My yoga practice screams at me. Not from the mat but as I hunch over the sink, feverishly scrubbing hardened grime from a frying pan. I am standing askew, my teeth gritted and my glutimus maximi are bunched into two tight balls. Since when did need my ass muscles to wash dishes?
I witness that I am not as relaxed and easy going as think I am or want to be. These shoulders can melt, the lips soften and my hands ungrasp. I find that I scrunch my toes when driving and clench my jaws when sleeping. I even have experienced my tongue unnecessarily wrapping into a twist during Parivrttaikapada Sirsasana. All relatively unconscious behavior now seen and considered due to my yoga practice. Witness is a common mantra in yoga. And in doing so, I see and decide its high time to follow this tension into my deeper being.
Yoga is like that. Life is like that. The more I practice and the more I live, through witnessing I can become more aware and wise. With applied concentration and unraveling, a murky mystery that plagued last year I now understand and see with blissful illumination. Where today’s shadows cast a fearful darkness, one day will be a sweet swatch of brilliance and playful freedom. This is not navel gazing, mind you, this is knowing thyself, this is exposing insidious ways of being that influence thought and action.
And today I suffer a shadow. I am not afraid, I am grateful for the time and space to unearth stoney blockages on my path to bliss. I witness my tautness and find it hooked into a desperate inquietude. Layered beneath years of accommodation are deep bundles of tense confusion. Freeing deep muscles such as the levator scapulae, rhomboids, quadrates and psoas unseals tombs of traumatic feelings. The energy is forced back into my mainstream and I am smacked with fears and memories and patterns. Voices. I am unlovable. I am not good enough. I am ugly. I am greedy. No one wants me. I do not want myself.
Am I depressed? Crazy? Running through the streets screaming? No, I am like many other plastisized Americans, secretly held tightly captive in an unconscious grasp. Wounds, simple yet profound, tucked neatly under applied strength. We grew up in stressed nuclear units, without communities, with Dr. Spock, with belief that kids are resilient!, without spirituality, with money and power placed above love.
And despite these muffled cries I’ve lived, leaning on hope, on others opinions, on others acceptance of the me they think they see, the me I weave and project with grace learned from fictional characters and heroines. I know that I do have unmarred strength, in me is true beauty cultivated from gratitude and learning. But it is shy and meek and pinned down and battered by the voices.
And now what? Pretend that I am not feeling this fear? Make like I don’t, it doesn’t- matter and continue on with my semi charade? Life is pain, no? No. Life is a struggle and this is the struggle. Facing our deepest fears and performing psychic surgery to exorcise them, these demons, these patterns. They are not small. With such negative banter whispering behind my scenes I lack the courage to shine, to believe that I am worthy of shining. I am held down from my higher self.
It might be that these firm chunks of muscle will release. And the fears, the memories and the sadness will loom. And my practice, of yoga and conscious living will guide me through this place, as I have been led through many shadows before it. I will move mountains, I will quietly sit and witness, I will listen, I will love. And I will be free.
