First Yoga Lesson in Here and now
- April 27, 2015, 3:40 p.m.
- |
- Public
First Yoga Lesson
“Be a lotus in the pond,” she said, “opening slowly, no single energy tugging
against another but peacefully, all together.” I couldn’t even touch my toes.
“Feel your quadriceps stretching?” she asked. Well, something was certainly
stretching. Standing impressively upright, she raised one leg and placed it
against the other, then lifted her arms and shook her hands like leaves. “Be
a tree,” she said.
I lay on the floor, exhausted. But to be a lotus in the pond opening slowly,
and very slowly rising— that I could do.”
Mary Oliver, Blue Horses: Poems
Last updated April 27, 2015
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Silent Echo/Quiet Storm ⋅ April 27, 2015
i have a senior chair yoga dvd that i enjoy doing. take care,
Leanne 🌈 ⋅ April 27, 2015
ODSago ⋅ April 28, 2015
Loved reading this; I remember my husband after his first yoga lesson. The once physics major remarked, when she said to breathe into your right leg, she lost me. That's impossible.
~Katherine ODSago ⋅ April 28, 2015
LOL! I've been trying to follow some standing yoga stretches on YouTube. Sometimes I have to stop and laugh because she's got me so twisted with one leg turned this way and the other foot "rooted in the earth" and then I am to lift my arm high over my head and turn my neck so that my face is in my armpit. While holding that pose I am reminded to "relax, breathe, keep your shoulders down." Seriously? All that at once? I've never been told to breathe into my right leg though. :)
Oswego ⋅ June 08, 2015
I, too, love her poetry, the little I have read. This makes me want to go back and read more. As for yoga, I think there's a lot to it. I wish I had the patience and will to do meditation properly, but I think we can create our own inner yoga any time and any place we really want to.