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.”