Grasping for THE Point

We (Aasne, Denise and I) had the good fortune of going up to the Midwest Yoga Conference this year. We started the first day of the conference with a class called Yoga at the Wall. I was really excited about practicing with the wall~I thought gentle, slow and restorative. That was the kind of practice this body was needing on that particular morning. When Nancy McCaochan walked in the room I was struck by her grace and beauty. She has long, gray hair and skin that has the look of a life well lived. I should mention here, it was a challenging practice (we were all a bit sweaty when we finished). However, what struck me most were the words that came out of Nancy’s mouth. I wish I could have written down every word she said, because they were all beautiful and instructive. One of the lines she said about our asana practice was: “when we grasp to lightly or too tightly we lose what we were trying to grasp in the first place.”

This line is so true in our asana practice. Can’t you feel it when you are muscling into a posture and holding your breath and sucking in your stomach and trying to be a contortionist? Maybe I’m the only one who ever does that. Anyway, it’s a sure fire way to miss the beauty of the asana~to miss the point. We might be in the physical posture, but we aren’t able to experience it the way it was intended. I think it is anti-yoga. What are we grasping for anyway?

I was recently at the doctor’s office receiving my allergy shots. Nurse Donna, who has been my shot nurse for approximately forever, asked me what I had been up to in the past 28 days. I told her what life had been looking like and I started to say “You just get to the point where” and she finished it with “there is no point.” You just get to the point where there is no point. Out of the mouth of nurses. What thoughts and ideas are we grasping onto that are leading us to feel like there is no point.

My friend Lindsay has talked about feeling the effects of the daily grind. You know? You get up, you go to work the same way you always go, you work, you go home, you fix supper, you watch a movie, you go to bed and you start all over again. Maybe this sort of dilemma is implying that we have forgotten what we were grasping for in the first place. Maybe we are grasping too lightly.

All of this has led me to recently ask the question (over and over and over) “what is the point?” What is the point of anything and everything. What is the point? Maybe this is implying an existential crisis on my part. If so, it’s not a new one. It’s one I believe I come back to over and over and over again. Maybe it keeps me fresh or maybe it keeps me from ever sinking into bliss.

So, I’m on the phone with Zoe the therapist in California. I love her. I love sitting in the park, under a big shade tree, talking on the phone with her about “the point”. Our sessions typically last an hour and they typically fly by. So, on this day, the day of “the point”, I am spinning and feeling like I have lost the anchor of security. You know, the illusion that we have control over everything. So, Zoe, in her magical way, leads me to question the thought “there is no point.” She asks me if I can absolutely know there is no point (answer: no, I can’t know for sure). She asks me how my physical body feels when I believe there is no point (answer: belly tight, shoulders tight, breath shallow). She asks what is the opposite of there is no point (answer: there is a point). She asks me to come up with three reasons why the thought “there is a point” is as true or truer than the thought “there is NO point”. I come up with three answers and suddenly there is no more question. There was silence. There was the sound of the guy mowing the lawn at the park. There was the sound of the ducks in the pond. There was the sound of the birds. There was a view of two squirrels chasing one another and there was a brilliant shadow on the grass. There was nothing. There was no question “what is the point” and there was no need for an answer to the no longer relevant question. There was just awareness of that moment. Just presence. There was just that moment, right then, under the shade tree with the phone in my left hand and silence on both ends of the line. I said I thought I wanted to finish early.

Towards the end of the class with Nancy and the wall, she said “Yoga is directional~pointing us towards understanding its about the journey.” I suppose we could say it’s about the journey we take while we grasp that we don’t need to grasp at all.


Nancy McCaochan’s book is called:
Yoga at the Wall
Like stanzas in a poem
It can be ordered through nancy’s website www.yogaatthewall.com