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Yoga and the Domino Effect: Inquiry and Experience #4

  Your body and mind communicate by an unspoken language. You begin class standing at attention when I suggest you lift the skirts of your inner thighs.   Your skin shifts upward like an arrow shot from ankle holsters. Your bones react and pull toward earth. Your breath migrates to the fullest reaches of your ribs; all of them. Inner thighs do not have skirts. Your mind has translated this to something else. Bravo. ~Your belly, receptive to the upward pull of the thighs moves in and up. ~Your calves, receptive to the upward pull of the thighs draw down. ~The heels root. ~The thighs rise. ~The buttocks descend. ~The chest lifts.   If the pose is set in motion correctly, the rest falls in to place. Who will begin the dialogue for the body to follow before you know the first word? The approach offered stealthily does not overwhelm the student. It is most effective when both delicate and deliberate. That is the catalyst to poetry in motion.   Your guide is the teacher who directs you with the first word. And allows the ones that follow to be uniquely your...

Yoga Like Water

  It exploded from comets To begin as the oceans, And borders of seas,   Becoming the vapor, the clouds and the rain, And one with the earth,   Becoming the rivers, the lakes, and the streams, To become most of me, I breathed it out to become part of you.   Altered, transformed, shifted, ripened In time and beings, Its sparkle drew my searching eye and quenched a thirsty palette.   Is there a broken line in the lineage? Does this drop contain the residue of the first drop? Some has been burnt away for sure but most remains.   Like water, this yoga: To know it with intellect is a lively chase for a living art from an ancient time. Not my favorite game, but one I’ll play when the players arouse, Uninterrupted on more peaceful days I’ll stand in sensation.   This yoga like water whose chemistry would not matter if the proof was  my health, Would bear further examination should it rouse suspicion.   I was curious and explored something apart from me, Until it was no longer apart but a part.              ...

Tradition Grows From Fallen Seeds

We Are Our Stories   “Oh the hands of my mother watch and keep over me And the hands of my grandmother are the hands you see on me From the house of great grandfather rivers run down to the sea And my sister’s mother’s husband’s father’s grandchild is me Don’t you see?” Sung by Mark Bailey to my children long ago in California   It’s snowing. It hardly ever snows here. And I’m sick. I’m rarely sick. I’m peaceful in that snowing and not feeling well kind of way and staring out the kitchen window. Leaning on the sill I stare into the frozen garden. Twin two foot tall bare twiggy trees are nestled between shrubs. I’m harvesting seedlings from the front yard of my husband’s next door neighbor from his childhood home.   We had gone back to hold a memorial service for my mother-in-law in the place she and my husband, Rob ,had lived most of her life. Tom’s house and Kitty’s house sat closely together on a dead end street in a seaside village of Long Island. Tom was as close in age to Rob as he was to Kitty and was as close as family got. That’s why I took the seedlings from Tom’s tree that he offered me as I marveled over it’s unusual beauty. Here take some, he said as he plucked handfuls from the ground. He filled a small plastic sandwich bag with seedlings and dirt and I hopefully carried them back to Nashville in my suitcase.   Three years later Tom is dead. And Rob tells me that not a...