Day 54 Listening to the Mountain
It’s warm and sunny today, which means I get to spend a few hours digging in the dirt, before I do my yoga for the day! Give me a wheelbarrow and a couple yards of bark mulch and I’m happy. Give me a vacuum cleaner and a floor mop and I’ll tell you exactly what you can do with them.
Our backyard is a rocky slope, made up of fill that has, over the past nine years, naturalized with mostly native grasses, thistle and blackberry.
Pastoral from a distance, but close up, it’s an eyesore. So I’ve been working on turning it into something beautiful, but still natural and low-maintenance.
My plan is to cover the wild and weedy area on the northside of our house with landscape fabric and bark mulch, continuing what I started around the west side. I call it my 20-year project. But hopefully this season I will make it across to the east side, nearest our neighbour, who has been patiently and kindly ignoring the overgrown mess adjacent to their manicured outdoor entertainment area.
Mine is no namby-pamby white-cotton glove affair. It’s a put-your-back-into-it job that usually leaves me with pleasantly aching muscles, cuts and scrapes from brambles, sweat and today at least, mud.
When I began this project, I should say, way back when we first looked at this lot, my mind began whirling with the possibilities and potential. We could have Butchart Gardens, right in our own backyard, I thought!
Then I realized I was being ridiculous.
Minter Gardens. Maybe.
“I’m strong and creative,” I told my husband. “I’ll make this into a showcase.”
“As long as you can do it all yourself,” he answered, “because we’re house-broke.”
So, that’s how it started. I’m strong, creative and Mennonite, babe. You won’t believe what I can do with nothing. Tillers of the earth, ya’ know.
“What’s your plan?” hubby asked, dubiously, when the biggest change was an enormous, and unsightly, pile of dirt.
“I’m not sure,” I answered. “A path through here, I think. Unless I hit a rock. Or a big stump.”
“Then what?” he persisted, the line between his eyebrows deepening. “Terraces? Steps? Retaining walls? How are you going to keep the weeds out? Won’t the deer eat everything you plant? How long will it take? This is going to cost $70,000, isn’t it?”
Unless he costs out a project himself, he believes all endeavours will run either $700, $7000 or $70,000. It’s just where his brain goes. Either that or “and we’ll all die.”
“I have to buy bark mulch and fabric,” I admitted. “But it won’t cost much.”
“Maybe you can draw out a schematic for me,” he said. “With estimated completion dates. So I know what to expect.”
I took a deep, cleansing breath, straightened my shoulders and looked at my mountain. It’s not going anywhere. If I put the right plants in the right spots, work with what I have, I can bring out the natural beauty of this slope. If something doesn’t work the first time around, I’ll try something else, until it feels right. Maybe not Minter or Butchart. But right.
I looked him in the eye. “Honey,” I said. “I’m listening to the mountain. I’ll do what works, and I’ll be done when I’m finished. Don’t worry. It’s going to be beautiful.”
I was remembering this conversation while I was doing my standing postures in class today. Despite a morning of hard, physical, dirty work, my practice was strong and smooth. Even Standing-Head-to-Knee! Not perfect, far from it, but… better.
It seems that, as with my landscaping project, there’s a limit to the control I can exert over my muscles, my body – my 80-year project, hopefully. And I have to focus on the potential, instead of the potential problems, to find the right way. My right way.
The name of my favourite standing meditation pose?
Tadasana. Mountain Pose.
Day 44 Breathe… Listen… Be….
On Tuesday, the Vancouver Sun ran a story of two boys charged with sexually assaulting and murdering Kimberly Proctor, and I’ve got to say, stories like this knock me off my pins. Such tragedy, such waste. For the girl, obviously. But also, in a lesser way, for the boys. What on earth happened to turn them into monsters capable of this kind of cold-blooded horror? Was there a point in their young lives when they learned to deny normal emotions, to subvert things like humiliation, loneliness, lust and anger into something so much worse?
Or were they just born sociopaths?
Understand, I’m no expert. I just read, watch people and ask the question “why?” a lot. (I’m an ardent fan of CSI and Criminal Minds, too, but don’t hold that against me. I know a plot device when I see one.) Mostly, I try to listen to my instincts and intuition. Turns out, they’re often pretty reliable.
One of the things we’re told regularly in yoga class is to listen to our bodies. Yoga isn’t supposed to hurt, they say — despite the somewhat confusing instructions to find “that stretching-pain sensation all down the backs of your legs.” (Stretching-pain? Uh, check.) So, if this means I can’t keep my knees straight on forward bends, well, so be it. The important thing is to do it correctly, and trust that my muscles, tendons and ligaments will lengthen over time.
