Trusting the unexplainable wisdom within.

I have a wretched cold. It came on strong yesterday morning with a hoarse cough, aching throat and all the rest.

But this isn’t a post about my cold.  It’s about how I listened, trusted a voice deep inside and made space for healing.

The full moon was so huge. A wonderful physical metaphor for the rich, bombastic end of summer-fall we have had in the Northwest. Personally, it felt like a culmination of some pretty abundant energy around my house: we moved and got settled, I returned to teaching and feel like I have really hit a groove with my work, my kid is growing and thriving (and growing funnier every day). But the moon can’t stay full all the time. There must be a trough for the peak to occur. And I knew this. Intellectually, yes of course, but also on an almost cellular level. Monday and Tuesday, I felt a slight draw inward. I even felt like I needed to dial back some opportunities to grow my teaching calendar to be home more.

And then, boom. Thursday morning I was sick enough to know that I must stay home.

This might not sound like a lot, but for someone who years ago tried to power through mono and asthma attacks and what-not without taking a day of rest, it is huge. And this is something that feels really important to me right now in my teaching.  At least in the US, there is a culture of advancing on a tangible, physical way: doing more, earning more, pushing harder, getting more, and this is often to our detriment psychically (i.e., acquiring and pushing isn’t necessarily making us happier or better people). Right now, one of the ways back to wholeness for me is the practice of deep listening and trusting the wisdom that is encoded in every part of my being.

How this relates to the physical practice is interesting. I’m revisiting a few favorite chapters in Bernie Clark’s The Complete Guide to Yin Yoga. He has a wonderful way of describing how the poses are not the “end” of this practice, but rather the “means”:

We don’t use our body to get into a pose, we use the pose to get into our body.

Sounds easy, right? Not at all. I have never been so thankful to be on that journey.  Right now I’m practicing (and therefore teaching) really feeling how each of my body parts experiences the pose. Where I feel the pull of gravity most profoundly, how moving slightly in the pose affects my expression. And then moving out of the way, and letting the pose do its work.

Love.