Fortunate
Despite my trip to the local farmer's market on Monday, where I bought a giant sack of vegetables, resolute to start eating super-healthy once more (although the final weeks of the year maybe not the best time to try and get back into the good shape I was in over the summer), tonight I found myself completely unable to summon up the energy to cook. After eating my takeout chow fun (not great, but not bad, and not cooked by me!), I cracked open the fortune cookie and read this: "If you think you can, you can."
For once, this fortune was surprisingly in tune with my life (the lucky numbers beneath it, maybe not so much). Because just an hour previously, I had had a real breakthrough in my yoga class, the one taught by my favorite teacher. He had us partner up today and spend almost the entire class facing our partners, which involved really surprising amounts of eye contact (uncomfortable and difficult even with my glasses off, which is impressive) and also paying close attention to what your partner was doing just across from you. Towards the end we did this sequence of poses that culminated in this one pose, the half moon (ardha chandrasana, for you Sanskrit scholars out there) that I generally have a really hard time with. Here, it's supposed to look like this (if you stretch me out by like another 9 inches and completely alter my BMI, plus also I was wearing this hot pink and black vintage Esprit tank top and not gauzy yoga goddess wear baring my steely abs):
I tend to fall out of this pose before my hand makes it all the way up, because my super-flat feet make it really really hard to maintain my balance solidly and long enough. But today, mirroring my partner, who has no problems with the pose (apparently), I just popped right in. And held it the entire time. On both sides. It was great, I think by the second side I was just smiling broadly until we returned to our original "warrior" pose. And felt somewhat elated for the rest of class, and right up to now, actually. She was very kind, my partner, and had clearly slowed down to help me, but just the act of focusing so much on her and following her through somehow removed whatever mental block keeps me from full realization all the other times. Which I had been thinking this whole time was a physical limitation, but apparently it's all mental. Or at least mostly mental, I mean, my calves were burning and my feet surely not as steady as my arch-blessed neighbors. Meanwhile, we were so in sync that by the end of class we were even breathing together, which felt even more intimate than the eye contact, really.
All this made me wonder on the walk home what the other ways are in my life that I do this to myself, psych myself out of a certain kind of looseness and openness and availability by overthinking. Not that I want to overthink this to boot. But maybe I can find a way to incorporate this somehow into my daily living, and when embarking on something difficult just think "I can do it" and then just start doing it. I bet that would help a lot. I'm going to be the little engine that could! Or a Greek goddess of Victory. Oh, the positivity! God knows the world could use it right now.
For once, this fortune was surprisingly in tune with my life (the lucky numbers beneath it, maybe not so much). Because just an hour previously, I had had a real breakthrough in my yoga class, the one taught by my favorite teacher. He had us partner up today and spend almost the entire class facing our partners, which involved really surprising amounts of eye contact (uncomfortable and difficult even with my glasses off, which is impressive) and also paying close attention to what your partner was doing just across from you. Towards the end we did this sequence of poses that culminated in this one pose, the half moon (ardha chandrasana, for you Sanskrit scholars out there) that I generally have a really hard time with. Here, it's supposed to look like this (if you stretch me out by like another 9 inches and completely alter my BMI, plus also I was wearing this hot pink and black vintage Esprit tank top and not gauzy yoga goddess wear baring my steely abs):
I tend to fall out of this pose before my hand makes it all the way up, because my super-flat feet make it really really hard to maintain my balance solidly and long enough. But today, mirroring my partner, who has no problems with the pose (apparently), I just popped right in. And held it the entire time. On both sides. It was great, I think by the second side I was just smiling broadly until we returned to our original "warrior" pose. And felt somewhat elated for the rest of class, and right up to now, actually. She was very kind, my partner, and had clearly slowed down to help me, but just the act of focusing so much on her and following her through somehow removed whatever mental block keeps me from full realization all the other times. Which I had been thinking this whole time was a physical limitation, but apparently it's all mental. Or at least mostly mental, I mean, my calves were burning and my feet surely not as steady as my arch-blessed neighbors. Meanwhile, we were so in sync that by the end of class we were even breathing together, which felt even more intimate than the eye contact, really.All this made me wonder on the walk home what the other ways are in my life that I do this to myself, psych myself out of a certain kind of looseness and openness and availability by overthinking. Not that I want to overthink this to boot. But maybe I can find a way to incorporate this somehow into my daily living, and when embarking on something difficult just think "I can do it" and then just start doing it. I bet that would help a lot. I'm going to be the little engine that could! Or a Greek goddess of Victory. Oh, the positivity! God knows the world could use it right now.
