Hey, yesterday’s post was number 1,400. What a nice number, and how nice to notice it, like when you happen to see your odometer rolling over a nice round number. And wow, 1,400 posts, that’s a lot. Posts from my old blog, Thrums, have been pulled in here (and wordpress just categorized them all as “big picture stuff” instead of taking the categories I’d originally assigned), and from the previous Queen of the Pillbugs blog over on squarespace. Even though I ebb and flow, and even though my blog has shifted focus — it used to be primarily a knitting blog — I am always glad to have this place to record my thoughts, and my life. So here’s to the next 1,400 posts. OY.
Over the years I’ve tried in spurts to do meditation. I wanted the benefits I heard about, wanted the stillness, wanted to find the clarity that meditaters seem to have. And of course it’s hard; people will say, “I tried, but my mind kept jumping around.” Yeah! Of course, that’s exactly the point! Your mind keeps jumping around. They call it monkey mind. That’s the point, learning how to discipline your monkey mind by noticing that it’s doing that, and bringing it back — no matter how many times you have to do it. I found it hard in a different way. When I tried to meditate, I dissociated or had flashbacks. It was very frightening, actually. And it’s not just me; many people with trauma histories cannot meditate.
I heard a very moving piece on NPR in 2009 about a psychiatrist named Michael Grodin, who works with traumatized Tibetan monks. Meditation is obviously such an enormous part of their lives, but when they tried, they had flashbacks to the torture they’d endured by the Chinese. Regaining the ability to meditate was essential to them. Eventually he found a technique that lived within their own experience. They held a singing bowl in their hand and gently struck it when they began to meditate. Of course that’s part of beginning a meditation for so many people, but not IN YOUR HAND. What it did for them was to connect them to the moment, to connect them physically to the moment. The bowl’s vibrations linger in the hand for a long time, and feeling those vibrations allowed them to remain in their body and in the moment.
So yesterday afternoon I was doing my daily yoga practice and had an insight. I was moving from upward facing dog to downward facing dog and my body felt like it was moving at “the great hinge,” which is how I experienced my hips in that movement from one pose to the other. I felt so fully in my body …. that’s not right, it’s more like my insides and outsides fully meshed or something. That’s not right either. I don’t know how to say it. Maybe it was just a different way of being fully present.
I’ve always had a very strange relationship to my body. It was invaded so frequently when I was a child and a young teenager; it was not my private body. I kind of separated myself from it in a strange way. Here’s an example: sometimes I’d say, “No don’t worry, I’m not crying, just my eyes are crying. It’s just my eyes crying.” It was so separate from me, and of course it makes great sense that I would come to feel that way during my childhood. So what occurred to me on the mat yesterday, as I felt so wholly connected in and with my body, is that being fully present during yoga, bringing my mind back when it wanders, back to the movement, to the pose, to the position, and being present right there with my muscles and bones, blood and heartbeat, well that’s a mighty good way to learn how to be present too.
So if meditation is hard for you and you want to get some of the benefits, you might try yoga — and keep bringing your wandering mind back to the pose. My mind wanders like this: “ooh, look at how the skin sags above my knees now, like my grandmother’s used to do…” Back to the pose, Queen. Mind back to the pose. Of if yoga’s not your thing, find another. There is a Zen saying, “Before Enlightenment chop wood carry water, after Enlightenment, chop wood carry water.” Lots of ways to find your way to being awake.
