The relief of sitting in meditation

The work I do in yoga asana is not limited to the physical envelope. It reveals, very gradually, the layers beneath; perhaps I am like an onion. I sit, and the mind itself sets the body’s channels to unclogging, the joints to listen, loosen and the prana to MOVE. I sat and practiced alternate nostril breathing, nadi shodhana. It was frustrating. Maddening. It did not work. Until afterwards, when I sit here and my nostrils are mighty and the breath scampers joyfully. An element of this breath practice I’d overlooked is that of resistance. Like swinging with a donut in the on-deck circle, restricting airflow to one nostril gives the full breath the benefit of relative freedom: wild, unharnessed, speedy and effortless.

Seated, I imagined my spine a tree. This is not so long a stretch, if you consider the spine a house for the body’s delicate, juice-filled neurons. As I sat in meditation, the left side of my tree flourished, steeped in verdant green energy and branching, growing, very happily. Particular to my body is a very drastic difficulty in breathing through the right nostril, perhaps the result of a broken nose or simply years of habitual left-nostril breathing (these things happen). The right side of my spinal tree was blown over, stripped as by hurricane, leaving a complete picture of a tree traumatized, recovering splendidly on one half but bearing still the dead marks of some powerful event. Imagery arose unbidden. I pictured my right body enlivened by the energy of the left, sprouting and growing its own sap-filled branches, recovering, reassuming the fullness promised by the original seed.

In the meantime, the body pulsed with joy at the sensation of living. Layers of restraint fell from those joints and muscles upon which the mind had clamped. The body pulsed with the heart, and this had its own effect on the vision which, despite the stillness and relaxedness of the eyeballs, saw flux in the boundaries and depths of things, punching forward and receding, as though the chair and the tiled floor were humming some peculiar tune of their own devising. The result of this feeling, present to immediacy and quiet in the mind, was like sitting at the base of a waterfall. What at first is joy and delight continues on unceasing, pummeling, and it instills fear at the largeness of the thing, the continuity and timelessness of it, and you sitting there are nothing besides a speck en route to annihilation. The mind would like to step out; the sensations of the body—fullness, aliveness, fleshiness, full of demands—continue to clamor as they grow in both joy and terror such that any distraction would be welcome, but you are confronted regardless that this thing, this movement, is the only thing, and you can make arabesques and sleep-over fort towers with the mind but never escape the truth that you are being worked on, worn away, eroded. And so you stay with that person, the one sitting beneath the waterfall, for as long as you can stand it because you imagine it makes you close to something that you will never know but that—unquestionably, it vibrates through all of time and appears as the 10^-10 percentage of error in whatever it is we try to measure—is larger than our selves, thereby instilling faith, at the very least, in our ignorance.

It stops when you stop. You stand up and brush off your thighs and stretch out your knees and feel the body change back to day-to-day mode, and you’re exhausted, like you just had a fantastic workout. The mind picks up and everything picks up and you’re back off to the races, perhaps affirmed in the fact of your solidness, your participation in the abstract constant of movement and the perpetuity of the world you perceive in realms outside your perception.