Last night, I did some yoga for the first time in ages. The yoga I trained in - Authentic Flow - uses familiar postures and sequencing, but also incorporates free movement and somatics. If you’re anything like I was before I did my yoga teacher training, the words ‘free movement’ may have caused you to shudder (while conjuring up the ‘Rainbow Rhythms’ episode of Peep Show), but trust me - it’s magic. Doing the training and changing the way I think about yoga has genuinely been one of the best things to happen to me, but, like lots of other things, I’ve neglected it recently.
Towards the end of my practice last night, I was struck again - as I have been so many times since I started doing it - that moving my body and connecting to myself in an unstructured way is one of the biggest contributors to my well-being. When I’m connected to my body, my mind (which is defined in Human Design, and a total busy bee) is able to take a back seat, even if just for a minute. I feel moments of peace that are near impossible to come by when I’m not practising. And I feel connected to the world in a way that feels magical. I see possibility, my heart is more open, I feel more love. It’s such a nice feeling.
As I lay on my yoga mat last night, I had a realisation that magic has been sorely lacking in my life of late. Back in November, for a bunch of reasons, I went back to the office. After hustling for freelance work for 3 years, having a regular income has been a welcome balm to my scarcity mindset, but I’ve also found it a challenge. I’ve missed working from home so much: I miss my cats, miss being able to plan my days. I’m depleted from sitting at a desk in front of a computer for hours on end, and I’ve struggled to adjust to the two days a week where I’m out of the house for near on 12 hours at a time. I know that even being able to notice this is something many people don’t have the luxury to do, and I feel very lucky that I even have the option to return to freelance work. But even with this knowledge, I’ve still found it a big adjustment.
I’ve also found that office work, in the 9-5 pattern really restricts my access to magic. There just isn’t the space and time to drop into the things that bring me joy anymore. I feel like I did when I was working 50+ hours a week in Detroit, even though I’m doing substantially less than that. My mind feels slow, my body is heavy, and by the time it gets to my one full day off each week, I’ve got very little inclination or energy for much other than reading and podcasts. Most evenings, I crawl into bed at 8pm and pass out by 9. It felt like a huge win to have managed some time on my mat for 25 minutes last night, and reminded me that it is always worth pushing through the resistance for something I love.
One of the ways that I’m most easily able to access magic is through music. Authentic Flow yoga is always accompanied by music, so it was a total game changer for me when I started practicing with an accompaniment. At times, the combination of the music and the movement together have led to some of the most profound feelings I’ve ever experienced. When I’m doing a proper class, I plan out the songs to fit with the sequence, but if I’m just looking to drop in for half an hour, I tend to shuffle a huge playlist of songs and trust whatever comes on. One of the songs it gave me last night was Untitled #8 by Sigur Ros, which I’ve never moved to in yoga before, and it was total bliss just to be carried by it. What a fucking song. It felt so good to be moving. My yoga teacher, Satu, always tells us: ‘let your body speak,’ and I felt that happen, as I moved around - in and out of sun salutations and cat/cows - especially after being still for so long.
Later: a song called Abandon Window by Jon Hopkins. As it started, I felt tears prick my eyes. As I always do when I hear this song, I thought about the first time I really heard it. I was in Portugal, on my aforementioned 200hr YTT, and I was practising for my exam - a 45-minute class taught through an access point in the body (I’d chosen the nervous system). We were on a break between sessions, and I’d taken my mat up to the orange tree orchard that sat next to the Shala. I say it was an orchard - it was a bit patchy - but it was beautiful: overgrown and wild; bees and butterflies everywhere. The day was warm, the sky a bright blue, strewn with huge fluffy clouds, overcasting the sun now and then. I ran through my sequence with the music, talking to myself as I did so, imagining what I would say and when. I was so nervous about teaching the class, but I found comfort in the practice and the music.
I had chosen Abandon Window for the part of the sequence where I wanted to drop the group into their parasympathetic nervous system. I wanted to invite them to consider what it would feel like to give themselves the loving support they so often give to others. What it would really feel like to direct that compassion inwards. I wanted to encourage them, first, to wrap their arms around themselves, to give themselves a hug, and then, to simply put their hand on their heart, and send love to themselves. To feel the weight of their own hands on their chests, to tune in to the soft moment where they felt their body say “yes.”
As I lay there in the orchard, with my own hand on my heart, I was flooded with feelings: for the beauty of the place; for the gesture of sending myself love; for the bigger act of love it had been to send myself on this training on a total whim; and for the music. Abandon Window is such a simple song: only a few chords played in a sequence throughout, but there’s a lot going on. Underneath the piano line is a gathering sensation; a blend of sounds: subtle strings, static, white noise, a rumbling, like wind or thunder, but lower and more resonant. At the end of the song, the sound of fireworks can be heard, but it could easily be thunder, or the sound of a bomb, or the aftermath of an earthquake. I realise that all these things sound alarming, but that’s not how it feels in the song. For me, it’s a slow build to a culmination of an emotion I can’t always place. It grounds me, and it makes me feel here. It’s deliberate. It takes its time. It peaks and falls away and then peaks again. When I hear it, I feel like everything is stripped off me - all the noise, all the thoughts, all the interference, and I’m left with a pure connection to my heart. Everything else falls away, and I’m brought face to face with the present, whatever is there. And crucially, it’s all ok: whether it’s awful or beautiful, or both, it’s all there at once.
