How Do You Approach The Poses You Hate?
{Photo credit: Kate Gotis}
Anjaneyasana: Life As Asana (Part Four).
Read Parts One, Two and Three.
Kate and Geertje are yogis, writers and friends on different continents. They correspond and talk about life as if it were a Yoga pose — requiring flexibility and strength, discipline and surrender, regular check-ins with reality, humor and kindness.
***
Dear Friend Who Shines like 10,000 stars,
On Sunday my neurons were firing like mad and my attention span was that of a mosquito on crack.
My Yoga/writing workshop was at 4:30 pm and I still had so much to do — handouts and writing prompts and even structure — how much to share, what to leave out… I couldn’t just take a hot bath with Himalayan sea salt and rose oil, draw the blinds, crawl into my California king-sized memory foam hug-drug, cuddle my silky soft Bambi-eyed border collie, and call it a day.
So, because I felt emotionally and mentally wrung out, and I felt like I was being squeezed from the inside out by at least six merciless hands, I went to a Vinyasa class at the studio where I would be teaching my workshop.
I figured, since I was already leaning in to some pretty sharp and achy spaces in my psyche, why not take my body there too?
Of course this wasn’t a conscious thought, it was made by the same aggressive hands that were holding my heart and other vital parts hostage, so off to Lacey’s 9 a.m. Vinyasa class I go!
I love Lacey. She looks lacey, she’s been blessed with long thick blond hair, twenty-something-just-hatched freshness, she’s tall, and her body is a perfect combination of soft and hard, lean and fleshy.
She holds a powerful space by making us hold our poses way longer than you would expect to in a Vinyasa class.
I can stay and find a place to be still, I can hold my arms above my head, offer my heart no matter what its state to the space above, drop my shoulders, spread all of my fingers like starfish, while the down-under portion of the pose is being done without fuss, and maybe I can even enjoy it.
I can find places to relax even when I begin to wonder if sweet Lacey might be a tad sadistic.
Did I ever tell you I hate Anjaneyasana? I used to actually make an audible sigh whenever it was called out in class, but now I’ve learned to accept that it’s part of the practice, therefore it’s a part of my life. I can suffer or I can surrender.
Anyhow, I thought I had gotten pretty good at the surrender… until Sunday. Lacey, the sweet sadist, had built her entire class around Anjaneyasana.
I am not exaggerating, and I am not proud of what I am about to tell you, but after about 20 Anjaney-have-some-mercy-on-me-asanas, I wanted to start screaming, “This sucks! Can we do something else yet? Anything else?!”
Left leg forward, inhale the arms overhead, reach your heart back and forward… over and over and over and over again. Okay, she did throw in some other stuff, but it just made it worse, Anjaneyasana to Virabhadrasana III to Virabhadrasana II, back to Anjaneyasana.
I’m in the practice, I’m sweating, and I’m also shaking, and then I notice that my breathing and my movement are so far away from each other they may as well be you in Holland and me in Arizona. The way I feel is familiar. I’m mad.
I’m fighting with reality, the way I fought with my ex a few days before this class. Except he didn’t fight back, it was my anger being thrown at a man who just looked at me and could only say, “Wow.”
I was 50 minutes into a 90-minute class before I got that I needed to stop fighting. As I was bringing myself into Phalakasana, I just gave up the struggle. I dropped to my knees and went into Balasana, where I found my life again, my breath moving in and out of my nose.
My heart unclenched, and then the tears started. I slowly got up and found a block to melt my spine over, my legs in Baddha Konasana.
Girl, then my heart swelled open and out flew the mean ghost. I was treated to a waking dream where I saw my current self walk up to a big white pulsating orb. I tore it open and out spilled me.
Me at 5, at 11, at 13, at 19, me at all the ages when my heart took bullets and I couldn’t protect myself, let alone heal myself. There I was. And then all of the me’s danced. Lacey plays ambient and kinda downbeat stuff, but still we danced and we hugged, all of us.
It went on for the rest of class, the integration and homecoming.
I’d gone way past my edge. I had been pushing too hard, and then I got the opportunity in Lacey’s class to make a different choice. To see what I do when I’m in survival mode.
I got to notice how much I was fighting with how I actually felt. I wasn’t full of energy that needed to be expressed in Vinyasa class, but it was in Vinyasa class that I learned that I was tired and I needed love. I needed my love. I needed to slow down and feel my broken heart for a bit.
Don’t you love it when your practice love-slaps you back into reality?
The workshop actually rocked, and was attended by a nine-year-old child who came with her parents. I gave her some paper and crayons, just in case our sophisticated grown-up jazz gave her the wiggles or the yawns, and she drew a picture for me.
She explained that this was my brain, and all the boxes and shapes were my different personalities, and the lines are how they get out, and then look on the outside. She gave it to me after the workshop, along with a hug, and she said, “I love you!”
