To Everything Turn, Turn, Turn

The yoga we practice enables us to turn towards life, not try to shut it out. I took my first class in a month today and it was wonderful. I have not been to class because I had an injury  several weeks ago which needed to heal. A very wise friend of mine said something after class about her own aches and pains and how it affects her physical body. I thought, I can get through certain things in my life, rationalize them, tell myself I have accepted them and move on, but my physical body will speak up to contradict me if this is not really the case.

We carry so much around without even realizing it. I can tell myself that I need time to heal, but I also need to know when to get back on the mat to do the work towards that healing. When your lower back hurts it is very easy to justify staying out of class. But what if that pain is telling you something? What if your body is telling you something your mind has buried? How do you face it? If I can't approach it in my mind, sometimes it is more accessible on the mat.

When the mind, body and heart are moving together things can become more clear. Simply put, it is all going to come out, whether you want it to or not, and if it does not manifest itself in your thoughts, it will certainly pop up somewhere else (like your lower back). When you turn towards life, it means you have to face certain things which might be holding you back. Unless you have no feelings, this is a complex and sometimes painful task. Admitting fault or fear or pain, or things that simply hurt is not easy, but as your body can tell you, these are very heavy items. When I ask people to hold a pose, say everyone's favorite, chair pose, for a long amount of the time, the effort involved is extraordinary.......but the release, bliss.

I wrote very simply of yoga in the previous blog. This is not to say that it is simple, it is just that I cannot express the complexities without sounding like a blithering idiot sometimes. It is just so MUCH. I don't want to distill it down to a pithy quote, but I do want people to begin to wrap their heads around things before they step into the deep end of the pool. The beginning of greater access to a bigger universe can be incredibly daunting.

Svadhayaya is the practice of self- study and in my mind (literally) one of the hardest practices. Sweet Lord, what if I don't like what I see???? Well you are a work in progress, idiot, as one of my friends used to say, you can choose to change directions, or stay right where you are and live with that.

I choose to look down and see my feet, remember who I am, recognize the joys and pains of my life up til now, and then turn my head to the night sky and see the universe.