I woke at dawn as I usually do. And forced myself back to sleep. It’s Sunday and I’m working on relaxing. Respite in bed is not a reprieve for me but today it came easily.
My dog, used to my habits, came at our usual time. She climbed onto the bed where she’d been allowed once when a vertigo event triggered anxiety that only my warm puppy could abate.
Now she drank thirstily from the cool stream that was strangely swiftly flowing through a crevice behind my neck.
Alarmed, I rolled away from the warm comfort of my sleeping husband and rushed out of bed to the kitchen as usual to turn on the kettle and looked out the window.
The gentle slope from the terrace up the hill was a flooded field. The bird feeders hovered over submerged poles. And the field was patterned in stripes of black and white softened with brown that revealed a congregation of wild creatures sitting terrifyingly still with their heads just above the rising water facing me, my house, a silent call.
We are in trouble. We are waiting for help.
Herons, cranes, deer, even a monkey came into focus as I stood frozen. The monkey rose from the water, writhed and slashed and struggled to move and I thought monkeys might not know how to swim. They will die. They are dying. There are so many. They are wild and alien and yet they’ve come to us like they are domestic, part of this house.
I ran to the bedroom calling my husband. You need to come. It doesn’t matter if you are tired. Get up you need to see this.
It had just begun to rain. Again.
And I woke up.
Yesterday Elizabeth Warren announced and all I could hear was the word “fight”. Big money, unfairness in cash, race, …. Shift I screamed to her. Don’t talk about health care talk about the planet, the food, the water, the raped land. Talk about the poison we are ingesting. Tell us we are an extension of all and they us and if we are to survive we have to eliminate our toxic overlords. The toxin is greed. They give us charity to save us from cancer while they make us cancerous. They give us medicine for all the disease they cause us so all we do is worry and band aid our shaking, limping mutated bodies and stay alive though it’s a half life. Talk about rebuilding community, eliminating loneliness, feeding and educating everyone.
Get these damn guns out of here. In this town children are snatching them from open cars. Where are the parents? Are they made useless by despair? Have they given up, the invisible till their spawn end up on the evening news?
Another press cycle begins as the crippled make the tedious trudge to the next presidential election. Will we notice the deflation, the anemia, dementia of ourselves as we make the choices that guide us forward? We are distracted by the affairs of weak men. We are guided to look away from the big picture to little pictures about little people and their pathetic or natural proclivities that are perhaps the worst of us.
Still, we go forward in small ways, in anonymity. This is as it should be and always was. We don’t need a megaphone and a platform to show us that.
But as the most powerful nation on earth influences the other superpowers that govern these small lives in our separate, intimate communal, we are bowled over, drowning in the sound and vibration of the doom broadcast through the sound and visual waves we flounder in, the undertow.
I know why the creatures came to me as the rain began to fall again. They are me and I am them and they and I know it.
Can’t you feel that too?
What is the Feminine Side of Yoga?
It was the 80s in Southern California and I’d wandered into a well attended yoga class at a local gym. The teacher was a woman.
She approached me purposefully as class let out and asked, “What do you think about doing yoga from a more feminine side?
WHAT!
It took about three decades to answer that question.
Yoga was interesting though I can’t remember why I thought so at the time. Mostly I was curious. When I was younger yoga wasn’t even an organized thing.
Dance was the thing I liked. Long ago in New York there was Haitian dance that fed my soul and also a modern movement class that fed my ego.
That class was a disciplined method. Precise. A purposeful brain teaser.Haitian was the opposite.
Lose your mind. Complete freedom within the form.
Wild animal wondrous Voodoo magic, fierce, graceful,bewitching, athletic and feminine at once.
I moved between the fancy Upper West Side studio graced by the city’s elite to a condemned building on the lower East Side where I stood out among people of different color and cultures. Upper West Side ~ pop music, Lower East Side ~ live percussion. Polished wood to worn wood, view of Central Park to pathway through the homeless.
I lived a double life or even a quadruple one but no one ever picked me out for being wrong or a slacker. Or a guy.
Years and years later, I am sitting with a psychic. I’ve met several over the course of this life. Why would I go? People I believed in believed in them. Simple. And compelling.
Like others, she refers to a spirit guide who is appears to be mine. She says, he is telling me…..
He?
Oh yes. He. You are entirely male.
What!
Your guides are only masculine.
I recall the first psychic I met in NY in my twenties. She was a Channel. She kept saying, he and she said, he’s calling you darling. I’ve never heard him call anyone darling before.
You know?
Well I don’t but I never disbelieve anything until it’s proven impossible and so.
The weather turned suddenly cold in Nashville. I’m beginning a yoga class as I remember a description of bones being yin… dry and cold. The organs are yang. Heat.
To balance the brittle in our bones we begin to move from the front and depth of the organs and blood.
The spine is felt in the back body, the intuitive body, the receiving body. We take a moment to notice.
We will not harden what is already hard. We will move from the front body which is the way the nervous system works anyway and let the receptors in back be calm and gentle.
I realize even as I teach them that most of the yoga I’ve studied has focused on bones. Most of the tension I’ve felt is the feeling of spine and sacrum. So much attention there had hardened me.
And before I even saturated my life with yoga? Why did that teacher recognize the masculine in me?
I reckon that the reason I was drawn to Iyengar Yoga was the reason I persevered through the first dance class mentioned here. It demanded absolute perfection and attention to detail that was familiar. That environment would emerge in me later characterized by personal eccentricity. There was a militaristic quality that I was sort of used to as a kid. Structure and alignment for sanity.
Anyone who knows me would be shocked by that. Because I grew up in a loving home, given all one could hope for including scads of freedom. And more so, I was a recalcitrant. I ran wild and against the grain. But there’s a kind of OCD thing that runs through my mother’s family of overachievers that stealthily bled into me.
I am telling you a story that speaks to the unfolding of yoga that makes it ever interesting. It portrays our experience of ourselves as fluid. It is a shape shifter, an enabler, a shrink, coach, parent and child.
So what is the feminine side of yoga? It’s the folding and unfolding and relationship of organ to organ. It is core strength born from breath that bone follows but does not initiate. It is bone as the structure and the interior as home.
It is home.
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