Rama Lama (Bang Bang)

{Bang, bang}

Those are the first two words in a song I was introduced to today. They are also a fairly apt description of what it felt like happened to me today.

There are moments, when I'm really letting myself feel my pain, where I would give anything for:

1) a gunshot wound, or
2) 26 miles to run, or
3) another couple hours of Asana (yoga postures).

Why that list, you ask?

1) Gunshot wounds: I have a new favorite show -- it's not new at all, but I'd never watched it, and I'm watching it now on Hulu. It's Grey's Anatomy, and gunshot wounds are among the many injuries with which the surgeons deal. By all accounts, they hurt like crazy, but the docs do their best to anesthetize the pain. No anesthesiologists were on hand at the workshop.

2) 26 Miles: My friend and training partner for the half marathon I ran last June, the woman who introduced me to the concept that a half marathon wasn't necessarily less than, decided to run her first full marathon. Filled with self doubt in the week leading up to the race, I tried to get her to focus on positive self talk and the evidence of what she's done in the past. She texted me tonight that she did it in 3:50. Her goal was under 4 hours. She said it was a beast. I'm sure it was -- I haven't managed to go the full distance myself. But in the moment when I read her text, all I could think was how magical that feeling of total physical exhaustion after a run is. Not to mention all those endorphins. None of which come with a sitting practice.

3) More asana: I realized today at the workshop that the reason -- ok maybe not the reason but a reason -- why I'm so intent on getting my practice in is to keep myself from really feeling what I'm feeling. Once again, today, when the time came to sit, it was a struggle. Not quite like yesterday. I had more tools. I sat more comfortably and that made a big difference. But after we sat we talked about pain, and the ways in which we numb ourselves or try to go away from the pain, and that it doesn't work. It can't. That the only way to get out of that vicious cycle is to see that you are in pain, and watch the tendencies that you have to push it away or numb or get yourself to feel a physical sensation to replace it -- even if that physical sensation is pain, it's not difficult in the same way as psychic pain -- and affirm that you aren't going to leave yourself.

I've heard that teaching before, in various guises, but today it really hit me in a new way. Maybe because I wasn't trying to figure out how it applied to my Dad or my last boyfriend, but instead I was breathing in how it applies to me. And it hurt.

Yesterday during the workshop when I felt the tears coming, I stopped them. Today I let them rip. It was uncomfortable, not unlike the discomfort I felt being singled out as the one who hates meditation because of the comment I made yesterday, but it was better than pushing them back down. By the last hour, I was really ready for the weekend to be over. I started thinking about getting a latte and going home to watch an episode of Grey's. As the last hour progressed, I started to get a headache. A really bad headache. I made it through, rode my bike partway home with another workshop participant, and then started up the hill for the solo part of the journey. My head was pounding so hard I felt like I was going to throw up. I almost got off my bike to lie down in someone's lawn but I wanted to be home, so I rode on. When I got home, I tried cold on my head, I tried heat, I forced myself to eat something so I could take some Ibuprofen, and then I crawled into bed and managed to fall asleep. For three hours. When I woke, I still had a headache, but not nearly as severe.

I'm guessing it was some kind of release. It seemed to serve the same purpose as nausea during pregnancy -- when you feel sick, you don't want to drink -- the body's way of protecting the baby during the first trimester. When I left that retreat with my head pounding, I couldn't go get the things that would take me out of the space I was in -- coffee, tv -- I was in too much pain to access them. And maybe that's what my body/heart/mind/soul needed:

Could a body close the mind out
Stitch a seam across the eye?
If you can be good, you'll live forever
If you're bad, you'll die when you die

Hearing only one true note
On the one and only sound
Unzip my body, take my heart out
'Cause I need a beat to give this tune

I love the image that that last verse conjures up. Like you could just take out your heart and remove the source of your pain, and just use its beat as music. This chick, Roisin, is super cool, but unfortunately, the message of the workshop was not to unzip your body and take your heart out. It was to go more deeply inside it. Especially to the places that scare you. "You can get so much closer to the pain than you think you can," Michael assured us.

I'm here to tell you that you can, but it will hurt. A lot. And I've got a ways to go before I get as close as I have a feeling I'm going to need to go to really heal.

I'm feeling tonight a bit like I did after I had left my husband and then found out that a family member had died. I just so badly wanted to be comforted. I showed up on his doorstep in tears and he told me it wasn't fair to him. And it wasn't. I get that. But I wanted to be held.

That's how I feel tonight. Like I understand that this is the path I am on. I get that it involves loss. I get that I am alone right now. I get that I need and want to follow my heart:

And if I need a rhythm
It'll be to my heart I listen
If it don't put me too far wrong
And if I, and if I

And if I need a rhythm
It's gonna be to my heart I listen
If it don't put me too far wrong

And that it won't put me too far wrong. But damn I wish there was someone here to hold me tonight...