Dahn Yoga was offering an open-house of sorts. Well, to say they're open on Sundays and staffed by volunteers is more accurate. Come one, come all. Leave your preconceived notions at the door and be ready to share in an exercise of being bigger than yourself.
My folks would be having fits at the thought of me going to a yoga class. "It's a pagan religion," they would chide. Not true, and it's still more godly that sitting slothily on one's ass, and gluttonously eating potato chips while watching pseudo-erotica that you hide from the kids. But, no indictments from me.
I know a little about a lot of stuff. Enough to make conversation with anyone who knows more about a given topic than I do, but not enough to be called an expert about much of anything. So, to paraphrase my favorite Bart Simpson quote, "Lady, what I don't know about yoga could fill a warehouse."
I once thought that yoga was really just frequented by a bunch of kept-women and stay-at-home moms who had nothing better to do between the hours of 9am and 2pm, and maybe it is. Admittedly, my experiential cross section of the demographic is from one hour of one Sunday. But Dahn Yoga was interesting. The small reception area (really more of a vestibule) was filled with a few chairs, a water cooler and racks of herbs. There were traction socks and meditation magnets on the walls, and pamphlets and flyers galore. The facilitator was a woman of a certain age whose name I didn't actually hear, but she bowed deeply to me when I entered and hugged me warmly. Her greeting was in Korean, though she was most decidedly of European descent.
She invited me into the studio and, along with some other attendees, we started dancing. It wasn't dancing in the traditional sense, though one of the other women in the class certainly turned it into that, but an exercise to stimulate the acupressure points on the balls of my feet. After fifteen minutes of alternately tapping my toes on the mat (while surreptitiously working my way around the room and feigning interest in the informational posters), my right hip flexor groaned incessantly. I think I need to see a chiropractor.
The next forty minutes or so were dedicated to exercises where we stimulated our energy and did several poses, which were meant to both strengthen the body and focus the mind. Throughout, we used magnets to direct energy to or away from our chakras, and I admit that when centering the magnet between my eyes (the seat of wisdom and knowledge), I certainly did feel a small ache that I could not explain.
One of the last exercises we did was to sit in a half-lotus position (you know this as indian style or criss-cross applesauce (the more PC term these days)) and our hands in front of us, nearly touching. We were to focus on the energy crossing between our palms and then to extend our hands out as far as we could until we felt that connection being lost. As I extended my hands, I felt as if there were in fact a rubber band trying to pull them back together. As we breathed in, I stretched the imaginary rubber band. And as we breathed out, I allowed it to pull my hands together.
As the exercise progressed, we were encouraged to imagine ourselves embracing the earth when our hands came back together. Then we were embracing someone that we didn't really like and asking their forgiveness. The next person was someone we loved, to whom we were sending our energy. And our final embrace was of ourselves. How can we love others if we don't first love ourselves? It's true.
I came away from the class with a new appreciation. The Sleeping Tiger pose is in fact physically difficult. Guided mediation does affect tangible sensation and the flow of energy. Is it psychosomatic? Could be. But does it matter? The volunteer-instructor brought us into a sharing circle at the end and we were given an opportunity to discuss whatever we felt during the class.
One woman expressed an awareness of her left foot, which I can only surmise is numbed from some medical condition. Another woman discussed her meditation practices from a battle with cancer five years ago. On Sunday, she welcomed back the occurrence of the color purple, which had been frequent visitor during her cancer days. I discussed my 'rubber band'. Others shared the inclusion of sensations not previously felt during the magnet exercises.
I can only conclude that the reality of meditation is in the effect that it has on people. I believe that it's more, but I'm looking for something concrete, verifiable. In the mean time, a warm hug from a stranger and a relaxing stretch on the floor while getting in touch with the universe can't be a bad thing.
And I'm not above copping a cosmic-feel.
