought me hope and happiness this week, the sweet stuff of life, those small gifts that brought me joy this week. By sharing them, I not only make public my gratitude, but maybe also help you notice your own good stuff and send some positive energy out into the world.

1. Tulips from a dear friend. This one is my favorite color.

2. A/C in the Eddy Building. They finally turned it on! My office is on the third floor of an old cinderblock building with huge windows that reach wall to wall and from the ceiling to the height of my desk, so it gets HOT in here. My plants love it, but my brain and the chocolate have been reaching melting point with the 80+ degree temperatures we’ve had this week, so I’m grateful for freon.

3. Dance Walking. Eric and I were watching “Glee” the other night (or rather, as I have explained before, I was watching and he just happened to be in the room) and during a musical number, he said “I would hate living in a world where people just broke into big dance, musical numbers or had to sing everything. It’s like my worst nightmare.” I just smiled and stayed quiet. He looked at me and said, “You’d love it wouldn’t you?” Yes, yes I would…

I have always loved musicals (The Wizard of Oz, The Wiz, Funny Girl, Lady Sings the Blues, Fame, Flashdance, Grease, Oliver, etc., and the TV show Glee). I was in theater and choir in high school. I long to be in a flash mob. I have been known to break into spontaneous dance parties of one. And this video makes me so happy.

 

4. Guess what I’ll be doing this weekend?

5. Susan Piver. I am still basking in the glow of the Fearless Creativity retreat I did with her and ten other lovely people two weeks ago, and for the Open Heart Project this week, she made a video about my favorite topic, basic goodness. I adore her.

 

6. I realized this week that in only two more weeks, I will be on summer vacation, my first one in about ten years.

Bonus joy, bliss, and gratitude: I had moments this week (you read that right, more than one) in which I felt like I was enough and that I had enough, and maybe more importantly, telling you this so publicly doesn’t even make me feel afraid that by mentioning it, I’ll somehow jinx it. I am cultivating confidence in enough.