Weeping Stillness

A meditation on grief.

Today you will set your intention towards stillness. Lacking sleep and overwhelmed with life, you know it won’t be your best practice. But you can be still, can’t you?

Find freedom in your bodily sensations drowning out the despairing conversations in your mind.

The room is heated. The instructor is demanding. The pressure is on.

It is a relief to feel pressure over pain. Pressure you can deal with. You have control over your efforts. Pain, however, cannot be controlled. Pain is its own god.

You balance on one leg for sixty seconds. You think it’s almost over when the instructor announces half way and the younger more flexible yogis opt for the harder version of the pose.

This balance is enough for you. Your right hip can’t handle it as long as your left. A nagging pelvic imbalance has developed over years of walking on concrete and waiting too long to buy new shoes.

The pain of fatigue draws your attention. You shift your internal gaze to some other pain. In your shoulders, holding your arms overhead. In your feet, fighting for foundation. In your chest, welling with a different kind of anguish.

Oh no, not that pain. Any pain but that.

You force your focus back to your hip. You fall out of the pose with ten seconds to go. You make a half-hearted effort to get back into it, and that’s okay because half a heart is all you have.

The next pose is another balance: Half Moon. One arm to the ground, one arm lifting you upwards. You find your body in a perfect T-shape, floating towards flight.

A few inches in front of your foot, your two eyes find one point. Your drishti.

The sensation of sweat beads breaking away from your pores stimulates a new curiosity, streaming down your back and calves, threatening to trickle into your eyes. You blink them away. You keep your balance. You open your hip. You open your heart.

The anguish under your sternum demands your inner gaze. The pose is over, and your heart pumps agony through your veins, into your feet and fingertips, into your brain.

Thought returns, taking you out of the heated room and into your crumbling life.

Before the gravitational pull of your dark fantasies drags you into a spiral, you turn your gaze inward to the welling chakra under your sternum.

You send your inhale into the feeling, softening and releasing its grip on your heart. The emotion transforms, moves up to your throat.

You try to contain it at your throat before it bursts out of you. But it cannot be contained. Your legs shake and your stillness is lost. You make all effort to stay in the pose, to match your fellow yogis. You don’t want to let them down. You don’t want to show your weakness.

Child’s pose. A moment of rest. The emotion swells again, and now you cannot keep it inside. You are mortified as your lungs heave and tears drop from your eyes to the mat below you.

It’s okay to cry on the mat when your face is down and no one can see. But the time comes to rise, and the red in your eyes reflected in the mirror betrays your secret.

The sweet voice of a woman sings Bob Marley’s lyrics through the speakers: Every little thing is gonna be all right.

You don’t believe it. But you try. You hold the belief just a little bit longer, until your quivering muscles and breath fail to maintain the pose.

Another failure. Another heave of inhales and exhales. Another torrent of tears.

You comfort yourself that the tears are camouflaged by sweat.

Or perhaps your entire body is crying.

Bridge pose. Your heart shines forward, cracking, bleeding, exposing you. A trickle of blood streams out of your chakra and joins the sweat and tears. You lose any hope of maintaining composure.

You find stillness in weeping.

You sniffle and snivel your way through restorative twists and rest. The mucus of emotions floods your nostrils. Will the studio hate you if you blow your nose into your hand towel?

Shavasana. Stillness on your back. The tears of your body soften the ground beneath you. You are buried in a sinkhole of your own making.

Corpse pose.

A final phrase passes through you as daylight shrinks to a pin: May the light in me see the light in you.

You sip in a final breath of light.

Namaste.

Also,

Thanks.