So today was my 12 hours of silence. I woke up at 6 with no alarm which is very odd for me and saw that it was time to start. Tim was still in bed. Since we couldn't speak to each other, I moved over toward him and laid my head on his shoulder. Eventually he got up to take a shower - he was going up to his parents' house in Dover, Ohio to do some target shooting (ahimsa). I listened to him shower and fought the urge to fall back asleep and the urge to turn on the Saturday morning t.v. I listened to the animals breathing their sleep noises. Moving around to reposition themselves as I did. I propped myself up in bed and looked out the back window out into the ravine that is at it's most lush green right now. That occupied a good deal of time. Eventually Tim went out to Panera. I had told him the night before that if I had to be silent all day that I wanted a cinnamon roll and some coffee to start the day. He's so sweet - he brought it to me in bed with the admonishment that I not get any sugary crumbs in bed. No problem - Lily cleaned all of those up.
After he left I propped up a bunch of pillows to do pranayama exercise. I have started my day like this before and I always feel invigorated. I just started with some deep breathing (I've got all day here) and then did my favorite exercise which is 15:10:5 breathing and then return to breathing so that you hardly feel like you are breathing at all. It's really wonderful.
My feet hit the floor at 9:30. What a leisurely wake up routine! My first priority was to brush the dogs because they have just been shedding and shedding. They are not used to coming when I whistle so that was a challenge and I usually tell them "good girl" and "stay" quite a bit. But we used non-verbal communication. I think they understood what was going on. The only problem was that our new next door neighbor came home and she wanted to say hello, but all I could do was wave. I felt so bad that I wrote her a note and took it over and dropped it in her letter box.
Then I came in and did my first of many meditations for the day. I meditated so much that by the end of the day I could just immediately come to it and quiet my mind. I did have one strange meditation where I kept hearing this voice with an odd accent was talking to me telling me that I was one and that I was part of the one. It was quite interesting. For a lot of the afternoon the dogs and I did what we might do on a normal Saturday which was chill out on the couch, except for surfing for some bad movie to watch I looked out the French doors at the ravine (there tend to be lots of mosquitoes and since I knew I was going to practice more I didn't want to put on mosquito repellent.)
I went back to my yoga room and did a super duper long yin practice. I couldn't decide if I was going to do primary. Well, after yin I did a 40 minute meditation. By this time, my mind was completely silent.
After that I felt so open, my mind at rest, I figured I had to do a little of the primary series, even though today is my typical day of rest. So I did a very modified version, but I found it very easy to let go. It was a completely different practice from my normal practice in a led class or even mysore. I didn't strive for anything, except to let go completely and to stay completely with the breath. At the end I did another short meditation before savasana.
After practice I coaxed the dogs outside and grabbed a San Pelligrino and lit every single citronella candle out on the back deck. The dogs ran around and did their little fighting show for me and I sat and admired the trees with the sun going down behind them. I noticed it wasn't very bright, sort of dim. Finally a bug or crawled down my shirt and I decided it was time for a shower. I got dressed and started doing laundry since it was technically past my 12 hours. I figured even in a monastery they do chores. As I was gathering the laundry together Tim came home. I started shouting "Tim, Tim, Tim." I told him about my day and he told me about his and then I turned on the computer to blog about my day of silence. Namaste
Saturday, June 23, 2007
Saturday, June 16, 2007
The Path
Is there a right path or a wrong path? I ask this question because someone recently told me that I am on the wrong path and it deeply disturbed me. I have been working hard to let it go, but the person who made this particular comment has been very close to me and I have gone through a great deal of change lately. All, I thought, to get on the right path. It was just one of those things that someone says and it gets under your skin like a splinter of glass. I guess I have to trust that my body/mind will eventually reject it and heal itself.
Today laughter was the best medicine. I talked over Skype with my friend who is studying at AYRI in Mysore. She is having such a great experience it is really inspiring me to try to start working toward getting to India myself. But we ended up just laughing for almost two hours. Thank heavens for some of this technology! Skype is free - I can't imagine how much a phone call like that would have cost. And it was so much better than e-mail - just to hear her voice and hear how happy she is. And things get lost in translation over e-mail a lot. Misread and misunderstood. There's no substitute for talking to a live person, unless she was actually here, or preferably I there. Anyway, it was very inspiring and fun and she was full of fun stories and she made me laugh and cry and count my blessings that I have at least one true friend in the world even if she is half a world away.
