Soft hands belie a commitment to hand sanitizers as the Pandemic forges onward.
Corona Easter Bunny 2020 by Hilary
Those souls whose sensory overload comes quickly in the best of times are quickest to notice the rawness of skin now washed in a constant acid bath of battle. No lotion soothes these scoured parts, the instruments of giving and receiving for too human bodies.
The skin the world sees, the skin of the organs, the skin of the breath and even the mind is chafed and chapped and twitchy. We are fragile and too tender for the fight.
Being thin skinned takes on a sharp meaning when the thickness of ones skin implies protection.
In a world where beauty certainly isn’t only skin deep, at a time when we are forced to the surface hourly in an attempt to come up for news that is the air defining our days, we live on the surface.
The yoga teacher urges the student toward the down under. Seek the quiet beneath the surf for answers to your urgent question. Who am I? What’s happening? What is real?
One might see living beneath the surface now as denial or detachment or worse, disassociation.
Underground is a dirty word aligned with other words like the “dark web”.
The underground rises to the surface again and again. It is blind and desperate for a light. It will not be ignored. On the surface it crashed the nation’s Capitol in a murderous rage. On the surface it is a violent virus burning holes in the skin of lungs.
But in yoga we encourage the students to visit the dark. We tell them with our salutation of namaste that here we are all together. Here we are one.
We are all the same beneath the skin. I see your true self. The light in you shines a light on me. I recognize myself and yourself without ego. We all shine like gold beneath the skin. These are a few of the ways yoga teachers express the meaning of the word Namaste.
At times like these it is a helpful band-aid for the wounds of the skin. It allows the surface of all who hear it to let down the guard, to receive the rarefied air of potential collective kindness.
It assumes what it doesn’t see but is spoken to be true until the words wear off like chipped paint.
For the sensory over-dosed yogi a solitary trip to the darkness shines light on sensations that over-load the circuits. The protective shield of namaste is not enough to ensure safety for the organs of the senses as skin, eyes, ears, mouth and mind reel in the hurricane force of lonesome clarity.
Layla
A sensory over-loaded yogi has the challenge of managing the organs of the senses without the warm blanket of Namaste. Naked and alone, that person has to be the nurturing balm for oneself applied hourly as the glow of a yoga practice fades when weathered by storms.
Unfiltered the organs of the senses get clogged with contaminants of memory and fear. That exposure brings sickness.
Yoga is a filter and searchlight at once but not all yoga fits all people.
Sensory yogis should move lightly, breathe softly as downy feathers floating in the wind. Sensory yogis do well to marry yoga to Tai Chi and dance. The dance should be like the I Ching taking them down the path where the souls’ dowel directs them.
Sensory yogis don’t hold your heads beneath the water forcing down that which is desperate for air! Rather let the skin soften and spread into other. There’s no room for the universe in you. You are too full. Let yourself bloom into the universe.
Gently.
And when eyes close and the skin presses down let your meditation begin, this too shall pass.
She approaches me after class. Tells me she’s in law school. She and her peers are suffering from P.T.S.D. she says. From life.
She’s responding to a comment I made in class. I consider it pure luck that I have a positive position on the life we share at the moment.
Things need to break. The shit storm of happenstance and wrong actions that are instigating an onslaught of information on disaster is also precipitating a wellspring of solutions. That is a wellspring of love. That is the breath we choose.
Hilary Lindsay-one precious life
The human condition shifts with awareness and it changes with our reactions. I see many hopeful reactions despite the barrage of sorrowful scenarios. We are looking for ways out. We are wielding sledgehammers. We are scraping peeling paint.
As radical politicians move the conversation from the usual banter, awareness grows. As spokesmen, leaders and newscasters inform people on pollution, poverty and violence against each other and the planet, quiet numbers choose to make things better in small and large ways.
It’s a life of small steps. We just step faster now. Diverse paths are rapidly emerging.
Some of us will be sacrificed no doubt. It was never easy to be aware.
But it would be less glorious to not be.
To blame nature’s weather or planets for our discomfort is shortsighted as well. Instability is nature itself. The perfect day will not last no matter how we pray for that.
Welcome to your place in the world. To smash and break it until it is right for you without harming any creature is artful. Perhaps that’s why the arts sustain us through hard times.
Remember, we are all artists. Your expression inspires mine. This is a beautiful instability.
I was the Tennessee Titans yoga teacher. Defensive End Kevin Carter was one of my dear students. I got to spend some one on one time with him and I shared a secret born of Pokémon.
In Pokémon; a cartoon I watched with my children, the animals had special powers that shared their names and they would command them to service that could save the day in dire situations.
The Titans thought I had superpowers. My longtime Running Back client, Eddie George was quoted in the papers saying I was stronger than most of the guys on the team. Of course that wasn’t true but I knew what I had to harness for dire situations which is what I would consider many of the postures I had to demonstrate to teach. As Winnie the Pooh’s friend Piglet once described himself; I am a very small animal.
I used my mind to fire muscles. Glute power; ON! Ankle power; GO! That’s how the Pokémons did it and it worked. When I had to perform on the 40 yard line before 50 men and their coaches and news cameras I didn’t have time to wobble. It wasn’t my yoga, just a picture for the others.
