So to help with stress, I started going to a yoga class a couple of times a week. There's this cool yoga studio in HMB, right on the beach. My friend Marina invited me to go one night, and three months later I am a yoga slut. Seriously, I LOVE yoga. Since I started attending, I've lost 10 pounds, I can touch my toes again and I'm somewhat calmer.
The yoga moves are challenging, but I can generally keep up, especially in my Wednesday class. It is a "Restorative " yoga class and is pretty much just an excuse to take a long nap while the teacher comes around and massages your feet.
It's the meditation part that's harder. It can be especially challenging for those of us who are slightly obsessive compulsive or possibly undiagnosed as having attention deficit disorder. The brain jumps about, never settling down...in my case, a line or two from a song I heard on the radio will blast through my mind over and over and over again....Have you ever tried to meditate while Grace Slick screams inside your head "We built this city, We built this city-on rock and roll. ...BUILT this City!" Also, some of the concepts of acceptance are hard for me. Even now, when the teacher tells us to "celebrate the infinite light of all living creatures", I have to add "even the Sea Hag (not her real name)" to the end of the prayer. Because I definitely have to be reminded that she, too, is deserving of love, and possibly even a living creature.
This constantly editorializing brain is one reason I don't fall asleep easily. No matter how tired I am, it seems like the second I turn out the light and settle in for a snooze...Zing! My brain is awake and ready to party! I have tried many things to help myself sleep at night. I can't even count sheep, because my crazy brain makes the sheep do all kinds of strange shit, like stop and do a little jig on the fence, or duck under the fence, climb through the slats and get stuck.
This is the situation on the best of nights. If I'm particularly stressed out (and why would I be? twitch, twitch) then forget it. So I've started to use some of my yoga class techniques to help me sleep at night, and the results are....puzzling. Somehow, my attempts at "untethering my mind from the conscious body" have led to an image of a piece of cauliflower adrift in an ocean. I can explain this (sort of). I'm kinda literal, so when picturing my brain, the nearest image I came up with was a piece of cauliflower. The I took it a step further and tried to image my mind floating untethered and of course, there's the ocean.
So now I'm stuck with a meditative practice involving a piece of cauliflower bobbing about in a vast ocean. Naturally, my obsessive brain won't let it be that easy, so I have a little trouble with nagging details - "is the cauliflower light enough to float? Maybe most of the stalk should be trimmed, just to be sure. Just enough so the head stays in tact. But, the water is salt water so don't things float pretty well in salt water? And what about waves? I keep picturing these waves tossing the cauliflower about, sending it on its journey. But if it's way out in the middle of the ocean, are the waves big enough? Or if the waves are too big, will it force the cauliflower to the floor of the ocean?"
Somehow, I don't think this is normal. But hey, it works for me!
