an ah-ha! moment

okay, i wrote the name of the post and now i’ve got “workin’ for the weekend” stuck in my head – way to go!
at any rate, it’s six-thirty in the morning and i am up and typing because A) i was having trouble getting back to sleep after getting up to let the dog out and B) i figured something out.

first of all, let me explain just a bit about my new clients, “the busybodies”. this is the same gentleman i mentioned in an earlier post whom i find very demanding and invasive and his girlfriend who is so vata i do not know where to begin. they both work high-stress jobs, are very wealthy, seem to buy into a very superficial lifestyle, and “feed” off the high of running in circles. please forgive me if i offend anyone here but i am about to reveal my own awful prejudices: i knew i was up to a challenge when i drove up to their cookie-cutter home in the suburbs and found their house by locating the enormous hummer with the bush ‘04 stickers on the bumper – if you’ve seen the show weeds you will have the perfect mental image here and if you haven’t, then you must immediately! he seems much more open to the true lessons of yoga and has the desire to really dive in and discover some things along this path – and note: he is the one who has arranged for and is paying for these lessons – but she doesn’t seem to have a clue or be open to getting one! she is so thin that i fear for her health and she has an enormously hard time stopping the “monkey mind” which then just spills out as incessant chatter – even in balances i cannot seem to shut her up!
the first thing they explained to me when i met them yesterday for their second lesson (after they showed up thirty minutes late and running around like chickens with their heads cut off!) was that i needed to “work [them] harder” because she was a little sore but he wasn’t at all – they just don’t get it yet! it’s going to take a while.
and so….
i’ve been looking for a way to relate to them what we are trying to find in the practice of yoga in a way that might make sense to them. the spiritual path might be a bit much for her to take all at once – she doesn’t seem to have ever taken a step down that path in her life other than perhaps praying to god for things she wants or when she is in a crisis – i should stop being judgemental, i know, but i am trying to paint a picture of the ground zero i am starting from so it will be a glorious story when (hopefully) i one day write a post about how she’s woken up and made such progress.
i suddenly began using the term “habits of tension” while teaching them the first time (i don’t know where these things come to me but they just do like i’m being told what to say from a source outside of myself – which makes me have delusions of being a prophet of sorts which is silly and fun to think about!). i began to point out, gently each of their habits of tension when a posture would reveal them…. his jammed neck and tight jaw…her contorted shoulder…his shoulders creeping up to his earlobes…her chatter…
and then as i was lying in bed this morning it made sense to teach them logically that our yoga will be a giant subtraction problem (although i don’t like the word problem in that phrase). if you are stressed in body and mind, then logically the easiest and most direct way is to seek out the sources of that stress and eliminate them/ease them/subract them. and if you decide that your job or your relationships or factors that you can’t eliminate are the source, then you have to eliminate the harmful manner in which you are storing and/or processing them. but first you must make that important decision not to let your body and mind be a processing plant for stress – you must decide that you no longer want to manufacture dis-ease no matter how beautifully you plan on packaging it and how clever your ad campaign is to sell it to the world around you.
so if body and mind are indeed connected (and getting them to change their minds is definately more abstract while dealing with their bodies is more direct and obviously something they relate to being appearance oriented and all) then working with the body is the route to take to ease their minds!
so i’m going to make a campaign to begin actively identifying their “habits of tension” and begin replacing them with “habits of peace”. i once read a great quote that said something to the effect of: if you’re standing there saying to yourself “something’s gotta change!” then by-god something’s gotta change!
so they (or at least he) has made the first step by hiring me and saying “i need help – this has to change” so let’s see how we can begin do that…. one. little. habit. at. a. time. step. by. step.
down the path we go…..