My yin teacher training that starts in a few weeks (online, and I blame breathwork for leading me there) so, in the name of research, I attended a class tonight.
Aside from wanting to throttle the teacher for using journey as a verb—“now journey your arms above your head” (though I may steal it at some point )—it drove me nuts that she paced the room almost at the speed of a hot Pilates class teacher.
With yin, you hold poses for five minutes or so; the pace is glacial. With the teacher zipping around like an emergency worker, I kept thinking she was about to dive onto my mat to make a correction. There’s no touch at the moment, so she didn’t do that, but there also wasn’t any individual attention. “Your body, your class!” she quipped a few times.
Which leads to me to the most interesting piece I’ve read this past week or two, on reiki. Go read it, I’ll wait.
I’ve never had reiki done on me and until reading that piece, have been deeply sceptical. The line that interested me in particular was:
Ted Kaptchuk, a Harvard Medical School professor… theorizes that the placebo effect [of reiki] is, in the words of the Times article, “a biological response to an act of caring; that somehow the encounter itself calls forth healing and that the more intense and focused it is, the more healing it evokes.”
It stands to reason, if this theory holds up, that people feel great after a yoga class partly because of the attention that has been given to them by the teacher in a safe environment. It’s much more dilute than reiki, but it’s there nevertheless. And so when you go to a class and the teacher is completely impersonal, that feeling is missing. You may as well have done an online recorded class.
Given how much of our lives have shifted online—even pre-Covid—it makes sense that reiki possibly holds even more potential power now for those who are more isolated than before. We all already know that there’s a huge difference between seeing someone on Zoom and seeing them in person. There’s a particular healing or rejuvenating energy of being face-to-face with someone.
Which brings me to the power of attention. Not just on us but where we send it, too.
I would say the first rule in connecting with nature is to pay attention, and part of paying attention is choosing to listen instead of speaking. The most difficult part of being outside one’s comfort zone is understanding how much you’re being taught by not talking. In my experience traveling with indigenous people, nobody says much of anything while they’re on the move. Because language collapses experience into meaning, and if you do it too soon, you’ve lost all the other meaning that would’ve been there.
—Environmentalist/author Barry Lopez (cited in his obituary)
Paying attention feeds others, and it can feed us, too.
Reading
All Adults Here by Emma Straub. I liked it a lot—it’s almost Franzen-ish. It’s a lot more interesting and polished than
The Question of Love by Hugh Mackay. I read this because I did not realise the Australian social researcher Mackay was also a novelist. I didn’t love the construction, based on a piece of music, particularly, but I did quite like the story. As with All Adults Here, the focus is on the intricacies of family relationships.
“Even as we regret who we haven’t become, we value who we are. We seem to find meaning in what’s never happened. Our self-portraits use a lot of negative space,” writes Joshua Rothman in What If You Could Do It All Over?, a reflective piece on examining our unlived lives. What’s interesting to me is how wondering what else we might have done with our lives has become more of a focus as we have largely stopped believing in an afterlife: “Given just a single shot at existence, we owe it to ourselves to hit the mark; we must not just survive but thrive.” But this wondering also forms part of who we are.
In the sense that our unled lives have been imagined by us, and are part of us, they are real; to know what someone isn’t—what she might have been, what she’s dreamed of being—this is to know someone intimately. When we first meet people, we know them as they are, but, with time, we perceive the auras of possibility that surround them.
If you are sad that you did not get to experience life working as say a potter as you once dreamed, then that sadness is very much a part of you. There’s something gently reassuring about that idea.
Synchronicity: I saw the episode of The Crown last night where Philip is regretting what he was not able to become (he blames marrying Elizabeth but maybe honestly maybe that’s just convenient).
“How Science Beat the Virus” is an essential read.
“It takes a certain type of person to think that weeks of reading papers gives them more perspective than someone with a Ph.D. on that subject, and that type of person has gotten a lot of airtime in this pandemic,” says Colin Carlson of Georgetown.
Also from the piece:
“Medicine is a social science,” Virchow said, “and politics is nothing but medicine in larger scale.”
On rethinking the food pyramid that you probably learned in school. The TL;DR version: Cook from scratch as much as you can, even desserts.
To Monteiro, the bag of sugar on the kitchen counter is a healthy sign, not because sugar itself has any goodness in it, but because it belongs to a person who cooks. Monteiro’s data suggested to him that the households who were still buying sugar were also the ones who were still making the old Brazilian dishes such as rice and beans.
As we head into 2021, this (old) piece of advice from Austin Kleon (potentially!) may be useful:
Anyone can fight the battles of just one day. It is only when you and I add the battles of those two awful eternities, yesterday and tomorrow, that we break down. It is not the experience of today that drives us mad. It is the remorse or bitterness for something that happened yesterday or the dread of what tomorrow may bring. Let us therefore do our best to live but one day at a time.
You find time the same place you find spare change: in the nooks and crannies.
A lot of good snippets are slipped into this Dr Rangan Chatterjee podcast, a selection of his best interviews from over the past year.
Perhaps you can use some tips as you journey yourself into 2021 ;)