Rest

Last Saturday, my friend Glenna and I went to the second annual YogaFest NC and were treated to a full day of well-planned amazingness.

I feel like I should recount the whole day to fully give props to the organizers, but I'm a tad distracted right now and there are two things I keep returning to:

1) Morning Meditation. The instructor who led this class spoke something to this effect: "Many of our experiences are emotional and do not require immediate action. In fact, they suffer from it. Get angry, get sad, get happy - observe it, process it, and then act on it."

2) Yoga Nidra. Yoga Nidra is referred to as "yogic sleep" and it uses savasana as a tool to take the student into different levels of consciousness. Our guide for this practice was a lively sprite of a yoga instructor who gave us a roadmap for where we were going by explaining she would first call our attention to each part of our bodies - twice - and then proceed with a visualization process.

The room was dark and slightly chilly. Nearly two hundred students lay in various forms of corpse pose. Glenna shared her sandalwood spray with two ladies near us. We all settled in. Our teacher began to speak.

Your right hand. Your right thumb. Your right second finger....

....Your right wrist. Your right forearm....

Up the right arm, down the right side, then she began again on the left. I felt a momentary warmth in the places she called my attention to. My breathing continued to level.

Now here's where it gets weird.

Somewhere around her pronouncing Your left shin my mind, my consciousness, went somewhere else. I heard her speaking but the words were washed into the hum of the harmonium. I was settled in my body, my skin a thin shell containing my soul.

What brought me back was a pain in the back of my head. I can only assume that my I had cut some circulation off to a surface vein on my skull in my stillness. When I swam up, our teacher was in the middle of ascending the chakras. She was at the root chakra when her words regained meaning. I followed her words as she ascended through the pillar of the body and then she had us take leave from the cave that she had brought us to while I was out hanging on some stars.

I think I'd like to go back there sometime.