Are you a yes or a no body?

Last week at True Body class at the lovely Shakti Factory, we considered a few lines from this beautiful poem by Pesha Gertler (full poem at bottom of post) called The Healing Time.

It begins like this:

Finally on my way to yes
I bump into
all the places
where I said no

We thought about and shared something in our current life we are on the way to saying "yes" to and all the places where we are bumping into "no." We considered whether the "no's" were internal or external or both. Then we dropped into a meditation to allow our bodies to feel "yes" and then "no." We repeated it a few times, trying to track further into our sense of ourselves to see where "yes" shows up (heart opens, taller, slight smile, pulse increases, hands tingle) and "no" (brow furrows, stomach tightens, head constricts, breath constricts).

We then did a few simple tasks from our "yes" body and our "no" body. We found the tasks easy and enjoyable in our "yes" body and frustrating in our "no" body. When we were in "yes" we saw each other. When we were in "no" our heads were down, caught in frustration, not in connection with anything except our annoyance.

And then we did some restorative poses to increase the feeling of yes in the body (my pal Baxter Bell is showing one of them here below because I learned this amazing sequence from him.)

After that, we did some writing to crawl a little under the surface of the day-to-day shorthand we come to believe as our own point of view. There are few better ways to come to understand how you feel about yourself and the world than to do a fast journaling exercise to a prompt like "My mother's body ..." or "My body has a secret and it is hiding ..."

After some partner work, we promised ourselves to check in this week to see where we lived - as yesbody or nobody, in hope or in fear. It was very telling for me as I moved through my day. I was able to shift to a sense of joy in mundane, simple and even slightly annoying tasks with a bit of a somatic, body reminder here and there.

So join us tomorrow night at 6:30 pm for another True Body class at the Shakti Factory and play with us a different exercise. Or do your own "yes" and "no" reflection and let me know how it goes.

         The Healing Time

                                                Finally on my way to yes
                                                I bump into
                                                all the places
                                                where I said no
                                                to my life
                                                all the untended wounds
                                                the red and purple scars
                                                those hieroglyphs of pain
                                                carved into my skin, my bones,
                                                those coded messages
                                                that send me down
                                                the wrong street
                                                again and again
                                                where I find them
                                                the old wounds
                                                the old misdirections
                                                and I lift them
                                                one by one
                                                close to my heart
                                                and I say    holy
                                                          holy.

                                                               © Pesha Joyce Gertler