Some Abstract Thoughts on Lady's Holiday

My restorative yoga is bringing the body's song — the rhythm I cannot see with the eyes except on monitors and charts and in sensory physical signs — back. Softer edges, a quieter wake up into the day, a loosely-held acceptance around the mystery of untidiness.

A couple of weeks ago, my teacher came to my house for a private lesson on restoration and modification to bring the body back into alignment with its own nature. In the beginning, I wanted to cry about it — it was so hard not to practice hard. But he told me that learning restoration would increase my range, would help me to work with injury, pregnancy, aging. And so I listened and kept the faith.

Since then, I have been restoring each day...waking up, trekking to the shala, taking my 6 blankets and strap and blocks and bolster to my corner of the room where we all practice. Coming to terms with using the wall for Surya Namaskara, trying to imagine the Earth and Wind. Seeing the breath, the beak of the bird in the palette sipping slowly, the winding and uncoiling Kundalini. Softening the knees, the spine, the hips, the shoulders. Feeling depth in these cornerstones of the body and wondering how I couldn't feel it before in Marichyasana D or Supta Kurmasana or Kapotasana. What the hell?

Calming the heart, softening the belly, quieting the brain.

Opening, and opening more. And finding even more ways to open. My body has been listening, and now ever so faintly the song of its nature is returning.

The constructs of life can disrupt the body. We know this.

"Restoration" can take us back to pristine places of listening that peel away layers of doing and being and achieving and earning, uncovering the basic beauty of raw humanness that I — to be quite honest — have been intellectualizing away.

Now that the rhythm is back, I will nurture and protect it. This will not be easy.

Messenger

There is an elegance to my child's management of herself. Raw, honest. Predictable, but difficult to understand.

When we get it, it blows our minds. Every tiny thing.

Last night, for instance, before we went to bed, and while I was trying to calm my mind (ha) I cracked the literacy code of some of her words...my heart nearly stopped and it was all I could do not to wake my sleeping partner and explain my genius discovery. This morning I wrote it out for him on paper, and he was impressed.

Mostly, we watch, and we try to extract the why.

In the mornings, after 10-11 hours of sleep, my daughter wakes up in the middle of a conversation. Eyes open, head lifts, words emerge. I know this because we sleep next to her audio/video monitor (one of the most ingenious inventions of all time).

I don't know if she is continuing with a dream, or if the morning ritual is just that logical: awaken, speak, do. She rests on her back and rocks back and forth, her legs in the air, staring up at the ceiling and pondering out loud. So many words...morning exercises of language.

She then sits up in bed and begins to instruct her "friends" (she has many that sleep with her) to wake up and go back to sleep. If they do not obey, she reminds them firmly. She's rather strict. We have no idea where she gets this.

Then, she stands and begins to toss everything in her crib out onto the floor. Whaaaat?

This morning, when we walked in to get her up, everything was out of bed. And there she stood, little peanut, ecstatic to see us, but not quite ready to get out. First, as always, she must tell us what has been going on in her world for the last hour. She must point out all of her friends, point out various objects in her room.

When her diaper is changed and her clothes are on, and she has finished with the many details of her day thus far, we stand her up and put on her shoes and socks. And when that is done, she promptly suggests, "All right. Waffle."

Her uniqueness is not simply a fact. Like, we are all unique. Yes, of course.

But how a child — our child — can mystify us so profoundly is still, and will continue to be, beyond me. She isn't the reminder that comes from the reality check of a good story, or the bit of perspective that one might stumble across in a fleeting moment of meditation, or even the split seconds of bliss that we feel this time of year because the Spirit is so plugged in to something much, much bigger than all of us.

She is the Spirit. I felt it the second I knew she was in my belly. And, now, we see it so clearly in her.

May we see it, too, in ourselves.

It's a Path, It's a Path, It's a Path...

I realize the irony in using these terms in this blog on this subject, but I can think of no other: I'm pulling out the big guns.

In other words, I'm seeking the fifth gear of restoration.

Since my quest to open space around my practice began this summer, I have seen some softness emerge. I have discussed it here in this blog. I have treasured the small increments of improvement as I have witnessed opening in my shoulders, my back, my mind. I have seen small changes in the inner workings of the body.

But I know that I have still been holding on tightly to restraints, abstaining from dairy and micro-managing my diet; cutting away from a healthy night of sleep so that I can get to the shala early and then to my full-time job as a professor; opening my mind just enough to let the urgency of an injury slow my practice but then snapping it shut again once the injury healed. Taking out jump-backs, and then randomly putting them back in; modifying twists, and then twisting into Marichyasana D.

While I have been making efforts to make space for the body to do what it needs to do as a female body and as a mother, professor, yogi, friend, partner, I need to do more.

See...here again is the trap of Ashtanga. It is, in many ways, an ironic practice. It attracts many people, of course. But it does tend to attract those who are disciplined, rigid, compulsive, perfectionistic, purist. All qualities that I have possessed for as long as I can remember being.

In a doctor's appointment just before Thanksgiving, I sat describing my lifestyle to the doctor, who paused to look at me, with some kindness in his eyes, and asked, "How do you do all of that?"

It wasn't really a compliment. And I didn't take it as one. Rather, and perhaps for the first time ever, I wondered with a moment of unique clarity: Do I do too much? Wait...do I seriously do too much?

In an extended conversation with my mentor recently, she asked me: "What has constrained you?" And in detailing the above to her I realized that, though I have paused to process the transformative learning that has happened to me because of this practice here in this blog, I have forgotten during the practice — the actual practicing — what it is all for.

The irony of the practice — the part that many of us are slow and maybe even resistant to accept — is that, even as it attracts so many of us who for so long have tried to gain outward approval, perfection, purity, an immersion in the practice can lead to a dark, lonely place that reveals to us just how long, and how sadly, we have been missing the peace of accepting uncertainty, allowing brokenness to be invaluable and brilliant in its own ways. Whatever brings us to that darkness — an injury, trying to conceive a child, a disruption in our homes or professional lives — we might expect to see that the practice is yet another outlet for us to seek perfection, but instead find (with a profound teacher) that the practice is there to nurture us exactly as we are now. Imperfect, unsteady. Graceful on some days, and falling over on others.

I have known the counter-intuitive truth to less-is-more, to the fact that progress in the practice actually comes from opening and softening spaces in the mind and body...I have known it intellectually. I have written about it here. I have taught it to my own yoga students and seen them open and soften in their own asanas. I have taught it to my university students and seen their ideas creatively unfold as they seek to find something new to add to old conversations. I have extended it to my daughter with every word and gesture of affection.

But I have not quite understood it in myself.

And I see as I write how recursive this documenting of heart, brain, and belly is. Practice, understand, write. Go back. Inquire. Practice. Live life. Write. Understand more. Practice, live life, understand less. And then more.

Then less.

And then more.