The Space I Am In...

Tomorrow morning I leave for a 2 week + vacation to visit family and friends in the West. I am over the moon about getting out of New York...watching people jostle each other through the doors on the subway this morning (as if we won't all get on, eventually) made me so grateful for the impending break.

I'm not certain how my practice will fall out while I'm gone. I went to class early this morning, so as to be limber for a long day of travel on the 'morrow. I am being strongly encouraged not to bring my yoga mat (space and all), but I'm undecided. Rolling it out in class this morning I was struck with what I am often struck with when rolling out my beautiful (now ragged) orange rubber mat--that it is such a clean square space to hold my practice. I have sweated and prayed and wondered and fallen and cried and struggled so many hours on that mat, in that particular 72" of space--it's like carrying a little temple around on my back. And on this vacation, where we will be in many spaces and with much family and where quiet time with my body and my breath will be perhaps hard to eek out, I might need my ratty orange temple, in order to carve out space for myself in all these foreign places.

It is also, I realize, the only thing which posesses as intimate a knowledge of my practice as I do. I love all its funny sweat marks and pock-marks and where my feet have worn down the rubber to its fibers. I want to use it until I can see the floor through it, and then I might have to hang it on my wall or something (P. would love that!)...I am so grateful for this rectangle of rubber. I mean really I am so grateful for this incredible versatile body and for Laughing Lotus which is my home away from home and for the amazing teachers who keep coming into my life and for all the hope of striving for an easier mind, but ALSO I am grateful for this strip of textile that I can role up and shove on shelves and in bags and lug around with me and lay down ANYWHERE and make a yoga studio of it.

That's it. I'm decided. It's coming with me.

After a while...

Um, I think my yoga blog ego suffered a bit of a blow a while back...hence the silence.

Possibly it's because no one is reading this. Or, if you are, (sorry) you are loved, and I apologize for the absence. Not to worry! All is well! It's just been days and then weeks and now, gulp, many weeks of hemming and hawing over the whats and whens and hows of my life.

Concretely: I will not be going to yoga school, I will be acting my pants off in several wonderful plays.

One door closes, another opens. Or sometimes; there's only room for one door at a time, which seems more ept.

My practice, however, is flourishing. Handstand and Forearm stand are inching their way towards me (or I towards them) and it will be only a matter of time now before I do not need the wall OR for the teacher to just come over and "stand by me while I do it" (How old am I?!!). It's the same for falling back into wheel...a brilliant and visceral hesitation to be overcome. For all of these poses it is the same:

I am strong enough to do it
I am flexible enough to do it
I have the form and the training to do it
I will not, probably, injure myself...

But all, also, require a supreme letting go. There is a moment, in each of these poses (whether coming up or coming down) where conscious control has to be relinquished and the body trusted (that legs and arms and neck will go where intended) and it is this moment (which widens out into a Grand Canyon of moments) in which I...pause. And in the pause I lose it all.

A teacher once said to me, "let your breathe be louder than your thoughts" and it was a revelation of sorts...or rather, a beautiful way to trick the mind. Example:

BODY: Time for handstand...

MIND: Um, okay. Okay, yes, cool. Cool. We can do this. I mean, woah, you're not going to do it right HERE, are you?

BODY: Yeah, I was...

MIND: What if you kick that girl? What if you fall weird on her block and you break your neck?!

BODY: I don't think, um...

MIND: Just, how about, how about just a little farther away from the wall? Baby steps. Baby steps.

BODY: No, I'd like to try it in the middle of the room.

MIND: I don't know. I don't know. I'm not really going to kick hard enough to accomplish that just to be sa--

BODY: Inhale. Exhale.

MIND: Are you--

BODY: INHALE

MIND: listen--

BODY: EXHALE..

INHALE...

(mind fading away into small birdlike whine...)

EXHALE...

etc. etc...

Ah, sigh. It could be that way, it really could. The microcosm of my life: Let go of the worrying and just let myself kick up into the sky.

Being Yoga

I've just signed up for the Being Yoga Conference. I hope it doesn't kill me.