Does anyone else find it utterly amazing that until the industrial revolution, humans slept in two shifts- with a break in the middle of the night?
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Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
The Verbs of Yoga
One night, after life had been knocking me around for a while, and I couldn’t achieve any kind of peace of mind, I thought of yoga. I remembered a particular savasana, in which my body let go of all the exertion of the preceding yoga class, and a coolness whispered over my skin. I remembered becoming ethereal; I remembered feeling still and peaceful.
But I had abandoned yoga years before when my hip starting hurting. Many anti-inflammatories and orthopedists later, I learned that for some strange reason, my brain failed to send a message to the top of my left femur bone to stop growing; and so it just kept expanding until it eventually hit my pelvis. Bone on bone. Any abduction—sideways motion with my leg—hurt. It had been ages since I had even seen my Richard Hittleman yoga book, and ages since I last sat cross-legged.
Still, something in my body wanted yoga. So, I started back with a class in the building where I lived, not a wood-floored studio smelling of essential oils and candles but a multi-use recreation room with a pool table in the center, which couldn’t be moved, and a ping-pong table in the corner, which had to be folded up and rolled out into the hallway. The students spread themselves out around the pool table on the concrete, linoleumed floor; I followed their cue and set up my mat near a corner pocket.
We began the class by sitting cross-legged. I tried, and immediately, my hip flamed with pain. I tried to sit there, my back slumped, my knees high. I tried to breathe. I tried not to blink, afraid a tear would betray my frustration. When the teacher told us to close our eyes, I wondered if I could slip out unnoticed. Then, without drawing attention to herself or to me, she placed two blocks on my mat. “Sit on one,” she recommended quietly.
When I was doing yoga years ago, there were no blocks, at least I have no memory of blocks, or props of any kind, for that matter. I had no idea such things existed. Maybe it was because I didn’t need them then; maybe the place where I took yoga didn’t offer them. But I discovered that day that blocks existed and straps and blankets (though my building didn’t provide those), and the wonderful verb ‘modify.’
‘Modify’ for me meant sitting on the block or on my heels in vdrasana, and though I was still self-conscious, and angry at my body for not being able to do what everyone else’s seemed to be able to do with ease, I was pleased at the prospect of having yoga, modified and propped, back in my life again.
I set my focus, wanting to make some kind of positive impression on the teacher. Just before class started, she greeted the people I assumed were regulars, then asked me my name, and laughed, and said she probably wouldn’t remember it next week, that she was terrible with names, but that she would get it eventually. But in the meantime, I didn’t want her to memorize me as ‘the one who can’t sit.’ My goal was to follow the instructions as closely as I could, to prove that I could do other things, if not sit cross-legged.
And I did follow, though I found myself more absorbed by the language of the instructions than the instructions themselves. In Downward Dog, we were to ‘twirl’ our sitz bones to the ceiling. In lunge, I was to let my pelvis ‘sink.’ In crescent, my heart center was to ‘shine.’ And I did it. I shone. We flexed and reached and balanced and breathed. But we also ‘floated’, and ‘measured’, and ‘planted’ and ‘windmilled’, ‘cartwheeled’, ‘spun’, ‘rolled’, ‘fanned’, ‘scooped’, ‘carved,’ ‘soared’, and ‘blossomed’.
We ‘blossomed!’
And then we ‘surrendered’ into the coolness of savasana, onto the hardness of that floor that ‘supported’ us. And at the end, we ‘offered’ Namaste.
I love words. As a child, I was fascinated by the meaning words could create when placed side by side. In this class, I was fascinated and so wonderfully encouraged by the actions the words could create in my body. It was these words, the verbs, to be exact, (and the props) that ‘welcomed’ me back to yoga.
Then, just as I was regaining the slightest bit of flexibility, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I elected to have a double mastectomy; I never wanted to get that diagnosis again. The verbs of cancer surgery are not pretty ones—cut and remove, stitch and reconstruct.
It was the aftermath, though, that was worse than the surgery. I became squeamish about my body to the point of being afraid of it, afraid to touch it, afraid to stand up straight for fear of pulling an incision, afraid of sleeping because I might roll and hurt myself, afraid to breathe too deeply, afraid of what felt like rocks under my skin where my breasts used to.
Knowing I couldn’t manage the regular class, but knowing I needed something, I left a note for the yoga teacher—did she remember me—the one who couldn’t sit cross-legged, and would she see me privately.
It turns out she knew my name.
We met in the room with the pool table. My body didn’t scare her the way it scared me. First, she had me breathe, a simple action I had been too afraid to perform fully. I ‘drank’ the breath. I ‘sipped’ in a little more. I ‘drew’ the breath deep into my body. I ‘directed’ it to my wounded chest. I ‘dropped’ my tense shoulders. I ‘rolled’ them back. I ‘opened’ my chest. Then I lay down on my mat on that hard floor, and I ‘played’ at snow angels, ‘arcing’ my arms along the floor, ‘distinguishing’ between muscle tightness and incision soreness, ‘informing’ myself of what was safe and what wasn’t. So much more was safer than I expected.
When that savasana was over, and our souls had bowed to each other’s, I left the room and my teacher with a set of recently abandoned verbs restored. I ‘walked;’ I didn’t ‘hunch.’ Energy ‘vibrated’ through me, and at same time, for the first time in weeks, my body ‘relaxed.’ I ‘trusted’ the teacher. I ‘believed’ in the power of my body. I ‘hoped.’
I ‘healed.’
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