posted by Pangea at 8:29 PM
5 Comments:
On an estimated 15.000 other days you would have raised a brow at best ath the cookie, and put the Yoga part ultimately down to whatever & oblivion, but on this one day...
- so right, what are the ways? Hum, is there a new approach to real-life issues of signifiant/signifié (to name things but in a linguistic fashion)? What's your starsign? What're people of that sign like? And are they really like that, or did they turn out more like that because they looked themselves up in some book on astrology, and found a bit of themselves in the description there (as they could've in any of them)? --- From the people who gave you self-fulfilling prophecies, the next Big Thing: self-fulfilling categorisation!
(and think about that in SocLing terms... the mind reels)
(Or am I completely off my rail, in which case sorry for bothering.)
Yes, obviously the fortune cookie stuff is nonsense from beginning to end (although I did quite like the one my hyper-masculine (shaved head, former military) colleague had up outside of his office that said "You look pretty today"). But I had been thinking a decent amount this week already about mental self-categorization (sorry, I'm sticking with the American zed there) and its effect on self-perceptions or interactions with the physical world. Not from a Saussurean structuralist or even post-structuralist perspective, but a more cognitivist, experimentalist one (which I imagine you'd be more down with, Phil).
Example 1. A recent study of some hotel maids, people who considered themselves sedentary and did no exercise outside of work, found that when they were told that the energy expenditure from cleaning 15 rooms was equivalent to at least the half hour of exercise recommended by the Presidential committee on fitness (or some such), they lost a statistically significant amount of weight and inches with no change in diet or exercise routine. A control group of maids, not given the information, showed no such effect. Their physical world and their interactions within it were essentially the same, but once told that they were actually people who exercised daily, it had a real and measurable effect on their bodies.
Example 2. One of my cats, let's call him Fatty, seems to eat out of emotional need, e.g., when I left him for my Russian fieldwork he weighed 12 pounds and upon my return a year later he was 16 pounds; I can't get him below 14 1/2 since then. Because of the dietary needs of one of the cats, they all eat a mixture of junk food and diet food, all dry, mixed together in a container and then scooped into their bowls. They love the junk food and only reluctantly eat the diet food, with post-meal bowls commonly showing just a layer of diet pellets remaining, with all the junky stuff consumed. But Fatty is also obsessed with the forbidden fruit, for example, is a big human food stealer and eater (most recently at the party challah and banana bread, but also donuts, oh, chow fun last night, and so much more). He has over the last few months started opening the low-level cabinet where all the cat food is kept, tearing into the bag of diet food, and gorging himself on it, with his head almost completely submerged into the bag via the hole he made. He sometimes jumps with guilt and fear when I come into the kitchen and see him there, just his rear sticking out of the cabinet, but I don't reprimand him for this ever because it is special diet food that is very good for him. And I think it's funny. And so here we have mental categorization at work again: he disdains the diet food when it is in his bowl and given out by me as part of the authorized feeding process, and consistently eats it last, but once it is forbidden and mysterious and in a cabinet and needs to be broken into and stolen, it is a delicious treat that he cannot keep himself away from.
Btw, although obviously a yoga-doing, meditating, near-vegetarian hippie type, I have nothing to do with astrology. Ever. But I'm always surprised by the number of my friends that do...
"American zed" is a funny phrase.
Please. Orthographic humo(u)r = my specialty.
Come on, Pangea! You're cheating! I want to see a photograph of YOU in the half moon pose! (And don't respond by asking to see a picture of me giving the full moon pose, please.)
Post a Comment
<< Home