Day 1:
My mother came to yoga class with me last night, which was wondering for several reasons. I learned that my favorite teacher there – who is leading the teacher training program I wanted to do – is teaching the late class on both Tuesdays and Thursdays now (yay) so I can actually take her, and she is four months pregnant (exciting!). She led us through a slower class of vinyasas, focusing on heart openers, which I have been craving recently. Today, of course, my upper back between my shoulders are terribly sore.
What does this mean? Why shoulder openers?
A sequence of “Shoulder Openers” or “Heart Openers” refers to asanas that stretch and strengthen the muscles between your shoulder blades and on the front wall of your chest. These are connected to the green-colored Heart Chakra, and exercise your emotions of acceptance and openness to new experiences, along with your compassion and reverence. I have been feeling, not tight in the shoulders, but tight in my compassion, struggling in my acceptance of self recently (and not in a high-school, I am unhappy with who I am way, but more in a deep rustling, awareness of some searching force inside of me type way). I have been more aware of this because of my longing for heart opening yoga moves and less of any other feeling I have noticed. So I was grateful when Gopi led us through much of this last night, and today I am feeling an upwelling of a small sorrow and anxiety in the day. This must be partly because it was released through all the muscle work last night, partly because (I am borrowing a term from a yogi whose blog I love) my Lady’s Holiday is approaching, the moon is soon in a crest of its wave, I miss my boy, and generally I have things to be anxious about. But because of all of those, I have needed to release this tension.
Every class for me is a hip-opening class. By nature my hip joints are twisted, which means walking can be painful most of the time because they are fighting against gravity. A simple hero’s pose can open up the most potent elements of anger within me. I am used to craving classes full of pigeon’s and malasana’s, because they hurt in a way that makes me stronger.
Hip opening classes are those that provide sequences of stretches all around your ball-and-socket hips and pelvis. These focus on the Red Chakra of the Root, seated within your groin, and exercised the emotions related to your life’s history, your anxieties, and your deep wells of passion. It is not uncommon to discover a fellow student crunched over their knee in pigeon, weeping. I have certainly been one of these students, but only after I moved past the intense anger and self-loathing that came up every time I moved into this asana. No joke. Now I feel a sweet sadness, but one I accept and almost look forward to, as if in grievance, as my hips grow looser and healthier.
I have never craved a heart opening class like I did, usually just hip openers as a way of self-healing. But perhaps with my heart so far across the country (past Denver now) I am provided a time to “Clean House”, to locate all my fears and find the time to hold them up in my hands, examine them, and blow them away. This will be the focus of my first meditation attempt, which will occur later tonight after a second yoga class.
My most important task in life, to follow my intuition, is often the hardest, as regular emotion can so easily get in the way.
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