Sweet Hips

We never arrive at the final resting place while we're breathing and our hearts are beating.  That truth is settled for me.  ...Life is all about contradiction so I'll accept it and continue. 

Given that we never arrive at the final resting place while we're living in bodies, what matters?  I think orientation matters most. Where am I orienting from and in myself (ego or soul? maybe?) and what am I orienting to?

Yoga postures are helpful for practicing orientation.  Each pose has particular anatomical focus so when we engage the pose and orient toward its focus, we can discover things about ourselves.  Take pigeon pose and its primary focus - the deep hip muscle called piriformis. Since we live in chairs these days and since we tend to manipulate and manage ours emotions, we are people of the tightened piriformis.  Over the 18 years or so since I began practicing yoga, I've been learning about myself.  When I get into pigeon pose, I can either orient to my piriformis and allow layers of discomfort to be felt and sometimes released (usually intense and sometimes illuminating) or I can just hang out in the territory of normalcy. 

A useful thing about yoga poses is that we can physically engage our orientation. To find the piriformis, I engage both legs to be turning my pelvis forward: front foot active as if I was standing on it, shin perpendicular to my back leg, hip rooted back and down, back leg is internally rotated, usually with my foot flexed to help that leg stay engaged.  It's a workout to stay focused that way and no matter what I do with my upper body, my front leg piriformis is given most of my attention.  

Orientation is more than physical activation, though.  It's really an internal focus, which can seem bewildering.  Luckily it is something we can practice and learn to recognize how to engage.  Being friendly is a necessary quality to the internal orientation.  Not pushing, punishing or fixing, just befriending and turning in the direction of the hidden stuff.  In the direction of freedom.   

In the pigeon, as I orient to my piriformis I can discover a letting go of my well-practiced demands on myself, aka tension.  It doesn't matter if the pigeon looks great.  How am I aware inside my hip?  How am I orienting as I do anything at all?  Yoga and life are not for showy presentation.  I don't care if there are yoga competitions and lip injections... whatever.... True presentation happens, uncontrolled and unpredicted, from how we are orienting within ourselves.  That's how love is.  Love gets out of the chair and unlocks what's stuck.  Love says "You can be free from that tight grip!  You can be free.  It might seem scary and it might hurt for a moment, but it's ok.  I'll go through it with you, sweet hips!"