Effort and Ease

I often get ideas in yoga class. Breaking my concentration to write them down seems most un-yogi-like, though, so I try to file them away to retrieve later. 

Last week the inspiration arrived during shavasana, the final, resting pose, when you spend a few minutes lying down and (at least for me) trying not to fall asleep. The teacher read us a passage about kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing ceramics with gold lacquer, celebrating the cracks rather than hiding them. Obvious post potential in that, but I'm saving it for another day.

Today I want to explore a suggestion I heard in class several weeks earlier: the need to balance effort and ease in each yoga pose. While some contortions seem more effortful than easy, I can see the wisdom in maintaining these two poles. If you're slacking, pick it up. If you're hurting, tone it down.

Some of us find it easier to slack, others to overdo. But neither attitude gets us where we want to be. To find freedom in movement requires attentiveness and relaxation, strength and flexibility, effort and ease.

Surely this isn't just advice for yoga, but for life. 

Still a Baby

The new year is no longer the shiny new penny that shows up from time to time in my change purse. It has dulled around the edges. But when I look at the days proportionately — 18 out of 366 — 2024 is still in its infancy. A resolution stands a chance with odds like that.

Which is why I trundled out to a yoga class at 8:30 on the coldest morning of the year yesterday. Not just for the stretching and the strengthening, but also for the meditative aspect of it. 

The trip was worth it. The class was small, and the instructor was experienced. She took us through a variety of poses and encouraged us to use our breath to get into and out of them. Studio lights were low, music was soft. When I left, the new year seemed young again. 

(Ah, to be as limber as a baby! Photo: CCC)

Blue Sky

In group meditation, we are visualizing creativity as blue sky and a spark of clear spacious light that expands and grows until it covers the universe. 

This is easier said than done. Into the mind comes the grocery list, the calendar, the need to notify team members that I'm off today. Blue sky vanishes behind clouds of my own silly making, which is what it always does. Because clouds are almost all of my own making. 

But today I'm stepping away from calendar and duties, hoping to spend as much time as possible outside, under the real sky, which is, as it turns out, mostly blue today.

Solstice Miracle!

This morning while meditating we were urged to think of our body as a receptacle for a warm, golden, spacious light. Let this light flow from above the head down into each toe, intoned the narrator, let it flow up the legs to the knees, filling the stomach, the chest, the throat, the head and, from there, each finger and through the arms up to the shoulders. 

I'm still a beginner at all of this. I try to visualize this light, which looks a little like melted butterscotch. I try to think of my body as a receptacle, which means thinking of it as empty. 

A funny notion, this, to think of oneself as empty rather than full. It dawned on me today that the very notion of emptiness is in itself liberating. That means that all of the worries and to-do lists clogging up my brain are actually not there after all. 

It's a Solstice miracle!  

Me Time

People always want "me time," said the calm voice emanating from the screen, but we actually have a lot more of it than we might think. The way to retrieve it, he said, is to live mindfully, to stop thinking two steps ahead of ourselves to what we will do after the thing we're doing now. 

When I heard this during my guided meditation session today, little fireworks went off in my mind. Not because I'm always clamoring for "me time," a phrase that frankly makes me cringe. But because I know, in my heart of hearts, how much time I spend spinning wheels and riling myself up over nothing. 

It's largely to still those wheels and quiet that worried, one-step-ahead-of-myself feeling that I've sought the solace of sitting still and focusing on my breath. I am still so poor at it, though; I can barely make it 10 puny minutes before giving in to rumination. 

But the sudden awareness that freeing thought is also freeing time — understanding the power of that equation — well, that will make me try harder from now on. 

Precious Moments

It's easy to feel a failure at meditation, although I believe failure is a concept frowned upon in meditative circles. But despite the wandering mind I must constantly try to rein in during my brief sessions on Headspace, I stepped outside today to pick up the newspaper and felt a thrill just to be alive.

The sun was shining, I could walk barefoot to the street — the moment was perfect for celebrating the importance of all moments.

And as if to underline this view, as I write this post the hummingbird, elusive this year, seems finally to have decided our nectar is worth sipping. Already I've seen her make several passes at the feeder, dipping as well into the New Guinea impatiens, her needle-like bill stabbing the flowers with surgical precision.

A summer moment. A precious moment. Precious as all moments are.

