Nina Lois Turtledove

Openings

My yoga practice has taken me deeper and deeper into the levels of my body, from the skin inwards. At first my attention was solely with my posture, and the organs of action: namely, arms and legs. I moved towards understanding how my arms and legs attached to my trunk, noticing when the big bones sat in the joints funny. Shoulders and hips, my teacher told me, are multi-directional joints that are representative of options. I remained unaware of the rest of my organs, until my colon got ulcers and I could not help notice it was out of whack. The point here is how much there is going on in the body underneath the skin in the organs, which attach to bones and are affected by the joints. Many of us, including myself, have been cut off at the neck, as Marion Woodman writes. The stuff of our intellect lives in its own world, often disconnected from the heart and the gut. My awareness of myself was scarcely more than skin deep, stuck in the contours of the surface.

The pain in my sacrum from my weak left buttock, which let my leg dangle off to the side, brought my attention to the options represented by the new awareness I was getting in my left hip and the muscles around it. I went to see Rick Olderman, and he helped me a ton. I learned to work my left buttock more and stretch my front thigh area. RIck’s work is amazing.

The physical correction of lifting my left quad even more in a forward bend put me down more firmly into my heels, rooting me more firmly to the Earth, the sacred Mother Matter. Fascinatingly, this adjustment in my forward bend, as my crown stretched toward the earth, facilitated an opening of awareness in my anus… the chakra associated to this deals with rootedness to Earth. I knew I had been cut off here. My teenage bulimia too, repudiated motherly nourishment and nurture. There in the gut, power center, fear of my father depreciated my self-worth. There, when I am there in a forward bend, staring at my knees, I see the other side of me. Folded in half, the other side of me is directly in front of my gaze. I can look into my gut, look for the blocks, breathe in opening, offer my attentive love, and she responds.

That is the thing to do in some of these yoga poses, and it had just been theory before: connect the crown and the anus. As humans, we are connected to spirit AND matter. We are mind AND body. Both demand our awareness– the rational and the irrational. Words AND symbols. The spoken and the unsaid. The good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the civilized and the wild. When the one is repressed, it begins to clamor for attention. Doesn’t it?

Rick, the physical therapist whom I highly recommend can be found here and here

The Human Condition, Yoga | 7.11.2009 16:38 | 2 Comments