Seeing Your Inner Gesture: Asking, Offering, Accepting

Reaching an arm outward is a physical action. If feelings are allowed to arise, they will. It is a trick of the mind to attach meaning to everything, meaning that triggers feelings, and feelings that in their responsive nature give us the next wave of action and reaction.

Just sitting in a chair and gently reaching a hand outward, extending your arm in front of you ... to the side ... above your head ... You can turn on the switch of being present with how you feel in the action. Are you holding a soft handful of air? Are you striving to extend back muscles and lengthen finger joints? What are you doing?

Each time you open your awareness to this, you will find something new. You, in this moment, and how you feel, can become more familiar and visible in your conscious view of yourself. That outstretched arm can introduce you to yourself. This is how the physical practice of yoga opens into a deeper understanding of the self, a path to acceptance of the range of feelings that are already there in you, a way to tolerate and release even painful emotions stored from past events, or to acknowledge and adapt in spite of fears of future events.

That elegant arm reaching out, the incredible hand extended... are you asking? are you offering? are you accepting?

If you drop your wrist and relax your fingers, your arm will still express your deeper feelings. You can release your hand to be the simple extension of this, allowing the unfolding from your heart. With the eyes of a warrior, soft, open, and ready for anything that might appear, let your yoga practice allow you to begin cultivating your view, your drishti, to accept what is already before you.

Making the offering, Being the offering

I've been enjoying poems from Gregory Orr's 2009 collection, "How Beautiful the Beloved." There is simplicity and deep resonance of losing oneself in the grace of love at the same time yearning to hold what will inevitably be lost. Everything is impermanent.

"All those years
I had only to say
Yes.

    But I couldn't.

Finally, I said Maybe,
But even then 
I was filled with dread.

I wanted to step carefully.
I didn't want to leap.

What if the beloved
Didn't catch me?
What if the world
Disappeared beneath my feet?"

As a teenager I was put in the position of making the family meals, and I've held that role fairly continuously throughout my adult life. I don't remember thinking of food as a token of love, and in those early years it was a heavy load on top of my schoolwork, my awakening political awareness and the swirl of emotional troubles between my parents. As a wife and mother I came to feel the job of feeding as a deeply nurturing one.

"So many were given only
A dream of love,
So many given a glimpse,
And that from such a distance.

Who am I to be ungrateful
Who saw the beloved
Face-to-face?"

One month ago my husband and I essentially became vegan, eating no meat, no dairy, no processed grains, sweeteners with the addition of eschewing all cooked and most uncooked oil. (For more on this, see my related blog eat2thrive.blogspot.com.)

"Surrender everything. Give up
All that's precious --
That way you won't be tempted
To bicker with yourself
Over scraps you still control.

Besides, who knows the depth
Of her pity? Who knows
How far down
He can reach with his love?"

Food has become transformed into a vast array of beautiful blessings. Each fruit, vegetable, bag of grain, bowl of soup, pot with simmering leeks, plate with the stain of beets, crunch of jicama and scent of lime or garlic brings such gratitude and pleasure.

We spend way too much time imagining ourselves to be lacking something, avoiding something. This pretending to be incomplete and unworthy stands directly in the way of living our fullest life in this moment as we actually are.

Again from Greg Orr:
"How beautiful
The beloved.

Whether garbed
In mortal tatters,
Or in her dress
Of everlastingness --

Moon broken
On the water,
Or moon
Still whole
In the night sky."

Props & Then Some

Give yourself what you need. Put the block under your hand. Give support to the elevated leg. Use the strap.

Yoga is not an exercise in "How do I get into this posture?" The practice is one of "How do I find myself here?"
Using and supporting principles of alignment, so that you gain the most benefit from your foundation in any pose, you can build the strength, encourage the flexibility, open the heart, release the joint, let the mind free of the constraints of judging yourself.

Sounds simple, right? "Find the support you need and use it." Perhaps it is spending ten minutes reading poetry before a stressful meeting to give you that sense of spaciousness in which to see with clarity and listen clearly. Why not take that plum with you as you walk to the train so you can focus on what you are doing and let go of the worries of whether you will find something you can eat later when you need a boost? Perhaps it is spending more of your practice time reconnecting with your feet instead of pushing through the complicated program you had set out for yourself.

It is wonderful in Trkonasana (triangle pose) to use a block under the hand on the floor. It doesn't matter if you "can do it" without the block. Give yourself the space to stretch the spine naturally, to let the neck be easy, to breathe into the sweet rotation of the ribcage. Perhaps you will find out that you have been reaching for the floor... perhaps when you take that block away you will find that the energy from that hand on the floor can now reach up through your opening heart.

Sit on the block in Virasana (Hero's Pose). Give your knees this new openness and see what happens. Perhaps your feet will relax in a way you have not imagined, or your breath might just reach further down to your root chakra because of the new relaxed length in your spine. Perhaps when you take the block away, you will feel that same deepening, lifting, ease, now that you know it is in you.

Wrap a strap gently around your lower ribs, crossing it in front of you and letting the straps rest gently in upturned hands. Then just breathe. Feel the way your whole body is supported by the soft wrapping strap, the way your hands gently move with the movement of the strap responding to your own breath. Close your eyes. Let the strap support your focus, enliven your sensitivity to being, find yourself existing in more than three dimensions... just breathe. Any time in your practice perhaps you can now bring that same level of awareness to your lower ribcage, noticing how the breath relates in that moment.

Navasana - Boat Pose- is so delicious with hands helping the thighs lift, or taking just one leg at a time, letting the other leg or foot hold steady. Let the lower back feel its length, allow the inner groin flexors to ease a bit. Try letting go and keep your focus on that feeling of steadiness rather than on the tension in the muscles. What do you need to help relieve the stress you feel? Find the source first, and then give it support.

Can you open up to the question of whether you need support? Can you allow yourself the openness to find the truth of this question in yourself? Exploring this on the mat, in the practice, off the mat, in your life, is not so hard to do as it might seem. Start with using the props, softness under your head in Savasana (Corpse Pose), or a simple block under your knees in Sukhasana (Easy Pose - cross legged seat) might just make room for your awareness to wake up, your attention to focus on something other than the muscular, and your breath to move you.

Once we learn how to find the support we need in the moment, our strength can develop. Each time you find yourself saying, "How can I support myself here?" you are also asking, "Where is this binding coming from, where is this blockage of my energy?" This is the deeper question ... and helps to explain why the support we find and give ourself is so enabling. If you seek out where the struggle is taking place in you, and make the shift to ease that, the freedom that comes is unpredictable and authentic.

Oh, by the way, you can always use the breath if you have nothing else handy.