Holding the pose.

Posted On October 22, 2013

My life feels ripped in two. They are moving everything today and tomorrow. I'm grateful this didn't get dragged out like it could have. I've found myself out in the greenhouse more times in the last few days than all summer long. There's something about that space that feels peaceful and clarifying for me right now.

I read something a few weeks ago that has stuck with me, and it's even more relevant now. It was a yogi explaining that in your yoga practice, the time to stay in a pose is when you start to feel like moving away from it. That's the time to stay, to feel yourself being challenged and stretched, to welcome that change, and then to slowly and with intention move into the next pose.

I meditated on that the few times I've done yoga since, but I feel that I need that meditation even more in this situation. I need to feel this and stretch into this. I need to watch my house getting turned upside down, belongings split and children that I love being taken away. I need to comfort my daughter and my husband while they ache and feel confusion. I need to receive comfort and love myself and allow my people to see me vulnerable and weakened. I need to look at the empty spaces left and remember what it really is that makes me strong and what builds more strength. Challenge and change and discomfort are there, but I shouldn't hide from it. I will feel all of this, I will stretch, and I will move with surety to the next thing.

This got shared with me earlier, and I liked it:

"You know, what are hearts for? Hearts are there to be broken, and I say that because that seems to be just part of what happens with hearts. I mean, mine has been broken so many times that I have lost count. But it just seems to be broken open more and more and more, and it just gets bigger. I remember saying to my therapist, “You know, my heart by now feels open like a suitcase. It feels like it has just sort of dropped open, you know, like how a big suitcase just falls open. It feels like that.”

Instead of that feeling of having a thorn through your heart, that feeling Pema Chödrön talks about in tonglen meditation, you have a sense of openness, as if the wind could blow through it. And that’s the way I’m used to my heart feeling. The feeling of the heart being so open that the wind blows through it. I think that is the way it’s supposed to feel when you’re in balance. And when you get out of balance, you feel like there’s no wind, there’s no breeze, there’s just this rock and it has a big thing sticking through it. I don’t know how you get from one feeling to the other, except through meditation, often, but also activism, just seeing what needs to be done in the world, or in our families, and just start doing it." (Alice Walker)