Go Cowboys! with Elise: 808 Wellness: Maui, HI: September 8, 2019
Eagle tug of war with my friend Elise, an Eagles fan. I’m a Dallas Cowboy gal all the way!
It’s the opening day of football season. While I haven’t watched a full game in 30 years, I’m still a Dallas Cowboy fan. I’ve never questioned it, never considered not being a fan; it comes with the territory, like being a blonde.
Though being a blonde is changing. I’m beginning to see some sparkle of grey hair and I”m wondering how much longer I’ll be making my bimonthly visits to the hairdresser to ensure my blondeness. I’m beginning to unpack these things between updogs and downdogs today; trying to loosen my tight spots as I move, including NFL allegiances and hair color. I realize how much I’m clinging to things that identify me. After all these years practicing yoga, am I really any closer to being free?
I don’t know.
But maybe. I can get bummed on myself as good as anybody, and it seems part of my journey is to give myself some credit from time to time. When I forget it’s me and the world and not me against the world, when I come into this deeper truth I have the possibility of seeing what all the sages are trying so hard to help us understand: that God is Love as it says in 1 John 4:8, and All there is is Krishna as it says in the Bhagavad Gita. Whenever it’s us against them we’re already in suffering. Football season, in theory, is all about competition and winning. Is it possible to live above it all? And I just don’t mean a friendly little team meeting on Sunday.
When I’m having a difficult moment in my marriage, or when I’m having a bad hair day, or when I’m having a spiritual crisis wondering why am I here ? Where is my path? it sure feels like degrees of separation from Love; it’s me against God, or the Cowboys against the Eagles.
In practice today with Elise, who is a Eagles devotee, we did several poses based on Garudasana ( eagle pose). Instead of Child’s pose between vinyasa sets, I reclined in the opposite direction, in saddle pose, partly to stretch my psoas, which always tightens up in times of psychic stress, but partly it was also a show of solidarity to my beloved Cowboys. It was one small way I honored what’s in my heart, which seems like the best way to begin to see it’s really not us against them, it’s me against me that’s causing such angst.
Sutra 1.33 gives us four medicines to help us in relationships, whether it be against others or yourself...friendliness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity. Yogis say “there are no others” which seems to me to be one of the bigger stretches of all. Until I realize that when I’m suffering I don’t offer many of the four suggestion to others, and vice versa.
There are those who say such a statement is spiritual hogwash, or at best, magical thinking. I have found it to be true because when you really get down to diagnosing and healing suffering I’ve found it it the stuff of real magic. How else is it possible I find myself here on Maui, on a yoga mat, on this journey in life and all she offers on this planet since arriving over 58 years ago in Baylor Hospital in Dallas, Texas. Through all my relationships, my joys, my pain, to realize the only way out of any pain is to raise “the self with the self”, as the Gita says. This is the magic medicine: attention to your own tight spots.
It’s a lot of work, of course. Most time I don’t get it. But I have moments, little sparks, and I like to record it when that happens. Meanwhile I’ll rest in saddle pose, also known as hero’s pose, which says everything about this moment. I’m aligning with what feels correct for me today, breathing through my tight spots, as the rest of the class does Eagle pose till their hearts delight. We’re all here just doing the best we can.
Health, Love, and Rock N Roll
Winifred