Pulling a Britt Paul with the lyrics =)

So I asked a friend about it on a bad day
Her husband had just left her
She sat down on a chair he'd left behind, she said
"What is love? Where did it get me?
Whoever thought of love is no friend of mine."

-- from "Iowa" by Dar Williams

If you're reading this, chances are pretty good you know how I get when I find a song that really truly resonates within me. I listen to it several hundred times, write out the lyrics if they're special enough, read them, listen to every version of the song, sing it, try to play it (usually failing miserably at this), and even take moments of meditation to it if it gets to that.

For some reason, this song "Iowa" has been resonating with me for the last couple days. This line specifically-- though there are other lines I want to say more-- sends a shiver down and up my spine every time I hear it and I can't explain why. It doesn't seem particularly profound, except for the fact that Dar's watery voice singing these words paints a lovely somber image in my mind.

But in the midst of this week's despair and hopelessness, it brought me back to remember why I'm doing what I'm doing.

I don't know if everyone has these moments, but when a work of poetry, writing, music, film, etc. touches me so deeply, I just fall apart. I shed something. I am stripped of everything I thought I was, and I disappear into its art. Sometimes these moments are explainable-- Walt Whitman has many spiritual teachings in his poetry-- but sometimes, like with this song "Iowa," I don't know why I'm so moved. Yet I discover that moment of reconnection in these works, and this is what brought me to be an English major when I was so set on health. And you know what I'm realizing as I write this? This spiritual connection I find in certain works of art is part of healing.

So on a day when I am disheartened (or pulled apart at the seams more like it) over a bad grade on a paper I truly thought I had nailed, it was lovely Dar Williams who reconnected me with my purpose. Behind these words I found the message, "Get up. Get back at it."

A nice passage

"But she feared time itself, and read on Lady Bruton's face, as if it had been a dial cut in impassive stone, the dwindling of life; how year by year her share was sliced; how little of the margin that remained was capable any longer of stretching, of absorbing, as in the youthful years, the colours, the salts, tones of existence, so that she filled the room she entered, and felt often as she stood hesitating one moment on the threshold of her drawing-room, an exquisite suspense, such as might stay a diver before plunging while the sea darkens and brightens beneath him, and the waves which threaten to break, but only gently split their surface, roll and conceal and encrust as they just turn over the weeds with pearl."

--Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, p. 30

The Liberation of Yoga

In conversation tonight, I had an epiphany. I've been taking huge strides in my yoga practice lately, and it occurred to me recently how funny it is that some of the yoga poses are so neat looking, yet yoga has nothing to do with how "cool" something looks. Asanas have much deeper meaning to true yogis than simply getting in shape and doing cool things with your body. I hadn't even thought until recently how great some of the things I can do appear, yet I'm so detached from it. I think it's a beautiful art, but the practice goes so deep.

So my epiphany was that when we do yoga, we're primarily stretching our spiritual body. Through intentional movements, meditation, and connection to the earth, we are allowing our spiritual body to become strong, controlled, and flexible. That then moves into the mental body, which makes our thoughts so as well. Once our yoga has penetrated the mental body, it goes into our emotional body and does the same. And finally, it moves into our physical body. The physical body, as well, becomes strong, controlled, and flexible, allowing us to move forward in our practice on all levels. Having penetrated all layers of our being, we are freed of prior limitations, habits, and of who we once were. We can move on into being our new selves, our best selves. In every part of the self, we are liberated through yoga.