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!
