the sun comes in just as i'm sitting down to write this. it's in and out. come and go. like so much about me. my bones still cold from long morning's walk. my head clear. pleasantly tired. if you take a minute, you can find a whole day and think - says one song i love. how lucky to have found it when i didn't feel like i had that minute.
i'm trying to be more consistent with social media, even though i hate it. this is what I posted today:
i love viparita karani 'cause it feels inside my body the way that song feels inside my head, kinda. if you take a minute, you can find a whole day and think. i try to put my legs up a wall for at least ten minutes each day because somewhere in there, i'm worried i'll get old and my legs will get all blotchy and varicose. that's one version of the story i tell.
another is, i put them up because when i don't, my knees feel funny towards bedtime. a long way that blood's gotta travel, and it don't help how poor my circulation is. so i'm tryina work on that.
yet another version is, it activates the parasympathetic nervous system. it says to my brain - yo, you're safe now, chill. my brain has a hard time with this chilling thing, so telling it to sit in a pose for ten minutes is...
I get anxious inside my own yin lessons. yell 'how much bloody longer'. only inside my head, but still. so it's a good challenge.
i've found, since i started putting my legs up consistently, this funny thing happens. I have more patience for other things. like in the morning, i look out the fucking window. who does that. i did this exercise in reducing inflammation in the body with an old honey-turmeric-cinnamon trick. it took minutes to melt the honey properly to make a paste and do it as i wanted to have it. i found i can be patient for whole minutes at a time.
if you take a minute. seems like a good trade-off, but damn, how hard it is sometimes to find that minute.
before i started teaching, I used to not understand when teachers said the hardest part in yoga was showing up. now i say it. not mechanically. just sometimes. with yoga and since teaching more specifically, i'm finding a beauty in routine, in slowness, in closing a class the same way each time. in acknowledging how hard it really was for this person to show up (which helps remind me how difficult it is sometimes for me).
it's a small act of defiance to my hurried, fast, animus-driven brain. forces me to step out and discover that, indeed, there is time. to cook. for the honey to melt. for insight to arrive. a whole day, even.
it shows up in little ways. like going on a long walk and changing your plan halfway through. allowing myself to be tired. to say this is enough. I would appreciate that now.
all from propping my legs up the wall every night? unlikely. more likely by far that i'm finally finding place for this practice now that i am at a place in my life where i can afford more patience. more time.
guess somewhere down the line, i took a minute.
my goal is to teach myself to stare up at the wall and do nothing for those ten minutes. i'm not there yet. so i read, instead. yesterday I did it while watching tv. the night before that, i did it while on my shakti mat.
my goal when i've learned to stare up at the wall is start doing it for twenty minutes. there's such a wealth of creativity nestled inside boredom, i know. but i'm not there yet.
i'm on a massive skunk anansie kick. so much so that i've started regretting not going to see them when they were in town last year. but not too long. what's the point of regrets.
and this. my dreams lately seem intent on warning me, the danger of playing with bombs, something i've never known intuitively. and this song, a flare-gun of sorts against projection. in her own words, the song's about a person who doesn't properly exist, a person made of so much space, that everything is possible.
"sometimes you get the good, sometimes you get a song"
and i know what that is, the danger of wanting a song, the part of me that wants songs incessantly. how it threatens, always, to ruin me.
because there's so much pj harvey in this, and because i'm glad iggy's still doing things without a shirt on.
I would've added the song i referenced throughout the text, but i'm sure i've already #threetunetuesday'd it. perhaps several times. here, in case you're curious. thanks for the challenge, 
