As Cigarettes After Sex starts playing in the studio, I settle in on my mat, allowing my whole body to still. It doesn’t happen all at once, nor in a particular direction; different locales of my body cease jerking, one by one, like a cymatic ripple flattening.
Did you used to dance? my pilates instructor asks. She notices I have the pointe. As we warm up, I observe how much I had been lacking noticing, a calm I never used to have before. I no longer just imitate her movements; we sync and flow.
My self-perception is no longer discombobulated. I now have a reference point for true disorder that is other than my past self to compare to, and what I am now is no longer either.
Breathing comes first; I tend to walk around all day holding my breath, keeping everything upwards. As a result, my lower body suffers from an imbalance. It’s not something I consciously do or notice, until random moments like being in a small room where you can hear your own breath, a break from deep concentration, the hypnagogic state between wake and sleep where jerks, shifts, and scattered breath arise, lower gut abnormalities; and now, mat. I breathe in through my nose, out through my mouth, and imagine not only vertical release, but horizontal expansion as well.
I think of the man I met during university who was really into Buteyko breathing, how we used to do exercises together; he’d put his palm over my chest and measure my breath, tell me how steady it was. I told him obsessing over it would make it worse, he insisted I hadn’t looked beneath the veil. We were both right, of course. Some books are made to be read aloud with another, not preserved on a mantle high up where no one can touch it, dusty, protected. You were right, I find myself thinking more often nowadays. Visions of a dark flowing hair, a black sun atop a hill.
Everything relies on engaging the sacral core. The more focus is directed downward, the more calm and consistent my breath becomes. Air-headedness changes state to liquid as it condenses down my spine. She’s quite good at directing, preventing my mind from wandering, but doesn’t possess that same shaman-like ability to divinate that my old yoga instructor did. Still, an Elliot Smith song comes on and she knows to skip it immediately, noticing how my body involuntarily tensed up. Another song came on, but the choir vocals and high reverb had the effect of enhancing my gradiosity, so she skipped that as well. She mediates well. Every time my mind starts to follow another loose end, my stomach loosens, and she reminds me, stomach! It instantly snaps my attention back down and to my breath. The mind and core do not separate.
Attention is physiological in this way, but the psyche’s innate tendency to distrust my own memory waits around the peripheral, threatening to derail it. I detach it from my body, the same way I do in meditation; like an anti-gravity chamber, I allow the white bulbs of my thought to simply float up there, without attaching to any of it, observing like going through a vinyl catalogue. Tripping shrooms with my old flatmate in the park in Cambridge, a man telling me, why’re you always riding on some train? Engagement’s reserved for my core today, though. I put complete faith in my memory. I say it: I put complete faith in my memory. This is how to preserve aparājayah.
Engagement becomes automatic, and as I concentrate my attention single-pointedly on “the horizon through the clock,” as my Butoh instructor once told me, I am able to balance standing, effortlessly. Slight adjustments here and there is not the ideal approach; the core tightens, and everything else follows, in turn ensuring the center holds. When the goal becomes finding stillness, to stay moving, you’ve already broken focus. The eliatics breed obsessives. One does not focus on the movement itself, nor its cessation or existence, but rather becoming a vessel for allowing it through.
You found it. My pointed toe touches the sky. It’s heaven up there.
It’s like transforming into stateless water; filling any existing space, any phase of matter, parting indivisibles and finding a comfortable position to settle in.
The space between the shoulderblades, imagining their compression in turn compresses the ring in front of me without my arms or hands applying any pressure. I look through it, out to a distant point in the sky, the sun setting across the beach where I used to live, the mountain’s apex from last summer.
Each sensation releases a new memory. This time, I recall a time from my teenage years, during one strange automatic period where I used to climb roofs near sunset and just stare out at horizons. The sky and waterline merged one day and became one blue-grey mass, I lost hours of time in what felt like 10 minutes. My friend climbs up in a hurry and says hey, we need to be getting ready soon. The function’s starting in 5, get dressed! To this day, I still have no idea how three hours could have escaped. It’s not a linear thing, but a continuous flow.
Sometimes it likes to flow backwards, for fun. As a kid, I’d imagine leaving paper trails for my future self, of creating a conscious intention with my thoughts for my future self to follow and come save me.
On my way out, I relax, the same way my spine decompressed during mat cooldown. My head re-attached, memory absorbed. As I pass by the woman, her coffee randomly spills over. I notice whenever I walk into a cafe, someone has a coffee spill, a synchronicity that has happened too consistently to chalk up to coincidence. Last time something like this happened, it was during a few days leading up to band rehearsal; me and my boyfriend at the time had kept suddenly finding broken glass everywhere we went, moments of clumsiness sure, but it spread like a virus during rehearsal; a roommate drops a jar. Another bandmate spills, not too long after. Pauli Effect in action once more.
I’m starting to think it really is a discharge of inner tensions formed from spontaneous resolution and its physical expression in bodily movement. It’s not the same as that state of eudaimonia one receives days after the comedown of a fourth-plat DXM trip (though chasing this did start my interest in meditation in the first place, then finding a lecture on mapping DMT realms from a friend in the Harvard Psychedelics Club leading to a playlist on qualia and meditation), or the calmness found after an unexpected body-mind untanglement resolves itself.
Relief isn’t the experience, no, it is more subconscious for me at least, but it’s more of an outwards release. Like maybe the disintegration of a cathexis.
What many take away from the Orpheus myth (Wagner’s Lohengrin is a retelling of the same) is that to make a relationship work, one must not name the properties of such, must overlook certain aspects to keep it together. But I think this is baloney and a functional relationship isn’t dependent on one or the other person keeping secrets/contortion to fit into something if not grotesque, certainly not beautiful. McGilchrist is a gem, but man, sometimes he is such a boomer.
My interpretation is something a bit different, more of this release of cathexis. When you love someone enough, you must leave them to their mire as Cocteau would have it, and not look back, hoping to help them, or else you have damned them to turn into a pillar of salt. The baby bird can’t develop muscle if human intervention breaks the egg or whatever. The swan returns, long-lost siblings reunite, only upon death brought on by the spoken secret. Euphorion lives as long as Helen does not hesitate.
