I have renewed respect for my body, my physical form, and the physical world. For a long while, I have seen the body as one with the mind. The person in me who I am was in complete harmony with my physical being, or so I thought.
Recovering from my abdominal surgery on Jan 30 requires six weeks of minimal movement: a lot of rest, and three gentle brief walks a day. Two weeks after surgery, I foolishly smoked a small amount of weed, a normal enough occurrence for me over the last few years.
Weed has been a happy part of my self-love year post-break up. Sure, it brought some darkness, sorrow, melancholy, perhaps now and then dramatically heightening my fear of the world around me, but always with a sense of blissful adoration of it all.
As was expected, my afternoon toke (a truly tiny amount) brought the feeling of deep love and connection with my physical form, and with the universal spirit of God around me and within me. As it turns out, this connection to my body was an illusion.
Typically I would dance, moving my body in slow distortions that come intuitively to me and which are deeply expressive representations of the grief and sorrow that I have been releasing over the past year. And so I did dance, but incredibly slowly. I would even call it a form of tai chi or qui gong.
I am one with my body, it wants to move this way.
How very wrong I was. My body did not want to do that and it immediately let me know by convulsing in agonizing waves of pain that lasted almost two days.
I recall laying on the hospital gurney, waiting to be wheeled into the operating room, reflecting on the deities surrounding me: Mercury, Jupiter, Mars, Saturn, Ketu, Venus… these were my dasha lords, coming together to bring deep transformation. [Mercury-Jupiter-Mars-Ketu and Venus]
I lay in my body, knowing I was shortly to be anaesthetized into a mere corpse that would be severely traumatized by a team of surgeons, all in the name of healing. It was violent, yes, but transformative and ultimately positive. Yet there I was, fully aware of my flesh form, aware of parts of me I hadn’t thought of.
After my little stoned dance experiment, the pain showed itself in places I truly hadn’t felt before, places I can’t even describe other than my insides. Here and there. As a yoga teacher I should know, but I am trained in philosophy not anatomy.
I saw this matter with greater reverence and a small amount of revulsion. The gross body, what a word, aptly named! It is warm and filled with character because of the life I bring to it, because of the grace of god that brings me breath and being.
Blood, tissue, organs, nerves, all reacting to the mind’s mistake.
The experience of being alive continues.
