Scalpel Moments

When I was 18, I cut open a pig.

Small pig

I don't mean that I enjoyed a nice pork chop, or that I wrapped filet mignon in bacon. I literally took a baby pig, sliced it open with a knife, and poked and marveled its insides.

I guess the knife part gives it all away. It was a biology lab I took my first semester of college, and the one dissection we had to do was of a fetal pig.

I remember the first day of class, when the instructor announced that we'd be doing the fetal pig dissection. "No fucking way," I thought to myself.

I was young, high on Ani Difranco and burgeoning liberal beliefs, and there was no way I would let this injustice stand. I discussed this with my mother, who encouraged me to abstain and to bring a brochure from AAVS to the instructor. I put the brochure in my bag, and on the second day the class met, I had fortified myself, ready to broach the topic with the instructor.

"Don't trip," my lab partner (and former McDonald's coworker) said. "I'll dissect it when the day comes. And you get to miss one lab per semester; you can just be absent that day." My political standpoint crumpled in the face of this opportunity for laziness. Plus, the instructor was kind of scary, and I didn't want to get into it with an instructor my first semester of college.

Inevitably, the day to dissect the pig arrived. My lab partner's one absence coincided with D-Day. My last-minute protestations to the instructor fell on deaf ears, of course, and the pig was placed in front of me. Bigger, pinker, and waaay cuter than I expected, the pig lay tragically on the tray, scalpel neatly placed beside it. I didn't know what I was going to do. As the only person without a lab partner, I felt the victim of some great injustice. I was an English major, for Chrissakes. In what possible context would I need to know what the insides of a dead pig look like?

To say that making the first incision was the hardest part would be an understatement. I couldn't have felt more dread and disgust as I would walking toward a pile of writhing caterpillars (of which I am intensely afraid). I understood that I was most definitely not going to take a stand, that I was going to participate in what I thought was a strange and unnecessary process. But once the skin gave way to the blade, once it pulled away to reveal the tiny, compact organs, the resistance dropped away. There was the pale heart, the maroon liver; there were the daffodil-colored intestines that could be unraveled like a ball of yarn. Not only was it not as bad as I thought it would have been, it was actually kind of cool.

I thought of that pig yesterday as my mind mapped out brilliant excuses to skip out on yoga (these scalpel moments present themselves all the time, don't they?). This time, the pig was far too cute, and I talked myself out of a Bikram class. How many wonderful experiences do we miss out on because we resist and fight? As Jack Kornfield says, "This resistance is a pushing away or closing off to the experience, just the opposite of opening to it."

I'm not really sure what the "takeaway" for this piece is, exactly, but maybe we can take a page out of Kornfield's book and just keep opening to experience. Pick up that blade and get to work! :-)

Something New

...And not just a new blog layout!

It's taken me a while to process the fact that it's a new year. I keep writing 2011 when I sign checks or write the dates on HW assignments. I'm not one who's big on making and then desperately trying to keep rigid resolutions, but I do like to take a moment to reflect on what changes I wouldn't mind coming my way ;-)

I think, if anything, I'm resolving to do more of the same. One is to keep settling into myself, allowing myself to be comfortable in my own skin rather than working so hard to fix every imperfection. The other is to be as open as possible to new experiences.

I started the new year with one of those: two weeks without a Bikram class--the longest it's been without being forced to due solely to travel! This wasn't by choice, though. The day I got back from Sedona, I got some sort of cold/sicky thing that hung around for at least a week. Since it's the new year and the room is packed, I figured I'd do my fellow yogis a favor and sit it out a few days. The anticipation--and the "I'm a bad absent yogi guilt"--mounted.

Breathing in

Finally, Friday a.m. came. With no morning classes to teach and no yucky symptoms to coddle, I confidently rolled out my mat. I breathed warm, humid air into my lungs during Pranyama and kicked my leg out proudly during Standing Head to Knee. And then.... I was just done. You ever work on a really tedious task, avoiding looking at the clock, thinking, surely, hours must be going by, only to find it's been about 13 minutes? That fun feeling hit me by Standing Bow.

I spent most of the class on the floor, trying to convince myself that I wasn't humiliating myself and that I shouldn't have stayed home. I tried to be a good yogi and just stay present, breathing the humid air into my desert-dry lungs. I slogged home, drank a bunch of juice, and spent the rest of the day in that occasional unpleasant post-yoga hangover: wrung out, headachey, unmotivated, yet unable to sleep. Ugh. It's not a fun combo.

Still, I dragged myself out to dinner, hoping that the warm glow of the pub and friends' faces (not to mention its greasy and delicious fried food) would snap me out of it. I wasn't halfway through a glass of wine when it hit: migraine! Crap. And I had been ignoring all the warning signs: post-illness, intense exercise, citrus, and now alcohol (both common migraine triggers). I excused myself early and dragged myself home.

Now, you migraine sufferers know that once it gets under way, it can feel like a full-blown attack in a war that lasts hours. I tried to resign myself to its course--fighting never seems to help much--and settled into bed, readying my iPhone to a Jack Kornfield talk should the need for his soothing words arise.

