I’ve been noticing more what students do in what they think are the gaps between poses. They do a lot! They drink water, they scratch their arms, they wipe sweat away, they have a quiet word to the friend who brought them, they lean over if they feel dizzy (I’m guilty of that one a lot), they adjust their jewellery, they take their own sweet time turning around to get back into savasana once we’re on the floor.
Here’s the thing, though. And it’s something a teacher mentioned to a class I attended years and years ago. It all counts. Every movement, every breath, from the moment you walk in the room—if you want it to. The challenges can be both easier and harder than you think. The challenge is not, say, reaching your hands back to grab your heels in camel. Well, it is, but absolutely no more and no less than not wiping that sweat away in between standing deep breathing and half moon. What do you want to do most at any point in class? Is it having that sip of water? Then don’t take it. That might be your toughest challenge of the entire class. You want to move that hair out of your eyes? Be aware of that desire, but then choose not to move it out of your eyes. Maybe that was harder than holding half moon for sixty seconds—nobody can see it necessarily, but you just did something amazing, my friend.
There are so many opportunities for deep challenges to be met in each class and nobody has any idea when anybody else’s challenge is happening. They are not necessarily the obvious: standing head to knee, full locust, camel held deeply. They are the subtle. They are steady breath. Stillness. Mindfulness. Consistent equanimity. Maybe every moment is an opportunity of challenge. Or is the challenge to turn each moment into a balance of effort and ease no matter what?
Taking it off the mat… What if we are looking for the wrong challenges there, too? We think the challenge is, say, to practice every day. But what if it’s really stopping what doesn’t serve us: the smoking, or the online shopping, or the drinking, or the vaping, or insert X? We are more than the practice and it’s just one part of us.
The challenges are easier to find than we think. You think the challenge is reaching your hands all the way back in camel, or to keep your forehead on your knees in rabbit, but what if the real challenge is only bringing the hands back to your butt when the teacher actually says to do that, or it’s to lift your hips when he says to? It all counts. Either all of it does, or none of it does.
***
I started writing this a while ago—think January 1-ish—and time got away.
You might make more sense of my notes than me:
Irvings black like the black in Fleishman
Nick Cave
Dave Eggers
NYT new drug
***
The beauty is in the cracks.
***
So many beautiful links I can’t share, as they were open over so many weeks and so many Chrome crashes ago, thanks to so many beautiful links being open.
***
Stay challenged. XX