Oxygen

I've spent the last week in the mountains of Colorado (a week away for a family wedding...sort of a vacation), and what a difference it makes to practice at high altitude. In the first few days, the air, so much thinner, feels like it's got holes in it...or like the lungs have holes in them. In those first few days it feels like the air cannot get all the way up to the collar bones, cannot settle all the way down into the bottom of the lungs. The air loses its grip. It hovers in the middle of the torso, superficially functioning to breathe the body. Spinning its wheels. And two breaths per asana is especially helpful.

But then those first few days pass, and the lungs adjust and strengthen. They expand to welcome each movement of the vinyasa, and that catch up in the collarbones clicks in. The practice lightens, the breath radiates everywhere in the body. It's dizzying, and the post-practice euphoria is lovely.

Maybe it was the body's struggle to breathe that cleared the mind, or maybe it was simply the displacement and the purity of contrast. The trip away in that spacious place has given me some perspective on what it means to micromanage. Tending so specifically, technically, compulsively to tiny details of practice, of parenting, of work. I took all of that micromanaging to Colorado with me: worries about wet socks and dirty hands, emails waiting to be opened, little political fires back at home, tensions with my partner as we tried too hard to relax, waiting for family wounds to open up, anxieties about bedtimes happening at the right second. And I saw that micromanaging there, in the mountains, and it looked so strange. Like a down jacket worn in the hot summer. It's a lot of unnecessary managing...it's far too much for one person to take on. It's narcissistic to think that it's all that important, that my role in it is all that important, that if I take my hands off the wheel for a bit the darn thing cannot steer itself.

I practiced for the first time this morning back in the shala in my sweet city. My sweet city full of heat and sweat and air quality alerts... But with lungs blessed by the clean, thin, enriching oxygen of the high-altitude air, the practice felt like floating, like a soft sense of ease.

I'm trying to find that breath and breathe into my handle on life without white knuckling. As I lay in Savasana, I imagined that there was much peace to be found in between the hours I've so strategically stacked into my day.

That kind of micromanaging simply cannot last. It's not sustainable in any way that makes room for calm, happiness. It doesn't help to support calmness in my child. Or in my relationships.

I'm not sure that Colorado is the necessary medicine. I am sure that taking the body out of its environment for a while can challenge, heal, and mystify.