THE POWER OF TEN

My friend Kelly is still teaching Zoom yoga classes for work. The best thing is that they record them and upload them so they are accessible to us during the week. One day last week, I pulled up her most recent class to use for practice that day. Kelly teaches a traditional Hatha style of yoga. This means holding poses for longer than one breath. My own teacher training is based in Hatha yoga and this is my usual practice. Or at least it was. Over the last year my practice morphed into something very different. There was no stillness or settling into a pose for more than a breath. I realized this as Kelly was giving cues to slowly move us into tree pose, but since I knew where we were going, I just put myself into tree pose. Then she made us hold tree pose for an hour.

Not really.

I don’t know how long we were in that pose. All I know is that it felt like I was in it forever. My thoughts ranged from an astonished “Wow! Am I still in tree pose?” to a whiney “OH MY GOD WHY ARE WE STILL HERE!?!?” Guess which thought was the loudest. The rest of the class proceeded in this manner. Kelly would cue us into the next pose were we would settle in and I would have an existential crisis while wondering how much longer I had to be here.

How much longer do we have to be here?

COVID virus cases are surging in parts of the US where they have stopped mandatory masks and social distancing because one person they know got vaccinated and too many people still don’t know (or care) how viruses work or spread. The trial for Derek Chauvin who murdered George Floyd began this week, and a sixty-five year old woman was beaten in an anti-Asian attack yesterday. We had to explain the confederate flag to the Cabbage and how it represents a time in US history where people in the South were so mad about not being able to own people that they left the Union and started war and that people who fly that flag today are basically people who think that if you are not white, straight and a particular brand of ‘christian’ then you are less of a human being. I refrained from adding in that these people are usually ignorant and hateful and that they are flying the flag of losers. The confederates lost that war. I find myself growing impatient with just how much longer we have to be in this time slot of history. I am not sure that I had any patience for it to begin with and you can see that in how my daily yoga practice morphed into a monster.

The day after taking Kelly’s class, I rolled out my yoga mat and then slowed my practice down. I would hold a pose for ten long yoga breaths before moving into the next one. It was a struggle for me to not rush into the next pose, not rush my breath, but I stuck with it. You never know how long a moment in time is really going to last. It could be minutes, weeks. The time between Chris being sick and his passing was a blink. With Dad, the time between was years that painfully stretched out in length. Then there are the moments that you actually want to last for weeks and years, but instead just wiz on by in seconds. How do we slow those moments? In settling into a pose for ten long breaths, I am training my brain not only to have patience for the moments in life that are crap, but to slow down the good moments. What if we all just took ten slow breaths before reacting and responding to any and everything?

I am settling in because I have no idea how much longer I have to be here.