meeting the moment [journal-type musings]

Even though I've deepened my yoga practice in the last year, and now practice multiple times weekly, if not daily (yet), I am no expert. Many things about yoga still strike me as odd, obscure, or downright offputting. For instance, the fact that I can't find a yoga shirt that doesn't ride up my mom belly in forward fold; the Sanskrit names for the poses, even the ones I've done thousands of times; and the reference to one side of my body as "masculine," and the other as "feminine."

One yoga pose in particular has always held the same importance for me as the peppermint that restaurants put on the plastic credit card tray. [Who eats that thing?] It's the "holding your hands at your heart, palms touching" one. [No, I don't know what it's called in Sanskrit.] Well, lo and behold, I finally understand it, and funnily enough, my dead cat explained it to me.

She's been coming around a lot lately. Not in a Sixth Sense for cats "I see dead felines" sort of way, but not entirely unlike that, either. I keep getting this impossibly tangible sensation of her hair on my palm.

The only part of her recovered from the coyotes was a tuft of her magnificent rusty-colored fur. I couldn't be counted on to brush it daily, but I took her like clockwork to the vet for a lion cut. I wanted to keep that fur from multiplying in the corners and under the beds. After she was gone, of course, I forbid sweeping the house. I missed the scraps of kitty litter getting stuck to my feet, even as I used to curse them. Eventually, my non-sentimental partner did sweep, did remove her litter box, and her food bag. I felt betrayed.

For a while, when I felt her ghost fur in my hands, I would go get the morbid little tuft in its plastic bag in my sacred box (next to my mother's wedding ring, an empty bottle of her perfume, a wooden spool that belonged to my grandmother, etc. and etc. and etc.) I thought about how I never let my cat sleep with me (she might have woken me!), and how she eventually stopped trying, even when I changed my mind. I thought about all the ways I hide from the present moment, thinking of the future or fearing it. Clinging to the past.

I thought of the whole "power of now" cliche. And it started to make more sense. If my cat's death was going to teach me anything, it would be something to do with this.

A dear friend and I have decided to get a friend tattoo. Since we rejected our partners' suggestion to get their names, but cut in half, like an ink version of the old friendship necklaces, we are left wanting a suitable alternative. In conversation recently, we focused on some central lessons we were both getting out of our yoga class, trying to visualize them. One lesson I'd begun to think of as "meeting the moment."

As we were talking about how this concept could be worked into our tattoo, I started using my hands to explain it. I gave the example of a friend she and I were both in the process of "dumping." No regularly chatty patty, this man. Logorrhea, thy name is... well, his name. He overdetermines the moment with constant verbal streaming. He was abused so severely as a child that he likely will never be able to trust others enough to allow them equal space. Listening requires a high degree of vulnerability. When you listen, you're taking something into you, perhaps even letting it change you thereby. As I was discussing him, I pushed one hand against the other and steamrollered past it.

Then, I talked about how some people hide from the moment, and I withdrew that hand, and held it away from its mate. Then I said, "but this is meeting the moment." I put my hands together, with just the right amount of pressure.

I realized I was doing that throwaway yoga pose! Except it was no throwaway pose! I always wanted to stand in a way that stretched my wrists, or with my arms up so I could work on my tight shoulders. The pose was so passive. Or something. And--hello yoga retard!--so absolutely profound!

Often, when we do this pose in yoga, we're singing a Sanskrit chant that means, in part, "My body is a temple." You've heard that phrase before. So have I. I always thought it meant "Eat well; make good decisions; you only get one body; blah blah blah." But it means something more like, "The body is a sanctuary. It's the interface between the self and the divine." [It's hard for me to use that word, "divine." That's another part of yoga I'm still working on, its discussion of a higher power.] My body is the vehicle through which I experience everything; it's the meeting place. How fully I am living in my body determines whether I meet the moment (or don't).

It's a constant struggle for me, to embrace life's loose ends. I strive to meet the moment, the ways my hands meet, just at that point of perfect surface tension, just at that point of sensual awareness.

Leaving my car the other day, I had this brilliant flash of total acceptance. I saw Titus's toys and aborted art projects strewn about my car, and I started laughing, not upset at having a messy car, but ecstatic to have a healthy son, to have that "detritus of Titus," the little littered proofs of his existence. Recently, I stopped taking Trazadone to facilitate sleep. I still use earplugs, and often have to sleep alone, but I'm making my way to being a former insomniac, to becoming a person who doesn't need to sequester herself.