Listening to the song, in the orchard was magic. A feeling I can’t really explain; an indescribable oneness with the world. Unconditional love for myself and everyone else. Seeing my life flash through my mind in a less than second and forgiving myself for it all. As a recovering perfectionist, I’m hesitant to use the word ‘perfect,’ but it did feel like that: a perfect moment. A whole moment. A complete moment. I felt simultaneously part of everything and like I was floating above it all. I was so lost in the perfection of the moment that I missed the start time of the next class. Satu likes to start class on time, and I’m a stickler for being on time but it didn’t seem to matter. One of my course mates came and gave me a nudge and, of course, the moment dissolved, but I carried a glow with me, even as the hyper-vigilant part of myself scrambled to roll up my mat and join the rest of my group for the next class.
There were so many moments like that during the two weeks of training, and when I hear that song now, it always takes me back: firstly to that moment, but secondly to that time and space. I think not only of that half an hour lying in the orange trees, but of the training as a whole: the place, the people, the practices, the uniqueness of the experiences. One of my Ayurveda teachers once described the experience of embodying prana - life force energy - as existing on the knife edge of your life. That's what it felt like in Portugal: like life was playing out in technicolour. Everything was heightened. I was poised and present. I was deep in the experience. I was doing and saying things I had never done before. I was moving in ways I had never moved before. I was interacting with new and different people from all over the world. I was in my body so much more than I had ever been before. I was also pregnant.
Mid-way through the second week of the training when some light spotting hadn’t materialised into my period, I had developed a hunch that I might be, but I hadn't acted upon it. After years of trying, and two rounds of IVF, the possibility of conceiving naturally felt impossible. Yet, the signs were all there: I recognised them from the previous time, even as I convinced myself I was making it all up.
I felt suspended between two worlds: I didn’t know for sure, and unlike all the other times I had suspected a pregnancy, I didn’t have an easy way of finding out. We were in the middle of nowhere, miles from a town. And besides, I knew instinctively that I didn’t want to find out until the end of the training, or at least until after I had finished my exam. I knew whatever the result of the test was, that it would change the experience I was having, and I didn’t want to change the experience. That was a total step change for me. I actually felt fine. I was walking around in a bubble, insulated by the group, and the landscape and the weather and the birds and the lavender and the rosemary and the bees. I was there to do yoga and have the experience, and the rest could wait. Given the heartache of the previous three years, this felt almost like an out-of-body experience: my sudden ability to be ok with the not-knowing, the capacity I had to put it in a box - not to bury it, but just ‘for now.’ As I write this today, I’m not really sure how I contained it. Maybe my nervous system was just really regulated. Whatever it was, it would be a few more days before I took the test, on the last evening after the final exam had finished, the day before I flew back to England.
Fast-forward a few weeks later, and I’m at home, practising yoga, as I’ve done most mornings since returning from Portugal. My mat is in the middle of the room, so the sunlight falls right across it, warming my face as I lie in savasana at the end. And then Abandon Window shuffles on through my headphones and I hear that song for the first time since I’ve been home, and it catches me off guard all over again. In a flash, everything falls away: the feeling of dread about the impending scan the next day (which will confirm my suspicions that I’m having a second missed miscarriage). The anxiety and fear and sadness that has dogged me, following the change I felt in my body; when I felt sure I knew that the spark had gone out. It all dissipates in the opening bars of the song.
And then I am crying again, but not because I’m miscarrying, but because I’m remembering the magic of my time in Portugal. It was real. It happened. It had not been a dream. The place, those people, that experience: it all happened. The song takes me right back there, and I taste the feeling that I had in the orchard, and how protected and safe I had felt in my insulated bubble during those two weeks. And I’m overwhelmed by a feeling of gratitude for it all, even as I know what is happening in my body. I have a feeling that it will all be ok, even if I can't fathom how, and I’m comforted by that.
It’s so easy to get caught up. All of this flashes through my head in a few short moments on a rainy evening in March, almost a year later. My current life is sorely lacking in magic, but in these moments, I’m grounded by the knowledge that the magic is missing, and it is the magic that I want to get back. That I’ve tried to return to the world of 9-5 office work and it hasn’t worked for me. That even though the previous three years have brought the most difficult moments of my life, they have also brought the best. And that in between moments of intense grief, those quieter years at home have provided the greatest opportunities for magic. It didn’t happen all the time, of course, but there was time and space for it to emerge; time and space which is missing now.
Why can’t I carve out the time for it? There’s always something more ‘important.’ Even though I know this statement is false, my brain and nervous system are so hardwired into these patterns, I can’t easily notice or break free from them. If I have actions to complete - particularly things that the “real world” tells me are important - then the things I love: writing, music, movement, being in nature, all fade to the background. It sounds like a grim realisation, but there’s also hope: I’m restored, knowing that change is on the horizon. I feel lucky that we’re in a position where change is possible. I’m reminded again how necessary our upcoming move is, and how the experiment that I’m currently engaged in is not working, and will soon be coming to a close (I hope!)
In a lovely serendipitous moment, the day after I began writing this post, Elise Loehnen, who presents one of my favourite podcasts (Pulling the Thread), interviewed Katherine May, about her latest book Enchantment. The book, which I am excited to read, focuses on the everyday ways that we can find wonder and magic in our lives. During the podcast, they talk at length about the ways that this can be made possible. I loved the threads of nature and embodiment that ran through the conversation, especially the idea that our embodied experience is the place from which we are able to experience moments of enchantment most deeply. I also loved their conversation about writing, and the way Elise so beautifully explained the idea that writing is not only how she processes things, but is a way for what is she is experiencing to be brought into the body and integrated. That writing is a way to tune into the world. This conversation, coupled with my yoga experience this week was a powerful reminder of so much that I know, deep in my heart, but which has been forgotten in the endless grind of day-to-day work. As we move closer and closer to our completion date, I’m going to try and make space for more magic where I can (and I’m off to order Enchantment now!)
