Creating Length and Space
"And as you draw your right arm up and over your head, extending that line of energy, breathe deeply into this pose aspiring to create more length and space on the exhale." My yoga instructions frequently contain this reference to creating length and space, but my invitation for doing so reaches far beyond the parameters of the yoga mat. Intentionally incorporating significant lengths of time in nurturing, comforting spaces into my daily living has expanded my capacity for inner calm and creative living, so I offer this invitation to create length and space for fulfilling activities off of the yoga mat to my yoga students too.
Acting on my own advice, I recently opened up time and space for novel binging. I don't read fiction often, but when I do, I'm reminded of how it feeds my soul, deepens my self-reflection , and stimulates my creative juices, and it is that deliciousness that keeps me immersed in novel reading for days on end, once I get started.
In the past five days, my spirit dined on a four- novel feast. The first course, Crow Lake by Mary Lawson, fed my hunger for a story set in my beautiful country, Canada. I'm particularly found of small town settings with ordinary people, and this humble story of personal struggle nicely wet my appetite for further novel reading. Graeme Simsion's The Rosie Project fulfilled my yearning for tasteful, uplifting and eye-opening humour. I rarely laugh out loud while reading, but this yarn created a very noisy reader out of me! I followed this second course of my fiction meal with a murder mystery - The Girl On the Train. Author Paula Hawkins managed to serve up an entertaining who-dun-it.
The final course was dessert - a sweet and dear novel, The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. Dessert is my favourite course; this was my favourite book. Ms. Monk Kidd's delectable dessert combined the perfect ingredients. I adored the setting - hot summer, rural area, deep south, decades past. I loved the rich, colourful characters, and my ever-constant craving for a good plot was well satiated. Surprisingly though, the story element that spoke most loudly to my tastebuds ended up being the author's themes involving sisterhood, the divine feminine, and the adherence to "do no harm" to nature. How fun it was to see myself in the characters who worked so hard to relocate pesky insects rather than to merely snuff out their existence.
And so, like on the yoga mat, I continue to try to create length and space off of the yoga mat, so as to keep those life giving juices flowing freely and happily through my body, my mind, and my soul. With my novel binging appetite nicely gratified but, apparently, not yet fully appeased, it likely would not surprise you to learn that mere hours existed between the closing of the fourth book and my trip to the Goodwill bookstore where I found myself hauling out a cloth bag containing a baker's dozen of fresh novels for digesting - ideal ingredients to fill the length and space I've created for my soul work off of my yoga mat.
Namaste and consider what author Jean Little wrote in the front of one of her novels that I purchased from her years ago, "The best place for your nose is in a book!"
