We emerge from the holiday season, and from our journey home to the place where we grew up, a lighter and more mindful family. But it is only through this morning's practice that I can say that and mean it.
The post-holiday letdown is always heavy. For me, especially in moments when I am rocking my daughter — oh, how clean and honest those moments are! — I see and feel the weight of how fast time passes. How astoundingly quick her learning is, how difficult to remember as viscerally as I want to the belly of the day between its beginning and ending. The speed of time makes my heart sink. I don't want it to go by so fast...all of it, any of it. I can say to myself: in a blink another holiday season will be upon us. And I will be right. And I wish it were not so.
But practice is a saving grace, for it slows down time. Drawing the mind toward the innermost spaces of self quiets the fury of activity and noise in the ego and outside the body, and the stillness makes the moments long and deep.
Moving from asana through vinyasa to asana, I see the diaphragm as a jellyfish, the way my teacher has explained. Inhale, the jellyfish flattens; exhale, the bubble of its body lifts and opens. Watch jellyfish move, imagine the unchanging stretch of their evolution over millennia, and you will see how slowly time can pass. And then upon coming home, kisses and cuddles and words of soft sweetness, lightness buried in the work day, the strangeness of scenes we see over and over and over, and the will to find peace in the next morning's practice can become part of an easier passing through life. Maybe with less worry. Maybe lighter, longer, and with more space in the mind to remember it.
Work Cited
Jelly Fish. 28 April 2008. YouTube. Web. 2 Jan. 2011.
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