Sunday, June 26, 2005Sandbag BuddhaThis evening, leaving yoga class, I saw this pile of sandbags on an electrical box on a street corner. Seeing the world with my fresh clean yogified eyes, I realized it looked amazingly like a little buddha. A little sandbag buddha.I have recently rediscovered yoga. Or maybe I'm discovering it for the first time. I'm too serene to really care any more about this thing called reality. I have always found yoga (a) too painful (b) too slow and (c) too boring to really get into it. I didn't try much in my earlier years. Then last year I discovered Bikram yoga and loved it. It's the one where they heat the room up to 105 degrees and you sweat and do the postures and feel like dying and try not to barf. I LOVED it. Mainly because it really made me feel great, and I felt that - whenever I'd survived a class - that I'd really accomplished something. For various reasons - mainly schedule but also because it was so arduous that I'd have to commit a whole evening to it - my routine with Bikram stopped about six months ago. And since then I've just been puttering along with martial arts and a few trips to the gym per week to keep myself together. Until about two weeks ago. I finally stopped by a local yoga studio to check it out. I took a 7 a.m. class and sailed through the day on this cloud of serenity. The next day I took a class in the afternoon. At the end of that class I went into a trance that took me out to Pluto... and then some. I was floating on these waves of euphoria for the fifteen minutes of post-class meditation that the teacher afforded us. Afterwards I floated out to the front desk of the studio and immediately started plotting my next class. All I could think of was yeah... Sex is what people do when they can't make their yoga classes. I feel kind of tacky, like the last person to a party who finally shows up and says "oh my god, why have I been MISSING all this?" I also know it's a cliche to be a white middle aged cell-phone totin' computer usin' multitasking hit-it-hard kind of gal, and then start talking about yoga like it's OOOHHH so MARvelous. So I'm wrestling with the touchy-feely-ness of it all. And I'm feeling like a poseur. And I'm feeling pretty physically sore. I also realize that - after only missing two days in the last two weeks - I am obsessively compulsively using yoga to combat my obsessive compulsiveness. Which is pretty zen when you think about it. Is it a bad thing to OCD on yoga? God, I hope not. And all these amazing things have happened since I started. Money from my dead father. Money from my alive mother (WAY more astounding than money from beyond the grave). I will tell you these stories later. It's been beyond amazing. How when we turn to face the direction we are meant to be facing, suddenly we are inundated with blessing of all shapes and sizes and colors. The world becomes filled with buddhas. They lurk in the corners and in shopping carts. They can be seen in my mother's face, flittingly but there. The buddha starts to form and show its form where we least expect it. Whether it's yoga or a career change or just taking a moment to breathe and assess which direction puts the sun on your face... do it. Take that moment. The difference it makes is ridiculously big, and the effort surprisingly small. It feels so daunting to step off that cliff... but when you do, you realize it's only been a very tiny step after all. It's the fear that makes it seem so overwhelming. # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 11:15 PM  
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