Finding The Great Connectedness
I exercise about four times a week, usually by kayaking when it is warm and if not with a 30-minute routine while watching TV. For years I added a stretching routine that mimics yoga, which I practiced long ago until becoming bored. Yoga was not necessarily boring, but the class was and I gradually discontinued it.
Over time the yoga-like part of my workouts became so tedious they tapered to a trifle. The obvious then happened: my body stiffened. I did not like that one bit. I continued to enjoy the endorphin high of hard exercise, the sharper sense of smell, vision and well-being, but there were too many aches and pains. My back frequently was in agony.
Last year, a good friend advised that I re-try yoga. I knew I would not unless some hot young girl taught me. This was not just the normal-male-chauvinist-pig-me talking. Yoga done properly is hard work. I know it and recognized I would flake out unless faced by personal humiliation in front of said hot young girl.
Further, the lessons had to be one-on-one at my house. I’ve tried taking public yoga classes three times. Never again. Doing that is public humiliation in front of 20-somethings who can stretch like pretzels.
In June, I found my answer in Kyuri Lin, a 27-year old Korean woman who is thin as a stick and can support herself in a handstand while contorting her body into a horizontal figure-eight. She also is quite unconventional. Nothing of what she owns was given her. And there is enough rough road behind her that it reads like a slacker’s romance novel gone bad.
She started me off slowly, twice a week in the early evening. She regularly changes the routine as she thinks my body requires and it is complicated. Soon enough I learned to concentrate on her instructions and just do it, trembling with the effort, sweating, panting.
She promised if I quit drinking Coke I would lose five quick pounds, mostly from my belly, which I did and my body did. I lost inches from my belt, my walk loosened and my back quit hurting. Friends are taking notice and telling me I “look great.”
But that is not the most important thing. The important thing is mental. This is where you can stop reading because now begins the crunchy-granola part about finding spirituality.
And all this is from me, a world-class cynic on touchy-feely nonsense.
So here it is: the-real-point-of-yoga is to obtain “shavasana,” which can be described as an “out of body experience” symbolizing how you will face your death. The English translation is, literally, “corpse pose,” meaning at the end of the session, you lay on your back the way you will end up on your deathbed. And you stop trying to guide your mind. You release it. You let it run.
If you look-up “shavasana”, you will find it means “obtaining self-acceptance” and “making friends with death.”
I take the lessons on my deck above the ocean. During only the second session and about five minutes before the end, it happened.
Suddenly I was floating in the middle of the curl of the breaking waves below. I was there, suspended as the waves crested and broke about me, but they did not touch me. I was there and I could see the foam from the waves and my house and the lights and the mist in the air, but I was not in it. I was of it.
Kyuri ended the physical part of the session with me on my back in shavasana and gone in the surf. It lasted maybe 15 minutes. Eventually, I heard Kyuri gently urging me up. I held up my hand, whispering, “No, no, I’m in the middle of the curl,” so she let me go longer. Then still in it, I stood leaning against the balcony, and then laid on a bench, my eyes slowly blinking.
I did not want to come back. I had found it. I was a part of it.
It was better than anything except really intense sex.
I’ve been trying to get back there ever since. I lay down at the end of sessions and let my mind lose itself, and my mind has—I’ve spent a half hour lost out there—but never again have I obtained the shavasana of that first experience.
It is not a religion. It is a state of being, and it blows my mind such a slip of a girl, no matter how edgy and tough, knows more of it than me. How can that be? Have I been that clueless?
Michael Ray grew up in Corona del Mar and now lives in Laguna Beach. He makes a living as a real estate entrepreneur and is involved in many non-profits.
