1/8/2011

After the news today on the tragedy in Arizona, and a pretty chill-inducing visit to the Sarah Palin facebook page (there was some gossiping on the internet about a map, now removed, on her twitter page with cross-hairs over the districts supporting the health-care bill, Gabrielle Giffords' district being one of them, and a proclamation from the Alaskan belle herself: "Don't retreat...reload!"), the chill being raised not even so much by Palin (who is sort of too ridiculous to be chilling...like some kind of right-wing paperdoll) but by her commenters, most of whom, left and right, were hurling around taunts of "liberal" and "conservative"...as if perspective itself were the enemy--after all of that, all I can say is:

Argh!!  And then...

We gotta do better!  And then...

I've gotta do better! And then...

Oh my god, I've got to do better.

If I am the micro of this macro, as all the spiritual disciplines would have us believe...if I am both a reflection of and the reflector of the world around me, then this insanity which is OUT THERE, is also the insanity which is IN HERE.  The insanity which manifests itself not as gunmen and wars and hate-spewing politicos, but as self-loathing and complaint and anxiety and all of the other little nasties that love to have their way when there's room...and if that's the case, then how is there anything more important in the world than cleaning up that particular mess (the one on the inside...the only one I have control over)? 

All of the excuses I make, we all make, about why we can't, why it's too hard, why it's too frightening, why it just seems too impossible to love ourselves (and thus the whole little universe over which our minds preside)...all of the ways that we tell ourselves we are not deserving of a mind and a heart and a body that are PEACEFUL and thus emanating PEACE, and thus capable of PEACE-making...

Are all just a lot of bullshit.  (pardon the el language-o).

Because it is just of so much more importance than simply our own sense of wholeness and well-being (a welcome by-product, but hardly the primary reason).  Loving more, finding more silence, more sweetness, more compassion...it is the antidote for insanity of all stripes, and it has got to be important enough that one (me) is willing to pay the price of losing one's (my) small sufferings for the sake of it.

Hasn't it?!

So, in honor of all those wounded or slain this afternoon in Arizona, I want to tell you, all you Shanti-towners out there...that I love you.  Big time.  And I want to remind you (in case you've forgotten) that you are capable of such wisdom and such insight and such love and such grace and such equanimity...you could scew the whole out-of-sorts world back onto the path of sanity.  I swear it's true.  I know it in my bones that it's true.  You are needed.  You and your clear mind are desperately needed.

Sending as much love as I am able due East to AZ...

More on the Organ Body...

(p.s. doesn't this look like a tree? and a dancing gumby? sigh...)


I told you I'd be back for more...

I have to first give a little shout-out of gratitude to the amazing Tara Judelle, my teacher, who has been leading me and several others deep into this study of the organ body. Other than being a pretty glorious teacher, she has a mind and a focus that is so rigorous it makes me feel a little shy, just to be in the room with her. She's like a pioneer in the back-country of yoga right now and I am just happy to be hitched to her wagon (is that a mixed-metaphor? Did pioneers drive wagons through the back country? I really don't know...).

And as an apt preface I will say that my knowledge of the geography of my inner body is much like my knowledge of geography in general and that is...very, very poor.

I can best Sarah Palin, I'm sure, but the intricacies of my knowledge of the earth's arrangement stop at the very basics. I know the continents, the oceans, the general location of the countries within, but if anyone starts getting too specific I just kind of have to shut up. So as not to embarrass myself.

Same goes for American history, actually.

And my sense of direction....

But, that's all another story. I only preface my talk of the organ body this way to excuse any "revelations" I might have that are or may seem totally dully obvious to my more educated readers. Many of the people I am going on this little organ journey with are much more sensitively attuned than I am. Tara can actually FEEL and communicate with organs as mysterious as her gall bladder. I am just happy to have actually learned WHERE my kidneys are and to finally, finally, finally, after god knows how many acting classes and 16 straight weeks of Linklater training last year to finally FINALLY understand how my diaphragm works! I kid you not, that sucker has always been a total aggravation to me. Wait, what, it's like a parachute? Beneath my lungs there is a parachute that goes up and down in the wrong direction? You may as well have told me that the parachute is operated by a circle of little school children, waving it up and down...the image would have made as much sense.

So, while I am not yet able to communicate with (or even locate) my gallbladder, I am thorougly and happily amazed with what I HAVE been able to locate. My kidneys! My heart! My lungs and the little aveoli inside them, which, when counted as total surface area of the lung would make it equal to the size of a tennis court!! WHHHHAAAAAAAA?! And my brain! (Yes, the brain is an organ), and...my stomach! And my liver (kind of). In all honestly, sometimes I am just glad to be able to feel anything in there other than just a sort of general lump of space.

True confession: I think prior to this class I most often visualized the space my organs inhabit as just that...space. Seriously. Empty space. I mean, I knew I had a heart and lungs and all that, but...I don't know, I just never really thought about it.

I don't say all this so that I can ramp up into some kind of weird gross anatomy lesson, or even just to talk about the anatomy of the body as it relates to yoga and movement, but to instead talk about the way in which the idea of being "in your body" can deepen. So that, instead of walking around feeling like I am skin and bones encompassing an empty cavity where my soul resides (this is embarrassing, isn't it?) I can INSTEAD begin to think of myself as this entire collection of organs and muscles and bones that EACH and every one house my larger self...so that I'm not just a container to be filled and emptied but an entire universe of pieces ALL filled.

I won't even talk about how the organs hold memories and feelings, or how I have begun to notice where my body bears down in times of stress to cut off the flow of energy from one organ to the other, or how the organs all reach all throughout the body with veins and arteries, how the heart has arteries that end in your feet and in your hands and your head which means the heart is not just located in your chest but in your ENTIRE BODY, how the organs, like the poses, have not just practical use but also a symbolic use as well...how we might be controlled or cut off from one organ or another which is also the perfect representation of what we are cut off from in our lives...

It goes and goes people!

We have, right inside of us, RIGHT NOW, this incredible factory--a landscape of organs--and it is moving and pulsing and communicating, and sometimes, when I'm deep in there, trying to send a morse-code message to my liver or one of my two funny kidneys I realize that when I am living there, when I am breathing into all these spaces and listening for the echo-call of delight in return, there is no room for any of the things which keep me seperated from myself to begin with.