Learning to soften

Learning to soften

by guest blogger Lia Aprile of Shanti-Town

If you’ve got your own website and would like to write a guest article for The Yoga Lunchbox on anything related to yoga or meditation, get in touch.

I have recently started a meditation practice.  Again.

I am several weeks in at this point, and things have been going pretty well so far, but the last week of this new-found practice has coincided with a particularly rigorous yoga schedule (there’s some ass-kicking virus going around, apparently, because all of my teachers have suddenly decided to make their classes twice as hard) and the beginning of the hottest week of summer so far AND the week before my lady-time (aw, yeeah).

All of which, combined, has left me just generally hot and aggravated—a feeling which is not easily abated by forcing myself to sit still for 15 minutes a day, when all I really want to do is punch stuff.

But, sitting still I have been, and one day, last week, while perched on my couch cushion/meditation pillow, NOT having fun, NOT feeling relaxed, feeling, in fact, like I would rather be doing ANYTHING than sitting in my own skin, I had the following realizations:

The first was that I was, in mimic of the I-want-to-crawl-out-of-my-own-skin feeling, actually physically lifting away from the floor.  My hip-flexors were straining, my butt was clenched, my thighs were working, as if desperate to levitate.  My eyebrows were raised, the skin around my skull clenched (“gripping my brain” I call this), my shoulders were imperceptibly lifted, all of me all of me all of me telegraphing via my body: Get. Me. Out of here.

And at first I tried to r-e-l-a-x.  I tried to enter my heeeeart and get in my body and breeeeeeeathe…and a whole bunch of other stuff that was only serving to make me more and more unbearably irritated.  Which is usually the point at which I toss up my hands, cry “see! this is why meditation isn’t for me!” and promptly find something more interesting (and infinitely less productive) to do.  But I did not want to do that this time.  I’d made a commitment, damnit, and I was going to stick with it!

And so I remained.  And rather quickly, a thought occurred to me.  As I felt irritation rushing through my body, as I felt my skin growing hotter and hotter, as I felt the energy-suck of clenched shoulders and eyeballs, I suddenly realized that maybe all this commanding myself to relax was actually just as stressful as what I was trying to get away from.  Maybe I was using spiritual sweety-sweet language, but still not actually paying attention to my body or my mind.

I felt that heat again, like a red blush spreading over me.  And then the very familiar sensation of me…trying too hard.  Trying too hard.  How many times have I been diagnosed with that pesky little virus?

And then, from out of the blue, came a single, quiet, solitary word:

Soften.

It came to me so sweetly, and the word was like cool water on my over-heated body.  Just soften.  I heard myself say.  Soften.

And my butt began to unclench (soften), and my thighs relaxed (softened), and my belly un-gripped (soften) and my shoulders and eyebrows and skull and eyeballs (soften, soften, soften), and the space around my heart (soften), and with that softening…with the softening of my heart…came such sweetness.  And each time I tried to rev my motor, each time a stressful thought made itself known in the spaces, I found I could remind myself…soften…and unlike so many of the “prescriptions” I had been trying before, this edict required no compromise, no finagling, because implicit in the word, soften, was an…equanimity.  An openness.  Not another attempt to banish what was unwanted, but instead a door swinging open to let it all in.  I was becoming soft, even in the face of stress.  Not choosing another room where stress didn’t know the combination lock, but choosing instead to stay—to softly stay—right there next to it.

Now, it is entirely possible that you are reading this and you are like, “yeah, man, I know all about that news…soft is the waaaay too go.”  And if that’s the case, you may be one of those naturally soft ones who find that your challenge is to engage—perhaps you tend to be too soft, or always soft, and find yourself retreating into fluidy flowy goodness even when what you really need to be doing is giving your life a bit of muscle.

I am not such a person.

For me this softness, it felt like the answer to something—It felt like I had finally found the release button on the pressure cooker of me.  And I thought about my body, and about how the deepening of my yoga practice has lit up all these parts of my body that respond to stress in my daily off-the-mat life—an unconscious clenching here and there—and how that physicalization of stress is, for me, so much about a pulling away, a lifting up, a warding off—and this one simple request, soften, can do just that.  It can soften me.  I thought about how, when I am at my most riled up, I am anything but soft…I am loud and bumpy and hard-edges, and how far a bit of softness…in fights with my partner, in long-lines, in hard conversations, might actually go.

If you look up soft in the dictionary, you will find, among the many definitions, the following:

yielding readily to touch or pressure;
easily penetrated, divided, or changed in shape;
not hard or stiff:
a soft pillow.
gentle or mild:
soft breezes.
responsive or sympathetic to the feelings,
emotions,
needs, of others:
tender-hearted
fusing readily.

May we all be soft like pillows, easily penetrated, easily fused and the tenderest of the tenderhearted.

Wishing you (and myself) much softness…

xo,

YogaLia

Lia Aprile

Lia Aprile is an actress, writer and avid yogi, who will soon add “certified yoga teacher” to her list of things-which-she-is.

When she’s not peddling her headshots or perfecting her handstand, Lia can be found tending to her yoga blog, Shanti Town—which is definitely about yoga, but mostly about life (the messy kind).

She is also an “expert blogger” on Wellsphere, an online health and wellness site, and is proud to add this contribution to the Yoga Lunchbox to her growing list of writing credits.  For Lia’s actress-y goings on, you can check her out here.

More from Lia’s yoga blog, Shanti Town:

• Blow it out people
  
• To invert or not to invert
  
• Being nice to Mickey Rourke Almost

If you’ve got your own website and would like to write a guest article for The Yoga Lunchbox on anything related to yoga or meditation, get in touch.