professional dancer whose workday consisted of dancing 6 to 8 hours most days I do remember how great the yoga stretches felt to my hyperactive body. During later phases of my life, phases where I may have been too sedentary, yoga exercises seemed to wake up my muscles. They reminded the various parts of my body and me of the functional relationship we might want to have with one another. “Feel your feet connected to the floor.” “Notice the alignment of your spine from your tailbone to the top of your head.” “Rise from the floor one vertebrae at a time.” “Roll over gently on to your side.”
One of the most important moments in a yoga class comes near the end, when after all the exertion, we’re invited to lie on our backs and totally relax. After all the doing, we enter the land of non-doing, which is a place many of us don’t visit often enough. As stress medicine has taught us, most diseases develop in part because we drive our bodies and our minds like the motor of a car that never has its engine turned off. Our bodies and our minds are grateful for this downtime. Twenty-five years ago now, in an early meeting for the non-profit Body Wisdom, Inc we board members envisioned together the future for InterPlay, a body-based creative approach to unlocking the wisdom of the body. The most positive future we could imagine was for InterPlay to become as popular as Yoga had become, even by that time.
Yoga, like any body- based system had much to overcome to be accepted in western culture. Few people live in bodies that meet the airbrushed examples of the culture’s beauty standards, and fewer still have the twisted pretzel flexibility exhibited by the skinny models on the yoga posters. Yoga’s association with an eastern religion may have been it’s biggest hurdle as this connection tended to frighten practitioners of Christianity, Judaism, and the Muslim faith. But yoga has overcome these hurtles and more as its now taught in schools, community centers, and in most every gym and work out setting in the nation. The finale of most classes comes when the instructor calls the students to a seated position and ends the encounter with a hand gesture of palms together praying and a bow to the students. The students are invited to imitate this posture and bow toward her while repeating the Sanskrit word “Namaste.”
In a class that I’ve been attending lately, the instructors invite the participants into a standing circle. We look at each other as we repeat the prayer gesture and bow to one another while stating out loud what Namaste means. “The divine in me bows to the divine in you. I honor that place in you that is of Light, Love, Truth and Peace. When I am in this place in me and you are in this place in you, we are one.”
Looking around the circle at people, most of whom I do not know, I’m reminded of the power of letting go of the tensions in our bodies before coming together around what remains. For many years we began staff meetings at our clinic by enlisting a Universal Greeting from the Gandhi Foundation that added sign language to a similar message, “My wisdom flows from a higher source. I salute that source in you. Let us work together.”
What have you found helps people come together in a place of mutual respect?
Sheila
