LIGHTEN YOUR LIVER!

"Lift your kidneys!", our teacher directed in class today.  Hmmmm....that gave me pause.  To visualize where the kidneys were even located, I had to momentarily harken back to 1974, sitting at my med student husband's side, hunched over a Cadaver Lab human specimen, helping him study for an anatomy exam.  Then I realized she wasn't saying to lift them OUT of our bodies, of course, but rather to lift them UP -- as in straighten your spine, allowing more space for all those internal organs to move apart and not be scrunched into each other in there.  Got it!

This direction falls into the category of teaching prompts that seem unique to Yoga that I can never quite accomplish in the way my brain imagines I should.

"Brighten your heart!"  Dang!  Is my dark heart showing again?  I don't mean to be sad, gossipy, judgmental...   Oh wait!  She means shoulders back and down, chest forward!  Got it!

"Lift your arches!"  My arches are uncooperative; they don't seem to want to lift.  Not like the St. Louis arch, or even the Golden Arches.  They just sort of sit there in a sort of semi-collapsed state of archness, refusing to budge upwards.

"Apply the badhas!"  The what?  Head banda?  Rubber banda?  Rock n' roll banda?  Traditional Mexican banda?  Oh!  NOT band!  The bandhas -- those muscles to tighten at the base of the spine (mula-bandha -- Kegels in our lexicon), abdomen (uddiyana bandha -- suck in your gut, as in putting on tight jeans) and throat (jalandhara bandha -- sort of a semi-choke).  These are "energy locks" that keep the flow of internal energy from pouring out or moving the wrong direction, or something.  Yeah, I don't really get it either, but they are a really big part of practicing yoga and I try to apply them at least for a few minutes, when reminded; then they get all soft and squishy again and my energy flow likely falls with my arches.

What is interesting about various teachings using these and many more admonishments to think of our bodies (inside and out) as plastic, moveable, and malleable is that they are!  Yoga urges us to be self-aware of body, mind, and spirit.  We mostly live in a very static, immovable state.  We fall into habits of mind, body, and spirit which calcify into a belief system about what we can and cannot do.  Yoga teaches us that we can risk moving out of our usual comfort zone, away from our usual mode of limited thinking, and into an expansiveness of spirit that we may never have realized we could achieve.

For example, during Shavasana today I had the fairly trippy experience that I sometimes have in deep meditation, where I'm fully aware of where I am and of others around me, while simultaneously feeling like I'm floating into the great Universe Beyond bathed in joy and peace.  It's the Theta wave state of the brain in deep relaxation.  A groovy place to be.  I don't know how or why that happened to me today; it's rare for me to get there, especially lately when my meditation practice has been so sporadic.  But I do know I was fully present for my practice today, craving my time on the mat, feeling the energy of those around me in our full classroom, longing for a respite from what has been a very focused and busy number of weeks of commitment and responsibility.

Or maybe it was that my kidneys, heart, and arches were locked into a Bandha Love Connection with my brain.  Whatever works, right? ©

Namaste,  donnajurene

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