I first thought to write a blog on this topic several
weeks ago, and it was going to be called “Letting Go At Yoga”. I’d just had my favorite yoga class of the
week; it’s called Vin/Yin and it includes about 45 minutes of hot vinyasa flow
followed by 30 minutes of long-hold gravity-driven yin poses. As we pulled back and down into child’s pose
to rest before transitioning to yin that day, I started to cry. No one knew, since my face was pressed into my
mat. I didn’t know what I was feeling,
but I realized I was simply letting go, and I welcomed it. My tears lasted a few minutes and mingled
with my sweat, and I eventually toweled off my face, had some water, and went
on to savor the rest of the class. Yoga
is so amazing and sort of paradoxical – practicing can provide a welcome escape
from one’s immediate thoughts and concerns (the “monkey brain”) while
simultaneously enabling discovery and unintentional insight.
I thought of a card that I came across a few years ago
while at Joseph Beth searching for a birthday card for someone. I still have it propped up in my window and I’m
looking at it right now. The image is
shown below and I love it. To me, it is
about letting go – letting beauty and pain in, and also letting the beauty and
pain of ourselves out. I’m a pretty
tightly wound person, pretty high achieving, pretty intense. When I cried in yoga, I had the thought that
I’ve been beating myself up with the question “What should I do?” with regard
to work, relationships, planning my future, the whole catastrophe. And instead the alternative questions “Who am
I now?” “Who have I always been?” were
bubbling into my consciousness. And I
thought, perhaps those are the
questions that could drive my answers, instead of externally driven “shoulds”.
I’ll keep working on all that! In the meantime, I wanted to write about the
importance of finding ways in our lives to let go. I believe that we can let go in infinite
ways, at multiple levels. We can be
stimulated physically, emotionally, spiritually; we can exert ourselves with
extreme exercise, we can place ourselves in the presence of natural or manmade
beauty, we can spend time with people we love or we find inspiring because of
their words or music. The important
thing is to find what works for you, and make time to do it, with
self-compassion and patience.
“Let it go” refers more to actions and events. We all have done and said things we regret,
or NOT done and said things we wish we had.
The more present and mindful we are, the less frequently this happens,
but when it does, I feel it’s important to make a decision about what to do –
nothing, apologize, reconsider, amend, offer – and then do that thing (or
nothing) and then let it go. Learn from
mistakes and grow forward. “Tell the
truth, tell the truth, tell the truth,” is the advice given to Elizabeth
Gilbert by a friend in her wonderful memoir Eat Pray Love, as she
struggles with how to end a toxic marriage and find her way forward. That advice will never be wrong.
“Let them go” is particularly meaningful to me at the
moment. If you happen to follow me on
Facebook, you will know that my sons have been on a road trip from Cincinnati
to Los Angeles for the past several days.
They left 7/1 and they’ll arrive in LA the evening of 7/4. Alex will begin a pre-grad school summer
internship in Clinical Psychology at UCLA and Zach will fly home 7/5 to be here
for a handful of weeks before heading back to LA himself to begin his second
year at USC. It is so hard to let them
go, and so important to do so, isn’t it?
I had a wonderful walk this afternoon during which I listened to the TED
Radio Hour on NPR (awesome show) and Guy Raz was interviewing the so-eloquent
Andrew Solomon on the topic of parenting.
Mr. Solomon cited a British psychoanalyst named Rozsika Parker who
describes motherhood as sailing between “the Scylla of intrusiveness and the
Charybdis of neglect”. The expression
can be more mundanely rephrased as “between a rock and a hard place” or “the
lesser of two evils” but invoking immortal and irresistible monsters of Greek
mythology and Homer’s Odyssey is so much more colorful! Just wish they didn’t have to be female momsters – I mean monsters!
http://www.amazon.com/Eat-Pray-Love-Everything-Indonesia/dp/0143038419
http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=335316881&m=336924063&live=1
