I love words, and it’s a relatively new love affair. Writing was not a strength I had as a child or even as a young adult. Maybe it was my tough English teacher, Mrs. Nicole, in middle school who never seemed pleased with anything or my bad spelling but it just wasn’t something that came easy to me. I had many other creative expressions and since words did not flow naturally, they held little interest for me.
While I attended graduate school to become an exhibit designer, I went with the intention to learn to write, really write, and discovered metaphors. It was similar to the scene when the house lands on top of the Wicked Witch and Dorothy emerges in a new land. I was not in Kansas anymore.
Words in the right patterns could paint pictures. Pictures that had nuances like those of colors and textures which were familiar to me as a designer. But not just literal pictures of objects and landscapes, people and spaces, but pictures with multiple meanings and rich places for digging deeper.
Over the years, my love of words has grown. While I still love metaphors and their richness, things have become simpler. Now, I just love exploring single words. As life spirals around, the connections are revealed. A friend shared a beautiful book where writer and poet, David Whyte, did just that in his book, Consolations. It’s so worth the read for the beautiful reframes and nuances of 52 words.
Flexibility is not one of his words. I’m making it one of mine.
Flexibility is freedom to soften in, to surrender to working with the stream of life. It’s not giving up, or compromising. It’s not pushing, or forcing into places that we are not yet ready to explore, but a reminder and invitation to be exactly where we are, to see it clearly and let go of the struggle.
The body, heart and mind have natural boundaries that are built for protection. Boundaries can be expanded with gentle coaxing and whispered calls for courage to keep taking the next step and the next one, and the one after that. Often it’s not even something we recognize until it has slipped away and our actions and bodies become constricted and rigid. Pain and limitations are not passive, silent friends. They scream for our attention and have needs that are quicksand for our time.
Flexibility is a place of gently daily tending to the garden of your soul. The drops of water, and moments of pausing to reach and relax, must answer the natural rhythms of life to keep the garden green.
To reach and pause. That’s the beauty of twists in the practice of yoga. There are many, standing, sitting and lying down twists, each with its own relationship to gravity. I’ve written about the poetic connection of twists and Duchamp’s Nude Descending the Staircase.
Seated twists are easy to do in a chair or on the floor and begin with the tailbone tethered to the earth as the point of origin for the twist. Each vertebra that grows up from the tailbone takes its turn as the spine gently spirals open from bottom to top.
It’s a slow unfolding, and softening in. Each inhale is the reach, as the crown of the head lifts toward the sky, making room in the soft spots between each vertebra. Each exhale is a softening into the spiral action. No pushing or straining, just a graceful walk into the new place the breath created.
Flexibility is the willingness to change and the quality of a life flowing with the stream of daily weather and seasons. Flexibility is bending easily without breaking because deep inside lies the unbreakable knowing of who you are.
Flexibility is saying yes to the promise of something unfamiliar and new, the risk of finding your boundaries and hearing the whispers that you are brave enough to follow through.
Flexibility is courage in action.
Be well…it’s a state of mind.
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