in reimagining the ways we might live, so that our lives become a source for life around us to flourish, thriving well beyond us, there are tremendous sources of inspiration and possibility. there are also tremendous challenges in a form that must be reckoned with for any fundamental change to happen. if i roll out a mat next to you and begin to stretch a little, perhaps the mat can help to illustrate what’s happening in this dynamic so we have more clarity and compassion in how we make this profound shift.
to begin, i like to settle down on the mat and notice how i’m breathing, how i feel. i’ll often notice an inadvertent sigh, then, maybe just the relief of allowing myself time for this. i like to do this early in the morning while the darkness blankets what i might look at and think about, with just candlelight or firelight as a guide. just making the decision to roll out the mat is often a wall of powerful reluctance, but when i do i never regret it. like diving into cold water, the anticipation is worse than the cure. but there it is, already. that dynamic. have you felt it?
i have spoken these words — morning, early, mat, cold water, these are words that have great possibilities that are then co-opted to punish or reward, that might suggest i am competing with you, or accusing you of sloth and laziness as you read this still tucked in your bed and not being industrious, exercising in the mornings. or, by turns i might be nervous lest you think i am posing as some expert without a certification and despite the fact that i woke at two am with perimenopausal insomnia and likely will be asleep again at the time i am suggesting we meet on our mats, and so my body refuses to play a game of discipline and excellence that probably was patterned on someone without a menstrual cycle to pause. as it were. not that they are some kind of villain, as much as these patterns of thinking and being might like to find one to defeat.
it’s strong enough that i almost stop writing again. but i want to write to you, i want to sit next to you, if you will, maybe you will have rolled out your own mat to practice beside me, and somehow we can work this out together. ok. i will lead for now, shall i? perhaps we can swap leads, like some dancers like to improvise with when i go to the local on wednesdays for swing dancing, where the lead and the follow might switch midstream, right there mid-song, passing the roles around like modern parents juggling babies, housework, paid work, a living improv in the midst of a structure we are co-creating, if mostly resisting or trying to game.
if i tell you how i like to begin, i hope you will hear that you needn’t follow my lead, but given the forces that pattern our dominant culture, i probably need to make this overt. if it works for you, in your specific situation, and how you feel today, and only if you are willing, you might join me, as lie on my back, knees bent, feet flat and parallel. here i depart from common practice, the ones that have already been taken so far out of the context of their origins that they are unrecognisable.
and yet, so am i, speaking english that sounds very unlike my sweetheart’s very english english, but what is that anymore, lying here on a mat on unceded traditional land that is now called british columbia, like some sort of weird colonial dj’s remix, and i myself am a remix of people who left lands dominated by conflict, who might once have come down on different sides but not round a table for dinner with two people in love and you see how we end up in a pickle. but then, i love pickles. yet i digress.
let me return my mind to my body on the mat, which is the practice anyway, and specifically to my knees, which i will tuck a cushion between and squeeze, there’s one for you here if you like. i rarely can find a strap to wrap around behind my knees and hold tight, to resist pressing out as well as squeezing in, if you like i can place my hands on either outer side of your knees so you might find that resistance. but that would be quite intimate — if therapeutic. (and i want to find the way beyond a culture that has repeatedly placed its hand on your knee without bothering with consent, colonising again. stop it) this resets something in the pelvis which is mysterious to me yet very effective. i learned it from a naturopath and the next bit from a physiotherapist but i’m guessing the ancient practices had poses to do the same. so i lie on the physio-massage-yoga-pilates-spiritual center and reset my own.
here i am talking of the pelvis as if it were not a site of so many stories, we might walk all day talking before they were done. nevertheless, my most important work on the mat is to activate my core. i suppose those long stories must put it to sleep and i must gently awaken it. more than one of my stories involved surgery that cut my connection to my core, so reviving it is lifelong work.
without my core alive to the world and participating i will repeatedly injure myself, and i have. all the actions in my days, my season, require the hub of this wheel to be strong. moving and climbing ladders, stacking and carrying wood, crouching and tending gardens, milling and kneading for bread, sitting and editing for hours. as a woman approaching half a century old, arriving late to a farm life that demands full, whole-bodied participation, there’s little testosterone to flex and not enough estrogen either. estrogen makes me limber and flexible, strong in my softness, resilient. but it is waning, for me it really crashed, so i take pills and potions or else i would be functionally 95. 105, some mornings. or not functioning at all…it got that bad. you see how the pelvis expresses what’s really going on here. a truth-teller. so, i will show you how i wake myself up, at my core, in earnest, if you’d like to know.
after that pelvic reset of squeezing the knees inward and then outward against resistance, i need to find my core. first i shuffle a little, still lying on my back with knees bent, feet planted. i want to pinch my shoulder blades together and draw them down the back as if they are going into pockets as my physiotherapist taught me. then my massage therapist speaks in my head, with her background in yoga — draw the lowest ribs towards the spine. ok.
now, you may not wish to do the following, but i offer it if you feel comfortable to. i draw my pelvic floor up as if to stop a pee, elevator rising, someone named kegel discovered and named this work but i prefer not to have men’s names inscribed on my body like a landscape. i’m guessing anyone with any body can kegel and did long before discovery day. so, i draw that central part of me upward toward my navel, flicker, squeeze, rise and shine. and relax.
next, with my fingers i find my hip bones and move inward and down an inch, press. then i both picture and feel those muscles, the transverse, activating, in a movement the pilates teacher calls elevator doors closing. i can feel them turn on, sliding toward the navel. and relax. ok.
now i focus on the breath, inhale, nice and wide, and as i exhale i bring that pelvic floor up, knit the transverse together, and as i do this, i move the ribs down toward the hips. then inhale, everything relaxes, support by air. and exhale, everything moves in again. repeat for as long as you wish to.
now, for me that is enough, it took practice, just this alone. i might then add pilates/physio exercises, toe-taps, tabletop, or perhaps even crunches, doing the difficult movement following the exhale. i might move very slowly through a yoga practice, or just stretch, or just bow to the world and go sit and edit a film or write to you again, before i climb in the orchards and bend in kitchen gardens and run with the goats and dance with old neighbours and curl up to sleep, well, and all through it the core of my being is supporting it all, so i can be limber in the spokes and resilient in the wheel of my day, protected.
and when i do this practice and offer it to you, i know that while this pattern is healing, there are forces embedded deeply in the patterns of dominant culture that might suggest that if you aren’t doing this, you aren’t enough, or that this is the way to success, and i have conquered something, i am winning, so i am an authority, and then i must keep it up and pretend i never get injured, insomniac, and that i have found The Solution, and Arrived. perhaps success would really be to make money at it, so i should market it, The Solution™, and really i must show off my body, which of course must be a perfect body, and start making films of myself doing crunches and push-ups, and assert that if you are just disciplined you too could succeed, just follow the steps in my book. you see how the domination culture co-opts us, extracting from ourselves and each other. how will we counter this? i wonder.
i wonder if just seeing it, compassionately, seeing how the colonising happens and noticing the stories it tells, and that none of us are evil for co-creating it, being as we are so very immersed within it, dependent upon it, but that many of us also have some kind of power to see it and choose other ways. maybe just the recognition and the practice of coming back to any core that supports us to do things in different ways, so that we do not injure ourselves, each other, maybe that is how we will make another world, one that heals and flourishes.
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my dear letter patron, thank you for giving me courage and faith and support to explore all these corners. i always love to hear from you when my words resonate, privately as many prefer or below, in conversation.
