Working with the Whole Package

We are a package deal, the yoga teacher said the other day. "Have you ever noticed," he went on, "that you are very good at some things, even excel at them, but can't do other things very well at all?" Yes, I've noticed. I have limits. I am learning to work with them.

In another yoga class recently I said out loud for the first time, "I can't do a back bend." The thing is, I can do a back bend, or "wheel" as the yogis say.  But I know that because of my back condition if I arch like a wheel I will end up hurting myself. So I have to take the long view and practice saying "I can't do that." It's hard--but it's getting easier.

Hang out a degree away from the edge, a physical therapist told me recently. Some yoga teachers will encourage students to hang out in a difficult pose for what feels like eternity, on the edge between discomfort and pain. No teacher wants you to hurt yourself. But teachers do want you to explore discomfort a bit and see if you can sit with it for a minute or two. That's good practice for life. Except if your adductor is strained. Then you have to shy away from the discomfort/pain edge and shift to the edge between an acceptable stretch and self harm. I'm practicing that, too.

Know your limits, my class dean, Pamela Daniels, said at our twenty-fifth college reunion in June. She spoke at our graduation as well, and revisited her own words from 1985--and her reference then to Jack Gilbert's poem, "The Abnormal is Not Courage." Courage, says Gilbert, is "the thing steady and clear, then the crescendo. . . not the surprise, but the amazed understanding." Twenty-five years later, Dean Daniels still stands by those words. But she urged us now, in mid-life, to consider the arduousness of making choices. She advised us to revisit our dreams and dare to be fully ourselves in the context of new self-knowledge, realistic complexity and logistical challenges.  Respect the givens, she said, because we can only do so much in a given day.

Our wisdom in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves, wrote the great Reformed theologian John Calvin. In his wildest dreams I'm sure Calvin never could have imagined a female pastor applying his theology to the practice of yoga and the experience of mid-life. But I keep coming back, gratefully, to Calvin's definition of wisdom.

I met with a seasoned yoga teacher one-on-one several weeks ago. She understood my back issues and led me through a sequence of modified poses that took those issues into account. Afterwards I actually felt more confident and free. I knew how to work with my own particular package deal more carefully and precisely, and that was a huge help. Maybe in some small way that's the kind of thing Jack Gilbert meant by "the amazed understanding."  I have resisted limits for the longest time but now I am amazed to understand that working with them has its benefits.