Turning to see

Back in the depths of lockdown when in UK we had restrictions about social interactions and you could only meet with those outside your household outdoors, I used to meet my yoga teacher in a local green space. I’m recollecting one such time strongly at the moment. Maybe it was about this time of year. The air was warm, the grass was springy. I’d been fretting about rotations. And emotions. The rotating of my emotions perhaps, the citta vrittis constantly cycling round. It was a pretty wrung out time for everyone, I know, and easy to get stuck.

I’d kept getting hooked up on something from my past life and on this occasion my teacher did this really cool exercise with me. Exploring a seated rotation, infinitely subtle movements of the ribs one by one, sensing the change in lung capacity, slowly so slowly but inevitably coming to look around in a different direction. A change of perspective. “Can you perceive it differently?” he asked me. No, not then I couldn’t. I felt a failure. I knew he was trying to give me a helpful experience and I just couldn’t go with it. I understood in my head how this might work. And in the movie version of my life this would have been an epiphany moment. The soundtrack would swell, I’d meet his gaze and declare “yes, I see; I see everything differently now. Thank you!”. And we’d cut to a montage of my future life, all sun-filled and fancy-free. Me looking curiously younger and more attractive 🙂

On that day I couldn’t feel it in my body, everything resisted this easy moment of release into a new perspective. I guess I wasn’t ready. And now a couple of years on maybe I had a small moment like that today. Unexpectedly. There was of course less chance I would habitually resist it, if I didn’t see it coming. But in this moment today, I felt undone, turned suddenly towards a new perception of myself, my past, and a taste of future possibilities of greater freedom in the world.

It’d been a tricky few days at work. Advice from my manager to ‘lean into the discomfort’ as I fessed up a few truths about how hard I’ve been finding things (or making things) in my professional life.

It’d been a tricky few days in yoga practice. Leaning into discomfort here too and feeling with renewed clarity just how that feels, the vulnerabilities and the deep, deep yearnings. Inarticulate yearnings.

It’d been a tricky few days in training too. Close to tears with my handstand coach as he too asked me to to lean in, to find a shoulder position that’s well within my physical range but feels so emotionally sticky in a way I couldn’t articulate. Literally leaning in to this one.

As I break from work today I did a few chores in town. It was warm and sunny and I sat for a while listening to a busker. He was an amazing young man, full of warmth and engagement, as he encouraged people from the crowd to come forward and sing with him. The way he made them feel great, the way he encouraged them to forget the crowd and to come into the moment with him — it was so sweet and fresh and real. And a duet with a girl where she really went for it, some off notes in the mix but such a beautiful expression of joy and vibrancy and aliveness on this sunny everyday kind of afternoon… Ah, I wept.

And maybe something shifted in me as I watched. Maybe I’ve never been here before? Maybe I just don’t know how to enact those things yoga teachers say: let go of what doesn’t serve, release the past, good vibes only (urgh!)…

Maybe the soft excitement I felt in my body as I watched this scene is how trust in life feels. I watched her leaning in, her own trust in this young man and the people watching them and listening to her song. I cried. Tears rolled hot down my cheeks. I smiled. And I sniffed. And I felt that I could turn to anyone in the crowd around me and ask for a tissue. And if I did, they’d give me one, they’d ask if I was OK, if I needed anything. I’d smile that everything was fine. I wouldn’t need to tell them my big secret — that I’d changed my perspective, that suddenly in this moment the world seemed less hostile, my heart less caged, my body less tentative in moving, my voice less unsure in speaking.

Sometimes it’s hard to find the words for new things. I’m familiar with this difficulty. Now I wonder if it’s similarly hard for the body to feel new things or to interpret unusual sensations. Maybe I never felt trust before? That might sound really sad. Or it might sound like an exciting new perspective!

I hope I can keep seeing it.

I hope I can keep feeling it.

I hope. And I trust.