Then my husband and I traveled a couple of hours away to attend a graduation party for the daughter of one of his college friends' daughters. She's actually his step daughter, very beautiful and full of hope and promise. We got to see a lot of friends that we only see a couple times a year, but that we are very close to. They are all so easy to get along with. No hidden agendas or fragile egos that I might damage with one wrong word. Again we laughed a lot and had serious conversations about life and death and changing jobs and marriage and then laughed some more. And made plans to see each other before too long.
As we were riding home I told Tim that the afternoon had been the perfect medicine for my soul. As we drove home I read two chapters from Understanding the Mind by TNH. It was absolutely profound. Then I put it down as he recommends not reading too much at once. So I held my husband's hand and enjoyed the scenic Ohio farm and woodlands. How they blended and fell away, divided by a small river or stream. The colors of the fields, deep green, surrounded by yellow grasses and purple wildflowers. And lovely dark woods with deer on the edges tentatively coming out to eat at dusk. And I just let myself enjoy this scenery that I have seen tens, maybe hundreds of times, but it was if I was seeing it through new eyes - and I was.
Today laughter was the best medicine. I talked over Skype with my friend who is studying at AYRI in Mysore. She is having such a great experience it is really inspiring me to try to start working toward getting to India myself. But we ended up just laughing for almost two hours. Thank heavens for some of this technology! Skype is free - I can't imagine how much a phone call like that would have cost. And it was so much better than e-mail - just to hear her voice and hear how happy she is. And things get lost in translation over e-mail a lot. Misread and misunderstood. There's no substitute for talking to a live person, unless she was actually here, or preferably I there. Anyway, it was very inspiring and fun and she was full of fun stories and she made me laugh and cry and count my blessings that I have at least one true friend in the world even if she is half a world away.
Then my husband and I traveled a couple of hours away to attend a graduation party for the daughter of one of his college friends' daughters. She's actually his step daughter, very beautiful and full of hope and promise. We got to see a lot of friends that we only see a couple times a year, but that we are very close to. They are all so easy to get along with. No hidden agendas or fragile egos that I might damage with one wrong word. Again we laughed a lot and had serious conversations about life and death and changing jobs and marriage and then laughed some more. And made plans to see each other before too long.
As we were riding home I told Tim that the afternoon had been the perfect medicine for my soul. As we drove home I read two chapters from Understanding the Mind by TNH. It was absolutely profound. Then I put it down as he recommends not reading too much at once. So I held my husband's hand and enjoyed the scenic Ohio farm and woodlands. How they blended and fell away, divided by a small river or stream. The colors of the fields, deep green, surrounded by yellow grasses and purple wildflowers. And lovely dark woods with deer on the edges tentatively coming out to eat at dusk. And I just let myself enjoy this scenery that I have seen tens, maybe hundreds of times, but it was if I was seeing it through new eyes - and I was.
Monday, June 4, 2007
Letting Go Fights Back
So I had been dreading this workshop on the anatomy of the belly forever because my first experience with the instructor had been less than positive, I'll just say. But that was at the beginning of our yoga teacher training and now we are nearing the end. Did I think to myself "Well I'll put that experience in the past and go in with fresh eyes and ears and heart and open myself to new possibilities." Let's just say I tried and tried, but honestly I could not. I was dreading and dreading too much. I thought this teacher was full of baloney and half-baked and goofy and I had to acknowledge that I still had those feelings or I would be lying to myself. I wanted to put them aside, but the stubborn holder on in me would not let them go.
So Saturday morning Tim and I tried to find the studio, which is in our neighborhood, but has no outward sign, just the address, which we hadn't written down, so we drove up and down the street looking for someone in teacher training until we found someone. I also had convinced myself that the studio would be icky and uncomfortable. It was quite the opposite. It was clean and large and had nice, new low pile carpeting, plenty of props, two bathrooms, very spacious. It was about the opposite of what I expected, so I immediately felt comfortable when I walked in and unrolled my mat. For some reason that feeling of comfort just gave me over to the whole experience and I let go of all my past resistences to this teacher and my mistrust of her, dislike of her, my feelings that she didn't know anything about yoga - especially my kind of yoga, Ashtanga yoga. In fact I realized that she was saying a lot of the same things that she had said in the first workshop, but I was hearing them in a completely different way. Something in me had woken up, opened up, my perception, my awareness, whatever you choose to call it was no longer threatened by other people's agendas. I can have my own feelings, I can own them and not be attached to them, they can come and go and other people can do the same - or not. But I am ultimately responsible for how I perceive and accept information and I don't have to judge - it can just be, there, in the world, with or without my interaction.