Roaming Free

What happens when a post idea flies through my head while I'm trying to participate in the meditation  program my office offers at 9 a.m. most mornings?

It flies through, that's all ... and is lost to posterity.

Meditation means clearing the mind of not only worry and clutter and pointless rumination, but also of the ideas that are sometimes worth developing in this blog.

There's always a chance that this idea will reappear later, of course. Ideas do that sometimes. But there's a greater chance that it's never coming back. And that's all right. Harvesting thoughts can be a tiring business. Better sometimes to let the mind roam free.

Breathing

If someone asks me a few months from now how I got through the quarantine,  I will say, well, I kept breathing. This will sound flippant and I won't mean it to.  It's not just that I kept breathing. But I've kept breathing.

The italics are important. They denote not just the unconscious, staying-alive kind of breathing, but also the breathing that's suggested in guided meditations and yoga classes, which I've been taking plenty of these last several weeks.

This is focused breathing, in-and-out-through-the-nose breathing or sometimes in-through-the-nose-out-through-the-mouth breathing. It's putting one hand on my heart and one hand on my stomach and feeling the breath moving through my body. It's becoming aware of the rise and fall, the inflow and outflow.

I'm a remedial meditation student, but I am learning to appreciate the power of deep breathing to settle the mind and calm the body. Breathe in, breathe out. Ah, that's better.

Labyrinth

Last night the pavement unfurled like a gift. It caught my feet and led me through the dark. It gave me room to breathe.

Earlier in the evening, October fireflies crawled up from the ground, blinking as yellow as the road marks I wrote about yesterday. If the fireflies could do it, so could I.

So I donned a headlamp and reflective vest and took off down the newly lined road.

The air was cool on my arms; it had the weight of summer air. It buoyed me as I strode past lamplit houses. It calmed me with its passage.

Last night, the road was my labyrinth.

Finding Francis

It's not as if I had lost him, or didn't know about him at all. But there was a bit of the miraculous in what happened yesterday.

I was facing a difficult situation at work, a delicate, pretending-like-everything-is-okay-but-it's-really-not situation. And that, on top of the grief and worry, was making for some desperate hours. I needed quick relief, an instant infusion of calmness and strength. So for some reason — I'm not sure why — I googled a 16th-century saint, Francis de Sales.

This is not St. Francis of the Franciscans, namesake of Pope Francis. This is the other Francis. I know about him because my parish priests are of his order, the Oblates of St. Francis de Sales, and his writings are sometimes reprinted in the bulletin.

Still, googling saints is not something I do in times of trouble. I'm more likely to pace or bite my nails. Nevertheless, the impulse was so strong that it was like reaching for Motrin when I feel a headache coming on. There was the near certain promise of relief. I knew this was what I was supposed to do.

So I found this: "Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsoever, even if your whole world seems upset." And this: "Have patience with all things but chiefly have patience with yourself." And this: "The same everlasting Father who cares for you today will care for you tomorrow and every day. Either he will shield you from suffering or give you unfailing peace to bear it. Be at peace then and put aside all anxious thoughts and imaginings."

Yesterday I found Francis when I needed him the most.

Standing Still

A post postponed. A post about sleep. Too long to get into today. Instead, a meditation on standing still, its importance in our lives.

Standing still to watch the grass waving in the wind; to ponder a fenced pasture.

Standing still to hear each leaf hit the ground, to feel a breeze I wouldn't notice if I were moving quickly.

A walk moves you through space. But standing still lets space move through you.

Eyes Closed

-->

It's a minor complaint, the doctor said, and the best way to treat it is with warm compresses to the eyes. He told me this a year ago and I didn't listen. This time he had my attention.

My new resolution, then, is to spend 15 minutes a day with my eyes closed, a warm washcloth spread across them, hopping up every five minutes or so to reheat the cloth.  This is my new meditation time.

It's strangely relaxing. The warmth of the compress, the blotting out of the world, my mind wandering, me trying, trying to keep it empty but largely failing. Still, it's a beginning, an earnest attempt to spend a few minutes a day in the mental equivalent of a warm bath.

When the compress cools, I re-enter the world reluctantly. Lights seem too bright, noises too loud. My eyes are still sore;  healing them will take time. But my mind is starting to crave its quiet time.