My dreams have come back. Last night, the dream was the moon through a window, and a 2-D representation of the goddess of Spring. She morphed into a neon green and electric flowing 3-D depiction, one that Android Jones would be proud to call his own. I woke up briefly, feeling blessed by that subconsciously generated art. I didn't freak out, "Oh god, will I ever get back to sleep?!" I enjoyed the residual image, and I let its visual lullaby lead me to Lethe.

If Bast (my cat) had been there, I might have looked down and remembered she was named for the goddess of fertility, and maybe she would have been laying next to my "feminine side," and maybe I would have thanked her for giving me the dream.

the believing game [yoga-inspired musings]

Perhaps my most heart-felt blog to date has been this one about my yoga experience. After steadily increasing my yoga practice over the last year, I became a member of Karma studio this month. I see this monetary commitment as a real step forward in putting my money where my heart and health are.

I think it's also a way of putting my family's heart and health first. Titus and I have our every-Saturday-morning practice, which we've been doing for 2 years now! Yoga is becoming so central to his life that this past weekend, he created a yoga-themed game. He took a piece of art he'd made, and converted it into "Yoga Game," which has the slogan (that he wrote out), "Go guys! Play the game!" It consists of grass, flower, rain, wind, and cloud poses. He had us roll dice, and do whatever pose we landed on. We played this game for over an hour, and it was as much fun as anything I've ever done.

In my own yoga practice last weekend, I attended a 3-hour Sankalpa yoga class in Boulder with my ridiculously fit and incessantly inspiring friend, Heather. The stereotype of the hardcore Boulder-ite athlete hit home as I watched half the class do headstand poses I hadn't known existed. When folks did the Dolphin headstand one-armed, I knew I was outclassed. I did manage to get into Bridge pose for the first time in years, with the help of the Anusara-based teacher's specific positioning instructions. I (think I) finally understand what "inner underarm" and "top of the arm bones" mean.

The most useful part of the class for me was the meditation in the beginning. He asked us to think about "what does your heart want?" My initial reaction: "vague! lame! My heart's an internal organ, you hippie!" My secondary reaction: "well, I'm not going to sit here obsessing over my relationship or my cat dying, that's for sure."

Of course, as I sat and attempted to clear my mind for pure thoughts my teacher would be proud of, I started obsessing over just those things. I realized if I wanted to break the chain of confusing, insecure, and sad thoughts, I'd have to be in the moment, and ask myself the damn question, "What does my heart want?", after all. Grr. Damn hippie yoga instructor. Fine.

Images came to me, not words. I saw Titus making a face at me, a pretend angry face, and felt myself making it back. He'd done this to show me I was being pointlessly irritable and to re-engage me. I saw myself in the halls with a student who'd had a particularly growth-filled experience in my class and who'd researched Carl Jung's "nigredo" as a way of looking at her recent "dark night of the soul." Various other images flooded my mind. After enjoying them, I realized they were all of one type: moments of expressive connection, contributing to mutual health.

That is what my heart wants. That's at the core of Stina. Expressive connection, contributing to mutual health.

Great. The little school girl that I still am inside, proud to have a right answer, wrote that under Question #1 in my internal test book.

Right on cue with my small enlightenment, the teacher asked his next question. "How can Yoga help you achieve this?" Ooh, "pick me! pick me!" Immediately, I thought: flexibility! Wait, this isn't a fill-in-the-blank quiz. It's short answer, so I thought further than that.

I thought about what flexibility really is. It's the ability to relax into discomfort, to let go of what's not serving me, of tightness and rigidity I don't need. It's been cited as more important for health than strength (and as necessary for good sex), and I think it is a kind of strength, the strength of the willow tree.

If we truly want to connect with someone through acts of expression, we have to be flexible. We won't get much (aside from conflict at best and inauthentic experiences at worst) if we come to an act of co-creation with only our own agenda, unwilling to waver from it in truly collaborative fashion. Anyone who's ever been part of a play or a huge building project knows this.

I thought of how I could have remained stiff when Titus made that face at me, but instead, I relaxed, returned the face. I stuck to my guns about whatever boundary he'd been testing, but I kept my mothering strength. I was able to give him (and myself) the reassurance he needed to know I still loved him; we were still connected.

It's not easy to do this. How much of ourselves can we let go and still be ourselves? How can we be sure we'll get what we want? Well, Yoga can help us re-see that question. It can help us get what we need, which rarely has anything to do with certainty. Yoga can help us achieve a balance of flexibility and strength that makes our insecure questions less scary.

