The theme of the Friday night session, in preparation for an active and somewhat athletic focus on healing for the remaining sessions, was making space to heal and to forgive. How timely.
I highly recommend, amidst all that is going on, pausing to recognize at least a bit of beauty.
I have been indulging in reading the thriller Angelology (complete with stories of angels and the war between good and evil), which I picked up at the Books for America shop in Dupont Circle a couple of weeks ago for the kind of night of reading that is the equivalent of a night of watching television if I had a television. Relatively early in the book, a professor says to one of the brilliant students who is a central character to the plot: “I have found that our texts will speak deeply to someone or they will say nothing whatsoever. It depends upon your sensitivity toward the subject. The mind and spirit become ripe in their own fashion and at their own pace. Beautiful music plays, but not everyone with ears can hear it.”
This statement encapsulated the ongoing thinking I do about my attraction to yoga and the tantric philosophy. I was contemplating especially deeply this week on my return from California, with no particular insight arising, what has drawn me in to this world of meditation and yoga. What am I doing, having been born in New York City and working as a civil servant in DC, coming from atheist Jewish grandparents and converted to Quakerism parents, finding such joy in learning Sankrit chants and working with energetic principles described in these ancient and medieval Indian texts? I do not doubt that the practices resonate and the texts speak to me and that the attraction is energetic, just as we are drawn to certain tastes and colors and entertainment and people and no interest arises from others. I just wonder why these practices and texts and not something else and why they hold me to such a degree that I am moved to teach them.
If it had not been for the half off coupon from Green Deals, I might not have gone to Wellbeing Massage in Dupont Circle for an ayurvedically inspired warm organic ginger oil massage after work today. But I am certainly glad I succumbed to the lure of the coupon.
It was absolutely perfect on this windy, bitter day in mid-winter to surrender, in a perfectly heated and softly lit room, to having warm oil poured onto my eyebrow center (ajna door) and having it massaged into my scalp, face, and neck and then poured on and slathered all over. With the quantity of oil used, it is more a treatment than a massage, and and such, an admirable supplement (and never a replacement) for my regular massages with long time Capitol Hill massage therapist and friend Patrick McClintock of House of Hands. For the first time in weeks, my skin feels completely hydrated, and though my house was set at 59F when I got home two hours after the treatment, I still feel warm.
If you decide you want to get one of these treatments to chase away winter cold and dryness, please mention my name (shameless solicitation; if five of you go, I get a free treatment). And if you are looking for a fantastic therapeutic massage from a wonderful person and experienced therapist, give Patrick a call. And if five of you go to get a massage with him and mention my name, maybe he and I can work out a deal donating a portion of the proceeds to D-CLAW‘s next charity of choice (that’s DC Ladies Arm Wrestling for Charity) (more on D-CLAW in a future post).
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Heh. I assume that’s the correct quote. I learned it worded slightly differently.