Fourth Form of Madness

This week my car got broken into. I had just come from a relaxing session of yoga out into the cool night breeze. As I come straight from work for this class, I have gotten into the habit of walking from the class to my car without shoes on. Heels don’t go so well with yoga attire. I usually walk on the cold crisp grass and the bitumen and I love feeling the different textures under my feet. This particular night, as a special treat from nature, there were some wild bunnies hopping crazily around the grass (I seem to have a bit of a bunny theme going on in my life at present, an interesting totem).

So as I am chatting to the bunnies and tip toeing over the freezing yet invigorating ground, I open my passenger door of my car to see papers strewn everywhere. Now the next few seconds I love, it’s the time where the mind still working with the image of the car as I left it, can’t quite figure out what the hell is going on – how did these papers get here. Those precious seconds were the mind is ungrounded and struggling to catch up with life, I now kind of love exploring these moments. Then someone presses the reset button on my mind and I realise “oh I must have been broken into”. Then I walked around to my driver side and there was no doubt left that someone had broken in, not only had they broken the window but they had also managed to twist the whole door frame. As I stood amongst the glass, I decided it was time to dress up my yoga outfit with a pair of heels.

Luckily that night it was freezing cold and I lived 45 minutes from my home. So as I drove the crisp and invigorating drive home, with one side of me being warmed by the heaters I had blasting on me and the other getting treated to cold, crisp wind therapy, I contemplated my car getting broken into and someone taking my radar detector and all the items in the centre console, which to be fair, I think was yoga music and not much else. The interesting thing for me was that for a while now I have been working on giving. Not the giving where it is of your own volition, where you want to give, but the kind of giving where you don’t really want to give but do it anyway. So often when life brings me to this decision point, I shut down, close up and dig in with my resistance against doing something I don’t want to do. I chose to stay stuck. Why would we ever chose to stay stuck – lots of reasons, but maybe they all revolve a little around identifying yourself to strongly as separate, as an individual. Maybe a little fear comes into it, something along the lines of “where will I define the borders of me if I give everything, what will be left that I can say, this is me?”.

Who knows, all I know is it’s an area that I have been really working on this year, I guess life felt like it need to give me a little push on this one 🙂 As it turns out, other than the inconvenience of not having a car for 8 weeks due to the door having to be fixed, the break in didn’t bother me at all. I had something that someone else needed, so they got it. Pretty simple when you don’t put a lot of rules and regulations around it. I have a very fortunate life, others have a less fortunate one. Things just balance out.

When I got home, frozen on one side of me and slightly less frozen on the other, I felt like I had to defrost my hands off the steering wheel. Later, thawing out in the lounge room with the heater switched to high, Hubby said “Well you must be pleased, someone finally took some of your music”. I used to live in South Perth many years ago, and my car got broken into about 6 times whilst I lived there and not once did they take my music! I was pleased this time it was yoga music, nice relaxing, mood softening yoga music. I really hope they listen to it and it brings them joy and peace.

Last week my cat caught a bunny. If that isn’t bad enough, she dragged it home and devoured it out on our alfresco – not the kind of outside dining I imagined when we built that area. Normally my cat is quite placid and loving unless you open a packet of crisps in her earshot and then she will maul you to death in order to get herself a crisp. But puss is a bit of a split personality, loving lap cat by day and ruthless assassin by night (or mid afternoon as in this case).

I didn’t think anything of it until the night after, when I was rushing off to yoga with just minutes to spare. Puss was snuggled up in tight little ball and as I bent to give her a kiss I noticed she had black lumps on her ears. As I bent closer I realised they were no black lumps, those were fleas and she was covered in them. After I recovered from the shock and spontaneous scream I let out, I did what any loving mother would do, I grabbed puss in one hand, grabbed a tube of Programme with the other and hastily dabbed at her neck as I hurled her outside. I couldn’t help savouring the sweetness of karma as I stared out at puss through the glass door, those fleas were definitely a parting gift from the bunny who, whilst unable to defend itself against the food chain hierarchy of nature, was able to return to puss some of the suffering she was dishing out, instantly.

Actually nature has a way of ensuring things kind of balance out of their own accord without any interference. The problem is, we all often can’t help interfering with the natural order of things. We often feel we have to control things, make things right, prevent things from happening when actually, all we really need to do is breathe and allow life to unfold of it’s own accord. Life will always strive to maintain equilibrium, just like out bodies. Whether we like the direction that equilibrium takes us is a mute point. Our task is to train our minds so that we can relax into life, come what may and love it with all our heart and all our soul as we ride the tides of equilibrium that are our lives.

