![]() In yesterday's class, I used the following two Mary Oliver poems to incorporate into an expression of our practice on the mat. The first one, The Humpbacks, pertains to our asana practice. It goes like this: The Humpbacks Listen, whatever it is you try to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you like the dreams of your body, its spirit longing to fly while the dead-weight bones toss their dark mane and hurry back into the fields of glittering fire/where everything, even the great whale, throbs with song. When you are exploring movement through the poses on your mat, the spirit becomes dazzled with "the dreams of your body." Often, we do feel the "dead-weight bones" inhibiting us from moving into poses as fluidly as we would like. Maybe they stop us completely from trying a pose. But, Mary Oliver writes, "everything throbs with song" and that includes your heart and your spirit. How do they want to flow on the mat? Neither of them are held back by your physicality; you shouldn't feel held back, either. And the following poem, Sleeping in the Forest, reminded me of svasana. I love the last line, "By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better." Does that not describe corpse pose?! Sleeping In The Forest I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds. I slept as never before, a stone on the riverbed, nothing between me and the white fire of the stars but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths among the branches of the perfect trees. All night I heard the small kingdoms breathing around me, the insects, and the birds who do their work in the darkness. All night I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling with a luminous doom. By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better.
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