Don't worry, I'm not going to break in to song. Nor am I going to dye my hair fire-engine red and sell my voice to a sea-witch. Instead I would like to share with you an interesting revelation that has been developing this past month.
Last month was a challenging one. The Year of the Horse seemed to want to exit with a bang and stirred up a whirlwind of obstacles for me. Not least of these was having a pretty nasty bike accident that prevented me from doing yoga for two weeks and effectively canceled my February plans of learning how to execute a handstand. Don't worry, nothing was broken (except for the bike), and I sustained some very colorful bruises and was confronted with my fear of falling head-on (not literally).
I also started private Grinberg sessions in February and they have been the catalyst for a major shift in the way that I think, act, and live.
After the first lesson, I realized that I find it difficult to trust myself and my body, which in turn makes it difficult for me to trust other people. The physical manifestation of this is that I try to hold my legs and arms up with unnecessary tension in my hips and shoulders, instead of trusting that my limbs will stay attached to me and to let gravity do its work. In my Grinberg classes, I have a hard time keeping my eyes closed because I don't trust that my body won't run into people or the walls or fall over. To date, I've only had one notable collision with somebody, and I've obviously lived to tell the tale. And now that I've survived falling off of a fast-moving bike, I think I can survive falling from a stationary standing position.
During the first session when my Grinberg instructor helped me to release built-up tension; suddenly there was so much energy flowing through my arms and hands that I felt like I was being electrocuted! My hands were buzzing so much, I was convinced that they must have been trembling like leaves in the wind. But when I looked at them, they were perfectly still. When I stood up and started walking, the ground seemed much closer than before because my legs had relaxed and lengthened.
The next few sessions were mainly devoted to releasing the trauma that my body sustained from the bike accident. But once my bruises and scrapes were on the mend, another pattern emerged, which was that I expect myself and others to be perfect. Obviously, this is impossible, but it has led to a great deal of frustration and disappointment in myself and in others (although I tend to be much more understanding about others' "failings" than in my own).
I realized that I have never been able to just look at the positive aspects of something that I've done without adding "but I didn't/I need to/I should have..." Lessons, recitals, papers, relationships...you name it, I've criticized it! This constant criticism of myself and of others makes it really difficult to accomplish anything, let alone get along with others.
For myself, I've decided to employ the phrase "[a,b,c,] went well today and tomorrow I will work on [x,y,z]."
You're probably familiar with the idea that when you see something that you don't like in somebody else it could be that it reminds you of something within yourself that you don't like. This is exactly the case with my quest for perfection. When I see other people behaving or speaking or thinking in a way that I don't like, it's usually because I don't like it when I behave/speak/think that way.
In my most recent Grinberg session, my teacher was pressing points on my face and my arms were tingling in response. I asked how tension in my face could cause energy blocks in my arms and my teacher replied that I wasn't seeing my whole body as me. That rather stopped me in my tracks. And then I realized that I fixate on the labels for these parts instead of understanding that my whole body is me.
This made me think of something else that Esther Ekhart sometimes
talks about in her yoga teachings. In one particular video, at the end
of the sequence when you are in the relaxation pose, Esther asks you to
imagine that you are a Google Earth camera looking down from above. You
see yourself lying on your yoga mat, the room around you, your apartment
building or house, the streets outside, the people going by, and it
just keeps zooming farther and farther out.
She asks, "What is you? Where do you begin and end?"
I think one answer is that we don't end.
Every person, every circumstance, every thing that exists in our lives is an extension of ourselves and creates our world - We are each a star at the center of our mini-universe. When I find it hard to accept somebody with "less-than-perfect" tendencies it is because they are an extension of my own "less-than-perfect" tendencies.
So I have decided to be kinder to myself and to see where improvements can be made without punishing myself for not being perfect. And since we are all part of each other's mini-universes, I will affect all of the lives around me by changing my own life and how I behave/speak/think.
I hope that this post was coherent and interesting to you. I would love to hear what you think.
Love and peace,
Daniella
