yoga practiced near children

Exuberant. Is it yoga?

















It's mid-afternoon and I've done exactly three and a half minutes of yoga today.

"Spare me the blow-by-blow," I can hear the reader saying.

But in the long run I hope to rummage some effulgence together out of precisely this sort of bloggy, earth-bound minutiae. That's seven half minutes of adho mukha vrksasana, face-down tree. Each handstand, that is, drawn out, with Western prissiness, to a count of exactly thirty. I don't go up, as I have seen teachers do, with both legs together in one seamless burst. I've found an archway in our kitchen where last October I learned to walk my feet up Spider-Manlike. Now I don't need the arch but I do the inverted vrksasana next to it, for old time's sake.

In inversions, the head which thinks, "I should have gone to law school," is upside down, as is the intrusive thought and its implications.

Today, these handstands are both yoga and that which keeps yoga at bay. By dipping in to a favorite pose like this, I am avoiding real time on the mat. There is some precise window of opportunity in the day when guilt at not performing a full round of Yoga Practiced Near Children is cancelled out by guilt at Ignoring the Children. Ten minutes ago, the children settled into lego. They have not yet begun to throw the lego. Get to the mat!

cat on mat

Have you ever eaten a peach?

My quasi-Buddhist friend used to like to ask me that. He meant, "have you ever just eaten a peach?" Here, now, just peach-eating me. Not thinking about it, or fretting about it. Just eating the peach.

Well, can't say as I've ever had a peach.

My yoga teacher would say, "just do the pose." Funny word, pose. More than a hint of faking it, built right into the word. No matter, do the pose please.

A stray tabby has been sleeping in the bushes. Today when I come to my mat she is sitting on it, like an illustration of the old saying philosophers use to prove that perception corresponds to reality. "The cat is on the mat," I say to myself like a koan, "the cat is on the mat." She seems to be doing nothing on the mat other than being there.

"Shove over," I tell her. "I'm going to try that."

Rounding a corner

For four days in a row, I don’t vary my routine, though it finally creeps up past an hour. This lack of variation is witless, but it suggests a kind of doggedness which at least means I’ll get through it. On day three, two tears leak out of my sad head as I settle into virasana. Regret that I have lost my teacher, and my way somewhat. I don’t want a teacher in Essex or London. I don’t understand them. I should be doing therapeutic and recovery poses, but I can’t remember which ones. I want my American teacher back. Poor me. But it’s all relative, suffering. Somewhere in the midst of my illness, Eva-Lynn’s nephew in Seattle, a lovely sweet boy, has died of a fever. I am not thinking straight. I got a long fever, and Royston, little RJ, disappeared. My mind still has cobwebs in it.

Back to the mat, I think, trying not to think, back to the mat.

But the tears are perhaps the end of my illness, and I recover rapidly after that. I have rounded a corner.

The next day, I can be found doing my exuberant adho mukha virksasanas, handstands, in the kitchen. The wall is brown where my dirty heels have touched it.

Fear is the center

Unimaginatively, I work through the same poses as yesterday. A skeleton regimen of standing poses, fleshed out with a couple of stabs at urdvha dhanurasana, backbends. Well, I’m not Madonna (to name someone my age) doing golden arches while singing “Like a Virgin” as a conveyor belt rushes me around stage, but I get up. I usually limber into this pose with some time in viparita dandasana. That’s inverted-stick-on-chair pose, a pretty good description of me in general.

As I enter the pose, I have what I haven’t had in some months, a little flash of nausea [suffering] and its Siamese twin, fear [suffering about suffering]. If I’m a two-meter stick, where is my fear? It hovers at the one-meter mark, pushing up into my stomach, like the air bubble in a carpenter’s level. Funny that it has a location, fear. How much of my life has been lived around this aching center? I haven’t had the nausea in months, but the fear, well, we’ve been companions these many years.

Later I’ve come down from salamba sarvangasana, having made it to the end of my [admittedly short] practice. Before I can go into full savasana, corpse pose, I have my arms to the side. “You look like those crosses in France,” says Liam (age five), “the ones that have people on them.”

Footprints

Went through the standing poses in a lackluster way. Tadasana, trikonasana, parsvakonasana, virabhadrasana I and III (II sort of gets lost in there). That’s the straight-up standing mountain pose, triangle pose, extended side-angle pose, the warrior pose(s?). After my recent illness, a week of fever and a week or more of semi-recovery from something contracted ironically at the Catholic healing shrine Lourdes in France (my pathologies are ecumenical, at least), I felt if anything actually a little more flexible in triangle pose.

You should always finish your practice with salambha sarvangasana, shoulder stand. A cooling pose after the heating, I think. But the kids suddenly needed food, Eva-Lynn was going to cook it, and it seemed urgent—possibly was urgent—for me to bike off to the Co-op and get carrots and cabbage for a healing soup.

Salamba sarvangasana is the caboose of Yoga Practiced Near Children, and sometimes gets left off. Bad, bad sadhaka. I tell myself not to say “bad practitioner,” but I say it anyway, and the most grace I can muster is to forgive myself for not forgiving myself.

Incidental sign of Yoga Practiced Near Children: dust footprints on the yoga mat.