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!