embracing the weight

Last night was a night of reunion. The gathering organized to get together friends and family of my adopted brother brought up old friendships, inside jokes, learned behavior, new people, and a waterfall of memories. It was heavy, but the energy was not pulling us down; no, it lifted the entire environment. There was a buzzing of energy inside and out.

Between all of us who grew up together sharing a youth group room inside a main street church that centered itself on the acceptance of all in a southern town stuck in tradition, we experienced a wide variety of life-changing adventures together from camps to mission trips to seeing youth ministers go and new ones arrive to cramming into a passenger van to losing close family members and friends who were like family members to graduations and new jobs to kids and relocations. The weight of our connections could be felt, but the heaviness was something we embraced because it represents the many influences on our lives that have shaped who we are today.

Hatha class on Saturdays is always active. I love that, and the instructor is energetic yet laid back. She pushes us and orchestrates a pace that encourages you to push yourself. Today she focused the poses of class on twists. In each twist the focus is always to lengthen the spine on the inhale and twist more on the exhale. She tells us that sometimes the exhale creates a more mental twist than necessarily a noticeable physical twist.

Within a twist pose, you are focused on placing your weight down in a specific distribution. As we move from down dog swinging our right leg up in the air then down and through our hands so we can bend into it and twist our back left foot parallel to the back on the mat and rise up to warrior two, you must evenly distribute your weight between feet but not just the feet, the outside of your feet while pulling your bent right knee out so it does not collapse but also making sure that your knee is not bent so far forward that it is over your foot because it should be over your ankle and your torso must be tucked and arms up parallel to the floor as your look over your front hand.

There is a mental strength that comes with the twist poses. Because once you settle into warrior two, the next part is the actual difficult part because then your a leaning a way with your hands either pressed together at your heart or extended out wide as your twist and still maintain the distribution of your weight that has now shifted. We so often move in the same ways and rest in repetitive positions that the twist offers a different feeling for our body simultaneously offering a new position for our emotional stability through the required new physical stability of the position.

Within us is our own well of energy. It is necessary for us to tap into that energy by condensing our physical being in various positions that can be awkward or even uncomfortable, but mentally we overcome those practiced understandings and shift into a perspective of strength.

Just like in life, when situations can present themselves as awkward or uncomfortable, we push forward and it is through them that we gain strength within ourselves.