But not two hours later, I remembered seeing Deepak Chopra on TV not six months before, talking about a meditation-based/biofeedback-ish technique for easing the pain of migraines. The instructions are as follows:

"Put your hands out and then close your eyes. Watch your breath for a few seconds and bring all of your awareness into the middle of your chest. Listen to your heartbeat and tell it to slowdown. Now move your awareness into your fingertips, and focus on experiencing your heartbeat as a throbbing sensation that has moved there. This technique diverts blood from your brain into your limbs, reducing blood pressure and slowing your heart rate so your headache goes away."
From "A How-to Guide to Holistic Health"

I did this, more or less, in about five or ten minutes while lying in bed. And would you know, it worked! I actually fell asleep--something that doesn't happen for hours into the migraine cycle. I woke up a couple of hours later but simply tried it again and slept through the night. I woke up feeling relatively normal.

It could be a coincidence that I managed to interrupt the typical course of a migraine. But I'd rather chalk it up to being willing to try something new :-)

"Aha!"

Serves me right!

Right after my post about rockstar classes--the audacity with which I spoke of driving the yoga truck--I was back to my normal ho-hum yoga classes: painful standing series, temptation to sit out Triangle and/or the next posture, and an overwhelming desire to leave the room during spine series. The anticipation (and, admittedly, anxiety) of travel and the changes it brings have hit.

"What's the use?" I whined during a particularly growly class. Our bodies are borrowed. Each time we look in the mirror, we're older. We're all marching steadily toward the grave, funeral pyre, etc. Why bother struggling and straining as we do in yoga?

I feel like an uber-nerd mentioning Insight Meditation teacher Jack Kornfield again, but I've just gotta. He addresses the question that I'm posing quite beautifully in an article of his. In honor of Oprah's farewell, I allow myself to say, I had a total "Aha" moment.

Kornfield writes of a meditation student so full of anger and judgment at the other students. At just the moment the student was about to leave the retreat from frustration, he ever-so-faintly noticed that he had the ability to see the connection between the physical manifestations of anger (tightness, shortness of breath) and his thoughts toward the students that were pissing him off. This realization was enough to keep him at the retreat. "He realized that his body had become a mirror," Kornfield writes, "and that his mindfulness was showing him when he was caught and where he could let go."

There's not really much more to say here. I think that most of us who practice yoga are comfortable with the idea that the body manifests its emotional traumas. As one of my teachers recently mentioned during class: "I have a very tight hip. When I was little, something happened, and my hip contracted." She had no need to elaborate further--those two sentences spoke volumes. That tight hip is her bodily reflection of whatever pain (emotional, I assume) she experienced as a child.

So... what's the point? "Aha!" There are a lot of good answers to that question.

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If you're interested in reading the (pretty awesome) Kornfield article, you can check it out here at the Shambhala Sun.

A Muddy and Bright Night

I was listening to a talk by Insight Meditation guru Jack Kornfield the other day, and in it, he quoted a famous Serbian proverb (you know, we just don't get enough of that Serbian wisdom these days!). The proverb goes, "Be humble because you are made of mud; be noble because you are made of stars."

This past Friday, I visited teacher training, and took a lovely evening class with a Canadian teacher named Ida. A dear friend of mine and I met bloggers Josie and Catherine, who was visiting from out of town, and just had a blast. There was so much energy in the tent that night (gee, did it have anything to do with the trainees getting the night off? The shouts of joy upon receiving the news were deafening).

It was just what I needed. After the class, my friend and I sat on our mats long after everyone else had left and talked to these bright and lovely yogis. I felt connected and alive. It was just what I'd needed after a pretty rough day. I'd spent the day with a real beast in my brain--so much frustration and, uh, not gentle thoughts toward myself. I was so down before class that I almost "called in sick" to yoga. Talk about being made of mud! Before the class I felt like my thoughts were formed out of clay, so hardened and thick that they'd be completely unmovable.

Obviously, though, I got myself to the class. Seeing Catherine's and Josie's happy smiling faces, entering that "yoga bubble" the trainees talk about, and the rockin' class itself softened up that clay.

I'm sure casual visitors to a TT class know what I'm talking about: you enter the tent and are astounded by experience of being surrounded by 400 people. You think you'll spend the class gawking at the blue shorts in front of you or the 10-foot high podium holding up the teacher, marveling at the many bodies moving in unison. Of course, somewhere around standing-head-to-knee pose it all becomes you and your mat once again. I think that's the most marvellous thing of all. Thanks to my old and new friends.

So... I don't really know what it is that enables us to be made of both stars and mud. Maybe it's the fact that we're made of of atoms that comprise both types of matter. Maybe it's because we let the sludge pile up over the stars that burn brightly inside us. Both are there, but which do we give power to?

We're made of mud, and we're made of stars. Let's feel appropriately humbled and inspired, shall we?

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p.s. A shout-out to one of the many sources of inspiration out there on 'net-land: download free talks amazing talks by Kornfield and the like on Buddhism and meditation http://www.dharmaseed.org/

p.p.s. for those of you kind enough to care about my termite saga, they are still keeping residence with me, but due to the cooling trend they are no longer swarming, praise Buddha, Allah, Mary, et al. I'm exploring my treatment options...