Tense and Release

Today is my dad’s birthday. Some years it falls on Thanksgiving, others not; every one we’re thankful for him anyway.

Mom and I took Dad out to dinner at a local sushi restaurant called Vivify. It’s a sweet little establishment with tasteful decor, creative entrees, beautiful dishes and a contientious business model. If not for the unfortunate online R&B radio station that always seems to be playing in the background, it would be near perfect.

Despite it all–the good restaurant, the good company, the good cheer–I still had trouble staying present tonight. My mind was all over the yesterdays and tomorrows. One minute I was thinking about how the last time I was at Vivify was with David; the next, I was ten years in the future with an income to support fine dining on a regular basis. I had to keep bringing myself back to the sweetness directly at hand, which, I suppose, is meditation in action. The mind wanders and we come back to the breath. The mind wanders and we come back to life. . .

An idea for relaxing the mind came to me while settling into savasana (“corpse pose”) during yoga this morning. Often, during this phase of the class, the instructor will talk students through a tense and release process which typically begins with the feet and legs. “Inhale and tense up your toes, calves, thigh muscles; squeeze! Now, lift your legs slightly off the floor, tight, tight, and . . . release.” Moving up the body, this is repeated until all of the major muscle groups have been tightened then relaxed.

While this is an effective way to help the body deeply relax more quickly, I find that my mind still runs amock in such a way that “final” relaxation is actually quite difficult to achieve. (I’m not alone in this. As simple as it appears, savasana is recognized as perhaps the single most difficult pose in yoga to actualize, precisely because of the fickle nature of mind). So today, as I lay still with a quiet body and a chattering mind, I thought to myself, “What if I tensed and released my mind as well?”

I reasoned that if tensing a bicep means using every portion of the muscle and all available energy there at once, then tensing the mind would logically be covering every topic my mind mulls over these days in a few brief seconds. And then, release!

If I recall correctly, today’s attempt went something like this:

What will I eat for breakfast? I have to get to work by 11. Should I replace my lost cellphone? Nathan is out of town so we’ll have to meet next week. When will Joe let me know about dancing this weekend? I wonder if Isaac’s party will be fun. What will I wear to the party? It’s almost time for another haircut. It’s dad’s birthday! I’ll take him out to dinner. I need to balance my budget! How much can I afford to pay Grael for Priestess school? And . . . Release!

I don’t know whether the technique actually worked or not. I’ve sort of forgotten what happened after that–which could seem like a good sign, hm? If I remembered all of those bothersome thoughts and then nothing afterword, that must mean something.

As for “Priestess school?!” Just another one of those secrets I’m not quite ready to let slip, an enigma of a topic I will likely choose to elaborate on . . . eventually. . .

Human Doings

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Oh Mary Oliver, you’re a genius with words!

Those lines are an excerpt from Ms. Oliver’s poem, “Wild Geese.” “Wild Geese” is a breath-catching piece that was first introduced to me by a crone and counselor of mine, Joan. Joan presented me with the poem after an unusually turbulent session we had during which I finally collapsed publicly under the pressure I had been piling upon myself to be, well, good.

That was probably three years ago. I am grateful to have since made significant progress in the arena of being too hard on myself. Treading that path is tricky though, when you’re trying hard not to try too hard and then trying harder not to try so hard. . . It took many helping hands for me to see the way I was and gently guide me closer to a sweeter definition of “good.”

While living in Boulder I had another wise counselor, this one named Kate (do all female therapists have one syllable names? If/when I become one, I suppose I’ll have to drop the “a” and start going by just Tess). One of the many things Kate helped me realize was that in effort to constantly be positive, I had adopted a way of maintaining a semi-smile with my cheeks, eyes and corners of my mouth all the time. It’s not that I never stopped smiling and always appeared excessively happy, it was just that I was always on. I wanted to be good and so I squeezed my face into excellent and never let down the facade. Until, with Kate’s help, I began finally to relax my facial muscles. As I did, so many other aspects of me melted, too. And I’m softer now.

My old boyfriend David also led me closer to peace. When we started dating, I was running 4-5 mornings a week and attending yoga classes on three of them. David supported my seemingly healthy habits, until he noticed the way my stress level would increase if I missed or skipped a yoga class. “Tessa,” he would ask me, “Don’t you do yoga to decrease your stress in the first place?”

Other times, David would remind me how sometimes the best thing we can do for our body is let it rest. He sometimes put his advice into Christian context, emphasizing that what we do doesn’t make God love us any more, nor does he love us any less for what we don’t. Buddhists or Yogi’s might phrase it differently, but I, an already self-proclaimed Buddhist-Christian-Yogini, believe that the sentiment is the same. Be present. Be here now. More being, less doing. We’re not called human doings, after all.

As I’m now plugging steadily away trying less to be good and more to simply be (notice I’m still trying. . . ay yi yi), I find my current challenge has become to understand more fully what my body, what the soft animal of my body, really loves.

And for all this, I am honestly “so grateful.”