Poetry and Yoga

It occurred to me after my last post that I haven't shared any of my poetry for a while, or written about my yoga practice. So, here's a short update on both.

At last I've been getting some more yoga work my way; I have a private client who's been having sessions with me for the past three weeks, and I had the opportunity to cover three weeks of group classes recently too. It's interesting how being in the Kundalini Yoga teacher role pushes me to excel to my capacity, and encourages me to walk my talk and have more integrity. Yogi Bhajan's emphasis on creating teachers rather than disciples was one way of helping us all to develop ourselves. When you stand in front of someone as a teacher, you are a representative of their higher consciousness, and that should not be betrayed.

So I've been working on speaking my truth, and getting more in touch with what that is, lately. A fascinating part of this process has been studying Yogi Bhajan's book 'The Mind', as part of a self-study for my Continuous Professional Development (a requirement to continue to be registered with my yoga governing body). One key teaching from this book is to only speak or act when the positive and negative minds have been balanced and you are in touch with your Neutral Mind. The Neutral Mind is the way that your soul speaks to you: the truth uncluttered by fear, prejudice and past actions. It's simply the truth of this moment.

Last night my friend Lou-Ice and I were talking about being in the moment and how that often means letting other things fall away; things you might have planned to do, but just aren't right when the particular moment comes. There is of course a balance between this and observing one's commitments!

And finally, a poem that I've been working on.It was inspired by a beautiful photograph (see below) by Lydia Panas of teenage girls that I saw at a recent gallery exhibition on an 'artist's date'. It's a bit 'dark' but I hope it makes you think...it might even remind you of your teenage years!

Invincible

Their faces are set:

chins jutting against the sharp

of what they cannot reach.

At night they go out,

take pills to line the longing

of their empty stomachs.

When they were five and their

bellies were round and soft

they did somersaults on the grass

before they sat on the toilet crying

"Daddy, I'm fat."

Hip-hop lyrics dazzle

off their pierced tongues,

their tongues so traitorous,

new revolutions spilt

like guilt pennies in the gutter of Monday.

How can they trust you

when behind their eyelids

there are a million worlds

without you in them?

Their eyes don't look at you:

they look into their own minds,

bore into their own bodies.

Their silence is weighted

with the words they don't know

to ask for what they want.

Tight-covered thighs

wait for the touch

of hard hands.

A Time for Every Season

I'm often amazed by the effect of uplifting company on my mood. Yesterday I was feeling a bit down and bored with the whole Stay-at-Home Mom routine. Morning time felt like wading through quicksand as I tried to eat my breakfast, read to J, and deal with his frustration when he couldn't get Eeyore to fit on top of the microwave.

Meeting up with a good friend and fellow mother later that afternoon, in the lovely Royal Pavilion Gardens, I caught some unexpected sunshine - both in the sky and in my mood. The key, for me, is honesty. I've met with fellow mom friends where that plain-speaking connection was absent, and gone away feeling even more alone. Susan Maushart's book The Mask of Motherhood discusses the phenomenon of mothers pretending everything is OK to each other, and therefore robbing themselves of the true support they could offer each other.

I'm not having any truck with that anymore. The ambivalence of motherhood, as well as tips and tricks on how to handle toddler tantrums, are the bread and butter of my conversations with my peers. Being a stay-at-home mom but feeling guilty for wishing you could get away sometimes. Or being a work-ouside-the-home mom and feeling guilty for being away so much.


One of the less-talked about things my friend and I discussed was the successive 'stages' of motherhood. How, now that we've got past the first year (and I'm nearly done with the second), it's hard to look back to that symbiotic, all-consuming early motherhood stage. Like once you are a teenager, you dissociate yourself from the things of childhood, not wanting to be reminded of that painful dependence.


Similarly, I find I'm gravitating more towards mothers of older children, those my son's age or older. Those who can show me the progression a little further down the line, and who are not still completely wrapped up in the newborn stage, where you live, eat, breathe and sleep baby. I'm also starting to do things such as plan poetry gigs, like my upcoming ones with my Writing Sisters Collective at Brighton Poetry Society on the 27th July, and the Out of The Ordinary Festival in September. You can listen to some of my performance poetry on my My Space page.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with the 'submersion' stage, and it's entirely appropriate at that stage. I was like that too. But now I'm starting to spread my wings and take moves towards re-establishing my own life. Today I visited the Brighton Buddhist Centre, had a chat about their programme of study and meditation and sat in their shrine room in much-needed silence; sat on the seafront and meditated looking at the sea; read a short story; went to the library; and now I'm procrastinating before getting down to some work on my short stories! All of these things rejuvenate me and bring me back to a sense of who I am, in parallel to J's increasing independence.



(Image courtesy of Brighton Buddhist Centre website)