Don't empty the ocean, calm the current: Reflection for week 4

It's nice when its more than just one body practicing as I 'teach', since all of us together are less likely to break the spell.

I used the only tool I really know I have - I simply asked questions. One after the other, letting them bubble up from my peripheral awareness, how the sun pressed against the container of my body, the wind gently wrapping around us, the sound of the water and children playing in it, how was it a support, this pull of space, the meaning of texture, the places where it all went in the body, how does our environment land? Am I the container or am I contained? What do I notice, and how many ways can I respond? My students followed my questions like a serious task, but I did not name a shape, I did not take a stance or give direction that wasn't in the form of a question that could swirl around a kinosphere like the rainbow flows on the outside of a soap bubble, noticing or taking in any of those questions, letting them reside inside of that bubble was a choice. The expressions of the two bodies I practiced on in this tiny park were so drastically different, later they both were really appreciative of the 'container' I gave them to explore themselves in relationship to their surroundings, as well as what they were interested in pursuing - and I am not sure what the 'container' was exactly. Was it my voice? Their own sense of their boundaries? Their ability or willingness to listen?

In meditation I am finding that it quickly becomes about how I am everything, expansive, sounds cease to be connected to their meanings, or related to the contexts they arose out of, I bond with all of it. And then I am lost, I am not myself, but a piece of something else - and I wonder if the quiet is so deep that movement has been the only way to feel myself inside of it. Maybe yoga has always been about me trying desperately to feel myself, to find all of the walls and boundaries to know what I am shaped like - and I am really enjoying layering the possibility to move with the kind of attentive patience of meditation, where the thread being followed tastes something like curiosity, in my mouth at least.

I just asked the kinds of questions I wish I could ask into a mirror, and crushed blades of grass between my fingers and smiled at the children who stopped to watch us while their parents pretended not to see us, and took in the sounds and the day shifting towards night and my student's bodies as they let me take them with me along this faint thread, this experience that we were weaving together.