Wednesday, January 08, 2003

This probably means that I will never be able to do an inverted triangle downward dog mountain head stand, but I think the thing I love most about yoga, and that I sometimes check my watch for, surrepticiously, which is another subtle, valuable, flexibility I'm learning from this class, full of mirrors and eyes, that I can use in meetings or during boring dates, is the last five to ten minutes of class, when we do the wax pose, which isn't a pose at all, melting into the floor. I sometimes see myself like one of the drawings, that always look like funeral home pamphlets to me, at the Hare Krishna restaurant in town, drawing energy through my third eye, my hands and my ki, like a four sided pyramid. Sometimes it's just a three sided pyramid, when the modest midwesterner in me is concerned about the fourth side getting a little too close to electrifying my entire pelvic girdle, which is generally, by then, melted into the earth's substrata, so any mountains of cosmic energy would just be a ripple in some farmer's corn field. The tension and release, tension and release is what I think I enjoy most in training as well, with rugby as maybe the most extreme, except for all the contusions. I vividly remember the pleasure, first year of high school, of watching my muscles twitch in Algebra, after coach made me start doing varsity practices in the morning. I don't know how the physiology relates, and it might not at all, but I always swam better in meets when we didn't have time to do relaxation exercises. When I was totally hyped up, my fast muscles, I guess, twitching. Track and cross country, exactly the opposite, I guess because my long muscles needed that relaxation. Yoga, I like the relaxation most. It's like the meditative state I get when I'm doing long runs, where my brain is floating somewhere, and only comes back to me for that last half-mile push, Coach Lawless' voice pulling me back, like Carrie's voice, which my body hears before my ears, as I find my pyramid melding together, stretching apart as my body moves from open hands to a full body stretch. I think I would be highly, highly susceptible to hypnosis, especially if someone caught me after a bzillion downward dogs. 10:09:13 AM