This week I started back at the gym. Where I work I am lucky enough to have access to a free gym which is awesome. This year I have gotten into the habit of working through lunch which is so unhealthy for your mind, body and soul. Once I got up after working for an extended period and could hardly straighten my knees. My body is quite supple, if it can be reduced to that stiffness in a few hours, how bad must sitting all day be for you!

Still I had to drag myself there, bad habits are hard to break. The best way I have found to change them is to do the opposite of what your comfort zone says to do. So off I trundled to the gym. I only use the gym to have a space to do yoga. The guys there are really cool, we struck a deal, I wear my gym shoes out onto their floor, and then I am allowed to remove them and do my yoga in my little corner. That way we are all happy and their health and safety rules retain their virtue.

A few years ago when I started to practice in gyms at lunch I didn’t think it was a good environment because of all the noise and “achievement orientated” mindset going on all around me. But I persisted week after week because I love yoga and that was the only place at lunch to practice. I started out, alone in my little space amongst the other gym goers, making my funny little shapes. As I persisted I noticed I was often joined by more and more fellow yogis who came out of their closets and claimed their space amongst the weight lifters and spin class regulars. It was nice to practice with people in a unstructured environment, all doing are own thing, quietly and in our own solitude amongst the gym chaos.

Then one day I realised, that when I practiced in the gym space, I no longer heard the loud blaring music, the loud crashing down of the weights, the continual shouting of encouragement from the personal trainers, all I heard was my breath and all I felt was the rise and fall of my stomach, ribs and chest. Quite out of the blue, in an atmosphere I would have least expected it, I discovered focus and the power of concentration. You got to love that about life. Sometimes we think we need quiet to cultivate quiet, but sometimes you need the opposite of what you think you need, just like when you are trying to break a bad habit. Don’t get me wrong, I am a fan of quiet, but I am also a fan of chaos. Both have their virtues.

So this week, as I completed my first sun salvation in my new little piece of gym space, I gave thanks for this quiet and solitude available to me in the mist of a big crowded, noisy city. Then I sunk back into the quietness that is my little piece of gym space and exhaled.

This week due to life circumstances, I pretty much ground to a halt. All the things I have been filling my life with, yoga, teacher training, uni, teaching were suspended for the week and I found myself without something to rush to for once and it was probably just what I needed. I even worked from home and surprised myself how much one can achieve in the quietness of ones own abode without constant interruptions.

I am a big one for home practice, but somehow this week I just felt that the mat was a no-go zone. Yoga is a gift and it’s ability to de-stress and increase one’s ability to handle life just as it comes is phenomenal but something within me wanted to test that I wasn’t also using it as a prop to hold myself up with and to hide behind. Oh how I missed it as I wandered around the house looking longingly at my practice space.

And then it happened. I popped some music on and started to hum a few bars. Soon I was trawling through all my old cps, putting on Dylan, The Waifs, Everything but the Girl and John Lennon and warbling along so loud that the neighbours probably wished they brought a house in Bunbury. It felt good, I felt connected and I felt a love that………………..suddenly I realised, I feel like this when I practice yoga.

Long before yoga, I used to sing. In the shower, at home, actually pretty much all the time. It was the time I felt most like me, contained in myself and free, if that makes sense. To sing is to vibrate as the sound you produces goes outwards but also very much turns inwards, so there becomes no difference between the outside and inside. I had forgotten this gift, this simple yet very effective gift that is equally there for us all. I gave thanks, as with everything that is going on in my life lately I felt I had stepped away from my centre a fair bit. I felt like I had taken “one giant step” back towards centre by rediscovering a part of myself that I had silenced through neglect.

As I continued to flick through my cd stash I acknowledged that all that throat chakra work must finally be kicking in 🙂 I also chuckled to myself as up to now I had seen yoga and singing as separate activities even though I have participated in kirtan many times and have hundreds of cds of various artists, it never occurred to me how joined they are, both with similar purposes and outcomes. Once very earlier on in my yoga journey, a teacher told me that “music has no place in yoga”, without even thinking and finding the courage from somewhere I automatically said back “There is always room for music in yoga, it is part of life’s soul’. I said those words like an involuntary reaction, without really understanding their meaning. Now I really understand those words and hell, I’m going sing about it……….. 🙂