Breath Control

Practising yoga is making me more sensitive, and I'm discovering that's not always a good thing, at least not in a feel-good kind of way.  My increasingly heightened sense of awareness sometimes really messes me up.
Yesterday I attended Yoga U. for my yoga teaching training course, and participated in a pranayama workshop (Sanskrit for control of breath or life force).  I've written numerous times on this little web of mine about my love of breathing, so I was looking forward to feeling calm, rejuvenated, and uplifted by the end of a three hour session of deep, sustained breathing and meditation.  But that's not the way it happened at all.  I was deeply affected, for sure, but not as I had hoped or expected to be.

The first half of the workshop was practising a series of poses to open up the body and create space for prana to do its thing.  There were a variety of poses in varying degrees of difficulty, and I felt fine with all of it.  I enjoyed feeling my body being cleared of tension and emotional blockage.  When we eventually came to the breathing and meditation, I hoped that I'd be able to settle into the simple, profound act of breathing.  But there was nothing simple about it.
In our final resting pose, which was lying on our backs for an extended period of time (it's hard for me to say just how long - one isn't watching the clock while doing breathing meditation), I began to feel aches and pains all over my body, including some very old, dormant injuries, as well as my bad knee, which is still on the mend.  In fact, my knee was throbbing, and I'd done nothing to aggravate it.
I lie in savasana, the final resting pose we'd assumed, almost daily, and it's always peaceful and pain-free.  Not so this time.  Although I'd managed to clear my mind of the typical big and small worries that make up ordinary consciousness, my body was taking on a load of energy that I couldn't dismiss or ignore.  It's hard to keep a clear mind when the body is yelling and screaming.
The heightened sensitivity I've developed since starting to practise yoga five years ago sometimes makes me feel as if I'm a tuning fork; resonating with all the sounds and energies around me, i.e., the vibrations.  Most of the time it feels good, especially when I'm listening to the deep, sonorous tones of the syllable OM.  Those are the moments when I consistently feel pure bliss.  Another notable experience I've had regarding my body as a receiver was when I participated in an ayahuasca ceremony a couple of years ago.  On that particular occasion I hadn't drunk the potent tea, but I still felt every sound and movement, no matter how loud or soft, pulsate throughout my entire body. Although I wouldn't describe it as blissful, it was still a thrilling, trilling, pleasurable time.  The pranayama workshop wasn't.

I instinctively understood that I might have been absorbing other energies, from whatever sources or people that were around me.  I could still feel the physical vibrations of ambient sounds such as cars driving by outside, but I was unable to fathom the reasons for my intense physical discomfort.  Most disturbing of all was the pain I felt in my upper right arm and the numbness that emanated from it all the way down to the tips of my fingers.  It occurred to me that what I was feeling could be symptomatic of an impending stroke. As foolish as it may sound, I didn't worry, because I was certain it was my body feeling the effects of surrounding energies, despite the fact that the pain and numbness in my right arm persisted the whole time.  I had to keep breaking out of stillness to massage my arm and stretch and flex some feeling back into my tingling hand.
I suppose some people might think I was being a new-age flake hoping for some metaphysical explanation for what could have been a life-threatening condition.  That would be a classic case of dangerous denial.  But honestly, I'm not that stupid.  If I'd felt those same symptoms under any other circumstances I would have checked into an emergency ward right away.  I've since googled the symptoms to see what else they might have indicated, and discovered a host of unpleasant go-see-doctor-right-away type stuff.  Nevertheless, I still feel fairly confident that I don't need to seek medical attention.
Much to my relief, the physical symptoms dissipated as soon as the meditation was over.  But I was left with lingering, disconcerting thoughts of what-the-hell-was-all-that-about?  If the body is a vehicle for the soul, my cage had been profoundly and literally rattled.  While other students commented on how relaxed they felt and wished for more, I was glad it was over.  I also felt as if I'd failed.  I muddled through the rest of the day distracted and disturbed, but still dealing reasonably well, or so I thought, with the small successes and failures that make up a day at Yoga U.  Nevertheless I was very grateful to finally go home and pour myself a glass of wine.  (Okay, so I'm a bad yogi.  And I drink coffee, too.  And do other stuff real yogis don't do.)

But the restful state of mind I was hoping to find at home didn't happen.  I was home barely a few minutes, with thoughts of the day still spinning my wheels, when I heard the horrific report that the recent Germanwings plane crash was deliberately caused by a suicidally deranged pilot.
Even though terrible tragedies happen all over the world and are reported almost daily, this one affected me more than most.  I'm a white-knuckle flyer and have had a macabre fascination with airplane disasters all my adult life. Add to that my recovering depressive's obsession with mental illness and suicide, and you have a dreadful news item that's sure to affect me personally.  Even a second glass of wine didn't relax me enough to make me feel "normal" again.  By the time I went to bed I wasn't feeling "sensitive" anymore.  Instead, I felt like a wet noodle - no mind, no soul, and no spine.  I couldn't get the news or the day's in-body experience out of my head, and ended up having a fitful night of very little sleep.  The peace and calm I'd been looking forward to never came.  I had become a sponge for all the sad and sorry stuff that was going on all around me in the larger sphere of my life, which included another very recent tragic event in the neighbourhood haunts of my past.  When I "cleared space" in my body to allow life force to flow freely through me, I was also allowing unacknowledged and unexpressed pain to enter me.  Although it wasn't my pain, I felt it anyway. It's known as empathy.
I realise now that my meditation wasn't a failure.  It just wasn't what I was used to or expected.  Yoga has taught me that we shouldn't be focussed on the the outcome of our actions.  It's the actions themselves we should focus on. (That's a principle in Magic as well.)  Meditation is meant to make us completely aware of the present.  The guru who led the pranayama workshop told us a yogi is  "one who is in control."  That doesn't mean being a controlling person, but being in control of ourselves.  We can't always control our circumstances, but we always have the choice of how we react to them. Therein lies our control, our power.

I began the workshop with expectations of another outcome, but just because I didn't bliss-out doesn't mean I failed.  That strange and unpleasant meditation was a learning experience. And when I can't let go of the western win-lose paradigm, I remember that we learn more from so-called failures than we do from success.  I'm learning how to learn.
Perform your duty without attachment, remaining equal to success or failure.  Such equanimity of mind is called yoga.
- Bhagavad Gita
Namaste.
- G.P.