Just a Phase

It’s a full moon tonight, my yoga teacher reminds us, which may have a negative effect on the energy in class today. And after a sweaty flow of feeling floppy and off-balance and ungraceful, I could see what he meant.

Mornings at home I wake up with a simple twentyish-minute routine, mostly just to make sure I move at least a little bit every day. But in the three short months since returning to regular yoga, it’s my Sunday practice that I’ve come to relish. I’m out of my house, onto my mat, and focused only on my breath and following the sequence. As someone who spends a lot of time alone with her thoughts, it’s during these 90 minutes that I feel the most clear and open and lucid. At least once per week, I feel that am moving with purpose.

In these moments of lucidity, I find myself channeling, or conjuring, really, situations and emotions that fuel my energy for the days ahead. I imagine this is what Sherlock’s ‘memory palace’ is like, a kind of complex, crystalline structure of evocation, full of drawers and doors and windows to pull open.

Often I transport myself to when I developed my yoga practice in Boston, reminding me that I can get stronger, I will get stronger, I have done it before. Sometimes I’ll recall a snippet of a conversation, and the perfect line for a piece of writing I’ve been turning around in my head will appear to me then, a revelation. Or maybe I'll simply imagine myself picking raspberries on a farm just up the road from my favorite North Shore beach, smelling the salt air and the berry’s perfume. 

An open mind, however, is no guarantee of envisioning endless raspberry patches.

No, on this full moon morning, my open mind instead invited thoughts of self doubt and loneliness. Lying on my back in savasana, I get stuck in a dire loop of feeling lost and aimless, homesick for another time, or maybe another life. Homesick nonetheIess. I suppose, like the moon, that this phase will pass. And once more next week, I’ll feel again that I am moving with purpose.