My heart with all its mysterious chambers lies beneath the dense protective fibers of the pectoralis....
Yoga and Injuries...a subject we try to avoid talking about as it can get kind of raw , perhaps too much of a whiff of reality unexpectedly comes our way.Injury, pain, and hopefully and eventually recovery and healing welcome and inevitable in our lives, in yoga, in relationships.... People often ask me, do "you" ever get injured in "your practice",almost as if they imagine that I never injure myself. or get an injury, that I am resilient, invincible. I can understand that myth a little as I am told that on the outside to "others eyes", my practice seems internal, quiet, steady, determined, that I am reflective. It is true that sometimes I feel calm in my practice , but sometimes I do not, and even when I seem more internally focused or quiet, there still is fluctuation of the mind and emotion erupting within me, as still waters do run deep, human that i am. and yes, I have had many injuries, some of greater import and others of less . It is truer that I am more silent during an injury as I tend to lick my wounds softly without calling more attention as I find the attention causes more pain festering and suffering.
. I tend to work quietly through a pain on my own terms.It has always been that way more or less.This week I experienced a new type of injury ,at least for me. I have been thinking lately about mula bhanda, the root lock, if somehow I can get closer to sustaining that feeling in a more continous subtle yet deeper way in my practice. I began imagining the image of the mula as a vessel or bowl that holds, circulates energy up, in and through me.With a greater accessibility to matters of energy I imagined a protective, nourishing bowl hollowing out at the base of my person .You could say, I even felt a metaphoric warm breeze of support enveloping me , only briefly,very fleeting, none the less present , at least sometimes.
So what does this have to do with injury, I think that I convinced myself that somehow this energetic metaphor, would really not only virtually protect me in some way,rather than just let "it" just be without expectation.. As I have had injuries in boney tissue, soft tissue, catilage, muscle and yes, in my soul as well, I am sensitive to knowing, feeling where the sensation stems from. Earler this week, I had a nice gentle, but deep practice, things seemed less effortful, like my breath was moving me rather than my physical being moving my breath. One could say, that it was" nice", a gift amidst this harsh stoney grey cold winter world. When I arose from the warm mysore room , acutely and suddely I felt a piercing, jabbing knife like sensation under my left breast bone. I know my own heart sits with crimson red and venous blue tapestried walls under that protective bone of glistening white cartilage rib and fibrous tenting muscle.. it felt as if the pain came from my mere walking into colder air , literally piercing my heart..yes, i had been working deeply, but I had a pleasant ,mindful practice of late. I was trying to decide if this was actual chest pain, fractured rib, strained muscle , all of those frenzied places the" not calm" mind will travel. .Over the next couple of days, I noted I could barely bare weight on my left side in chaturangas.and turning the steering wheel to the left in my car caused pain-discomfort. I nursed the pain with ice-heat-ice, ginger, tumeric etc and gradually the pain started melting.I realized the discomfort was in my pectoralis muscle, the tent like large protective fibers,that shields my heart , the sting radiated around my chest. I am recalling the details of this injury as I have never had an injury in a muscle that envelops the muscle of "my heart". It is a whole new level of experience and learning when the hot stinging energy of pain surrounds one's "very own heart".I have been feeling unusually vulnerable, friable,delicate ,fatiguable and vincible. It as if this warm tingling energy is melting away the walls around my heart. I have had emotional experiences that have left me feeling this way, but less so as of yet in the form of a physical energetic sensation of melting.I am sitting now with this new sensation, in curiosity and reverence and with kindness , as after all I am delicately entering the "chambers of my own heart"......
For You Emma:
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High School Senior (from The Wellspring)
by: Sharon Olds
For seventeen years, her breath in the house
at night, puff, puff, like summer
cumulus above her bed,
and her scalp smelling of apricots
--this being who had formed within me,
squatted like a bright tree-frog in the dark,
like an eohippus she had come out of history
slowly, through me, into the daylight,
I had the daily sight of her,
like food or air she was there, like a mother.
I say "college," but I feel as if I cannot tell
the difference between her leaving for college
and our parting forever--I try to see
this house without her, without her pure
depth of feeling, without her creek-brown
hair, her daedal hands with their tapered
fingers, her pupils dark as the mourning cloak's
wing, but I can't. Seventeen years
ago, in this room, she moved inside me,
I looked at the river, I could not imagine
my life with her. I gazed across the street,
and saw, in the icy winter sun,
a column of steam rush up away from the earth.
There are creatures whose children float away
at birth, and those who throat-feed their young
for weeks and never see them again. My daughter
is free and she is in me--no, my love
of her is in me, moving in my heart,
changing chambers, like something poured
from hand to hand, to be weighed and then reweighed.
Dearest Yaara, I share Sharon Old's sentiments,thank you for reminding me of one of my favorite poets and poems,"you are in me, moving the chambers in my heart"
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