After a recent conversation I began asking myself: In what way does my yoga practice provide
nourishment to me? I feel around me, among many I dearly love and those I meet
through my teaching and individual work, a need for the nourishment of the rain
after a drought.
An interesting medley of thoughts came in response to my
question. I offer them here to all of us
as we move in a world that might be too dry or too wet or in bodies and spirits
that are hurting or exhausted. I offer
it with humility for each of us has our own way. Many of the responses are “small” moments. But they take me into spaciousness. In a
series of books by Ursula LeGuin, there is a grove of trees on the island where
the wizards are trained. From a
distance, the grove looks small but when one enters and walks, the grove
expands indefinitely. The Patterner
lives in the grove. He watches the
patterns of leaves and light and gains understanding and wisdom through them.
Perhaps there is a pattern of understanding and wisdom in
observing some of these small moments related to my yoga practice that
nourish.
* * *
The hawk calls almost every morning during my pranayama
practice. This wild hawk call pierces
through to some forgotten wild place in myself and I hang momentarily suspended
from even breath. I hang suspended in a
wild mystery. The wild place nourishes me.
* * *
During the summer months I practice on my outdoor yoga
platform under an oak tree. I built it
with my own hands. If one traces the
word asana back and back and back, as I have learned from Richard Rosen, it is
the platform the yogi’s had outside their small houses to practice on. And before that it can be understood as an
altar. And so as I practice outside I
feel I am offering my practice on an altar to that mystery of the hawk call. The layers of understanding reaching back
toward my yoga ancestors, nourishes me.
* * *
Some mornings, if I am very tired, my practice consists of
primarily or only reclining pranayama, as was the case on the morning I write
this. I lay over the pranayama blanket,
my head wrapped in a cloth, my legs belted, a sandbag on my thighs, and a
blanket wrapped around me as if swaddled.
Amelia sleeps on top of my legs.
I go very quiet externally and internally and all that I feel is breath
and space and Amelia. The quiet is
nourishing.
* * *
Sometimes on a Sunday morning when I am there, Elenna
invites me to her outdoor yoga studio – a pier out over the water in
Alameda. The birds are usually
there. Often we practice in silence. Or we enter into conversation that I can only
describe as sacred. Practicing by the
water with a friend nourishes.
* * *
My mother has macular degeneration so she is unable to read
without some kind of magnification.
Recently, she was waiting for her regular treatment of having an
injection into her eye. She could not
read during her wait so she decided to practice her relaxation breathing,
something she had learned in her yoga class.
She waited an hour. She sat
breathing and coming back to her breathing every time she found her thoughts
wandering.
Normally, when she receives the injection in her eye, her
body jumps as the needle is inserted. It
is not pain, she has been given something to prevent her feeling the needle. It is more of a reflex. This time, after her hour of breathing, she
did not jump. She was pleased and
intrigued as was the doctor who thought perhaps his technique had
improved. She explained to him what she
had been doing. He agreed as how it was possible.
My mother began practicing yoga at 75 and is now 83.
I feel nourished by her story.
* * *
As I write this, an email comes in from someone I have not
heard from in a long time:
Pooraka is drawing the breath up. Kumbhaka is retaining the breath. Rechaka is the exhaling of breath slowly
from within.
Many sorts of cakes are prepared from the same rice.
So also, by breath, everything is accomplished.
Nourishment comes in surprising ways.
* * *
Sitting with fifty some other people in Durango, Colorado in
the afternoon – the soft light shines over the mountains and Patricia Walden talks
us through a pranayama practice. The
precision, the place, the dedicated people around me – all melt into a timeless
experience, again of breath, that is like walking into the grove of trees
Ursula wrote about. This is nourishing.
* * *
A friend who is a brother to different parents, knowing
something difficult has happened for me, leaves me a phone message. He says that when I am next in headstand, I
should think of him also in headstand giving me a hug. His interweaving of support with his
knowledge of my yoga practice nourishes me.
* * *
My whole body hurts on the morning after I have been moving
some very large rocks from one place to another to wait for when I know how and
where to place them. They are rocks I
gathered five years ago with vision for them that I have lost. I have been swearing at them for years when I
weed whack (not really at them but at me for not finishing the project) so during
my time off over this holiday, I move them.
My body hurts when I enter my practice the next morning. This physical practice of inversions and
backbends and twists does not magically take away all sensation but softens it
or makes it more fluid so that I can move through my day without
discomfort. I feel a physical body
nourishment similar to eating when I am hungry.
* * *
The hawk calls almost every morning during my pranayama
practice and I am pierced and suspended in a moment of wild mystery.