Keep Your Gaze Within Your Mat

I arrive at Julie’s Gentle Yoga on Monday very much in need of the hour after a bad weekend and, to put it mildly, a difficult Monday morning (made slightly, easier, I suppose, by the fact that I saw it coming, having been here before). This particular yoga class was just what I needed, and I am not talking about the poses, though we do begin with a favorite pose--Supta Baddha Konasana. I get there early enough to get my favorite place by the mirror, and the space next to me remains empty right up to the beginning of the class. Then...a latecomer. I groan as I realize it is the heavy breather who is usually in the corner across the room (but who can be heard throughout). I move quickly through the irritation that comes from concentrating on his breathing rather than my own, to chuckling at the little voice in my head chanting, "Blog Fodder, Blog Fodder." In Julie’s opening “set your intention,” she suggests that this time of year our intention might be simply to spend the hour focused on the yoga and not the other stresses in our lives. "Yes," I think, "that is exactly what I need to do."

A line I read in a book a few months ago about the author's living through the mirror of her yoga practice, floats into my consciousness: "Keep your gaze within your mat." I lie on my mat with my feet drawn up close to me, soles of my feet together. Eyes closed, I block out Heavy Breather. I am the only one in the room, just me and my small lime green mat with the peace button focal point attached at the top. This is Advent peace week, and though I am most definitely not feeling at peace, for this hour I can let it all go and, perhaps, let peace find me. I concentrate on my breath, slowly in through my nose...hold...slowly out through my nose. If blowing all the tension out through his mouth is what Heavy Breather needs when he arrives at yoga from I know not what, that is his practice on his small mat. Later I am vaguely aware that his breathing has settled down.

"When you start on a long journey, trees are trees, water is water, and mountains are mountains. After you have gone some distance, trees are no longer trees, water no longer water, mountains no longer mountains. But after you have traveled a great distance, trees are once again trees, water is once again water, mountains are once again mountains" (Zen teaching).

I just read this. I don't know what it means. But it speaks to my hard week. Do we begin with rules and expectations that we understand, and gradually expand and adapt and grow, only to have to return to the previous rules and expectations? Or did I misinterpret somewhere along the line. I believe the technical term is "got too big for my britches." At any rate, it is time to adapt, to see the trees as trees again. To keep my gaze within my own mat.

Maybe its the hard week that keeps tears caught just behind my eyes, but they let loose deliciously when I receive my annual December box from my mother in Washington. I get home from work and bring it in from the front porch to the kitchen counter. I feed Smudge, change my clothes, and wash my face--carefully following my daily routine, while anticipating the annual one. Then I sit with my box. Carefully slitting open the tape and folding back the box flaps, I lift out the plastic bag. I hold it a moment then untwist the twist tie. Still holding the bag closed, I close my eyes and bring my treasure to my nose. Letting lose just a bit of the opening, I bring my nose close and let the aroma slide in; then plunge my whole face into the bag and breathe deeply of home. Douglas fir and noble fir, lovingly collected by my dear mother who knows me and sees me, packaged in wet paper towels and mailed across the country. Year after year for the past 35 of them, it sparks that deep, deep longing we all have for home, wherever that may be and whatever that may mean to each one of us.

Mid-week a cold front comes through, breaking the ridiculous December heat wave, during which Smudge and I are outside acting like it is garden season (I reluctantly, she not-so-much). The cold front is introduced by a vigorous downpour. I need to make a confession here. Along with judging Heavy Breather, I have often tended to turn up my nose at southern colloquialisms. Provincial, my children's father used to call me, in my teasing intolerance. I am not proud of it. My learning, perhaps, has been to "have" to live in the south for a good bit more than half my life 
now. You will learn to let people be who they are, damn it. And I am getting quite fond of the odd phrases. One I particularly have come to love I first heard from my dear daughter-in-law: "Pouring the rain." (Makes so much more sense than "raining cats and dogs," which I grew up with, don't you think?) And that is what it does on Wednesday evening. "Pours the rain." And behind it comes cold, blessed crisp air.

For a while now, I have been writing a single morning sentence several times a week, and sharing it with my friends, and perhaps some of their friends, on Facebook. It has become a spiritual practice for me. Encapsulate one experience from my morning walk into a single sentence--a photograph captured in words, rather than on the virtual film of my digital camera. Friday morning, though, I take my camera. (Well, truth be known, I almost always take my camera. I can't help it. I usually don't use it, however.) I decide I am not going to get to work early so that I have the much-needed few minutes alone in the building to center myself; instead I am going to hang around in the cemetery waiting for the sun to come up. "Lollygagged in the frosty cemetery, fingers frozen and breath visible, to see the drowsy sun crack open the sky and set it on fire." I notice that this time of year it comes up 15 degrees to the south, through the empty windows of the beautiful broken down historically-protected building just beyond the cemetery, rather than back to the left behind Bartholomew Figures Moore. It is reluctant to rise; it being the kind of morning meant to stay under the duvet. But it does eventually slide up from behind the covers and light up the sky. I lean against a tombstone and savor the spectacle. I am late to work. Whatever.