After the showers

I felt lightness after class last evening. It’s been a long time since that kind of a sensation. As I walked out of the institute, there was a tiny spring in my step and my senses felt more alive than they have in a while.

Getting to class is a mix of fear and surrender. Fear of constricting and having tides of tears and surrender when I show up knowing that I’ll be the only one having these spells. I let go into the hands of my teachers and they look after me. I keep wanting to get over this soon so they don’t have to sort me out every other day but I suppose it’s really not in my hands.

The 90 odd minutes I spend in the large hall are 90 minutes of discovery. It’s an active practice despite being propped and helped. None of the passive, watching from my corner kind of practice. Here I am naked, fully stripped of whatever image I held of myself as a collected and calm person. There is nothing save my body and heart and they’re raw. My mortal fear was losing control in public and that has happened so many times here in the middle of so many people. There is nothing left to hide so I avert my eyes.

I shared with my sister about my frequent breakdowns in class and she pointed out that I never cried when different kinds of difficult situations cropped up. That included deaths, illnesses, massive accidents and abuse. Seen in that context, this tearing up is very little considering that this expulsion is about 30 odd years of bottling everything in.

The pragmatist in me would push aside having to deal with difficult feelings and focus on fixing the situation. In fact, in a previous session when the tears flew fast while in a swinging sirsasana, I felt helplessness like the one I experienced as a little girl. I always avoided experiencing the stronger and difficult emotions and focused on the positive. In the bargain, I didn’t learn to walk through feelings that were painful. They were shut in a box and pushed out of memory.

All these days, anything that had to do with opening the chest area just dislodged heaves of sorrow. It still comes but yesterday was less difficult. In one of the poses, my legs started to tremble for no apparent reason. Through the duration of that pose, I felt ironlike stubbornness of unshed tears and the rigidity of control. Pockets of tightness in different places that had been solidified by years of pride in being resilient and self-sufficient. The high point of the session was after cycles of being helped in and out of sirsasana – vipareeta dandasana repeatedly. It felt good. I didn’t know my body had the capacity to do that. Maybe one has to lose everything to start finding oneself.

There were moments of tears, tightness and tremors. But, there were also moments of something else. Newness, maybe? Considering the rains and lush green all around, I’m thinking green shoots after heavy showers.