DISCOVERING NEW MODES OF BEING AT AGE 32
11 MIN READ
“What fires together wires together” and I had done enough dysfunctional firing together in my youth to have pretty well wired up modes of being in the world.
At 32 I found yoga and those wirings changed. Yoga nourished my body. This nourishment awoke three qualities in me that had long become dormant and atrophied: sensitivity, dignity, and beauty.
Beginning
Yoga came back into my life serendipitously. I had done the odd class or two before but I was always competitive, forcing my body into the poses to do it “right”.
A friend suggested Yin - a very slowly moving and in a way, precise form of yoga. Yin changed my life.
Sensitivity
The author and physician Gabor Mate has an analogy for how we sometimes process trauma. Trauma opens a wound within us. This wound is like a physical wound, in that when it heals it is replaced by scar tissue. Scar tissue holds the skin and organs together, but it is thick and lacks sensitivity. We turn off feeling in certain areas when we experience trauma.
Sensitivity was the prerequisite quality that yoga gave me to move deeper into my journey back to my body. You need to be able to sense something for it to exist (if a tree falls in the woods, etc…) and there were plenty of parts of my feeling body I could not sense prior to yoga.
It was not a linear journey and it was clumsy. In this domain I was a baby learning to take his first steps. I had compassion for the process, but refinement would take time. This took many forms. I would feel an inexplicable sense of spaciousness in cobbler’s pose some days. In other sessions I would sob in forward fold for what felt like forever. I would have thought these things silly just months prior but the truth in those feelings was undeniable, I still struggle to use language to explain these experiences but they are as real as the ground beneath me.
Dignity
It’s incredibly strange to feel new things at age 32. Your experiential world is well-codified at this point.
It began when I would rise up steadily into warrior one - some kind of stable and righteous sensation. I am thousands of feet tall, joining together the heavens and the earth with my body. I am statuesque. I am powerful and I am deploying that power mindfully and compassionately to the necessary areas of my body. I am pure. I embody the part of me that cannot be harmed by the world, the part of me that glorifies God.
This, sensation is what I associate with the word "dignity".
Beauty
The culture tells me that I am expendable like a machine part. If I fail, I will simply be swapped out with “another one”.
The culture tells me that masculinity is harmful and should be suppressed and denied.
The culture tells me that feeling my feelings is “gay” as if that’s an insult in the first place.
The culture tells me that I can’t be abused because my genitalia makes me an oppressor.
The culture tells me that I can’t be raped.
The culture tells me that I must prove my worth through money and performance.
The culture tells me that Rebel Wilson is beautiful but I must look like Chris Evans who, by the way, got that body naturally, what is my excuse?
Yoga taught me that the culture is living in a false reality. When I am in a headstand or crow pose, time stops and I know that I am beautiful because I can feel it in my body. When my breath moves me between cat and cow the motion is poetry. It’s not that I’m doing it in some theoretical “perfect way” it’s that I’m doing it in the way that I’m able to in respect to my body. It is a unique expression of my essential Josh-ness. It is a balance at the nexus of respect for my body, growth, and awareness. Not inherently better or worse than anyone else’s, but perfect and beautiful in its own regard.
Off the mat.
More and more I see these qualities happening during my day off the mat.
I can sense when I’m overworking and respect myself enough to take the break I need. I have put my body’s needs over the expectations people have of me — I hope they align but I know deeply that I wont be betraying my body anymore.
I feel dignified when I refuse to eat seed oil laden bullshit food. I feel dignified when I consciously choose to make an occasional exception (I will always eat the Biscoff cookie offered on the airplane). I now know that an occasional exception actually keeps me from slipping back into my perfectionism.
I feel beautiful when I put on a nice outfit I put together. The respect for my beauty overcomes the social anxiety I feel about wearing a Stetson or a loud necklace. Paradoxically I get compliments from strangers all the time on the way I dress now. A cashier at a coffeeshop recently told me that he “liked my whole thing I had going”, it made my day and I didn’t feel anxious about being noticed.
The most profound experience I’ve been having in the background of all of these new feelings is that I feel like I’m showing up for myself. Most days I don’t feel guilty about feeling good. I feel like I deserve it. I feel like everybody deserves to feel this way. I am grateful.
Preach
I still suffer but there's more ease in my life now. I have this joyful desire to try and share this ease, this way of being. I don't know the best way to do it. Undoubtedly your "yoga" will be subtly or distinctly different than mine, maybe it won't even involve asana practice.
All I know is that I see these patterns everywhere now and I don't think it's just the "law of the instrument". I see workaholism, addiction to alcohol and drugs, anger, vicious competitiveness and inexplicably arising physical ailments. I see what seems opposite but is not: individuals championing lofty social causes despite not addressing the demons in their own house. I see individuals denying their own needs to appear saintly, wise, "manly", hardworking, etc. I can't know what causes forced these ends, but I have to wonder if the path to healing might begin with practicing feeling the body.
