Into the Next
This is the story of a grasshopper. And glue.
When I’m teaching yoga, you’ll hear me often say, we hold our issues in our tissues. I’m not sure where I first heard that, but the concept was immediately branded into my brain. We, quite literally, carry our grief, our fear, our trauma, our shame. If we don’t tend to it, it calluses and lodges in our fascia. When we’re lucky, we might function onward, in spite of it. But that luck never lingers and the issues are guaranteed to unleash themselves in the form of stiffness or soreness or pain or a myriad of other chronic handicaps.
Personally, I carry my “stuff” on the left side of my body, mainly in the neck and hip. As I’ve aged, I’ve become even more acutely aware of the so-called baggage I hold onto physically. And when I allow seasons to pass where I am less mobile and/or unhealthy in lifestyle (read: all of 2021), I move about with ache. Gravity pulls at the parts that are weighty. For me, most recently, the additional pounds from all the fried chicken and red wine and the unseen heft of emotional and mental load kept me in a sloth-like nudge forward for the better part of last year.
Move your body, change your mind—another saying I picked up and tucked into my mind. It’s so true. When we are dormant, we atrophy. And atrophy is my greatest fear, y’all. Yet sometimes I fight against myself. I’ll make what feels like a rewarding decision to get horizontal on my couch and I’ll lay lifeless while I binge whatever is trending on Netflix. While, yes, I do believe in the practice of moderation (and I’m totally here for some delicious #NetflixandChill), I know that when I choose to be sedentary over being active, my mind suffers. (*Stillness, I’ll note, is a practice that offers vitality of mind. There is a difference.)
During the abyss of 2021, I did much holding, clenching—at a red light, in line at the grocery store, during a meeting at work, in the wee small hours of the morning when I lay in bed wide awake playing mental chess. The weight of worry doesn’t just disappear when we’re forced to focus on life. For me, the worry curls up in a heap in my lap (and binds tightly to my hips).
Last Saturday I went for a massage. Let me stop here and add that massage for me is not luxurious (although, yes, it is a luxury). When I walk into that room I am surrendering to the experience of letting things go. That’s actually quite hard for me to do. When the practitioner digs an elbow into my piriformis, things get…heated. I’ve been known to cuss or, worse, hiss in a pain as something deeply lodged gets confronted and my body is forced to reveal something I’ve been afraid to feel. The wise sage Jaz-Z tells us, what you reveal, you heal. I couldn’t have said it better.
I endure massage because it clears away the barnacles. If I’m brave and if I get present with my breath and allow it to soak through my deepest clenchings, I have the opportunity to shed the psychobiological bullshit that’s made its home in the tissues of my body.
After an especially painful (yet glorious) session on the massage table, I excused myself to the restroom to gather my functions before I was forced to walk out into the world and resume day-to-day living. I washed my hands, splashed a bit of cool water on my face, and dried my hands. In the corner, I noticed a grasshopper laying still in a dark corner. I reached down to pick it up, feeling responsible to transition its lifeless body to a final resting place, wrapped in a blanket of clean tissue paper. But when my fingers got close, the grasshopper stretched its legs upward, as if reaching out. This grasshopper was not lifeless.
I noticed a wad of fuzz caught on one of the insect’s back legs. Now, to an adult human, this mass of dust and hair and whatever else would be a barely noticeable mass. To this small creature, though, the weight of said fuzz pinned its body to the ground making it impossible for the grasshopper to move itself forward. I carefully removed the fuzz and scooped the grasshopper up out of the dark corner of a building’s bathroom and I walked it outside. I lowered my hands to the grass. This little guy spared no time. He leapt forward and disappeared from sight in an instant. The weight of whatever was keeping him down had been removed and, so, life continued. Man, oh man. You know this got me thinking…
In Katherine May’s gorgeous book, Wintering, she questions if maybe grief is like glue, freezing us. I think that’s exactly what grief feels like—sticky gooey glue. Grief forces us to be still. I have no shame (or regret) in saying that I spent nearly the entire duration of 2021 glued to my bed—I had no choice. The waves came strong and fast and many times without warning, and so I let that glue have its power over me, as tightly as it could, lest I be knocked over and washed away.
But then, the glue began to weaken, and I began to find movement again. Those sticky spots raged in defiance each time I found more mobility, the motion of rising requiring the glue to let go of what it held. What a crazy hard thing but also what a beautiful gift. To release—to let go—to move beyond—hell yeah.
Call it funny if you must, but that grasshopper showed up to remind me to keep moving. I’m certain that I must keep showing up to tend to those places that challenge me and I have to breath through that gooey grief-powered grasp until the hold releases and I feel the freedom and capacity to rise and leap.
Oh, darling grasshopper. You didn’t have a chance in that dark place, where the weight of something beyond you kept you pinned in place. But when the weight was dislodged and lifted, you pounced gloriously forward and you charged ahead, into the next…
Into the next—let’s go.
Image: Tom Morel
