Back to the Cradle

Creative nonfiction
by Ginny Mahar

It’s weird to watch your hands get old. I’m only twenty-seven and I can already see the years in the fractal lines around my knuckles and nail beds. These same hands that are already showing signs of arthritis from too many hours clenching a chef’s knife, were once pudgy and soft, wrapped in my mother’s manicured hands, clapping pat-a-cake. Life is so much about growing up now. I had forgotten what it felt like to be so soft, and so new, until a day very recently.

I hadn’t anticipated such gifts from the yoga studio down the street. I stumbled upon it out of convenience. It was February in Seattle, and I had just moved up from San Francisco, along with my life’s love, Noah. One of the first things we did after signing the lease to our Ballard home was to investigate the yoga studio we noticed down the street. As we walked the four blocks to Soma Yoga, fifteen months of California sunshine washed down our parkas into the rain gutters.

We pressed our faces up to the window so as not to disturb any classes that might be in session. The old door creaked open and we were greeted by Jean Hindle’s warm smile. She invited us in and introduced herself as the director of the yoga studio, as well as the instructor for many of the classes. Jean’s perfect posture and ageless appearance reflected her livelihood.

Stepping through the door, we entered a warm open room. Mats and blankets were neatly placed on the floor, meditation music played quietly in the background. A class had just finished, and some serene looking students were filing out.

As we chatted with Jean, she explained to us that her classes integrated something called somatic movement education with hatha yoga. I was well-acquainted with hatha yoga—a type of yoga that combines postures with breath work and meditation—but as for the somatic movement she mentioned, there were only question marks. Jean began to tell us how different physical and emotional patterns were reflected in the movement of our bodies, and how some of those movement patterns don’t serve us in the long run. Somatic movement sought to reawaken healthy movement patterns we were born with, but had forgotten in the midst of our lives’ complicated histories. The description included terms like sensory motor amnesia and neuromuscular re-patterning. I was just going to have to try it out. We thanked Jean and she sent us on our way with some literature.

Only recently had I begun to consider the ways in which all kinds of emotions and belief systems are reflected in our bodies. In San Francisco, I had been seeing a massage practitioner who was gifted in intuition. He was somehow cosmically assigned to become my guru the moment I entered the Republic of California (go figure). He loved to remind me how everything is connected to everything. It wasn’t long before I realized that the recurring back problem I had been seeing him for occurred like clockwork every time my life was at a big turning point.

In Seattle, a tumultuous three months would pass before I would attend one of Jean’s classes. Noah and I began the process of rebuilding our nest. We had moved five times in the last three years, and once again we threw ourselves into the familiar blur of moving logistics. We spent long days unpacking our own complicated history. I planted flowers and vegetables, for the happiness that comes from watching things grow. Spring rolled by with both of us lost in the process of settling in, finding our place in another new setting. One morning, I woke up and saw a bald eagle soaring high above our house. It filled me with powerful energy, and I knew it was time to do something wonderful for myself. I signed up for a class at Soma Yoga.

I arrived feeling a little wound up, and ready to expend some energy. As the class got underway, skepticism pervaded my thoughts. We were in the somatic movement portion of the class, and we were lying on our backs, rolling our heads from one side to the other, very, very, slowly. “Can you do any less?” Jean asked us.

Slowing down that much takes real effort. It was a drastic change of pace, coming from a world that persistently pushes us to our limits and then asks for more. I wondered to myself how many more calories I might burn watching television; but eventually, I surrendered to the Zen flute music, the earth’s gravitational pull, and the lilt of Jean’s voice. I surrendered to myself.

I began to unravel. Without effort I drifted to deep places, while all pretense and preconceived notions seemed to float away. My thoughts drifted by like slow-moving clouds, and I watched them as if from outside the confines of my body, noticing how critical I was of myself. I had never experienced such self-awareness. It was nourishing, and I carried it with me through the week until the next class, which I found myself anticipating with joy.

Each session took on a life of its own, with Jean’s gentle guidance toward higher consciousness. In this comfortable and safe environment, the class began to connect. Each Wednesday we shared these wonderful moments together. In the brochure, a student’s testimonial had stated that Jean possessed an “ability to infuse each class with both profundity and lightness.” I found truth in those words.

It was my fifth class, and I had arrived feeling quite scattered. I was picking up company from the airport, and hosting a dinner party that evening. The house was a mess, and our computer had just crashed, losing all sorts of important files. Just showing up to yoga that day was enough, I thought, as I resigned myself to going through the motions. In fact, I was still preoccupied when it happened.

We were lying on our backs with our knees bent. After an hour or so of some vigorous yoga postures I was glad to be lying down. Jean asked us to just feel our breath in our abdomens. I lay there in the silence feeling the gentle rise and fall of my belly with each breath, navel falling towards the spine with each exhale. It felt so good, and very relaxing, my body tingling with endorphins. A thought drifted across my mind: “This is how babies breathe, with their little bellies rising and falling.”

In a flash I was remembering what it felt like to be a baby. But it was stronger than a memory. It felt as if I were actually experiencing it, like a dream. It must have been transcendence.

My twenty-seven-year-old spirit was back inside my two-month-old body, just lying there looking around, in this peaceful state of wakefulness, with a complete lack of anything resembling pain in the physical or mental sense. I felt the easing of gravity in my tiny body, resting on the cloud-soft surface of my crib. I was alone, and felt safe in my perfect state of peace. My vision was slightly blurred as if through an ethereal gauze of white light. I savored the bliss of inhabiting my original self. My soul felt limitless, radiating like warm sunshine, as if my body were merely an anchor, not the entire ship.

When I felt the experience begin to slip through my fingers like a handful of sand at the beach, I tried to hang on. But the trying chased it away. As quickly as it had come, it was gone. Yet, when I opened the clenched fist of my psyche, a beautiful memory, like a seashell, remained in its hand. My five-second journey filled me with lightness and joy and profound inner peace. I experienced the complete absence of expectation.

Before that, life had become a conundrum of unanswerable questions: What does God want me to do? Why don’t I know? Is this what growing up is? Is it always going to feel this way? How does this make sense? I felt as if my “audience” of friends and family was growing impatient with the meandering path my life was taking through my early twenties. I was frantic for solutions. Now my spirit remembered vividly what it felt like to expect nothing from the world, and have the world expect nothing from it. On the walk home, I carried that lightness with me. I knew a change had taken place, and somehow I felt more content with the mystery of it all. When I remembered life before the questions, everything had become quiet.

It was like opening a fortune cookie only to find that the paper inside says nothing. It just is, and in order to celebrate that, we must also honor what is not. All of it is connected: good with bad, desperation with hope, death with life. The experience of one depends on the other. This certainly didn’t answer all my questions, it just reminded me, in the words of Rilke, to love them.

Once upon a time, we were all just pure souls in these little light-filled bodies, with no great expectations, before the world started demanding things, before we got tangled up in the confusion of it all, before we forgot how to play, before we forgot how to love ourselves and respect one another, before we became so enamored with fame, before we forgot how to just be.

I now know that if we can be still, the memory can be found. Just look at this seashell still in my hand.

Copyright © 2007 by Ginny Mahar