“The Quietest Place in the Universe”

This title of an article in Harper’s magazine naturally caught my attention.  I have studied the yoga sutras, read the commentaries, memorized a few of them, chanted some of them (though I make no claim to being anywhere near a scholar of them) and I always come back to “yoga is the stilling/quieting of the fluctuations of the mind” as the sutra that calls to me most.  I like the simplicity and the invitation to something both difficult and mysterious. I also remember as a child being quite taken by the Psalm: “Be still and know that I am God.”

Lead, South Dakota is at almost the exact geographic center of the United States.  In Lead, there is a deep hole, possibly one of the deepest in the world.  Once a gold mine, it is now a center of scientific study on neutrinos and dark matter.  Neutrinos are subatomic particles that have been around since the birth of the universe. They are not very well understood and in fact, are rather mysterious.  They are able to pass through matter and so pass through the earth, and us, all the time. 

Deep underground, the theory goes, the rock will filter out background radiation noise from other sources so the path of the neutrinos might be recorded. It is as if one is moving from above ground being like the sound of applause at the Super Bowl to a place where one hears only one hand clapping or perhaps, a single breath or the “residual sweep of neutrinos from the Big Bang, like the movement of air inside a newborn’s lungs.” 

The author of the article, Kent Meyers, says this:  “I began to think of neutrinos and dark matter as whispers: the most intimate messages of the universe’s voice, carrying its closest secrets to ears that are all but deaf—or, perhaps more accurately, immune, because so other-natured.” 

It is so incredibly difficult to filter out the busyness and consequent noise of our lives and our minds.  And yet, I suspect, that filtering out of noise is one of the important paths for us to collectively and individually find another way of living with the earth and all the beings we share it with—what Thomas Berry the myriad ways the Divine communicates.  Yoga may be part of the change we seek, a way of bringing something back into balance – the yoga that brings us home to our bodies and quiet to our minds so we can hear the whispers of the breath of the universe as we listen to the whispers of the breath of our own bodies. 

Kent finishes his article with words that deeply touched me.  He describes this research as a kind of science of introversion and withdrawal, “setting up the conditions of silence and waiting for the smallest voice of the universe, the voice of its conception.”  Telescopes reach out into space in search of information and images just as our eyes reach out into our world and take in information that is sent to our brains.  The research in this deep cut in the earth, originally dug in an attempt to gain wealth in gold, is now a place of withdrawing and listening. 

“Part of me is excited by the possibilities of neutrino and dark-matter research, the sci-fi glitz of better heath and medicine, longer and richer lives, interstellar travel.  Another, quieter part of me, though, wonders.  What if we arrived at knowledge that we cannot mine or turn into something—arsenic, dynamite, trucks—that helps us mine something else and in so doing produces, always, another thing we cannot get our minds around?  What if dark matter and neutrinos are so out of reach that all we can do is think about them, not manipulate or change them or mix them into new combinations?  Of the many revolutions science has offered us—and challenged us with—that could be the quietest and the largest and most interesting of all.”

When we sit and quiet the fluctuations of the mind, or filter them out perhaps, we are also setting up the conditions of silence and waiting for the whisper of the universe. The yogis and other ancients who explored and developed the practice of meditation have given us a great wisdom. We do not need science to confirm it but the parallels are fascinating and quite beautiful as they overlap and interweave with each other. 

If you are interested, I highly recommend this article in Harper’s, May 2015: The Most Mysterious Particle in the Universe (on cover), The Quietest Place in the Universe. 

Also, Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth.

Zero Phase

Zero phase, in Manual Lymphatic Drainage, is the moment when the hand is touching the skin but there is no pressure.  During the training, our teacher would come around and ask the one on the table receiving if the giver was getting their zero phase. Very often, they were not. The lightness of touch requires enormous concentration.  How fascinating that the resting of the hand is the most difficult to master. 

The hands make many different movements in many different sequences. All of them must be memorized and the hand must learn to make the movements skillfully.  With every movement, there is a zero phase.  The movements are repeated with deliberate slow monotony. The skin is stretched as far as possible (often not far at all) and then returns to the zero phase. 

The initial lymph vessels are found in the skin.  They open, drawing fluid, proteins, fats and other small bits into their lumen (space).  They close again, causing the fluid, now lymph, to move on into other transport systems that will carry it to the lymph nodes.  The hand movements cause these tiny initial lymph vessels to open and close faster.  They close at the zero point.  Closing is as important as opening.  It is the rhythm of the two that matters: open and close, movement and zero.   

I don’t know when I have had to work so conscientiously to not move, to rest my hand with no pressure, to stop before moving on.  How much easier it is to push or pull the skin, or a muscle, or a hand or leg.  Or in a moment when I am troubled by something, how much easier to push at the thoughts, trying perhaps to uncover something that will ease my disturbance.  What if I could find a zero phase? What if I could ask my mind, like my hands, to rest without pressure until something small closes for a moment and then opens again?

Hildegard, our teacher who is 85 years old and has probably the most experienced MLD hands in the world right now, tells us that dancers often do well with MLD.  There is a quality of rhythm and grace to the movements - after you have learned them each with painstaking attention to technique - that reminds one of dance.  I have always been rather a clumsy dancer and painfully self-conscious but as my hands learn the techniques and sequences well enough to actually find the zero phase, I believe I feel this dance with the fluid of the body.  When I draw my hand back to the zero phase, that place of touch with no pressure, I feel the buoyancy of the fluid underneath the skin and sense, at least in my imagination, the rhythm of the opening and closing that I cannot see.  My hands then seem to move with greater ease and possibly find their dance.

The zero phase reminds me of my pranayama (yogic breathing) practice.  There is the inhalation and the exhalation.  Then there is the inhalation with a pause when breathing stops, and then the exhalation.  At the end of the exhalation there is pause when breathing stops, and then the inhalation.  These pauses are referred to as breath retention. Breath retention is written about in most of the major sources within the yoga tradition and  there are numerous accounts of yogis being able to suspend their breath while buried alive for days and reactivate normal breathing practice afterward. Patanjali writes of breath retention in the Yoga Sutras (II.49-53) as a way to find greater clarity and quiet in the mind. Some translations/interpretations refer to the later stages of pranayama as a place/time where prana (life force) permeates everywhere and is the path to a place of bliss. 

The practice of pranayama shares a difficulty with zero phase.  One must release all pushing or pulling for the breath will not be forced or hurried.  Dancing with one's breath asks for the lightest of touch and requires enormous focus.  I doubted my capacity to find zero phase as I often doubt my capacity with pranayama and yet, there are moments, when I feel the dance show up as an unexpected gift.

During my first week of training, I had the honor of working on a woman who agreed to be a model for us.  She was also in her eighties and had been an MLD therapist for many years.  She said two things to me: “Imagine you are skipping though a field of daffodils.”  And then, “Do it with abandon.”  I am certain there is mystery and magic to be found through the portal of the zero phase. 

Photo by Ginny Wilson

Yoga Nourishment

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.