So of course, at this point, just when I'm on top of the world with all my right answers, and the easiness of this whole meditation thing--pshaw!--back in come thoughts of the problematic areas of my relationship and the dead cat.

Crap.

Return to the question. What does my heart want?

Return to the answer. Expressive connection resulting in mutual health.

So, why do I mourn my kitty, Bast? Surely not for her own sake. She is no longer in pain. But for my own sake, I mourn her. I mourn the end of connection, the end of her effect on my blood pressure, the end of my making her purr.

Given this, is my sometime unease in my human relationship really rooted in our lack of a verbalized public statement of long-term intentions (marriage)?

No.

I fear lack of connection in the NOW, which is making me care overmuch about the future. The symbol of commitment has become more important than the commitment itself. This compensatory measure is common to us humans. You see it when a parent with a troubled household obsesses over putting "perfect" pictures of their children in frames on the walls. You see it when a man stresses his masculinity to prove he still has it. We put up the facade to hide what's not working underneath.

At this point, I could have turned to thoughts like, "Whaaa! Why don't we have more authentic, mutually expressive connection? What's missing? What am I/is he doing wrong?"

Thankfully, yogic meditation had granted me that spacious mindset that makes this sort of finger pointing seem as pointless as it is.

Return to the question. "How can yoga help me achieve this? How can I allow for more connection in the now?"

Return to the answer. I can relax into the uncomfortable areas. Instead of thinking about what I want, and how I want love to be manifested, I can listen to my partner's non-verbal expressions of love.* He has often asked me to "read his actions." What if I tried actually doing this, even though it's out of my comfort zone? What if I tried to see him for what he is, truly observe him, versus some vision of what I think he should be? What do I stand to gain? [See Peter Elbow's "The Believing Game" for more thoughts on this way of question asking.] If my partner also engages the process of loving in this way, if we both pay attention to what the other one needs vs. just expressing and projecting our own needs, what do we both have to gain?

A) Mutual expression resulting in connection and increased health for both parties
B) Happiness
C) Nookie [SFW, I swear!]
D) All of the above.

Ooh, pick me! I know the answer!!! D! It's D!!! [And hopefully lots of C!]

*If you haven't heard of the Love Languages, I recommend them to you. I am grateful that my partner's dominant love language is physical affection, as is mine, such that when things get tough, we return to the nuzzle and the cuddle, the hand hold and the kiss.

open letter to a 4th grade dancer in the borrowed leotard [letter to former self]

I see you've chosen to dance for your 4th grade 4-H talent competition. You have recorded a song called "Miss Red" off the radio, and you have danced your heart out to it every night for weeks. You don't know much about professional dancers, but you have noticed they tend to wear leotards on TV, so you borrow one from a friend. It was part of her Halloween costume last year. She dressed as a devil. So, in your red borrowed leotard, you take the stage, which is really just a place in the cafeteria where they moved the tables over.

Afterward, you'll wish no one had been watching you dance like no one's watching. You'll cry for a half hour in the back bathroom stall after Jason Mullinax and his entourage of meanies ask you for your autograph sarcastically, as you turn as red in the face as the borrowed leotard. You won't realize until adulthood that part of the problem, but only the smallest part, was playing an R & B song to a country and rock crowd.

In this moment, though, you're following your bliss, and you are totally immersed in the dance. When it is taken from you, you spend years getting back to it.

Last week, you made a new friend at a dance event you attend weekly, where everyone dances their hearts out. No one is worried about how they dance on TV. No Jason Mullinaxes wait in the wings to humiliate you. You do see a few men who could have been him, though, who seem to have changed their mind about this dancing business, but don't yet know how. You always make a point of going over to them, drawing them out, bringing them in.

Because another thing you have realized in adulthood is that you weren't really the awkward one back then.

You ask your new friend if you can borrow her outfit for your first ever belly dance performance the next week. She is glad to loan it to you. You spend last night at this event practicing your upcoming routine in this borrowed blue homemade beauty of an outfit. The belly dancers in the room draw you in, make you feel supported.

This morning, on the way to perform, you're nervous and out of sorts. You can't put your finger on the reason. You love to dance, why should you be so irritable? That old R & B song, "Miss Red" comes on the radio. You instantly realize that you still fear Jason Mullinax and his entourage of meanies. You don't fear them in any real, embodied form, but you've internalized his voice mocking you, and you still use it against yourself. The infectious beats of this classic song cause you to car-dance the voice away, and you resolve to write this letter to your 4th-grade self.

I want you to know that I was watching you dance, girl. And even if no one else in that middle school cafeteria would agree, I LOVED IT!