“Don’t just do something – sit there.” – that was the caption for a cartoon about meditation in New Yorker Magazine some years back, and it keeps laughing up the sides of my days. The more yogic I become, the more in touch with the essential in me, the more I find myself ‘doing.’
Today three important tasks finally got done: the proposal for Yoga in the Classroom for Hilltop School next year; the new class/workshop schedule through September 5th for teacher certifications in Bergen (with Ronda Lam DiChiaro), Rockland (the whole team) and Orange Counties (with Happy Buddha) ; the high impact (I hope) press release for the book signing in New Paltz at Barner Books on May 30th.
Proposal. Schedule. Press release. Is this my life now? I leave the house, leave my secluded contemplation, and go and teach and stretch and meditate with others? What in the world am I ’doing?’
Time was I was rabid for insolation, grinding my teeth to produce the well-known popular fiction. So serious was I of intent to become one who accomplishes ‘something.’ Which of course I thought would come about by my doing yoga and meditating – I’d get original, even more authentic than I was; an astonishingly fresh style would jump out at me.
When I was in Australia visiting my younger brother, in 1997, I heard a story about a group of aboriginal people practising yoga to fill up their time, because they could not go walk-about any more, and had ‘nothing else to do.’
The children down the block and the children up the hill were the same as me when I was small - wild with play-fever. What were we all doing then, what kind of something?
With all its longing and letting go movement, stillness, thrashing about secretly humming, buzzing, shrieking, giggling, sweating, cooling off, sobbing, hushing up the unknown- yoga I’m coming to recognize is play-fever too – all in the name of nothing if not being.
Doing is as nothing I suspect now as something.
Tags: aboriginal, Australia, child, movement, New Yorker