Coastline Pilot/LA TIMES

4 February 2005

 

Chasing the Muse

Catharine Cooper

 

 

February!  The calendar screams at me as I turn the last page of January and wonder … what in the world happened to the first month of the year?  Granted, the first week I was kayaking on a beach in Baja, embracing resolutions, and the last week, I was communing with whales and whale babies in a different Baja lagoon.  I guess what happened to January was sandwiched between Mexican bookends.  Lucky me.

 

The middle two weeks of the month were focused on balancing my client’s marketing needs with the search for a new President for Laguna College of Art and Design (that’s right .. the jewel of a 4-year degree granting college right here in our fair city), and figuring out how to turn the City’s Open Space Committee into an Environmental Committee.  Add a last minute flurry of letter writing and consensus building to lobby the NPS for continued public access to the river corridor in the Grand Canyon, and yes, it was quite a month.

 

To balance the pace of activities was a constant goal, supported by the foundation of meditation and yoga.  And since the first of the New Year, the practice of yoga has, for me and several Lagunaites, expanded meaning.  Jason and Melissa, owners of Bikram’s Yoga Studio in the Pavilion’s shopping center, started the year with a ‘challenge’ - 32 classes in 30 days.  I’ve never seen so many sweaty bodies – people doing doubles and triples (2 and 3 classes in one day) – all in a quest to meet the 32/30 goal.  What a joy it has been to be present to everyone’s devotion and progress. 

 

There is something about yoga that just can’t be matched by other forms of exercise.  Properly sequenced, all parts of the body are worked, both inside and out.  Balance, concentration and focus are increased, and the mind is refreshed in the process.  Since I re-committed to my practice, I’ve become quite ‘pretzely’, somehow longer, and better balanced.

 

Several yoga postures are known as ‘heart opening’ poses – those that stretch the body in such a way as to open the chest. This is not something that we do easily in our worldly lives.  We tend to cross our arms, slouch our bodies, and generally fold into ourselves.

 

Yoga has many ways of opening the heart.  Twists, side stretches and back bends massage the muscles that constrict the rib cage, the back and the spine.  It is not uncommon for these poses to cause a welling of emotion, as the ties and locks we’ve programmed into ourselves begin to let loose.

 

The heart is profound.  In its job as a major muscle it pumps the blood, circulates oxygen and moves the lymphatic fluids.  It sends nourishment to every cell in the body.  It also serves as the center of our emotional well-being.  As we open new areas of our body, we are able to increase our awareness.  Judith Lasiter calls this being ‘radically present’.

 

To be radically present is to experience each and every moment with crystalline clarity.  This means that I can look at the world with new consciousness and perception.  I can muster new solutions to old problems because I can see and understand them differently. 

 

Sandwiched between my two Mexican sojourns have been untold hours spent in camel, bow, standing head-to-knee and spinal twisting poses.  Their effect has been transformational, both internally and externally.  My sensitivities have been heightened. 

 

A small black-headed phoebe flutters onto the rail at my studio.  His dark feathers shimmer in the afternoon sun, and we stand close and quiet, simply being ‘radically present’, one to the other.  I watch the rise and fall of his chest with his breath, and match it with my own.  For a few seconds, there is no fear, just the moment, and the beating of our hearts.

 

 

Catharine Cooper loves wild places .. and the yoga studio.  She can be reached at ccooper@cooperdesign.net.