Soul Circling

I have thought a lot lately about my second child. Wondered, hoped, patiently imagined.

One of my beloved yoga teachers believes that the soul of the baby chooses its mother.

In Savasana the other day, I imagined the soul of my second child circling like a plane in the sky above my belly, just waiting for a soft place to land.

Restoration and Marianne Dashwood

These last few days I have been doing restorative yoga in place of traditional practice to try and regulate some of the post-pregnancy imbalances in the body. I will be doing this for the next week or so, until I can feel in my body an internal softness, an openness. My restorative practice involves Surya Namaskara; followed by a combination of restorative and Yin postures that aim to deepen and open the hips, upper back, shoulders, hamstrings; and then followed by Yoga Mudra (without folding forward) and Padmasana. I close with a supported Savasana.

Though this is a more passive practice, and though it generates less heat (though I am consistently amazed by how much heat Yoga Mudra creates), there is an intensity to it. Folding forward in Upavishta Konasana and holding it for 2-3 minutes instead of 5 breaths creates a completely different wave of energy in the body. I emerge from this practice with a high that is comforting and warm. And I see and feel the effects of taking restoration. I miss my practice...but I am giving myself permission to restore.

Thankfully, because my teacher is generous and wise about the evolving needs of the body, my teacher allows me to do this practice at the shala while most of the other students are making their way through the Primary, Second and Third series. This generosity is the spirit of the shala — even though we practice as traditionally as possible here, any student with an injury, sickness, pregnancy, fatigue can take the time needed to restore. Ashtanga is a lifetime practice, after all.

And so, as I lie in Supta Baddha Konasana, I can feel the body heat and breathing swirling all around me. The sound of Ujjayi, of bodies falling to the floor out of handstand or Pincha Mayurasana, the little sips of air before a body jumps up into handstand or Bakasana...

Yesterday I lay there and listened and felt. In particular, I tapped in to the female energy in the room, marveling at the magnificent strength of the women at the shala, and I thought about Austen's Marianne Dashwood. She is fiesty, improper, strong in many ways. But physically, as the book tells us, her well being gives way to her heart. She has few boundaries in her passion, she falls and almost breaks an ankle from sheer bliss, and she nearly dies of a broken heart. And yet the narrative — the culture itself — makes space for her to fall helplessly into the arms of her rescuer, or to the days spent in bed with a fever she contracts from consequences of heartbreak. She is a combination of beautiful will, and a feminine creature of her time. She negotiates the dominant standards with her own desire to jump out of her skin.

In this shala, strength, passion, love, determination...all look quite different these days. We would not have seen Marianne jumping up into handstand, or breathing her way into Kapotasana. Her clothes would layer over the delicateness of her body, while the women at our shala, including myself, leave the body — carved from so many practices — only lightly layered and open to sweat.

But Marianne would have wanted to practice Ashtanga, I think. And, at the same time, if she were to get hurt or overly tired, she would rest. Marianne would restore, and her world would let her.

As I lay there, I tried to imagine myself in Austen's day. Needing softness, having permission to go very, very gently. I imagined Margaret Dashwood — who takes after her sister so much — saying in the film, as Marianne drags her out into the summer rain, "I'm not supposed to run..." And part of me giggled. And part of me said to myself, "Right now, I'm not supposed to run."

"Don't worry. I've got you."

Today during practice I asked my teacher if she would help me to drop back (Tuesday's pre-Moon-Day Kapotasana was still haunting my lower back, and I needed some help softening on the way down and up).

She dropped me back once and saw that my feet turn out when I stand back up.

"Do it again without turning your feet out," she said. And I hemmed and hawed about how I know I shouldn't do that, and how I always do, and yada yada yada... And she smiled and dropped me back, and I kept my feet forward.

She got another idea. She told me that one of her teachers used to hold her feet while she dropped back, and of course I shuddered at the idea. And she looked at me with this look of earnestness and wisdom that I have become so used to, and she said these words that I hear her say over and over to all of us: "Don't worry. I've got you." And she sat herself down on the floor (let it be known that she is quite pregnant) and held firmly onto my legs while I dropped back over and over, with very little pain in my back, and somehow I caught a glimmer — tiny, but there — of what it might be like to stand up on my own without turning out my feet. And as I dropped back, she said, "Yes!" and encouraged me. And as I stood back up she said again, "You see? Don't worry. I've got you. Do it again."

And when my drop backs were done I sort of floated to the floor and found Paschimottanasana.

And now, several hours after those dropbacks, I am thinking about what a tremendous gift it is to have someone say to you first thing in the morning, "Don't worry. I've got you."

Resting from the Gaze

I've been working so hard to soften my practice for the last few months. I have neglected to realize that softening is a bit about working less hard, and about resting from the gaze of focus.

Frankly, whether you're mindfully trying to soften or not, it's not necessary to work SO hard. But it's hard not to, isn't it? Years of associating success, strength, and ability with hard work that hurts have persuaded me to think that progressing in practice means exertion beyond what is reasonably challenging (a nebulous qualifier there). "Trying" to soften, likewise, has been constrained by the same ideal. I picture a small child squeezing her eyes tightly together — it doesn't make a ton of difference to the darkness you see, and it gathers a whole lot more tension in the face.

I'm have been a squeezer: squeezing into my day all that I can fit into it, squeezing the energy I have left before I MUST stop to have a meal, squeezing my patience before speaking up, squeezing myself into a bound pose. If you're not careful, you can squeeze yourself into a small space where there's not much room for anything that doesn't quite fit. That's not Yoga, and that's not the expansion of the mind, the dissolution of the ego, the liberation of the body that we're trying to work through/toward. It's not fun, or freeing, or loving, or sustainable.

It took a conscious week away from practice to show me what I was missing. A few weeks ago while vacationing in Maine, I took a whole week away from my Ashtanga practice and did restorative yoga. Using props, I incorporated Yin Yoga into a dreamy, soothing morning practice that involved sitting in poses like Virasana and Padmasana for minutes at a time. Aside from the high that came with this practice — a long, liquid flowing sense of calm — there was an opening in the joints, in the muscles, and in the heart. Wrapped up in this practice was a kindness to the self and the body that created a kind of floating, and it was invaluable in negotiating the complexities of visiting with family, long car rides with a wee child who doesn't like them, an ego that tried to berate me for taking some time away.

When I returned to practice the following week, I saw even more profoundly the impact of this sojourn. Indeed, some of the poses were more challenging than before (drop-backs, for instance) because I had been doing the passive practice of restoration; but other poses were significantly more open to breath (bound poses, deep hip openers). And, surprisingly, even after a week away, I was able to jump up into handstand on the first day back. More softly.

But even more significant was the spirit of practice that began to bloom after this week away. I was more comfortably interested in the taste of food, smells, the feel of my bed. The hardness of the body had begun to soften, returning subtle curves to a form that had squeezed away the baby weight and then some. And, more generally, practice has taken on a larger omnipresence — where before it seemed like a fixed object in a sea it now feels like the sea itself. A vast change in a small amount of time, but this is what a shift in perspective can do.

Focusing on the goal can sometimes slow the process of achieving it. Turn away, rest the gaze, take a breath, soothe the mind, and then look back — see what you see, then.