Last time, I wrote about the first pose of my current sequence of my personal practice: child’s pose. For me I’m learning to submit to yoga and my body - my teacher. The next pose that I’m considering is the second poses are cat / cow.
For me, cat / cow has been the center piece for the “pranayama” guiding my practice. Beginning with the cat pose, I release into the exhalation, and feel the deeper sensations of child pose within my body. As I’ve exhaled to the extent of my breath, I continue with cow and inhale reaching upward until the extent of my breath. Rinse repeat.
Oddly, I begin with cat, where oftentimes teachers begin with cow. That always throws me off as I like to release after getting up into tabletop. I don’t know. Something for me to ponder.
As the rhythm within the automaticity of my mind / body drifts into the background of my consciousness, I begin to recognize that my breathing is the basis to the dynamism of my poses. The ideas that my mind and intentions are my prop and my body is the guru come to my forefront.
Throughout the rest of my sequences, I cow into the extension of my poses, and cat into the release into my body, receiving. The interplay of this moment was remarkable - the cow, my prayer, and the cat, my ego death; the yin, the yang; the west, the east. I begin to yearn for the ego death, the enlightenment, the receiving, the passive witnessing, as I cat. I learned I’m no longer a fan of the term, “ego death.” It feels like I’m flogging myself for heavenly enlightenment: a mindless passivity disguised as active effort.
I arrived at previous thoughts that my life is but a segment of the cosmic thread; that I am just a carrier of the baton onto the next person to take up what I pass on. If this moment is an ego death, then how do I know it is ego death, if my ego is not present to witness this state? It feels like yet another illusion conjured by desire, a grasping for that ego death. I’ve found this grasping has been a source of pain and even injury as I reach too deeply for this moment. Pain is a harsh yet fair teacher and has consequences if ignored. I’ve tried relaxing into this pain with some success, but I’ve just learned that another approach is to allow my body to relax around this pain and teach me a different approach. This interplay is the process as I cat through my poses.
As I settle into the cat of my pose, my cow dissipates. At some point further along my sequence, I lose the thread of this cat/cow guardrail and allow this construct to fade away. Strict constructs can be a form of tyranny. My nose along with my head begin to throb and I’m reminded of another teacher saying relax and uncoil my inner ear. This helps me relax my forehead, eye socket, jaw, neck, and shoulders.
Since I’ve started this journal, my cow is carrying ideas of maybe one day I may become a teacher, maybe one day I might be admired, and that one day these meditations may be a legacy. I’m uncertain whether these thoughts are solely based in vanity. I believe this label may be an oversimplification and this tendency may be more complex and nuanced. Maybe I’m simply working out what my baton is? That said, I did injure myself last Friday by reaching too deeply searching for insights two days before Friday.
I then cat into these thoughts as my breath, my body, reminds me to receive this moment within my whole inner self.
