Still Water

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This past weekend I went on a hike with a very good friend. Well, I’m not really sure you could call us very good friends. If you sat down and counted the number of times that we were in the same place at the same time, it’s less than ten. We communicate through little Instagram meme messages and tags that remind us of each other and we check in to see how things are going in life, but it’s different from what I guess my ideal picture of friendship is. Still, this person is very important to me.

We met during a bad time. It was a time where I was way too involved in something that I probably shouldn’t have been involved with. Looking back I’d say I was slowly but steadily losing my grip on who or what I was and some of the more important things in life. But when you’re inside of a storm it’s easy to focus on just staying afloat.

If you’re scooping water out of the ship with a bucket, navigation becomes a little less important.

I would not have met this friend if not for the place that I was at. I also don’t think I would have righted the ship if she had not been there. You see, my friend is a Reiki practitioner. For those of you keeping score, I am too but I’m not really sure what it all means. I definitely feel energy. I definitely think that I can focus good energy towards people or situations and I can definitely feel energy that I don’t want in my life. Maybe it’s just my cynical New York upbringing, but I’m still a little bit skeptical as to whether or not waving your hands 3 inches above someone can improve their overall health. 

This friend seemed legit though. I could feel her energy and I knew that it was good. I could feel something had been off in mine and I wanted it to change. So when we discussed a Reiki session it just seemed like the right time and place. I laid down on my mat, she burnt some sage and played some worldly music and then I stayed very still with my eyes closed for about an hour. I’m not sure what she did during that time. For all I know she could have sat down to read a book, but I tend to trust that she was working her magic on me. 

I felt better afterwards. I sat up and felt like I could breathe. The ribs around my lungs felt like they had more space to move. I was in a bit of that daze that follows great Yoga classes or experiences of ‘enlightenment.’ But then she did something that brought me back down from the clouds like I had an acme anvil tied to my feet.

She asked if I wanted to hear what she felt. And before she told me, she asked if I felt ready to hear it. I said that I did.

She told me that my power had been completely removed.

That my third chakra, where the ego resides, was barely even beating. She told me that my heart was almost entirely closed off and the color she found associated with that space was black. And then she told me why she thought those things had happened.

She told me the things that I really needed to hear.

Later that week I removed myself entirely from the bad situation.

There’s an odd balance that exists in the role of Yoga Teacher in group classes. If you look back at the history of Yoga, it was always supposed to be passed down individually from teacher to student rather than in a group setting. But the fact of the matter is that your Yoga practice is your Yoga practice. I always caution students of teachers that want to steal it for themselves.

Early in the new Bikram documentary on Netflix there’s a part where Bikram asks his class aloud, “What do we say, it’s my way or…” and they all answer in unison, “…the highway.” How people got locked into that con artist, I will never know.

So as a teacher you want to give students the space to discover themselves through the practice, but at the same time you supposedly have more knowledge and a deeper insight than they do and you’d like to share it with them. In that way you can help them to grow.

So when I cue a Half Crescent to warm up the hip flexors and somebody is already popping up into the Full Lunge, it becomes a practice for me to give them that space. Do I know that they’re going to burn out their glutes before we get to the good part of class where they can push deeper into their postures? Sure. But maybe that’s something they have to discover for themselves.

The one thing that I would love for my students to hear, and really hear, not just think, wow that’s a great way to cue into the posture, but sink deep into it and let it spill into every aspect of their life, it’s this:

STOP MOVING IN SAVASANA.

For those of you unfamiliar, Savasana is the final resting posture. It’s roughly translated as corpse pose and it’s your opportunity at the end of practice to be still and let everything that happened marinate for a minute before you leave your mat and return to the ‘real world.’

And while I often say it’s the most important pose that there is, it’s constantly being abused. People skip it and leave class early. 

(Side note: I teach 6 :00AM Yoga classes and completely understand that people need to get to work. For those people, I’d rather have them do the 45 minutes of Yoga that they get in rather than the zero minutes of Yoga they would if I were a hard ass and said you had to stay the whole time. But I still think they wind up missing the whole point of the practice.)

People use the time to take a couple last twists or one more hip opener. It baffles me, but some people actually do sit ups during this time of stillness and acceptance. And oddly enough you know what bothers me the most? Like, more than any of these other modifications to the posture..? It’s when people scratch. I’m not a manners person who thinks it's gross or anything, but it’s such a missed opportunity to practice the posture! Something small and insignificant happens in your life, like an itch at the top of your nose, and we are so conditioned to believe that we can control it that we immediately abandon our practice to do just that. 

When really you could just sit there. You could let the itch be there and not react to it. You could let the sweat drip from your brow harmlessly onto the floor. You could let the little bit of discomfort in your low back be there. You could realize that not everything requires an immediate response from you.

You could realize that if you let things sit, everything slows down and the answers become clear.

So as I hike out in Malibu with my friend, I’m reminded of what she did for me. That at a time when everything in my life seemed like a massive storm at sea and I kept pulling at the sail trying to beat it back in every direction, she got me to sit still. She got me to stop fixing everything for just sixty minutes of my life and in that time frame I was able to realize that maybe it didn’t have to be this way. Maybe I didn’t have to take responsibility for fixing everything around me. Maybe I wasn’t capable of fixing these things.

We climbed up a rather steep ridge across the PCH (Pacific Coast Highway) from Leo Carillo Beach. It’ll take you some time and some endurance but if you keep climbing, the trail will finally start to plateau so that you can walk across the crest and stare out into the ocean. As the trail begins to descend on the other side, your vision opens up into a field of tall grass turned golden by the lack of rain. Keep the course and almost by accident you come to a small pond reflecting the midday sun. From time to time, a duck lands disturbing the perfection of the glass. But don’t try to smooth it out. That would never work. Instead, sit perfectly still right on the banks.

The noise will cease.

The ripples will fade.

And in still water, the answers become clear. 

That’s just something I’ve been sitting with…

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