Satya

It's 7:00 on a Sunday evening before a loaded week. I had this idea of writing a really great post about the way we are embodied--about being physical beings. That's going to have to wait. It will all have to wait because I have papers to grade, scores to enter, articles to read, and a yoga sequence to put together for my fitness center group tomorrow night. I have this idea that I will take a spinning class at 5 AM, come home, shower, go to work, come home, take my daughter to her volunteer job at a local theater, attend a zumba class with my other daughter, teach the fitness center yoga class, come home, finish up my reading for my reading endorsement class and manage to eat, drink and sleep somewhere in all that. Fortunately all of this is a pleasure, though perhaps in smaller doses. Could be I have a mouthful of more than I can chew. On the other hand, what else would I do? TV doesn't sound that appealing. I have had to give up a few loves this year in order to manage. My book group is out. I doubt I'll make it to many Jung Society lectures. As the time approaches, too, I'm sure some of those plans will change. My body my demand a rest or my kids may need my time in a way not anticipated.

Rolf Gates writes that satya on a yoga mat translates as humility, not to be confused with humiliation. He states, "it is being honest. It is being right sized." In my yoga class this morning I tried to convey this sense of satya by suggesting that yoga is an open-ended question and being honest is looking at whatever answer comes up without judgment or a preconditioned response. Being right sized, yes. I think this is far cooler than being grandiose.

I had the chance this morning to lead a small group through some yoga asanas. More than half of them were more accomplished yogis than I am, which scared me. I tried to infuse some talk about satya into the sequences and it occurred to me to just be honest with myself and them as well. There wasn't much I could teach anybody there, but I could enjoy talking them through some sequences and encouraging them to hold an asana longer than they might usually do and to stay with it. Their faces were beautiful, their bodies amazing in variety and form.  In the end it was just a pleasure to be there, nothing more or less.

So to be honest with you, humble, even, I'm just this human being at this point in time slogging through her days, mixing up left from right and noticing too late the perplexed look on the faces of her yoga students, who scratches her head in wonderment at the 2nd grader who stumbles over words in her guided reading text, who tries to cram too much curriculum into a day, forgets to charge her cell phone, who needs to pick those beets in the garden, clean the fridge, make sure she has clean underwear for the week, sneaks off to write a blog entry when she should be doing this, that, and some more. I'm also this human being who finds a second in the chaos to notice a look of focus on a yoga student's face, or the way someone's leg shakes in ardha chandrasana and he holds it anyway, the way her daughter's eyes look bluer with her new hair color or to appreciate her family for the people they are and their ability to return the favor. I'm a human being who still manages a five-second glance of wonder at an amazing sky of stars before heading off to one more thing on an impossibly long list of things to do.