Let's get this straight, minor adjustments these are not. They require constant clenching and concentration. Think of arm wrestling—that's the level of concentration I am talking about. Imagine that same physical and mental intensity simultaneously in your elbows, knees, ankles, neck, and back while in a lunge position, extended knee locked tight and bent knee sustaining your body weight.
But yoga is not about striking the perfect posture, Lindsey points out. There isn't a panel of judges scoring you on form and style. It's the concentration, awareness, and stretching involved in striving for the posture that counts. If you master the ability to direct your attention to different parts of your body, then why not use those skills to set aside emotional chaos and enjoy your life?
All this adds up to a different consciousness, promises Lindsey, because anxiety subsides and intelligence, awareness, and intuition emerge. This is what I'm shooting for.
Running Is Empty
Some try to achieve this by running, he tells me while pantomiming a frantic, breathless jogger. (Easy, tiger.) But from the yoga perspective, running is "somewhat crude," he says. It does violence to your body. Plus, running, aerobics, and sports in general are all too achievement oriented, too steeped in calorie burning and pulse lowering, says Lindsey. You may attain great thighs on the StairMaster, but it won't enhance your consciousness.
Aerobic fitness is fine, I tell her. But mindless, repetitive exercise with clanking machines under fluorescent light, or running in circles with zombies in Lycra is a doom-laden and commercialized jock consciousness. She laughs and so do I.
I want her to leave the jogging mind-set behind for a while and concentrate on the subtleties of what I am asking her to do. I want her to learn to focus her awareness without effort and be more conscious of the tension within her body that the postures reveal and release. And when she is faced with mental or physical discomfort, I want her to be able to free herself of it.
And she should also have a feel for what yoga does health-wise. The postures work on a physical level with the muscles and joints, on a physiological level with the internal organs and nervous system. When muscles are relaxed, and the internal organs are working more efficiently, then the nervous system works better and emotional health improves. Properly practiced, yoga postures bring about improved circulation and lymph movement, digestion that is less impaired by stress, and more efficient heart, lung, liver, and kidney function. Different groups of postures stimulate and refresh different organs—twisting postures work on the liver, forward bends affect the kidneys. Through the postures, natural detoxification occurs, the immune system improves, and energy increases.
Ex-Tension
I learned my lesson yesterday: Never eat before yoga. I decided to limited myself to coffee today, then brushed my teeth. Lindsey thinks coffee causes paranoia. God, I hope he can't smell it on my breath.
So I'm a little sore today. It's to be expected right? It's not that I'm out of shape or anything, I mean I have run three times in the last six months.
I hold the poses a little longer and more precisely today, though I still strain against the tension, which Lindsey reminds me is in fact my own body. What an insight. I am truly fighting my own body, not some diabolical gym machine. He can read me through my face; apparently I look as if I am silently screaming. So he constantly nags me to release my forehead, jaw, and neck and relax into the posture. Relaxing into pain, that's a little sick, isn't it? But I do and somehow the tension subsides. Maybe it's because I am redirecting the energy and strength it took to grimace toward extending my arms, opening my chest, and straightening my legs.
Lindsey has a problem with my posture. Years of bunching over keyboards while sitting in rickety office chairs have left me with the posture of a 70-year-old. He believes my chronically slouched shoulders are a reaction to inner tension and stress that is so ingrained in me that I'm not even conscious of it. By doing exercises that will push my shoulders out and straighten my back, Lindsey ensures that I would be working toward freeing myself of that tension physically and emotionally. He sees it as an alternative to psychotherapy.
He gave me the exercises, but it took me days to learn how to maneuver my back in the right way to achieve them. Obviously my body just naturally crumples into this haggard posture. But somehow, Lindsey taught me to access muscles I didn't know I had by articulating the movements with strange clarity. Somehow, when he asks me to drop my shoulders, leaving a space between my shoulder blades, or to move the skin of my sternum toward the ceiling, I can find the sensation and extend my body still further. You can't help but develop a sort of body intelligence, as Lindsey puts it, by doing yoga. With my mind consumed with fine-tuning my movements, there is little room left for the anxieties that had plagued me only hours before.
Subtle Changes
By this time I knew that Claire was very focused and learned fast. I wondered how she would react if I pointed out that she had a body-posture problem with her upper back and shoulders. I took a couple of polaroids to make the point and they were far from flattering. But despite the horror of confronting her imperfection, Claire got more interested. I did not really want to get into yoga therapeutics, this was a Psychology Today deal and the ancient yoga practice of exercising the body as a way of developing the mind was at the top of the list.
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