[thoughts after our most recent teacher training weekend]
mulling over the word pendulate — from pendulum — and our ability to swing from one side of the spectrum to the other. wondering why sometimes there’s a bias to favor one end of the spectrum and not the other. our practice asks us to show up, to sit with our discomfort, to look at our aliveness, our bodies, our minds, our beauty, and our joy. looking through a movement/yoga lens, an asana, a pose has magic, and has the lessons embedded in the pose itself. but honestly, it’s not the pose, it’s you that’s the magic; we pendulate into a pose and look around, like we’re on a trip to Patagonia, and decide to stay or venture deeper or turn around and pendulate back toward something else.
when i lie down, back over a bolster, and breathe, a state of rest emerges. slowing down, seeing on many different levels how i feel, vacillating between spacing out and focusing on the breath, and how the pose swings me into the rest end of the spectrum. hanging out with discomfort. pausing and waiting after the inhalation and then, later, the exhalation. watching. noticing volition beginning to build to pendulate back toward activity. rolling, pushing, sitting up and folding over my legs, listening to my back, what’s behind me, what i cannot see.
thinking about how to keep encouraging exploration, mine, yours, this journey. to ‘sit’ with the physical and where it is today. to embrace wildness, danger, to uplift fear and failure. to see the too muchness of myself, and the world. and to deal with the psycho-emotional reality without surprise or shame, simply as if it were a tight hamstring. To turn my face in the direction of…
–inspired from Will LeBlanc’s talk in one of his classes