We did some asanas and I had decided to give myself over to this new feeling of trust and letting go and it felt amazing. I went farther and farther in every pose. I felt new sensations throughout my whole body. I let go of any resistance I was asked to, that I was aware of, that I possible could. I went home Saturday night. Since we'd been working on the belly area I wasn't that hungry and I'd also developed a migraine the size of Texas from a storm that blew through. So I didn't eat much and just laid on the couch and read and watched t.v. Sunday morning I woke up and I couldn't move. My back had gone into complete spasm.
Ultimately I did make it out of bed and into the shower and took some ibuprofen. That all helped. I felt much better when I got to the studio. I confessed to my back pain and was told that was good because it meant that the muscles were releasing. We did more asana and I worked with the guidelines that we'd been given the day before. I let go and let go and let go some more. I surprised myself with the amount of letting go I could do when I brought my attention to it. It felt amazing. When we broke for lunch I was exhausted, so I drank my energy juice and had my carrots and Clif bar and then went back to the studio to read. Eventually I fell asleep so soundly that I was drooling on my mat. After a while I woke up and sat up to see if I could work any of the kinks out and the instructor came over and rubbed my back to bring the blood back into it. She said it felt more pliable already.
After lunch we had a review session. I finally found a comfortable position laying over a rolled up blanket in the fetal position. But I was still accepting, still open. Am I crazy? I don't know. That night I called my mentor, teacher, massage therapist and asked if he was available Monday (today) and described what had happened. He said it sounded like a chiropractic adjustment. Interesting - he said, I thought. He said no practice until he saw me, which he wouldn't have to tell me now, though I may have tried. I am going to attempt to sit for meditation. Like I told one of my other friends, it might not be the way that I choose to practice, because I know there are other people who have gotten similar results without this kind of pain, but I'm glad that I let myself go there and experience it.
So Saturday morning Tim and I tried to find the studio, which is in our neighborhood, but has no outward sign, just the address, which we hadn't written down, so we drove up and down the street looking for someone in teacher training until we found someone. I also had convinced myself that the studio would be icky and uncomfortable. It was quite the opposite. It was clean and large and had nice, new low pile carpeting, plenty of props, two bathrooms, very spacious. It was about the opposite of what I expected, so I immediately felt comfortable when I walked in and unrolled my mat. For some reason that feeling of comfort just gave me over to the whole experience and I let go of all my past resistences to this teacher and my mistrust of her, dislike of her, my feelings that she didn't know anything about yoga - especially my kind of yoga, Ashtanga yoga. In fact I realized that she was saying a lot of the same things that she had said in the first workshop, but I was hearing them in a completely different way. Something in me had woken up, opened up, my perception, my awareness, whatever you choose to call it was no longer threatened by other people's agendas. I can have my own feelings, I can own them and not be attached to them, they can come and go and other people can do the same - or not. But I am ultimately responsible for how I perceive and accept information and I don't have to judge - it can just be, there, in the world, with or without my interaction.
We did some asanas and I had decided to give myself over to this new feeling of trust and letting go and it felt amazing. I went farther and farther in every pose. I felt new sensations throughout my whole body. I let go of any resistance I was asked to, that I was aware of, that I possible could. I went home Saturday night. Since we'd been working on the belly area I wasn't that hungry and I'd also developed a migraine the size of Texas from a storm that blew through. So I didn't eat much and just laid on the couch and read and watched t.v. Sunday morning I woke up and I couldn't move. My back had gone into complete spasm.
Ultimately I did make it out of bed and into the shower and took some ibuprofen. That all helped. I felt much better when I got to the studio. I confessed to my back pain and was told that was good because it meant that the muscles were releasing. We did more asana and I worked with the guidelines that we'd been given the day before. I let go and let go and let go some more. I surprised myself with the amount of letting go I could do when I brought my attention to it. It felt amazing. When we broke for lunch I was exhausted, so I drank my energy juice and had my carrots and Clif bar and then went back to the studio to read. Eventually I fell asleep so soundly that I was drooling on my mat. After a while I woke up and sat up to see if I could work any of the kinks out and the instructor came over and rubbed my back to bring the blood back into it. She said it felt more pliable already.
After lunch we had a review session. I finally found a comfortable position laying over a rolled up blanket in the fetal position. But I was still accepting, still open. Am I crazy? I don't know. That night I called my mentor, teacher, massage therapist and asked if he was available Monday (today) and described what had happened. He said it sounded like a chiropractic adjustment. Interesting - he said, I thought. He said no practice until he saw me, which he wouldn't have to tell me now, though I may have tried. I am going to attempt to sit for meditation. Like I told one of my other friends, it might not be the way that I choose to practice, because I know there are other people who have gotten similar results without this kind of pain, but I'm glad that I let myself go there and experience it.
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