Fourth Form of Madness

Whilst I was doing the mopping this morning I started to realise why I never do housework 🙂  It’s hard work!  But lately I have been feeling more connected to my house and garden and having some sort of order.  Now it is true if you look under my bathroom sink or hallway closure you still might just nominate me as a candidate for the Hoarders tv show but I am getting there.  Back to mopping.  So there I was sweating it out with the mop trying to restore a feeling, an energy about the floors that was more pleasant to live with.  Then I noticed my breath had become jagged and laboured and irregular.  Interesting.  If I was practising yoga right now I would rest until my breath returned to it’s slow, regular rhythm  🙂

It was this rhythm of the breath that made me fall head over heels, intoxicating in love with yoga in the first place.  The kind of love that shows you joy and sorrow share an entwined structure  like a DNA strand.  When I first started yoga I was living on the extreme  edges of stress and misery.  I  fondly call it hell.  I don’t even really know what made me sign up for the ashtanga beginners course maybe it was the result of a haunting dream I had a few weeks earlier that left me feeling like I was missing something vital.  Half way through the first class, I knew this was something special 🙂  Hook, line and sinker I was gone.

Many more practises on, I was in the flow of practice when I began to really connect with the expansion and retraction of my body as I breathed.  Not just my belly, not just my ribs, but my totality, expanding and retracting.  I let this rhythm lead my practice for the rest of that day.  Off the mat, I contemplated this natural  rhythm of the body that we all have. This beautiful expansion and retraction and how similar it is to the expansion and retraction of every atom making up every substance on this planet and perhaps universe.  I remember feeling so connected to something so much larger and comprehensive than myself and yet also so vital to it, as we all are.  It made me feel like I belonged, a feeling I never really felt in life prior to this.  A rhythm that is there for everyone at anytime.

There are many rhythms we can become a slave to in this lifetime.  I was quite fond of rhythm of stress and anxiety there for a while.  Some rhythms are life sustaining, some life withdrawing, some a little of both.  But if you are going to be a slave to a rhythm in your life, let it be to the rhythm of life, the rhythm of the breath.