Tag Archives: yoga

fearful anticipation

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walking to my morning watering hole (does that title work for coffee shops, too?) down Main Street with sandals on my feet, my fingers tingle just a little bit with the cold.  Later today, it’ll be 70 degrees, but now it’s hardly 50 out–I love the freshness of the morning. 

Even so, the peeking sunshine jogs my memory of long, hot, sticky days in July and August–already I dread walking more slowly because it’ll keep my temperature down and feeling as if I’m swimming down Main Street.

It’s 51 degrees, and in my mind I’m already baking in 101-degree weather.

My memory and anticipation (of sweaty 101 degrees) ruins the present moment (of gloriously chill 51 degrees).  Some anticipation is good; studies show that most of the enjoyment and mood-boost of a vacation occurs before the actual event takes place.  When anticipation steals the present moment’s joy, though, and even causes you to lose focus on the good, blessed bits of life, anticipation, and especially fear (if “fear” isn’t too serious a word for a reaction to hot temperatures!), ought to be kicked to the curb as quickly as possible.

Big futurey clouds can quickly overshadow the present moment; all the uncertainty and possibility can overcome the gentle, ordinary beauty of your simple surroundings this very moment. 

Instead of looking ahead in fear to July’s heat, or to the possibly wonderful, possibly disastrous future, may we take a deep, deep breath and notice the beauty of this very moment right here.

Soaking It Up

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Since the first seeds dove into the soil the end of February, the weather has been rather dramatic.  There are strong, sunny days when heat seems to rise off the dark soil, and I imagine the seeds waking up warm and cozy, opening themselves to the nutrition of the dirt and the affirming warmth of the sunshine.  There are lots of chilly, wet, very cloudy days, when I imagine the seeds soak up the wet, even soggy, nourishment floating around them, loosening the hard seed covers, encouraging the seed’s stretching and growing–like those little sponges that start out as colorful pills but become great animals for bath times.

The little seeds–and me!–don’t get to choose which are sunny days and which are cold, rainy days.  They’ve got to just keep doing their thing, growing and stretching and taking in what they’re offered, using all the resources of the moment to help them grow.

How are you using the resources you’re being offered this very moment to help you grow?

Healing Breath

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In practicing mindfulness and yoga, the breath is our anchor–when our minds try to tiptoe away toward distraction, we smile and gently remind our brains that our lungs are taking over for the present.

In our lives, we try to let the Holy Spirit take over.  We focus on God’s presence, God’s love surrounding us–just like the air we breathe–and we accept and let go of the other things that swirl up around us, tempting us away from the breath, distracting us from God.

Part of the breath’s power in yoga is how, during challenging poses, we imagine that as the breath and the heat it creates is being sent throughout our bodies–especially to those places that are in need of some loosening or some clearing out, allowing a deeper twist or a more complete bend.

The Holy Spirit is the Breath of Life that comes into our bodies, eager to brush out the stinky, dark bits inside us that are holding us back (or maybe that we’re holding on to).  God’s breath is the loosening, healing, heating agent of our souls.

Today, walking with my dog, I was practicing some deep breathing, and as I sometimes do, I was forcing the breath out, contracting my stomach to really squeeze out all the air–mostly because I love the energizing rush of air that rushes into my lungs afterward.  It occurred to me all at once that perhaps, just like our literal breath (and just like so many figurative, spiritual applications as I’ve found and shared above), the Holy Spirit is most ready to come in and fill us up with God’s presence and power when we’ve gotten the emptiest.

As Thomas Keating puts it, “The Gospel teaches that Christ is present in the storm, not just in emerging from the storm.”

Maranatha!

Being Present – On Which to Chew

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“The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them for eternity.  He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present.  For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.”

– The Screwtape Letters

Screwtape goes on to talk about the various pros and cons of trapping a given “patient” in either the Past, or the Future; the Past, while distracting, is of limited use, he says, because there isn’t much unknown–it’s been experienced, it can draw one off a good path, but it doesn’t take them much of anywhere else.  The Future, however, is very fruitful for despair’s handmaids, as tempters may suggest all sorts of fearful, disastrous, unknown, untested events, possibilities, and thoughts, all of which come at an alarming speed, producing a scurrying mind with little connection to reality.

Mindfulness, a practice I suspect our dear mystical brothers and sisters knew well, is fantastically useful in combating the mind’s susceptibility to darting around anywhere except This Moment.  Reality, which can sometimes burn us with its brightness, might make us want to run behind the dark shadow of the Past, or to find tasty unreality in the Future, but it is only in living in the bright reality of the present moment that its healing heat can transform us (in this Church season of Epiphany, the bright truth of God’s love shines hot on humanity through the person of Jesus Christ).

More by me on The Screwtape Letters: here & here.

Paying Attention

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Another yoga lesson:

Letting go of expectations and instead paying attention to what’s happening now.  …and now.  …and now.

In yoga classes, we students are encouraged just to breathe–to concentrate on breathing in, and then stopping for a second, breathing out, and stopping for a second; noticing how our bodies feel when they are full of air, noticing how much air there must be in there because of how long it’s taking to breathe it all out, taking stock of how our necks, and shoulders, and backs, and hips, and knees feel–what hurts, what is buzzy and tight, and what feels okay today after feeling crappy for the last few weeks.

Many of the church fathers talk about looking honestly at ourselves, taking stock of our faults and our gifts and our struggles and our service.  Even more true today than when Orson Welles penned it in the 1940’s, “the faster we’re carried, the less time we have” (The Magnificent Ambersons–the opening sequence is the high point of the film; I couldn’t bear to finish it); we look less at ourselves in assessment–or in amazement–than we used to, and we suffer for it.

If our expectations are out of sync with reality, what fault is that but that we cannot accurately project what we’re capable of accomplishing?  (in other words, making superhuman to-do lists because we have lost a conception of time hits us twice–we don’t finish the list, feeling inadequate, and we can’t quite figure out why we couldn’t complete it)  That may mean that we should look a little closer at what on earth we’re spending all these waking hours doing, but it also may mean we should consider what we’re fighting through at the moment, or what our companions need from us in the current phase of life we find ourselves.

In a yoga class, we show up and do our best to focus on the task at hand, putting all our concentration and effort into breathing and stretching and holding and breathing–and explicitly not thinking about other things–for an hour (or so).  What if we showed up in our lives and did our best to focus on the task at hand, putting all our concentration and effort into whatever was sitting in front of us at the moment?  It would be vital to understand that our writing, or our conversation, or whatever it is that comprises our work may not always come as quickly or neatly or easily as we think it ought to, but letting go of the expectation that our work will look and feel a certain way allows us to find new, perhaps more effective and joyful, ways of approaching our tasks and our days.