one beat at a time

Granny Self and my mother. Both presumably heirs of the Green and Self genes, including plenty of sciatica. Granny Self died when I was young. I wish I'd noticed how flexible she was (or wasn't).




Have been thinking about yoga in relation to the injuries of my friends. The lower back pain of one, the upper back pain of another, and so on. Even a friend who's had paranoid scizophrenia for thirty years. The upper back friend has been told by her osteopath (practitioners who straddle east and west? I'm always surprised that they still exist.) that she has "early onset" arthritis.

What do I know to be true, about myself and about our likely relationship to healers? And of what do I wish to persuade people? Or should I stay quiet and attend to my own practice?

My friend David Noble Green Self, who sometimes has an erratic heart, writes (mixing metaphors a bit): When I’m doing yoga, old injuries keep me staked to the ground like balloon tethers. But sometimes I stand before the mirror in tadasana and jump my limbs apart, leonardo da vinci position, and I feel my friends’ injuries. They are written on me like a butcher’s chart of a cow. In headstand, my heart beats just one beat at a time, and offers no guarantee that there will be another.

For my part, perhaps I'll leave off writing for a while, and get more seriously onto the mat.