“It is practice alone that brings a burnished glow to our own rough-hewn skills; it is by continued application of our craft that they become jewels in their appropriate setting.”
The Celtic Spirit, Caitlin Matthews, p. 84
Day 352 – I woke up stiff and wobbly. My right eye can’t seem to focus and I have a dull ache on one side of my head and neck. Like Rolf in today’s reading, my image of my wellness wasn’t “fully formed and it wasn’t fully conscious,” so I sat upon my mat and chose a pilates/dance conditioning warm-up, next to the space heater which I stole quietly from our bedroom. I followed this with a healthy practice of Datura style moves, but I quickly realized my body wasn’t going to comply and followed this up with a short yoga practice seated.
Rolf’s words today resonate. Like Rolf, “in order to move through a series of asana that required my body to perform a normal range of motions, I had to confront the ways in which I had shut down to certain movements and eliminated certain options.” Although I am not fully convinced that my body’s aches and imbalances are fully a reflection of a “hardened…self-made” image I have of myself, nor are mental, emotional, and spiritual assumptions” creating all the disability in my body, I do believe that practice frees us of our “own rigidity, weakness, and injuries.”
Practice in all the varying forms of everyday life, from meditation to healthy eating to mindfulness to movement are healing. The when and the where of practice is simple; they become everyday rituals. It is the how much that I struggle with. And this, my friends, is the crux of our society’s dilemma: when something is good, we tend to overuse/overdo it and then, shriek and swing the other way. Is there any sort of healthy obsession? How thin is the line drawn between healthy passion and curiosity and nonsensical routine for practice’s sake? Where do intuition and dopamine fall within these realms? Sometimes I think that growing old is just another version of childbirth, where I am forced to watch a beautiful person be born into the world full of potential and individual flaws, desires, and unique opportunities to fail and succeed, all while I am required silently to be the observer.
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