Inward Seeking Dog
A friend of mine who shall remain nameless cracks me up with his yoga malapropisms. Let’s just say he’s not a yoga practitioner…and because of that, I love when he humors me and asks about how yoga is going. The other day he opened with, “So…how’s downward-seeking dog coming?” This is a hybrid of mockery and sheer not-knowery, but the actual pose is called downward facing dog…which makes the new title a darker, perhaps more morbid version (although more closely connected to my actual experience of working in downward facing dog which is just generally sheer torture). Although, I digress…I don’t want to talk about downward facing dogs or even yoga.
I want to talk about the insights I’ve stumbled on this week…and they’re really about going inward.
Oh this single, solitary life. Oh this PhD, dissertation-devising life. I think I can imagine no situations more isolating…put them together and…well, you’re the equivalent of a hermit…no, you’re the troll that lived under the bridge. At least a hermit sounds, in some faraway place, honorable. But the troll…just warty. And that’s what this summer was for me…warty and horrible…and friggin hot. So it’s not coincidence that within hours of it cooling off, I’ve come back around to some of my senses. But not without effort and a commitment to cleaning out the dark little corners of my life that I’d rather forget are there….the places I retreat to when I feel warty…and thus breed more wartiness. If I wanna get out from under the bridge, I gotta start clearing that stuff out.
When I started to work at clearing out the underbrush, I realized a really interesting (and potentially devastating), nasty little habit I have. When warty, I spread myself really thin. Not with work or not enough sleep…I call and contact everyone I know in a (often futile) attempt to “be acknowledged.” “Hey guys, I’m Heeeerrrrrre. No, over HEEEEEERRRRRE.” I’ve always thought that keeping social contact would soothe the wounded soul. As it turns out, not really. In fact, in this experience, it’s not unlike the Horcruxes in Harry Potter. Though not intended to make me immortal, each little speck of social interaction I would try to create would spread me out literally too thin. No one was home. People weren’t answering the phone. I was getting the “text message response” (you know the one…when you’ve called and they return the message not with voice mail or a call but with a text…regardless of what it says on that phone, just the action says, “riiiiiight….I’m not going to talk to you today.”) “No one cares. I’m insignificant. I’m an afterthought,” says my warty, trollish internal chatter. Thus ensues more panic, frustration…ultimately isolation.
So, on this last round of wretchedness, out of nothing other than just not wanting to talk to anyone, I sat with the silence. I sat with the aloneness. I actually moved away from people. And it ended up being a strengthening experience. In a myriad of ways. When I stopped flailing around in a panic, thinking I was moving toward making a better situation, and just was there in my world, in my moment…things actually transformed. People responded in new ways. They met my change with changes of their own, changes I had hoped to have but could never see how I’d get them. It was incredible, actually.
I think my struggle in yoga with downward facing dog is not a coincidence to this story. The whole spiritual point of that pose is strengthening in places that we don’t often use for protection. When we protect ourselves we cover our vulnerabilities with our stronger parts. We turn our shoulder into oncoming force or use our shoulders to fully absorb the weight of force, whether it’s our bodies falling or hitting into something. We tense the neck and turn the head. We firm our hamstrings, preparing to spring into action. We cover and run. Downward facing dog requires you to kind of reverse all of that…you’re deeply stretching your shoulders and hamstrings, thus rendering them not the strong points but the stretched points. You open your chest to the floor, use the muscles of your torso and upper and lower arms to push you away from the ground…you relax the neck and jaw. You open…you uncover…you dis-cover…or if you’re me you start sweating profusely as the muscle fibers in your shoulders and hamstrings audibly rip.
Interestingly, though, it mirrors what has to happen in order to be an inward seeking dog. As I have to open my chest and torso in downward facing dog, I have to open myself to being alone, by myself, quiet, not panicking. As I strengthen those tiny little muscles (that kill to the 12th power when you pull them) around your back and ribs, I also strengthen my resolve to emotionally support myself and not need to outsource my troubles. As I learn to breathe through the hellfires burning in the backs of my legs and shoulders, I learn to withstand the heat of that panic that tells me, “no one cares what happens to you.” It’s a journey that has to be settled into…and one that requires an acceptance of the challenges and an acknowledgment of the good sure to come, even if in the present it hurts like sideways facing sonofoabitch.
I am an inward seeking dog…and I think I’m in the process of learning to be okay with that. But I already know this much. Inward seeking dogs aren’t really warty…not warty at all. Let’s put a “w” in the win column on that insight.