Subtle Unrest

Last night I took class with the lovely and amazing Gina Zimmerman, who does this, and also this, and with whom I now have a nearly Pavlovian response when I attend her class--as soon as I step foot in the studio when she's teaching my nervous system automatically lets out a great big siiiiiiiiigh.

She is groovy and grounded and glorious and all kinds of other things that start with "G". Graceful! Girlish! Goober-y? No...sorry. That's me.

Anyhooo...last night Gina started out class asking us to "let this moment be enough"--meaning, you know, Get Here. Be Here. Actually and truly...HERE.

ME: Yes, yes, that sounds like a good idea...as soon as I get this one little problem I'm working on in my head solved, I will completely get on board with that.

And then she said something that caught my attention, she said--"if you're reaching for anything right now, grasping at something, can you just, put that down? Can you just let right now be enough?"

This caught my attention in such a way you would have thought my arms were actually raised in front of me, grabbing at the air--my entire body responded to it.  And I thought about how I've been re-reading and re-listening to some spiritual texts lately and all these new things have been popping up for me...one of them most recently while listening (for the umpteenth time) to a recorded lecture by Pema Chodron in which I heard her say that all spiritual practices are about relaxing.

All spiritual practices are about relaxing...I'm sorry, wait, all spiritual practices are about RELAXING?! I'm pretty sure that I thought at least some of them were about finally becoming perfect.... I really wish someone had told me this a long time ago, it would have made things a lot easier...

And as I went through class with Gina last night, as I felt myself over the course of the hour and a half, slowly begin to put my arms down, and felt my consciousness start to return to the place it most desperetely wants to live--my heart and my body and my big MIND (not my little brain) it kept occurring to me, over and over again, that whatever it is that softens you...is the right thing.

Whatever I can do...whatever I can focus on or contemplate or do or open to that SOFTENS me is the right thing. The path is all laid out--it is in fact this perfectly choreographed series of steps all plotted out and whispered to me via this feeling. Follow the softness! Follow the open-hearted gooeyness! The truth is that-a-way!!

And when we got to Savasana, I thought about how difficult a pose it can be for me sometimes, how even though all I'm doing is lying on the ground, still I can feel how much I pull away, how and where exactly it is I do not want, nor do I trust, the softening. And just as I was thinking about this (bemoaning it!) I heard Gina's lovely graceful grounded voice call out and ask us, "Can you let go of even the subtle unrest that most of us are usually hovering in?"

I could not have asked it more perfectly myself...

365 Days of Yoga - Day 16

First class back at the Lotus. Hooray! I have to say, as lovely as the Kripalu experience was, I have missed me some flow! It has become very clear to me now that I have Vinyasa in my blood and bones, and that though I'd like to learn some other styles so that I can get some more in-depth alignment instruction, the flow, for me, is the way to go.

(I'm a poet, and I don't even know it.) Or, wait...I guess I do...

However, there were some things which I took away from my few days of practice at Kripalu that I am going to continue to integrate into my practice in New York: 1. pranayama. Way more of it. Especially Breath of Fire and Alternate Nostril Breathing. We do both of these at the Lotus, but I'm now going to try to do at least a little bit, every day. As many times as I hear about how vitally important the breath is--the breath is your life, the breath is your practice, the breath is your presence, etc. etc.--I keep having to discover it for myself, little by little. I think a lot of times when I hear that I think, of course of course...I know, I knooooooow. The breath. The breath the breaththebreaththebreaththebreath. Get it. Got it. Wooopdee frickin' doo. But then...then I do something as simple as starting my day with some truly deep breathing and I feel like I've discovered fire. Hey! Hey you people, get a load of this: if you BREATHE (a lot and often) you feel GOOD. Amazing, actually. You feel connected to your body. Your mind clears. You feel alive. You feel present. You feel calm.

I have just figured this out. And it has only taken me 6,000,000 yoga classes to start to learn it. And it only takes me about two stressful hours in a day to forget it all over again.

So, the pranayama. That's one. The other is...well, there were just some images that were given during classes that really resonated with me, which I will continue to try to incorporate, in particular this one regarding savasana:

Now, for those of you who don't know, Savasana is the pose at the end of every yoga class. Corpse pose. And you...well, you just kind of...lay on the ground with your eyes closed. (Actors do this pose all the time in acting classes. A castmate from my last show said once while we were warming up, "there are people who never lie down on the ground! I feel like all I'm ever doing is rolling around on the ground!") This pose might sound really easy, and the form of it is, but the actual execution is extremely difficult. Because, if you're like me, as soon as you lay down with your eyes closed, your mind thinks it's been invited to a thinking party, of which you are the willing host. So, I'm always interested in canny advice about how to release deeper into savasana, and the following is my best reiteration of what one of the Kripalu teachers said.

The best image for me, he said, is this: Imagine you have a little one in your arms--maybe 3 or 4 years old. You're reading to her in your lap, and at a certain point, she falls asleep. And you know the EXACT moment when she has fallen asleep because you feel her body weight release into you. You feel her let go, into sleep. That is the goal of this pose, he said, to release into the ground in that same way. To let go, in that same way.

Now, this may not sound like much, but I nearly started bawling when he said it. (Maybe it had something to do with it being 6:30 in the morning, but I don't think so.) And the reason is--I had never heard the idea of "letting go" explained so potently, and in that moment I could picture it all--how much we are all walking around holding on; to our consciousness, to ourselves, to our lives, to our activities--and how when we do things like fall asleep it is as if our consciousness is a balloon we've been holding on to all day and in that moment of sleep we just let it slip, gently, from our fingers. And I thought about the ground I was laying on as my mother and I as the child in that story, and I thought of the kind of trust it would require to release into her in that way, and how contained in that is a sense of security in the earth as something that holds you up, that sustains you, that comforts you in sleep. And in my bones and my muscles and my blood I could feel this longing to let go in that way. I could feel that balloon straining at my fingers, let go let go let go...

Which I did.

Just a tiny tiny bit. Just a tiny tiny bit more than I usually do, but still, it was enough. I felt a little softer, a little more open, and I could feel, really feel the ground beneath me. And I could feel the strength of it and the enormous size of it. And I understood for a second how much I usually ignore its presence there, beneath my feet, beneath my body. So. Yeah. I will be keeping that image...