a selfie made from found objects and reflected light

                                               

 

 

I have spent the past 10 years doing yoga and embraced my place in the labor industry as penance for not being better, stronger, more capable, more brilliant - the pain in my belly and thighs, my shoulders and my spine as lashes on my physical body to punish spirit for all the things it could not make my body do, its lack of control on the physical plane. For my feelings of helplessness and powerlessness that I have carried since a small child growing up in dangerous and unhealthy circumstances. For all of the times I could not speak up for myself. Because I deserved the pain. Because it was the only time I could feel anything.

Of course I didn't want to share any of this with anyone.

Watching one of my best friends sinking into Half Pigeon yesterday during dialogue practice, something changed. Looking at her body, and talking about the discomfort triggered inside of the hip, feeling my own experience inside of someone else's body - I realized that it was gift being given. That moving the body into places where it feels a lot, whether Half Pigeon or Chair Pose - is an act of love. Is a cry for freedom from the constraints of our daily lives, of joints from flesh. That breath IS the language with which we comfort and communicate importance to the body, since the words we think inside of our thoughts have little to offer to this conversation, the most important conversation we will ever have. The freedom and power of allowing the body a safe haven to feel, to grow, to explore its boundaries is something that society and the education system rob us of on a daily basis - and every single person in the room with me is committing an act of revolution.

I understood what it means to pray for the first time yesterday. How a yoga practice can be so much more than a battle. It's a song. Its a story that we are constantly rewriting, and for once I get to be the hero, instead of the villain.

I see my place, finally. I'm a Liberator leading bodies (safely) to war against the accepted, the expected, the required. My task is to empower our fullest expression as an act of love, which is inextricable from the nature of revolution, whose ideal battle ground is the field of consciousness.

Last night's class, there was no nervousness. My dialogue is strong because I know why I walk into the studio. I know what story I want to tell, even if it is told through the tone of my voice and the touch of my fingertips. That bodies may hear what minds cannot, and that bodies respond because I am giving them a stage on which to sing their own songs, and a captive audience to let them know they are being heard.

I think this is what it feels like to be in love.

"The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain."

ever since i met you on a cloudy monday, i can't believe how much i miss the rain.

finally, stilted and cringing, i drew yesterday. stiff fingers, and bizarre painful yearning, i wanted to. i wanted to record the poorly put artwork on the wall of the coffee shop, and the cheesy guy that wishes he could be a mac ad. it was too beautiful not to.

its been hard watching these students draw, and know what training and skill is inside of me, but i wonder now if a sketchbook was always an entire novel of images that could become the worst weight i've ever experienced: failure. i never drew for me, i drew for other people, i drew to remember things, i drew cause i had to achieve a grade, or study a form for later painstaking illustration, but never for me. just because i saw something witty, and wonderfully human, something that struck me with its wry sense of tragic comedy, to capture a moment, a whisper of mortality.

these art students have it wrong. the ones i'm modeling for are so concerned with the contour, the outermost edge, the vague outline of what makes a pose what it is, not the form, the sense of weight, not the power of a thoughtful, contemplated gesture.

its about looking for that particle, that line, the subtle crease that makes the whole drawing, the scene, the charcoal or pen on paper... finding the moment in a gesture, the shape of being human.

so its coming back. the discourse finding its way to my fingers, the truths i know about illustrating life awakening in my hands that have been numb for some time now. since i have no one to seek favor from, no grades to fight for, i can let go of my intense fear of failure, of not having the best, most skillful drawing to show, and think and observe through my hands, rather than my terrified heart.