As I last wrote, I walked into the second training weekend feeling not like myself. But then again, isn’t this how I walked into the first weekend?
Keeping track of my crazy seems to be one of the purposes of this blog. If I’m “not feeling like myself” as much I seem to be, I suppose that begs the questions, What is “myself” supposed to feel like? When do I feel like myself? What does that even mean?
Maybe “not feeling like myself” is, in fact, feeling like myself.
The point here (I think) is that I am what I am every second of every moment. It’s all me. I can either dismiss the hard times and parts of myself I don’t like as anomalies or I can accept that all that I experience and label as “good” and “bad” are the same. It’s all my life and who I am.
Anyhow. Because I’m in a state of grief, I’ve not felt fully connected or present this weekend. I’ve been through enough grief in life to know these waves of disconnect won’t last, so I just ride them through the moments and try my hardest not to be afraid of the pain.
In addition to me riding waves of grief, the entire training on the third day had an “ocean” theme to it, as we spent the most of the day practicing a solar wave sequence that we are going to teach towards the end of training.
We also heard from a guest speaker on the parallels between native Hawaiian culture and yoga.
A few takeaways I want to remember from the speaker:
- “Aloha” does not simply mean “hello” and “goodbye” as I’ve been taught.
“Alo” translates to “presence” and “Ha” translates to “breath.” Understanding the more sacred Hawaiian definitions of both breath and presence–that the former is what gives life and promise and the latter is equally distributed among every single being–gives “aloha” a definition that is closer to “namaste.”
The ways to translate both “aloha” and “namaste” are many and varied. Here are two I’m currently settled on:
Aloha: I recognize that the same breath connects us to all that is good in our shared humanity.
Namaste: The light in me sees and recognizes the light in you.
- The speaker asked one of my classmates to stand and hold her arm straight out to her side. He asked her not to let him push her arm down, which she did quite well.
Then he asked her to focus on something negative she felt about herself (temporarily) while he pushed again. This time she wasn’t able to resist the pressure as well and her arm quickly went down.
The third time, he asked her to focus on a negative quality she felt about someone else. Again, she didn’t have the same strength to resist the pressure against her arm and down it went.
He did the same thing twice more, asking her to focus on positives: first in herself and again, in another person. Both times she had the same strength in the very first attempt, able to resist the pressure on her arm and hold it up.
The point: we are all connected. The negativity we feel towards someone else is the same, to our subconscious, as feeling negativity towards ourselves. The positivity we feel towards someone else is the same, to our subconscious, as feeling positivity towards ourselves.
Our conscious minds function to separate the world into units and labels– “tree,” “house,” “hamburger,” “me,” “you”– but our unconscious minds hum along with an intuitive vibration of understanding that all beings, while distinct, are connected.
Breath. Posture. Cue. 