Meandering into the New Year

As I thought about this week's blog, I decided it would be useful to revisit some writing from last year to see where I was and how similar/different this year is from last year as I enter into another early winter season. For the most part, I'm still feeling vata overload. Kapha is a distant energy. I can see it on the horizon and catch glimmers of it in my body, but for the most part, it is the dry, vibrating energy that has me in its grips.  

Here, though, is a paragraph from my experiences last year, December 19 of 2012 to be precise:

At one point in Juliet's Saturday class, I was in malasana and I thought, this is it.  This is the shit that I resist, despise, and from which I always disconnect.  I felt it deeply in my hips as I struggled to find a comfortable moment in the position.  But then I tried to relax and started to focus on my core and pressing my big toe into the earth.  I then felt something moving--that dark energy moving around and making space for something else.  My butt settled down closer to earth and I felt lighter in my heart.  I could feel that the sludge did not have to take over.  The feeling was again momentary, but what I realized this time was that I can plug into that darker heavier energy and find places to move and shift.  I can play with this energy instead of fearing and dreading it.  I realized the real work of my body in the juncture and the season: to play with kapha.

That dark energy, the sludge, as I called it, has not been settling into me too heavily. The feeling this inspires within me, though, does remind me of what I felt in cycling class on Monday.  When class started, everything was heavy.  It was hard to push the pedals. It was hard to get my rpm's up to a decent rate.  It all felt tremendously difficult. The easiest of motions felt like I was trudging through mud.  And I focused on that feeling.  I stayed with it and as I stayed with it I could feel a loosening.  After a few rounds of work, I was able to, metaphorically, pedal out of the mud and smoothly move my body through the motions of the class. 

I bring this up, because I realized as I read that entry that the act of sitting with does not take as much work as it used to.  I can access it more quickly these days.  The daily practice. The routine of my morning  It all seems to have helped me face the immediate moments of fear that the sludge can induce.  It is freeing.  It gives me tremendous energy as I enter into this cold and dry early winter that has hit us in Fargo.  Sub-zero weather has been the consistent temperatures for the past month.  The snow is crunchy and dry.  The wind isn't bad, but the air is incredibly dry. Vata is definitely lingering in a serious way in my environment and in my body.  Stiff joints.  Shoulder achey.  I can feel the ache from the back of my skull to the left side of my hip.  I get to head to a massage today, which I hope will inspire juiciness. Help me find juiciness. I love that word: juicy. 
And it is something I am craving deeply in my body.  Deeply.  Because I am feeling so dry--the anti-thesis of juicy. 

Body Patterns and Shifts: A Tangent

One thing that emerged from my Thai massage session was that my body was feeling some aches due to holding my body in a more puffed up fashion.  Why is this interesting?  Probably because I have been spending an enormous amount of time working on shifting away from my typical victim narrative.  It is a story that comes with a particular stance-- a stance making me as small as possible.  That means hunching, crossing my legs, and holding in my shoulders. Anything that I can do to not take up much space--especially in moments of stress and tension. Anything I can do to hide, become invisible. Not be accountable to anything.  Not even myself.

My body seems to be moving into expansion and visibility. At least that is how I'd like to interpret my body right now.  It is feeling the aches from holding my chest out, lifting my shoulders--not hunching them.  It is part of a new narrative taking shape. Just as this type of ache in my body is new, so are all the feelings that come with being awake and accountable--especially to myself. It was not a sensation I felt with much force. I find it intriguing how unconsciously my body posture started to change as some of my new story started to settle in.  It helps me to think about how the way we see ourselves in the world has a direct impact on how I'm physically in the world.

There was also a serendipitous moment in this experience of my bodily changes. I was watching an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in which there is a girl who becomes invisible. She is so socially marginalized and unseen that she becomes physically invisible.  I couldn't help thinking about that girl as me. How that story was mine.  How I had worked hard to try to make my body something invisible and unassuming and now here I am working hard to break free. Here I am trying to hold my space. Here I am finding space and holding space for me. 

So as I think about last year and how the sludge hit me so early. I am amazed at how I move through these rotating seasons, but they are far from redundant.  This year is drawing out something different. Something else.  It isn't just a replay of last year's early winter for me.  I am a new body facing this season in a new way.  It is a thrilling feeling.  I never thought I'd find a thrill in the winter season. I never thought I'd feel a lightness, a curiosity toward this time of year. 

Another practice I indulged in on Christmas Day was not leaving the house.  I stayed in pajamas and stayed home all day.  And I didn't feel guilty or gross.  It was a challenge, but there was something lovely about reminding myself that December 25 would be a day of leisure, not guilt.  That work and the world is always there and I can take a day to hibernate. It wasn't totally conscious.  There was television. There was food. But there was also reading and loving and all kinds of wonderful that can be found in the great indoors.  It felt as though I had finally shed some of the past in which being inside meant being depressed.  I felt as though some of that old story was rendered completely irrelevant and that it now time to turn to something deeper.