Tag: yoga
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Safe
During savasana, there is meditation, tonight “loving kindness.” First, we were prompted to generate a sensation of safety in our bodies. The teacher urged us to picture someone or some place where we feel secure and say to ourselves, in brains and in cells, “May I feel safe.” After that, we worked through “May I…
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Five in Five: Friday, February 2
And I’d been sleeping so deeply, too. But then came the moment when my bladder was so full my brain started to surface, and my body’s first impulse, a sort of readying itself to stand, was to roll over. Holy mother of lightning in the fascia. Pain radiated from seven different places in my right…
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Five in Five: Tuesday, January 23
In an effort to get myself writing — writing anything — I’m going to try to type every day: five minutes of freewriting and brain dump followed by five minutes of cleaning up the dump. The results will be random, but at least I’ll be making myself get words out. I have no idea how…
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Preschool Pom Poms
Out of the cacophony of Facebook, good things can emerge. Tips, recommendations, friendships, support, connections, networking — all of these have come to me through Facebook. But my favorite Facebook moments happen when a thinking person uses the platform for storytelling. My friend Ellen is a master at maximizing the Facebook space for sharing vignettes…
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The Third Floor
Her tears wet my shoulder. I hardly knew her. Three minutes earlier, we’d been standing next to a cement pillar, talking quietly but intensely. Our bodies were close, the conversation intimate. An onlooker would have guessed we’d known each other for years. Yet I’d only spoken to Molly a couple of times before–in the locker room, maybe once in yoga class…
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Vigilantly Constricting
Then there was the time I hotfooted into yoga class ten minutes late and discovered that, uncharacteristically, the teacher had taken some time for talk before movement. Hoping to illuminate the theory behind the practice, she’d explained a few terms and their role in the various poses we’d be doing. By the time I slunk…
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Conscious Sedation
The other night, as I was sipping the head off my third beer, I started to contemplate the complex relationship I have with my yoga teacher—even though she only knows me as Beefy Lady in the Colorful Headband. Although I have recently discovered subtleties in my relationship with this woman, mostly I’m afraid of her.…