"Here in this body are the sacred rivers: here are the sun and moon as well as all the pilgrimage places...I have not encountered another Temple as blissful as my own body." Saraha
(Thank you for the beautiful quote Veniets!)
I often feel as if am a captive in my own body. As if I can actually fly, but am being held in place within a box. Some mornings when I look at a flight of stairs (read: mountain) and I know it will be a struggle, I can see myself flying over it to the top... when every step is a calculation and fear rules where I think I can go and what I will be able to manage within this body today.
And then there are the times when I walk past a window, or a mirror and for an instant I do not recognise myself, almost as if the picture I have of how I look and walk - who I am, is not what I just saw? Weird!
Let's not even start with the true me, captured between dimples and several layers of padding, resulting in a divided closet. There are the "fat"clothes and the "thin"ones, the days of triumph and the days of despair, when I actually dislike all of myself for how I look? Other that acknowledging that I know how shallow it is to think like this when I look around me - how we all struggle with our bags of issues (pun intended!), it probably forms part of the lessons we have to learn in this life. This body is still (next to money) the most important measure of success in this world. Definitely a topic for another blog entry altogether.
And then there is yoga: The almost surreal feeling, as if to watch yourself from the ceiling, stretching and breathing and being almost weightless as you flow into secret places into your own body. The awareness of being in tune with yourself through different delicious postures....ohhmmmmmm......
The bottom-line (no pun intended!) is that I am on a journey to make peace with this vessel which holds my spirit, the casing which we all look at and form instant opinions about. It is a very humbling experience: the aches and pains, the diseases, the abuse and opinions this Temple suffers - mostly self inflicted. But oh, those moments when we are at peace with each other, when all the past experiences and future expectations become subservient to this moment. When body, mind and spirit become one....pure bliss :)
