Miscellaneous

Thursday 27th July 2009

Inconsistencies
A heady mixture of extremes over the last few weeks: practice/no practice, running/no running, healthy minimal food/a ton of chocolate, relationship mood swings. For someone so involved in spiritual and psychological development, my inconsistency still perplexes me.
But no-one would ever consider me inconsistent. I’m considered to be serene, stable, dependable and disciplined. Only as one digs deeper into the samskaric layers do the gaps and blips appear. And I’m a compulsive digger, so I see them, I feel them, I tease them out of their hiding spots to analyse and work with them. That’s the practice, digging into those deeper layers to flush out the impurities.

Yoga Practice (and pain)
This week I’ve done three consecutive morning yoga practices, working gently with a body that has stiffened in a survival response to lower-back trauma. I’m convinced (again) that I've seriously injured my sacro-iliac joint, not surprising considering my legs are different lengths causing my pelvis to be crooked, and I've been doing daily yoga practice lopsided for over 10 years.
During the initial acute phase of the injury last December, I visited a Sports Med doctor; after briefly touching this area he said it wasn’t sacro-iliac related. Funny that even after x-rays, he still couldn’t diagnose the cause of my agonising pain. And this was SERIOUS pain - not a tweak or a pulled muscle, or ‘arthrosis’.
Eight months later, the pain is still acute, my entire lower back still tender.
The pain varies day-by-day, week-by-week and I know it varies according to my mental state. Over the last week it seems to have regressed back to acute pain throughout the sacro-iliac area.
So I’ve had to dumb down my yoga practice this week: some core warm-ups, the 10 sun salutes, the evergreen sequence of standing poses, some seated twists and backbends, then lapping up all the extra time in the inversions and seated meditation to fill out my 2 hour practice.

Running
Running hasn’t happened at all this week, not because of my back, but because my tiny window of opportunity to run at night has been filled in with drizzly rain. Dedicated runners go out in the rain but I'm still a reluctant neophyte runner.
Maybe I’ll go tonight.
Or maybe it will rain.

Bhagavad Gita
I’m coming to the end of the Bhagavad Gita. Reading the Gita is uplifting (especially all those descriptive qualities of a saintly person). I'd like to get my hands on a different translation though. Some of the phrases in this one (by Shri Purohit Swami) are a bit archaic and clumsy and do little to convey the delicate complexity of meaning hidden within the Sanskrit words.