Breaking Through...

I am now a certified yoga teacher.  I am also now an engaged woman.  And nearly thirty (but that's a story for later).  I am back in Los Angeles, back taking class, trying now to build this new business, trying not to spend too many hours pouring over wedding porn, trying to maintain even a modicum of the devotion I was so steeped in over the last month in NYC...

It's a lot.  It's a lot. 

Going back to classes at Still, diving back into the deeper alignment work and the slow steady pace of classes there (none of the color and music and whirling-dervishness of Laughing Lotus), has been good--an opportunity to begin to digest all that's happened to me and all that I've learned since July. 

But yesterday, feeling a bit sad and distracted (what? I thought I was done with that!), I urged myself to class--knowing the caffeine hit of the room full of other practice-ers would do me some good--even though all I really wanted to do was treat myself to an extended lie-down on my mat in the middle of my sunny breezy living room.

Okay, but first, please don't laugh--lately I've been often (and shame-facedly) consulting these native american "medicine cards" that I got as a gift (I know! I know!)--especially when I'm feeling a little out of focus--just as a tool to give me something to think on, or, if I'm lucky, to flip my thinking totally on its head.  And yesterday morning I drew one with the intention that I'd use it as inspiration for my home practice, just a little something extra to meditate on.  But to my great dismay, the card I drew was "Action".  It was all about some animal I've never heard of and how action is the recipe if you've drawn this card.  But I, feeling quite nap-ish, and also a little sad, was completely convinced that this card could not mean what it said it meant--I had no desire to have an active practice, so how was I supposed to meditate on ACTION?  My then-tender monkey-mind immediately decided that this must be some kind of (probably bad) omen about an action I'm supposed to be taking but haven't, and I spent the next 20 minutes rolling around on my mat, worrying about what it is I'm supposed to be doing, but not.

Fun!!

And so by the time I dragged my sorry little butt to class I was feeling a little, well...picked on.  (That same pernicious bully is at it again!).   But the class was happily rigorous and as it ALWAYS happens when I am forced by sheer physical demand to pull myself up from the depths I was immediately cheered.  "Why don't I remember this?"  I asked myself.  "Why do I always think that indulging a worry is going to be more helpful than doing some...I don't know...sit ups?!"  The relief is so immediate and so visceral and the ah-ha is like that of a person who has just learned that the quickest way to stop the burning in her fingers is to REMOVE her HAND from the STOVE.  So, blah blah this came, this relief...and the class progressed...and handstands were down and backbends and all kinds of friendly stuff, all going along swimmingly, until we get to the...

HANUMANS.

Yes, hanumans.  Plural. 

Now, I've talked about my difficult relationship with hanuman before (these are the splits, for those of you squinting at the sanskrit)...and it has not improved.  In fact, lately, even attempting hanuman makes me want to burst into tears.  And for that reason I have not been attempting it.  At all.  For weeks.

So, the first round of hanumans come and I am pathetically far from the ground.  My hamstrings are whining, I'm shaking...partly from aggravation and partly from exertion.  I'm annoyed at all the women (and a few men) who slip right into it.  "Don't you know!?" I want to scream, "don't you KNOW how hard this is".  It all lasts too long, but I make it through, thankfully.

We are instructed back into downward dog.  And then right back into hanuman on the first side again.  I am livid.  AGAIN?!  My god.  I am only mildly plused to see that I'm a teensy bit closer to the ground this time.  Mainly I'm just trying to stave off the waves of sick emotion rolling through me.  Get me out of this get me out of this get me out of this.  Again, it lasts too long, but again, I make it.

We are instructed back into downdward dog.  I am impressed with myself for surviving.  And then we are instructed back into hanuman on the first side.  AGAIN.  I am--I'm a little stunned. I have NEVER done three hanumans in a row.  Ever.  But apparently this 3rd round is just absurd enough for my body that something...changes.  Because I give up.  I surrender.  And I feel myself "drop" into my body, as if prior to then I had been hovering somewhere just above my own wobbly form, lamenting my misfortune.  The difference is palpable.  I'm relaxed.  I'm okay.  I could stay--maybe I could even do another round.  And just then the teacher, from the front of the class, who has not said much to me up to this point, calls out:

"Great, Lia.  I see that.  You've broken through something.  Do you feel that? You stopped fighting it."

And I felt a hot flush rise to my face as he said it...was it that obvious?  But of course it was.  And it was true--I had been fighting and fighting and fighting, until it became clear the fight was futile, and so had thrown up my hands in surrender.  And quick as you know, in had marched sweet relief.

And I thought about the stupid "Action" card I had drawn that morning and how totally convinced I was that action didn't mean what it said it meant--didn't mean real honest to goodness concrete physical action--no, it must have meant something grander, something more esoteric, more existential.  And I realized in that moment that of course it had meant exactly what it said it meant.  It meant DO. It meant that sometimes getting IN your body and IN your life is a much quicker route to relief than all that mucking around in the mind.

It's so ridiculously simple, the edict to just "do", and I have so often in my life been the kind of person who wants to make sure all my internal messes are cleaned up before I take to any kind of action--though I have learned over and over again that those messes will never be clean, and I could end up waiting forever--but still I have been reluctant to believe it could be as easy as all that. 

But I am getting older...and my life is getting bigger...and I am beginning to see that if I want to break through whatever layers within still sometimes pin me down, I am going to have to act.  To just continue to do, no matter what.  Not because there is some magical action that will solve all my problems, but because to engage with the world often IS the solution.