Baptiste with Rachel

After nearly a month of nothing to break the monotonous joy of a personal practice, I went to two Baptiste classes. One with Gregor Singleton, who is always lovely, and one with Rachel.

Baptiste is a phenomenon that makes perfect sense when you consider the average lifestyle of a young Bostonian. Just got a nicely paid corporate job that requires sitting still all day, pressure to remain thin and present overwhelming, and torn between the mental benefits of a good workout (which are lovely) and the soothing preaches of yoga (which I'm fairly fond of, as you may know). Today was especially archetypal. It rained all day and after spending the day in a business skirt sitting down at a chilly conference, I was absolutely miserable, irritable and out-of-body. I spend the day not working too hard, devouring free candy, and eating an accidentally expensive three-course lunch. In an other era, this might have been a dream. My generation sees that as a cause for a 10-mile bike ride. Irritatingly lacking challenge.

I love yoga, but I like to have some strenuous exertion each day as well. In a non-corporate lifestyle, this is easy. Life, for millenia, has been an exhausting process, after all. When I was traveling and walking everywhere, for example, I had a very yin yoga practice, because that's what my body craved at the time. Now, sitting down all day, I need intensity.

When I walked into class it seemed like everyone was in the same mood, all at once. From the audible sighs all around (I always saw that as a YTTP phenomenon) I felt myself falling into the rolling waves of class. I felt so much solidarity for the people around me that it overcame my frustration- I was safe, I was somewhere I could move and stretch and work hard (or not!) and that was okay.

If class was difficult, I didn't feel it, because it was nothing but joy. And you know, there was a part where we did a random backward bend that I bet you would be discouraged by any Iyengar practitioner. And I loved it.

for sooth and for shame, that was the part in which I felt myself get slightly dizzy and enter a completely different zone, one in which there was absolutely nothing else but the shimmering physical reality around me. And that for me is yoga. It's about getting to that point, it doesn't matter how or what style or in what manner, where you are nothing but your breath finding its way in space through vivid technicolor.

When I got out of class, everything slowed once more in identity-killing attention-grabbing detail. A sensation I've missed terribly.

Inbetween Times (Perception Post)

Many relevant, strange, story-spacular events have happened in between the last time I tried to make some sense of things and now, but we're going to stick to a few slow, steady trends I've noticed.

The shift in my perception has been absolutely ridiculous. I've been noticing these patterns in my visual perception that emerged after I studied chaos theory and fractals. I'm not sure if its that they were there before, or that I didn't have a concept for them and that's why they didn't fully shift into my consciousness. But that's really besides that point, it's an experience I'm having now and its origin is inexplicable to me thus far. When I spend more time with myself in meditation, this increases substantially.

Overall sense of presence: perhaps its just that I haven't been in the city for a while so its sheer physicality shocks me, but I am pretty sure that this is mostly to do with perhaps overall health and focus. It's hard to describe, it's just that things have more weight and depth to them, I am shocked by the three-dimensionality of objects. I think being an actor would probably create that sense of three-dimensionality, but more so for real life theatre than movies.

Having some time to myself is greatly going to increase the chances of me writing, and I bet if I did it long enough at an hour that wasn't late enough, something sensible would start to come out. And now I'm a bit sad that I didn't bring my laptop with me (I'm about to head to Morocco and Italy) so I can maximize writing potential.

But wait. My brother is bringing his laptop.
A brother is a very useful thing.
As is a lap top.

Love and with,
M