Friday, November 16, 2012

Spirals Out of Touch, Back in Touch


Today I went to NIA class.  Moving, dancing, swirling, rolling.  Usually I would include in that list:  breathing, sensing.  And yet, today, the breathing and sensing did not come easily.  When the teacher asked us to sense our spines, I (the very yoga teacher who asked my students to sense their spines yesterday), had trouble feeling the tiny articulation of bones in my back that I have felt before.

What is going on?  I am feeling kind of out of touch with my body.  And, the very coolest thing about it, is:  That is okay.

When I was 14, my first experience of aerobics made me feel awkward and clumsy.  Later, at age 21, yoga made me feel subtly exhilarated---coming home to myself in a way I had never known possible.  And now, at the age of 44, I realize that I have revisited both places many times. 

After having discovered the feeling of being “in touch” with my body, the first time that next I felt out of touch with it, I was unnerved.  Scared.  Where had the mother ship gone?  Was I a failure for not being centered? And then, eventually, somehow (probably through dance, rest, hiking in nature, laughing with friends, hugging, eating good food), I found myself “in touch” again.  This process has occurred enough times now that I see I am comfortable with this uncomfortable spiral. 

The past few weeks I have needed to push myself professionally and personally beyond my comfort zone.  I knew there was a cost.  Whenever we push, something else usually contracts or recedes or atrophies.  If we go too long without returning to attend to it, then our bodies/beings get way out of whack.  But, if we make time to return and check in with that part, then we can restabilize our health.  I realize that that was happening in my Nia dancing this morning.  It was a slow returning, and is not yet a complete restabilization.  That is okay.  That is the spiral we live in.

A decade or so ago, I thought that a yogic lifestyle meant that I should never push or stress myself.  Yet, I discovered that this resulted in a kind of bland life.  Now I am seeing that a well-lived life means choosing our pushes wisely and tending to the costs.

This principle is true of organizations and families also.  A professor of medical ethics once explained to our class that whenever a difficult ethical choice is made in the hospital by the doctors and family, that one must later return and attend to the members of the medical team and family whose choice was not chosen.  For surely, all voices were lifting up crucial values!  But only one choice could be acted upon.  If the family and medical teams are to stay cohesive in the future, there must to time to tend to what was not chosen, for it is also part of the values that feed and anchor them. 

If I am to keep living out my values, I need time like Nia and yoga and walking in the woods to return to the places that I wasn’t listening to when I was pushing myself.  And then, from this integrated place, all sorts of creativity and power can blossom forth to surprise me (and the world!).

---Alex McGee, Nov 15, 2012.  Thanks to Susan McCulley for sharing her Nia teaching gifts with our world!

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