I watch the show Sunday Morning. A confessed multi-tasker, I do my Sunday practice watching that show because I have three hours before I go to work and six hours of stuff I want to accomplish. And I love that show because it’s information about wonderful things that people do instead of the context of contending news shows that assure me what a bunch of assholes we are.
There was a segment on sharing. People are sharing their homes, their cars, and their stuff. It’s making it easier on everyone. It’s good for the economy. It works. I’m reminded of an initiative in my son’s town of Seattle where people are growing free food for anyone to pick. Sharing is not the game for those playing survival of the fittest. It’s the game for people who know that the fittest don’t survive, we all survive and we all survive to thrive when we work as nature does, for the greatest good for the web.
I’m in tree pose. I imagine I can feel all 26 bones in my left foot arguing over turf. I think of sharing. My hip is hurt and the rest of me is trying to share the job of the hip but damn it hip it’s time to step up. The others can’t do it and the adductor is starting to get pissed off and snap at the Iliopsoas which will surely be the destruction of all.
So I turn on some muscular action with my mind and attend to my breath. I should have put that oxygen mask on first before saving the others but I was preoccupied with a bit of an impending crisis. Hands to the sky inviting prana, I notice an impediment. I’m doing my damndest to save all that I can and I can’t get a proper breath out. The quality of the last exhalation will set me up for the next breath, some might say, the next life. Without that I am lost and all systems will fail.
How many folks devote, share, themselves for the good of the whole without noticing their own breath. Divine people die of awful diseases and others wonder how someone so good, so pure, so generous could be taken if there is karma. Could it be that our intention behind the exhale will be the quality we ensure for the next breath and without attention to that we are unwittingly dying without noticing? Did we abandon ourselves inadvertently?
I am in the mind of the winds of the breath as described in the Upanishads and later refined by Ayurveda because I just did a study on it. Maybe I’m overreaching. Forgive me. But also take a lesson from it if you want to because I’m offering one from experience. Generosity and love only go so far when you are neglecting yourself. If you want to share yourself with the world remember to allow the world to enter you as prana; as life force which moves everything and pay attention to how you manage that in your own universe of flesh, bone and mind. I am still here but somehow I imagine my last breath as one who has not paid due homage and I do not sense an easy end.
It’s what I have to share today. With love and humility, Hilary
bitchin yoga 
Sensory Yoga In Hair Raising Times ~Namaste
February 2021.
Soft hands belie a commitment to hand sanitizers as the Pandemic forges onward.
Those souls whose sensory overload comes quickly in the best of times are quickest to notice the rawness of skin now washed in a constant acid bath of battle. No lotion soothes these scoured parts, the instruments of giving and receiving for too human bodies.
The skin the world sees, the skin of the organs, the skin of the breath and even the mind is chafed and chapped and twitchy. We are fragile and too tender for the fight.
Being thin skinned takes on a sharp meaning when the thickness of ones skin implies protection.
In a world where beauty certainly isn’t only skin deep, at a time when we are forced to the surface hourly in an attempt to come up for news that is the air defining our days, we live on the surface.
The yoga teacher urges the student toward the down under. Seek the quiet beneath the surf for answers to your urgent question. Who am I? What’s happening? What is real?
One might see living beneath the surface now as denial or detachment or worse, disassociation.
Underground is a dirty word aligned with other words like the “dark web”.
The underground rises to the surface again and again. It is blind and desperate for a light. It will not be ignored. On the surface it crashed the nation’s Capitol in a murderous rage. On the surface it is a violent virus burning holes in the skin of lungs.
But in yoga we encourage the students to visit the dark. We tell them with our salutation of namaste that here we are all together. Here we are one.
We are all the same beneath the skin. I see your true self. The light in you shines a light on me. I recognize myself and yourself without ego. We all shine like gold beneath the skin. These are a few of the ways yoga teachers express the meaning of the word Namaste.
At times like these it is a helpful band-aid for the wounds of the skin. It allows the surface of all who hear it to let down the guard, to receive the rarefied air of potential collective kindness.
It assumes what it doesn’t see but is spoken to be true until the words wear off like chipped paint.
For the sensory over-dosed yogi a solitary trip to the darkness shines light on sensations that over-load the circuits. The protective shield of namaste is not enough to ensure safety for the organs of the senses as skin, eyes, ears, mouth and mind reel in the hurricane force of lonesome clarity.
A sensory over-loaded yogi has the challenge of managing the organs of the senses without the warm blanket of Namaste. Naked and alone, that person has to be the nurturing balm for oneself applied hourly as the glow of a yoga practice fades when weathered by storms.
Unfiltered the organs of the senses get clogged with contaminants of memory and fear. That exposure brings sickness.
Yoga is a filter and searchlight at once but not all yoga fits all people.
Sensory yogis should move lightly, breathe softly as downy feathers floating in the wind. Sensory yogis do well to marry yoga to Tai Chi and dance. The dance should be like the I Ching taking them down the path where the souls’ dowel directs them.
Sensory yogis don’t hold your heads beneath the water forcing down that which is desperate for air! Rather let the skin soften and spread into other. There’s no room for the universe in you. You are too full. Let yourself bloom into the universe.
Gently.
And when eyes close and the skin presses down let your meditation begin, this too shall pass.
Hilary.
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