Day 17
One of my favorite cues that I hear in a Yoga class is something like “Can you find ease?” My teachers usually offer this cue when they’ve put us into a posture that is really pushing the edge. That’s causing our face to contract into a grimace. Our teeth to grit. Our breath to catch. Namely, I’m usually given this reminder when I’m in a posture that isn’t easy. Can you find ease? I respond by laughing, most of the time, because it seems so ridiculous to ask us to find ease during a time like this. But then, I scan my body, and I find that one place, that one corner of me, that can soften just a bit more. I release the hold on my breath. I unclench my teeth. I let my eyebrows drift apart from one another.
My mom used to do something similar to my teachers when I was a kid. I frowned a lot when I was little, better to judge all of the adults around me, I suppose. My mom would catch my furrowed eyebrows, and rub her thumb in between them. Helping my face to relax. Allowing me to find ease, even if there were parts of me that felt stressed or overstimulated. My mom was always teaching me about balance in some way. It’s been one of the most important teachings of my life, and one I keep returning to. How do you find ease when something is not easy?
I turned to the dictionary, of course, to determine what my intuitive question meant in a literal sense. Merriam-Webster describes easy (adjective) as: “causing or involving little difficulty or discomfort,” while ease (noun) reads: “the state of being comfortable.” Easy, I think, points to the amount of effort that is required. While ease says something about how we choose to apply that effort. Will I apply my effort with force, judgement, and grit? Or will I find a way to soften, to open to what is being offered, to move in a way that is sustainable? Those are the questions that I am offered on the mat. And those are the questions that translate into literally every other area of my life.
I have thought about this as it pertains to race work, too. By and large, I think most would agree that race work is not easy. It is unpredictable and anger-inducing and often seems to ask more of us than we have capacity for. How often have we stared at a phone screen during one of these moments in our history, frozen, with no idea how to proceed? The task is too great. And what we are striving for is too hard, too impossible to even conceive. Race work is not easy.
I wonder, though, what the keys are to finding ease in this practice. I wonder if it is possible to recognize that none of this work is easy, but that, perhaps, we can still find ease and softening in our efforts.
A Practice for Today:
Consider your exhaustion. When do you feel most drained or hopeless when it comes to your work around race? When do you feel most energized and empowered? What would it look like to find ease, in this “work” that is not easy? Where can you stop wasting energy or applying force to something (or someone) that is not ready to move? Where can you soften?