It was like the little girl I met earlier during my dream in Lacey’s class decided to come visit me.
We did not practice Anjaneyasana in my workshop, in case you were wondering.
I gotta go to bed, I have to play nurse in the morning!
Love!
Kate
***
Sweet Fire-Cracker,
I actually had to Google Anjaneyasana to see what you’re sighing for, babe, and then I discovered that it’s what I know as Low Lunge. My teacher loves it. And since my Yoga-body has been molded by her preferences during the last 10 years of being her student, I kinda do too.
I sigh or plain boycott other poses, like Matsyasana — can’t deal with that. Anyway, when I was Googling your loving Low Lunge, I saw that the contraindications for doing it were heart problems. So now you have medical reasons for resisting.
It ís funny, don’t you think, this whole put-your-body-in-a-weird-shape thing? My friend and amazing teacher, Jill Satterfield, changed my Yoga planet from flat to round when she said it’s not about being in a pose, it’s about becoming the pose.
What your inside-out story reminds me of is how Yoga practice can give you a second chance. It’s like what Natalie says about writing: you get to live your life twice. Not only can you relive something in a semi-safe way, but also to do something different. Be kind instead of pushy like you did.
To heal the stuff we broke the previous night — or the previous life.
Last night I went to class with a sad powerlessness coursing through my veins. My girlfriend, after weeks of me tearing our house and my guts down over it, took off on a tantra week.
About 10 minutes before we were about to start class, my friend — who did the same tantra thing years ago and told me about it in technicolors that remained way too bright for me — said that my girlfriend would attract a lot of attention there.
She probably followed it by some wise words that naturally, by then, were totally lost on me.
I started class with the image of my baby surrounded by an array of attractive strangers, and of course loving it, and of course heading off into a sunset or an infinitely more sexy, interesting, sensual future. Without me of course — a lump of pain.
So in that state we begin to move. Through cycles of slow moon salutations — and yes, Low Lunges. Lots of lying stretched out on the floor on our bellies, going to Dhanurasana from there, and back to Balasana.
I felt like crying a couple of times, and thought of you — knowing Yoga class is your place to emote — but then didn’t, because I couldn’t cry and follow instructions at the same time; I suck at multitasking. Plus, I wanted to move more than I wanted to cry.
I actually wanted more than to just move; I wanted to burn. I loved stretching out the right side of my body, twisting it at the top and then leaning to the left, because it felt like what my inner body had been doing for weeks. Like you said, why not take your body there, too?
Maybe I should have been in Lacey’s class.
I had no trouble stretching to capacity. In fact, it felt good and appropriate. Pain felt appropriate. There’s relief in feeling something in your body that matches the terror that goes on within it.
Four years ago, during a particular sequence of heartbreak, I shaved off my long hallmark red curls. Being bald matched how I felt on the inside. Even though it shocked my family and made the modeling agency I worked for drop me like a hot potato, it brought great relief.
I guess alignment can take many forms when life becomes asana. Sadomasochismasana.
I didn’t give myself a kind last night like you did. I gave myself pain and the reassurance that I could live through it.
I did wake up sore this morning. But that also could have been the three gin ‘n’ tonics we drank après Yoga at my friend’s house. Let’s be confounded about life together, she had texted me earlier that day, an invitation that was impossible to refuse.
So we sat on her giant sofa and drank and sang Endless Love into remote controls and watched videos of Chastity Bono becoming gay and then a man. Which felt weirdly appropriate, like a drunk version of Mary Oliver, watching Youtube instead of grasshoppers.
Tell me what else should I have done?
The world spun until subconsiousness banged the doors down by giving me nightmare after nightmare about my baby getting her freak on with others, me watching, then turning cold and faux-indifferent, then raging like a madwoman. That’s how I just woke up.
Yoga, along with your letter that is like balm, brings me back to life again. Whateverasana.
I guess it ís time for a Balasana. I’ll follow your lead, dear one.
Love,
G
***
Reading anything Kate wrote is great. And no, this is not her writing her own bio in third person, it’s me talking, Geertje. Kate says she has biography anxiety. I think it’s cool of her to refuse to be distilled into a tiny bio-box. It won’t work anyway, not with a woman-writer-phenomenon like Kate. Writing a bio about her is like fingers pointing at the moon, to make it sound Zen. Like the song goes, to know, know, know her is to love, love, love her (and I do) and you will too once you dip into her magical world.
Writing Geertje’s bio is a fool’s game, but way more relaxing than writing my own, because, who am I? Well, I’m pretty sure I’m a fool, so here goes. Geertje is sugar dipped in flames, fierce-hearted sage draped in ginger-scented supermodel flesh. A mirror that is angled just right, reflecting sparkly disco-ball light. Read more from her zany and just sharpened shank mind here.
***
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Read More: Life As Asana (Part Five).
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