Right. Apparently I didn’t listen in Monday’s class, because within hours, my right hamstring was in a bad way. A grab-my-ass-and-moan-with-every-step kind of way. And just when I thought I was making progress, too! Which is, I suspect, where I went wrong. I felt unusually tight that day, and instead of listening, and accepting, I pushed through. “Oh no you don’t,” I told my hamstrings, through clenched teeth. And now I’m paying the price.
Turns out, my muscles may well have been warning me that not all was well in the kingdom of Roxanne. There’s a virus going through our family. I’ll spare you the gory details, except to say that, between my aching hip, and my gurgling tummy, Monday was another restless night. Instead of listening to my body, I responded with a show of power – and got a revolt.
And I know better.
When my children were small, I worked hard to help them identify, understand and accept their feelings, physical and emotional. For instance, it’s okay to be mad, sad, frightened, etc. It’s not okay to brain your sister with a Playmobil barn. I tried to avoid such phrases as “You can’t be hungry, you just ate.” Or, “Say you’re sorry! And mean it!” Or my favourite: “Smile! Be nice!” Which is, I think, especially meaningful when said in a low, menacing tone.
This kind of cognitive dissonance – “I feel cold but Mom says I can’t be, because I’m wearing a jacket.” “I’m so sad that my hamster was eaten by my sister’s cat but I’m not supposed to be upset because it’s only a hamster.” – sets us up for all kinds of problems. Like, “I’m gonna get that cat. I’m gonna get my sister!!”
It’s normal to feel pain, sorrow, anger, fear, anything. It’s when these powerful sensations are denied that we get into CSI territory, because they don’t go away, any more than my hamstrings can stretch by force of will. Disappointment is ignored in favour of revenge. Loneliness turns into that biting determination to never let anyone get too close. Humiliation becomes rage.
I suspect that those two boys haven’t faced anything with emotional honesty in a long time, if ever. And now? It’s probably too late for them.
It’s certainly too late for Kimberly Proctor.
It’s the simplest task – and a life-long challenge – to pay attention. To actually feel our feelings, experience our own lives.
To breathe, listen, be.
Day 40 Endorphin Junkie
Several years ago, before a trip to Mexico, I decided to have my legs professionally waxed. I have nothing against shaving, but I’ve got a raised pigmented mole on my left shin that I tend to forget about. I’ve cut the top off that thing so many times, it now looks like a little brown target, which you’d think might help me remember, but doesn’t. I figured it would be nice to vacation without a bloody scab.
Well, that was a deeply enlightening spa experience I’m in no hurry to repeat, thank you very much. Lovely result, but that poor esthetician was dodging random kicks to the head and I’m pretty sure I was offering to sign a confession, any confession, by the end. Turns out I need to be in control of the pain myself.
So I do my own waxing. Now that I’ve reached the age when, as Janette Barber’s famous quote goes, “they’re not chin hairs, they’re stray eyebrows,” it’s a top-to-toe deal. “Your face feels so smooth and woman-like,” my husband tells me afterwards, with all sincerity.
And you know what hurts the most? (No, it’s not what you’re thinking. Hello, natural childbirth times three.) It’s the top of the feet. Oh, come on. I’m not the only one with periodic bouts of hobbit-foot. You know what I’m talking about. Or if you don’t you either should, or you will. Somehow the skin over the feet and ankles is so thin, it produces a spectacularly bright sort of pain when the hairs rip free.
But afterwards? It’s not just the smooth, exfoliated skin. It’s an endorphin rush, the body celebrating “I suffered, and I survived!”
I wonder if that’s not part of the draw of Bikram yoga, for me. I’ve never been one to do anything the easy way. Ten years of pregnancy and/or lactation. 14 years of homeschooling. 23 years, coming up, of marriage. In fact, if there’s a hard way, a long way, or a wrong way, I’ve probably taken it. (I chose to be a writer, after all. And not just any writer – for years, I wrote for pet magazines and church magazines. The two lowest-paying segments of the freelance market. Good job.)
But there is satisfaction in doing something really, really difficult. (I once wrote a piece on how to deal with masturbation in cats. It’s true. I’m not saying it was a good story, but it was assigned, I got the information, the interviews, and met my deadline. Thank goodness the editors saw reason and killed it before the issue went to print.)
There’s nothing like the sensation at the end of class, when I’m lying in Savasana – Corpse Pose – drenched with sweat, swimming in endorphins, limp, limber and loose.
I’ve suffered, I’ve pushed through, and I’ve survived. And I’m stronger for it.