I'll Stop the World and Melt with Me

It happened. At some point when I wasn’t looking, Youth skipped town without paying the rent; now she’s probably shacked up with some Gen Y’er who has tattoos and plays the guitar. And here I am left to fret over aching joints, and both the frequency and quality of my bowel movements. Such are the joys of aging.

But not all is bad about moving into mid-life. As my body has lost some of its elasticity I’ve been drawn to yoga to help keep the joints mobile and the muscles pliable; and it's been quite a gift. My preference is attend a class so the instructor can show me how to get the poses correct. However, family and work sometimes dictate that I can’t make a class. For those times, I purchased a DVD to practice at home. Now to say I enjoy Yoga would be a bit of a stretch (Ha! Stretch. Get it?). For me, it’s kind of like eating broccoli. I don’t hate it, but I really only do it because I know it’s good for me. There is one part of yoga, though, that I absolutely love. And that is Savasana. This is the time at the end of the session where you lie in Corpse Pose and just relax. Each session on the DVD ends with a different Savasana where the instructor takes you through a guided meditation of sorts. My favorite one involves imagining that your body is like ice or butter. You start with your toes and imagine them melting into little pools. You then move to your feet, up your legs, through the torso, the arms and finally the head. As you go through the body you imagine the sun melting it away to nothing. This relaxes me like no other meditation I’ve tried. By the time I get to my head I’m usually completely relaxed. This is an uncommon state for me. I come from a long line of anxious insomniacs (Some people are born with silver spoons in their mouths; in my family we’re born with Tums and Xanax in ours). But all of that flies out the window when I do this particular Savasana. What hit me the other night as I practiced this meditation was that while my body was relaxed to point where it almost didn’t exist to me, my consciousness was still there and aware.

This made me think of the suggestion of many ancient traditions to “die before you die;” put another way, to realize that you are “in this world, but not of it.” It's the perceived pressures of this world that cause my anxiety: bills, relationships, poor quality bowel movements, whatever. But when I realize that everything I can see and touch is temporary; and when I choose to believe that my connection to Spirit lives beyond this temporary world, I’m able to simply observe without worry or judgment. The moments that this happens are fleeting, but they’re there. It’s interesting to me that they happen when I just lie there and “do nothing” (as many popular new age guru-types tell us to do). But to get to the “do nothing” part, I have to get the kinks worked out to the point that I can relax. This requires that I “work hard” (as many popular self-betterment motivator-types tell us to do). As one of my yoga instructors said about a particular pose, “to get this right, you must find the balance between effort and surrender.” If you ask me, that’s good advice for just about anything.