Category: Yoga

Bending over Backward

Tonight’s yoga lesson:  Backbends!  Energizing!  Heart opening!

The teacher’s confession:  She hates backbends.  And she’s not good at them.  In practice.  She can give you plenty of theory and information about your anatomy, but that doesn’t get her hands back to her heels in camel or her hips off the ground in upward bow.  She’ll skip bow, then.  Maybe offer it up as an option for those “who regularly use it in their practice.”  And she’ll teach half camel, which she can actually do, though she rarely enjoys it.  And so the class plan comes together, a gumbo of knowledge and reality, seasoned with a pinch of shame.

And so the teacher learns:  Not the poses, though god knows she tries.  She learns it doesn’t matter.  She stands at the door of the classroom, all limitation and insecurity, and she loves her students.  Casually, while shaking their hands, she slips them the gift of happy imperfection.

Garage Satori

double-rainbowPulling out of my parking spot

I am meditating on whether kapotasana could be done in a chair,

whether one would feel enough pigeon-ness if she were seated,

when I awake to the chime of my front quarter panel kissing

the wheel well of my brother to the left.

Only paint.  Only paint.  No scraping, really.  I can’t handle this today.

The car will be fine.  The driver might not even see it.  I can’t handle any more.  

Out of the car, I spit on my fingers and rub along the Oregon Trail of Shame.

It’s fine.  I’m leaving.  Why should I be the only person on the planet to leave a damned note?

Drive out, heart pounding, hitting the brake at imagined vehicles.

Bring breath into belly, in and down, up and out.  Brain comes on line,

a light at a time, a Whoville Christmas in my neo-cortex.

I turn and spiral my way back up to brother Saturn to reveal myself.