Posts Tagged ‘death’

brain drain

kim on 8:51 pm May 20th, 2009 / Be the first to comment! »

A reason we avoid asanas we don’t like is because typically we want to avoid pain. This makes sense, as pain could be associated with death, and we have a biological imperative to live on.

Your brain is always going to go where the strongest sensation is, which during yoga class can often be–especially for beginners–the place of pain or discomfort.

This is why breathing mindfully is so radical. Who knew? This process is waiting for you, right under your nose, and yet the breath wafts in and out, sloshes through the lungs and out, every day all day, without ever being noticed.

Breathing mindfully through a strong sensation in class–the hamstrings, the shoulders, and neck as their tightness emerges–will relax the reaction to the sensation and give you more information. Am I really in danger here? Should I back away as though from a predator in the wild? Or can I stay here for a few more breaths and see what happens next?

As you breathe and contemplate these question when “pain” or a strong sensation comes up, the brain goes to that spot through the breath. This is when the practice becomes much more interesting, and harder to avoid. If we stay in the space where we let ourselves avoid the sensations we don’t like, and search only for the ones we crave, growth in yoga doesn’t happen. If we really breathe and inquire, the only thing that *can* happen is change.

Weeping in Shoulderstand

kim on 8:42 pm May 20th, 2009 / Be the first to comment! »

So a big reason I haven’t posted anything since early February is because I could just as easily puked my way through the event, or fallen asleep before it was over. The lil’ lady growing in my belly has had other plans for my creative output; as my main creative output of 2009, she is in fact a drain on all the others.

This morning, in yoga class, I wept after shoulderstand. It was the first time in two months that it hasn’t made my head feel like it’s going to explode or created a warm sensation in my uterus that was probably fine but still scary in the moment because I’d never felt it before.

So I cried. It was more a release of tension than anything else, because this pose, salamba sarvangasana, has been my favorite for many years. The extra 15 pounds I’ve rapidly gained has made this pose, more than the other inversions, challenging and uncomfortable.

It’s a full-circle experience, because when I started yoga in 1994 in New York City, no one used blankets for sarvangasana, and I walked around with a stiff neck for days after doing this pose in class. But it became my favorite solace in asana once I’d worked the alignment out, and I can always stay there longer than in any other pose.

So soon after I got pregnant and the runaway train of weight gain left the station (and the hormones, and the other shifts), I avoided the pose thanks to its new discomforts. And yet, I knew it wasn’t harming me or the lil’ lady, so I convinced myself to try it this way and that way, a shorter time, or piked, and finally, this morning, it changed and became an informative, still challenging, but mentally relaxing pose as it has been for more than a decade.

From a yoga point of view, this brings up several questions: What happens to our practice when something so dramatic shifts it? What do you do when the poses you loved are no longer accessible to you? Or they “feel” different all of a sudden?

I’ve found in this process that “practicing yoga” has had to change. I’ve found that I was far more attached to my performance in asana (poses) than I thought — in fact I’d convinced myself that I wasn’t attached at all! I’ve found that there is a necessary grace to be found in change when you don’t fight it. The observation of all these things, as always, is the work.