Page 40 - the NOISE September 2013

Diamond Making Conditions
Insanity laughs under pressure we’re crack- ing / Can’t we give ourselves one more chance? Why can’t we give love one more chance?
... Love dares you to change our way of caring about ourselves / This is our last dance / This is ourselves / Under pressure
— Queen, “Under Pressure”
Surrendering to less than savory conditions seems coun- terintuitive. Are we not supposed to fight and not surrender to the things that ail us? To talk about all those terrible things in order to find a solution? But, as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. says, “The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it ... Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.”
What you focus on, you give power to...
Surrendering poses were my hardest in yoga teacher train- ing. Leaning back, letting gravity take me as my heart and neck were exposed to the sky. Oh, to trust the universe, that all pervasive god force, so all will be well with our souls. But, it is with composting that our garden truly blooms; it is within the mud and muck that the lotus does rise.
When I think of the things I need to let go, the things that no longer serve me (and therefore the greater good), I think of the stories of how monkeys are trapped in India. They are se- duced by something they think they need, but only want: an enticing, gleaming object. Narrow opening to a jar. Clutched hand. The determined monkey cannot pull her clenched fist out, no matter how hard she struggles, until she lets go. Then,
there is freedom.
Our mind is the biggest chain of all, and pranayama, yo-
gic energy work with breath, allows us to get into gracious energetic flow. Try sipping some cool, refreshing air through your nose. Send that breath all the way down the back of your spine, all the way down to your tail bone and the gravity-lov- ing earth. Then breathe the ethers up the front of your body into your nose and circle that breath back down your spine. Do it again and again and again like you can’t get enough of it. Then, when you feel your flesh sinking deeper towards the waiting-to-bloom mother earth, sink even deeper. She will suck the weariness out of your bones, the dis-ease out of your flow. The circular cycle of life will have you.
An all-time favorite yoga pose, Any Body can do is this: Lay on the grounding ground and scootch that booty up to the wall, as close as you can. Lift your legs up, supported. Your re- versed blood flow will wash you healthy. Place a pillow under your backribs so your heart, shoulders, and neck are open to the sky as you relax down and deep. Sweep yourself clean with your breath, your air behaving as water. Let go and into bliss. And then, as Glen Hansard says in his song, “This Low,”
“Thread the light / Shine the light / Don’t hide the light / Live the light / And give the light.”
Easy, as letting go of ugly is supposed to be ... As like be- gets like, so whatever the eye is fixed upon, it attracts more of. The question of evil is age old. New age solution: dodge and dance, laugh and flee. Turn the corner of your lips up and see what happens. Go into the Now.
| elissa Abbott makes mince of tree pose. lotusheart16@gmail.com
40 • september 2013 • the NOISE arts & news • thenoise.us