Learning to BE rather than DO

I took a new (well, new to ME, anyway) yoga class this morning, Core Yoga. It was completely awesome, I enjoyed it a lot. Almost as soon as I left the gym, however, I got a stabbing pain in my left deltoid muscle. For a while it hurt to breathe, but it seems to be easing off. Hopefully is just something I slept wrong on and not a serious injury.

At the end of most Yoga classes that I take, the instructors do something called Savasana, a little meditation. In English, Savasana is Corpse Pose. You're supposed to relax completely. Sometimes the instructors do a guided meditation for this part of the class, sometimes not, you're just supposed to concentrate on your breathing.

Today the instructor gave us our direction while we were still in the final pose of the sequence, which happened to be boat pose. "Imagine something, something relaxing," she trilled. (She was pretty sing-song-y throughout the whole class, it entertained me a lot.) "A child's smile, or a butterfly, floating along, just that and nothing else. Then, when I tell you to, clear your mind and think of nothing, nothing at all."

Living in the moment is very, very difficult for me. When I'm trying to sleep (and this is the biggest reason that I take a sleeping pill) my mind is busy making lists of things that need done tomorrow, or the next day, or just in general. Trying to meditate is a bit like trying to pick one instrument's sound out of a vast symphony for me. So I tried to focus on the memory of a butterfly that I followed around Lily Dale for about a half hour on my last day there, trying (unsuccessfully) to get a picture of the darn thing with its wings wide open. It was a delightful few minutes, I almost felt the wonder of being a child again, chasing after it.

I'm laying on the floor in the exercise studio of my gym, trying to remember the wind off of the lake, the butterfly bobbing along with the breeze, the flowers it landed on, and into my mind pops Jensen. So I pushed him out (blasphemy, no?) and went back to the butterfly. Then my closet with its heaping piles of stuff on the floor that I'm supposed to get into reasonable shape while I'm off pops up. Pushed that out as well. Then the laundry that isn't done, Jensen, the floors that aren't scrubbed, Jensen, the car that needs washed, Dean, the dishwasher that needs unloaded, Jensen, the weeds that need pulled, Dean, the flowers that I haven't planted, Jensen, a conversation I had with a fangirl friend about Jensen, (are we seeing a pattern here at all? No? Must be just me, then.) the mess that needs cleaned up in my bathroom, Dean, the bed that isn't made, GAH!!! Butterfly, dammit, butterfly!!!

Each time I managed to bring myself back to the meditation, only to have it disrupted with something non-related. So much disruption that I never heard her tell us to clear our minds, the next thing I knew she was having us sit up into Lotus position, exchanged "Namastes" with each student, and the class was over. It occurred to me after I left that perhaps next time I ought to choose something else to concentrate on, that whole butterfly thing wasn't really working out for me.

Being in the NOW, right this moment, has always been very tough for me. I'm always thinking ahead to what's next. But as I walked to my car, I realized that this time I've had away from work is making it easier for me to just BE, that I've got a sense of almost serenity that I've never had before. Is it the medication? Probably. Maybe. I don't know.

I finished reading "Is It Me Or Is It My Meds" and I hadn't really thought a lot about it until I cracked that book, and read about others who think the meds make them less creative people. The meds are stifling my creativity. I think. I'm having trouble writing the book. Blog posts, these rambling bits of what runs around in my head are no problem, but the book, that's a problem. Knitting, too, I'm not very interested in doing.

I feel so much better, mentally lots more stable, and I don't ever want to go back to where I was in February/March of this year. But at what price? Taking away my ability to write may just not be worth it. The last time I felt able (and excited) about writing was after that mediation class I took at Lily Dale. Perhaps I need to incorporate that into my daily routine to get "it," whatever "it" is, back.

The only reason I'm not giving up on the writing completely and saying "forget it. move on. find something else." is because I love my little story and having had at least one other person read it, I know it is worth it, there's something there, that could just turn out to be the most amazing thing I do in my life. And if Rowling could write the first Harry Potter book whilst she was unemployed AND a single mom, well, damn. I can manage it too.