Losing My Grip (in a good way)

So.

The Winter Olympics are awesome...just amazing. I find them to be inspiring, goose-bumpy, tear-jerking, challenging, delightful, romantic. Probably for the same reasons that I feel exactly the same way about the Harry Potter novels: they are a combination of righteously dangerous and deliciously snuggly. I'm safe at home...I am not at Hogwarts where Voldemort is trying to break in, and I am not in the middle of a frightfully steep mogul run. I am watching and feeling the swirl in my belly of the speed-skating short track. And my heart is broken for Georgia and Nodar and his family as I sit with my own family and watch my daughter watch the Olympics with wide eyes. I am a patriot who has a newfound love for Canada. And this week I have more work to do than I am supposed to (given the commitment I have made to balancing work with my love for work in my life), and I am pretty sure that the Olympics are going to make it much less onerous. All of this — trivial and heavy — is with me.

And so the Olympics also have me thinking about the daring and the accomplishment of practice. How sport and practice are the same and not the same. So incredibly similar, so critically different. I have a 'coach' -- but he is not my coach; he is my teacher. These roles are different. In all my years of sport, I do not remember the hands of my coach helping me to kick or catch or shoot; in practice, the teacher's hands are part of the movement through the practice. Moreover, the goal in sport is obvious. Many, many of my students have chosen to write their composition projects on how sport has changed their lives, led them toward evolution. But this awareness often comes later: after multiple seasons, after training and semi-finals and state competitions. The goal in practice is less tangible; and ours is not to focus on it, but rather to be in the moment and then let the moment go. Myriad athletes have talked about how being present has helped them to perform; but the performance is most often still the goal. In her discussion about the differences between yoga and sports, Kino MacGregor argues, "the deeper benefits of yoga cannot be distilled and separated from the true intention behind it–the goal of inner peace. The body or the level of physical performance in yoga is never an end in and of itself" ("Yoga Beyond Bending"). While sports are very much about the body — strengthening to kick harder, run faster, swim more powerfully — yoga is more about getting past the body. The movement toward greater strength and flexibility is not to inflict force on a ball or a track, but rather to move inward.

Years of gymnastics and ballet and soccer and basketball and running and competing with myself to get straight As and competing with hundreds of others (whom I'll never meet) for an award or a contest or a spot in a graduate school or a professorship or a publication, and even 'training' my body to give birth without medication...all toward accomplishment, one success merely a step toward the next obstacle, all toward the outside.

This is not to condemn the pursuit of success, but rather to distinguish it from what this practice is.

The other day I was doing a self-led practice at home (snow day) and I jumped up into handstand. I hung out there...I could have stayed there for a minute or more with what felt like no effort. This was new. It was all I could do not to yell downstairs, "Sweetie! Come see me! Come see what I can do!"

If a 35-year-old mother/professor/Ashtangi jumps into a handstand behind a closed door, and there is no one there to see her, has it really happened?

Does it matter?

It's hard not to let it matter in that way. You know? That outside sort of way... It's hard to keep it all directed inward toward the unnameable place we call "inner peace." Here's the difference nowadays: I know, I feel that there's not much peace in, "Come see what I can do!" I feel it as soon as the instinct bubbles up. I feel the loss of the inner-connectedness, rather than the gain of the "getting it." And I know rawly, viscerally that something has shifted. Kino writes, "When students are enamored with the appearance of a posture it is often actually a deeper inner longing that is expressed." I have wondered — many, many times — whether I have chosen a practice that is awfully tempting for this over-achiever, and whether I have walked into a trap that seems like growth but is only more of the saaaaaaame ooooold worrying about not doing enough, wanting to succeed, working so hard for the goal.

The part of this that mystifies me most, however, is that this worry passes on its own, almost in the same moment. That is, I feel the ping of latching on to the success — or failure, if that is the case — of a pose, and then I somehow lose my grip on it. Not in a scary Cliffhanger kind of way, but rather in a way that looks more like tempting a child with one toy while trying to gently pry the dangerous, tiny Lego out of her hand. I worry, and then something speaks softly to the worry. I have this new watcher behind the worry. He/she hasn't been with me long — less than a year? It is guiltless, anxiety-less, kind. And this watcher knows the "deep inner longing" from miles and miles away.

I don't know how long it will stay. Is it the Mary Poppins or Pete's Dragon character that shows up and soothes the mind of a child or family and then has to leave again when the wind changes? I hated the ends of those movies. I fear this kind of departure.

But I don't think it's that kind of presence.

Works Cited

MacGregor, Kino. "Yoga Beyond Bending." My Yoga Online: Yoga Blog. Blog. 29 Nov. 2009. Web. 14 Feb. 2010. http://www.myyogaonline.com/blog/2009/11/yoga-beyond-bending-by-kino-macgregor/>.