I end this essay knowing that I have gone against my "no more long essays dictum" and with a poem by Charles Bukowski that I feel is relevant.
Let It Enfold You
by Charles Bukowski
Either peace or happiness,
let it enfold you
when I was a young man
I felt these things were
dumb, unsophisticated.
I had bad blood, a twisted
mind, a precarious
upbringing.
I was hard as granite, I
leered at the
sun.
I trusted no man and
especially no
woman.
I was living a hell in
small rooms, I broke
things, smashed things,
walked through glass,
cursed.
I challenged everything,
was continually being
evicted, jailed, in and
out of fights, in and out
of my mind.
women were something
to screw and rail
at, I had no male
friends,
I changed jobs and
cities, I hated holidays,
babies, history,
newspapers, museums,
grandmothers,
marriage, movies,
spiders, garbagemen,
english accents,spain,
france,italy,walnuts and
the color
orange.
algebra angred me,
opera sickened me,
charlie chaplin was a
fake
and flowers were for
pansies.
peace and happiness to me
were signs of
inferiority,
tenants of the weak
and
addled
mind.
but as I went on with
my alley fights,
my suicidal years,
my passage through
any number of
women-it gradually
began to occur to
me
that I wasn't different
from the
others, I was the same,
they were all fulsome
with hatred,
glossed over with petty
grievances,
the men I fought in
alleys had hearts of stone.
everybody was nudging,
inching, cheating for
some insignificant
advantage,
the lie was the
weapon and the
plot was
empty,
darkness was the
dictator.
cautiously, I allowed
myself to feel good
at times.
I found moments of
peace in cheap
rooms
just staring at the
knobs of some
dresser
or listening to the
rain in the
dark.
the less I needed
the better I
felt.
maybe the other life had worn me
down.
I no longer found
glamour
in topping somebody
in conversation.
or in mounting the
body of some poor
drunken female
whose life had
slipped away into
sorrow.
I could never accept
life as it was,
i could never gobble
down all its
poisons
but there were parts,
tenuous magic parts
open for the
asking.
I re formulated
I don't know when,
date, time, all
that
but the change
occurred.
something in me
relaxed, smoothed
out.
i no longer had to
prove that I was a
man,
I didn't have to prove
anything.
I began to see things:
coffee cups lined up
behind a counter in a
cafe.
or a dog walking along
a sidewalk.
or the way the mouse
on my dresser top
stopped there
with its body,
its ears,
its nose,
it was fixed,
a bit of life
caught within itself
and its eyes looked
at me
and they were
beautiful.
then- it was
gone.
I began to feel good,
I began to feel good
in the worst situations
and there were plenty
of those.
like say, the boss
behind his desk,
he is going to have
to fire me.
I've missed too many
days.
he is dressed in a
suit, necktie, glasses,
he says, 'I am going
to have to let you go'
'it's all right' I tell
him.
He must do what he
must do, he has a
wife, a house, children,
expenses, most probably
a girlfriend.
I am sorry for him
he is caught.
I walk onto the blazing
sunshine.
the whole day is
mine
temporarily,
anyhow.
(the whole world is at the
throat of the world,
everybody feels angry,
short-changed, cheated,
everybody is despondent,
disillusioned)
I welcomed shots of
peace, tattered shards of
happiness.
I embraced that stuff
like the hottest number,
like high heels, breasts,
singing,the
works.
(don't get me wrong,
there is such a thing as cockeyed optimism
that overlooks all
basic problems just for
the sake of
itself-
this is a shield and a
sickness.)
The knife got near my
throat again,
I almost turned on the
gas
again
but when the good
moments arrived
again
I didn't fight them off
like an alley
adversary.
I let them take me,
I luxuriated in them,
I made them welcome
home.
I even looked into
the mirror
once having thought
myself to be
ugly,
I now liked what
I saw, almost
handsome, yes,
a bit ripped and
ragged,
scares, lumps,
odd turns,
but all in all,
not too bad,
almost handsome,
better at least than
some of those movie
star faces
like the cheeks of
a baby's
butt.
and finally I discovered
real feelings of
others,
unheralded,
like lately,
like this morning,
as I was leaving,
for the track,
i saw my wife in bed,
just the
shape of
her head there
(not forgetting
centuries of the living
and the dead and
the dying,
the pyramids,
Mozart dead
but his music still
there in the
room, weeds growing,
the earth turning,
the tote board waiting for
me)
I saw the shape of my
wife's head,
she so still,
I ached for her life,
just being there
under the
covers.
I kissed her in the
forehead,
got down the stairway,
got outside,
got into my marvelous
car,
fixed the seatbelt,
backed out the
drive.
feeling warm to
the fingertips,
down to my
foot on the gas
pedal,
I entered the world
once
more,
drove down the
hill
past the houses
full and empty
of
people,
I saw the mailman,
honked,
he waved
back
at me.