I can explain why we sometimes cry during savasana.
There are tears of relief, tears of gratitude, tears of exhaustion, and tears of mourning. There are 10,000 kinds of tears. Generally, we know why we're crying. Or at least we think we do. We stubbed our toe. We get divorced. Something dies.
Or there's just one straw too many; after waking up late, fielding two hundred incoming emails, having an unhelpful and largely inane conversation with tech support, your boss gives you another responsibility without having said thank you for the last three weeks of around the clock work. Then you pick up the kids and your kid's school has sent a note home that feels mostly like you're not giving enough time to the school district and the classroom, you're a failed parent, you don't dress your child adequately and their behavior reflects your own disorganized finances. When you get back to the car, a traffic cop is writing you up a parking ticket. And then suddenly there you are. Holding on the the steering wheel and crying, and crying, and crying without there seeming to be an off switch. Crying that is disproportionate to the day. Crying that has more than the day in it.
It has the whole of your career at this bloody job behind it, all seven years of your kid's life and the difficulty you had in pregnancy, the whole garbled romance and relationship with the kid's father, the failed relationships before that one and the way you tend to short sell yourself, contort yourself, try to make someone love you, and how you've done this since you yourself were seven carrying a note home from school.
Or whatever. Or maybe you have very good off switches. That would prove my point, not unmake it.
We think we know what we're feeling and why. And we tend to think we've got it all under control. But sometimes, without knowing why, we cry during savasana. Emotional release - tears or laughter - aren't actually things we understand or do not understand. The 10,000 things between relief, gratitude, exhaustion and mourning don't comply with reason and they live outside of time. They live in bone, in fat tissue, in old songs, and our perfectionism. Yoga calls them samskara. Scar tissue. Effective yoga practice softens, elongates, heals deep body tissue. Letting the breath and the light shine on the old places, the gristled tissue, the storage around your pericardium and the ballast around your lower back is evocative. It is healing. This isn't an understanding, thing, but a bodied one. Your mind and your body are not "related"; they are the same thing. It's deeper practice weekend. We're going to:
- understand yogic ideas of scar tissue, neuro plasticity, character and why we keep doing the same things in our lives.
- see how stress affects metabolism, cognition, and immunity
- learn how to effectively practice to relieve built up tension, rather than creating more.
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- Explore how this moving in or toward is ultimately where the healing happens, not in the final expression of a pose. This is the vinyasa or mindful, attending, movement, more than sequence is.We'll also look at transitions in asana practice, the way we move from pose to pose and into a pose.
- Thus we'll understand how to get where we're going with clarity, strength, openness, and integrity. This in terms of asana, but also in terms of life. We move differently and make different choices and ultimately, rocket ourselves into change if we move from openness, clarity, strength, and integrity.
- We'll look at relaxing the diaphragm and getting better at reading our own bodies, making asana more effective