Our theme at the studio this week is the third limb of the eight limbed path of Yoga - asana which means ‘to take a seat on the earth’. The famous yoga sutra sthira-sukham-āsanam expands on this and tells us asana should be ‘steady and sweet’.
Whenever I think of the word Sukha I think of two things.
a brilliant yoga studio that used to exist in Bronte, Sydney called Sukha Mukha, happy face, and was painted bright orange and pink. In was within these colourful walls I first met my teacher Jasmine Tarkeshi.
‘Sukha Bombasana’ which is my first teacher Mathew Bergan's tongue in cheek name for lying on your belly and wiggling your bottom (you'll notice this pose is in every class I teach). Sukha means happy, he'd tell us deadpan in teacher training as we hung onto every word. Bombasana, that's your booty girlllll!
I love the often repeated phrase, the posture should be steady and sweet because it reminds me of so many things in life. Right now as I'm writing to you, I'm sitting on the rug I bought on impulse from Etsy that is apparently made in India and cost me much more than I ever thought I'd ever spend on a rug. Raven is sitting next to me purring her little head off. She's sitting pretty, obvious to the fact that her and Salem have clawed this beautiful rug to death. A testament to the rug I guess, it still looks good, albeit a bit shaggier, rough round the edges that suits our ‘rustic by accident' vibe.
She is extremely Sukha, especially now as she's just moved to get even closer to me. She's also very Sthira. I saw a quote once about cats being the ultimate Zen masters and damn if it aint the truth. As far as I can tell with the little amount I'm actually here, she spends all day doing this. sitting or lying down on the softest surface she can find, purring. she'll get up occasionally to scratch the chairs or rip the flyscreens and then go right back to this.
I often wonder what she thinks of us, running around all over the place, hardly here, staring into screens.
Last night I went to Alice's class at the studio (if you haven't been yet - you need to!) and she was talking about the innate movements within us all. Blind athletes who have never seen an example from others, will throw their arms up in victory after winning a race.
The way we hold our bodies is deeply ancestral, and the tension we hold in our bodies can be our libration or our undoing.
I fell in love with asana, hard and fast.
I'd never been ‘good’ at anything physical before. At school I was always laughed off the pitch and made to endure the weekly torment of being picked last in every single game for years. I'm not being self deprecating here, but I was seriously bad at sports. I had no coordination and seemingly wasn't able to summon any kind of competitive energy to win balls or save goals or hit anywhere near a target. I was embarrassingly bad and I'd always do my best to get out of ‘games’ which was most peoples favourite lesson but I hated it with a passion. I never found a convincing enough argument to get out if it.
So, after that awkward phase of finding everything about physical yoga really fking hard I was absolutely stunned and delighted to realise ‘I was good at something!’
Now, obviously (or maybe not), you can't be ‘good’ at yoga.
Yoga is a state of being. Yoga is freedom from thoughts that take you into dark, stormy waters in the middle of the night with no lifejacket.
Yoga is realising that no matter how hard you try, you can never control what someone else thinks about you and thats ok.
So maybe you can be good at all that, but it has very little to do with the physical postures. BUT, for me, repeating the physical postures over and over again until I finally built enough strength to hold my body off the floor in a plank, lower down half way without crashing to the floor, one magical day in a drafty apartment in downtown Toronto finally standing on my head without support, this was freedom I'd never known before.
Maybe if I'd always been physically adept and agile I wouldn't have had the same reaction, but I was over the moon.
The feeling I got and still get from flowing from posture to posture with ease and lifting my body off the ground is ecstatic. I feel like I'm flying.
This didn't happen overnight. It's taken 16 years of consistent practice, and I know that one day my body will disintegrate and won't be as obedient and then my practice will go back to being very still and that's ok.
I'm so grateful to Asana for giving me the confidence to give things a go.
With repetition, most things are possible. We are what we repeatedly do. I repeatedly eat chocolate and drink never-ending tea so I must be made of these things too.
I'm lucky enough to be studying ‘Daoist Energetics' with Tahnee Taylor which is blowing my mind. On a call the other day, Tahnee said the mind is fast, the body is slow. The mind can process information at lightning speed, but the body takes its time to process. That’s why we can feel like we’re over a particular situation or shock, and then come to a yoga class and suddenly start crying. The body remembers.
A story I often tell is that when I was practicing religiously at Jivamukti in Newtown, riding my purple 70’s racer with the curly handlebars from my house in Marrickville, puffing my way up the hill on Enmore road, dodging traffic and the Russian Roulette of cars opening their doors without looking, at all hours, on very little food, on borrowed time with my full teaching schedule, devotedly, doggedly I went through a phase of crying in every class.
I’m not talking about a little bit of crying. The odd tear here and there.
I mean full on snotty sobs, body shaking emotion that I had no control over.
At first it shocked me. There was nothing ‘wrong’ or so I thought. I didn’t have anything to cry about. Except I did. In those few years at Jivamukti I felt like I released years of shock from my body. From all those years I felt like it wasn’t safe or appropriate to cry. For all the times I was bullied at school by girls who were supposedly my friends and I pretended not to care. From the time one of my best friends had sex with my boyfriend when I was sleeping in the same bed. From the time my ‘friend’ made hundreds of posters out of an unflattering photo of me photocopied, with Clare is a monkey as the tagline, and plastered them across my high school. From all the times I said Yes when I really meant No.
It all came out.
I was embarrassed at first. I tried to stop it. But it felt so good. After every class I felt washed clean. Like I’d been standing under a waterfall. A shower for my spirit.
People would side eye me surreptitiously from their mats. Eventually they’d know not to put their mat too close to mine.
Still the tears came.
Then one day, without warning, they stopped.
I went into full wheel. Prepared for the great cleaning and nothing came. I wondered if I’d broken the spell. Had I done something wrong? Was my backbend not deep enough?
But no. I’d just cried it out.
There were many more tears to come, in Peruvian malokas with frenzied drums, in circles around fires with dancing rainbow light, in lovers arms, with friends over cake, but the crying in yoga stopped and never really came back.
This is my love letter to asana. to the sweetness, the steadiness, the sweating, the grunting, the belly aching laughter of attempting to balance on ones chin, the proximity of feet to face, the ability to listen. the ability to listen! and to act, on what my body wants and needs. Thank you asana. I love you!
~
ways to work with me