For a little while I’ve been getting gentle nudges from the universe to look for this wooden yoga back stretcher, or as my Italian yoga teacher would call it, “la cassetta”. If you don’t know what it is, I suggest consulting the Google Gods and finding out. It may just change your life. All the forward bending we do and hunching over, especially in some yoga practices, can be countered by backward stretches and using one of these little babies, is painful but heaven. Heavenly painful? Perhaps. And this past year, it would pop into my mind periodically and I’d wonder where on earth I’d put it as I moved from place to place these last few years. Each time, the nudging getting a little louder, ever more persistent. And finally, the other day I open a cupboard and there it was, waiting patiently to be rediscovered up on the top shelf. I was busy that day, so didn’t have the time, as we say, to get a stool, climb up and release the stretcher from its enclose. So there it sat some more.
In this same period, I started getting memories of wooden flutes my father had brought back from Iran many years ago. So long ago that I couldn’t even remember if it ever happened or if it was a figment of my imagination. And of course he’s not around for me to ask. Or perhaps he is. And these gentle nudges…
I used to have a solid yoga practice, feeling the benefit in my body as the discipline of getting onto my mat and moving beyond my apparent limits, brought me strength, flexibility; feeling the benefit in my soul as the “meditation in movement” as ashtanga yofa is often referred to would open and soften Heart. But these last few years with the unsettling that happens in a period of transformation, it’s lapsed and injuries have occurred and I’ve been gently and patiently rebuilding it. Yesterday I did a wonderful yoga practice, the best I’d done in a while, even managing to get back up into bridge pose, opening my back, feeling the power in my arms, the twinge that has been harbouring in my wrist handling it surprisingly well. It felt amazing. But I later paid a small price for this exertion, feeling it in my back and my shoulders, not entirely a bad pain, but pain all the less. The kind that says: yes, these muscles have needed a little shake up! And as I lay in bed last night, the image of “la cassetta” was deafening. I knew I needed to get it out this morning and finally use it.
And so I obliged these nudges, I acknowledged them and followed their direction. Upon waking, I opened the cupboard and tried to get it out, but a whole load of “stuff” was blocking it. I’d stored it away in tetrisically beautiful alignment, meaning I had to unpack all the “stuff” to get to my back stretcher. As I did so, I noticed said “stuff” was a large bag full of oddities from my past. I cleared the way, got the stretcher and then opened the bag.
One item after another led me back in time to different moments of my life, some completely forgotten, others treasured but dormant. Even finding a Birthday present given to me by my flatmates in my last year of uni, the memory of which was so distant it was as if it never happened. And yet, emotions came flooding back. As I opened the delicately wrapped present, I took out piece after piece of a Japanese set of fans and chop sticks, accompanied by the smallest Birthday card ever. Joy filled my heart. I was once very much taken by all things Japanese, still am really, and they knew this. These beings who entered my life for only a short time in my troubled years as a young lady emerging into the world. I rummaged further, and found the treasure I’d hoped would re-emerge one day. In amongst those physical mementos, lay my wooden flutes, and even my first wooden recorder, the first ever instrument I learned to play.
Was it possible that via my yoga and my back and my quest for the stretcher, the gentle nudges of the universe were leading me back to my old self and to find these wooden flutes? And along the way. saluting the Sonia of long gone years and sitting with how far I’ve come on this journey we call life. Sending love back to that girl who so much needed softness and safety. And finding these flutes at a time when a new musical world is unfolding for me.
I even took out my acupressure mat, untouched for a couple of years. It was time.
The yoga practice of this morning was of a kind I don’t often embrace. Soft, gentle, nurturing yin-like yoga. Slow and without rushing to embark on the day’s tasks. Allowing myself the freedom to just be. The polarity and duality of existence is an ever-present necessity for our beings, and if we stop to listen to our bodies, our soul and those gentle nudges, it allows us to push on through the busy, fervent, fertile moments, and find moments of stillness and nurturing, so we may be gentle with ourselves and bring into this world more soft ripples of the Eternal Heart.
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