When I got up badly, my back still hurt. I walked Elsa briefly. I went to Bikram. I spent the whole class on my back again, hoping that these stretches would do some good. I was able to do all the postures with modifications. Doing yoga while lying on the floor provides a whole different perspective on my alignment from the mirror. I can use the contact with the floor to see if my back is touching evenly.
Heather announced during the class, "Betty, you were so missed when you were gone." After class, I asked her if the classes were better when I was there. As I had been expecting, the answer was yes. She said, "You don't know how many people come up to me, so tell me what an inspiration you are." People find me an inspiration because I come, despite my problems and, I guess, my age. I find that frustrating. If I ignored the basics, I could probably do the postures as well as other students who aren't very good. Also, there are students with worse problems than I have. I want people to find me a role model because of how I work, being a body nerd, and carefully monitoring my alignment in every posture. Oh, well. I am glad that I inspire people to do more. The only problem is that they only see me doing 'more' instead of 'better.' Doing 'more' can be harmful; doing "better' is a whole different order of animal. I want to think that my concentration when working makes a difference besides my' courage,' the word Heather said was the quality that inspired others.
As I left the class, one of my old students, K, called me from the second-floor dance studio as I walked to my car. After asking me how I was, she said she would love to work with me again. She is the most difficult student I have ever worked with. She would do nothing my way and balked at doing any work. There was nothing I could do to get her off the dime. Her mother had transferred her to a school where a lot of the work was online, and she attended classes at the site once or twice a week. She loved the setup but still didn't carry her weight. This year, her mother transferred to a charter school with a more traditional setup. Would you believe it, she is working? I had heard she was doing better and investing herself in her work, but I was still skeptical about why she wanted to work with me. Did she want to sit on my lanai? Did she just want to be in my company? While I like and care about this child, no, no, no, I don't want to spend time supporting her bad behavior. Then, she said she wanted help learning how to break up big words. Yes, yes, yes, I would love to work with her on that. School vacation was the following week, and she was traveling to California for a family reunion. I'm looking forward to working with her when she comes back.
My back wasn't much better after the class. Oh, well. I was planning to do house cleaning today while I listened to my NPR Saturday shows. Guess not. I took to the love seat, ensuring my head was at the same level as my back and not elevated as Judy had recommended. I slept. I can always sleep. I woke up now and then and heard some of my shows.
One of them was the TED Radio Hour, which featured Maslow's hierarchy as the topic. It generated ideas and ideas and ideas.
Musings:
On Maslow's hierarchy of needs:
Several things were discussed tie in with my theories. One was a study of soldiers in a combat situation in Fallujah. They were isolated. They had no toys that appealed to young men: technology, cars, girls. They were utterly dependent on each other, prepared to risk, even sacrifice, their own lives for their brothers in arms.
The researcher said a situation like that becomes addictive. One man compared it to a cocaine high. The researcher said that they miss it when these men return from the front. They don't miss the combat, the opportunity to kill, and the threat of death. The intensity of that life-threatening situation creates that bond, which transports the human psyche beyond the normal state.
My theory was that this was a frequent, if not a normal, state of mind for our ancestors, whose lives were constantly under threat from the environment. They survived because they had each other's backs. What a wonderful bond!
The sister of a friend of my sister once described a heroin high as 'the smallest universe I know." Now, I wonder if there is a connection between our 'addiction' to intense social bonding and drug addiction. They have some internal 'feelings in common.' Addiction to the intense social bond is linked to our survival as individuals and as a group. We belonged. In our current world, drugs are more accessible than strong social bonding. Now, most of us live like zoo animals: our safety is assured; there is no need for a strong bond to ensure survival. We miss it.
Being intensely invested is a gifted moment. Psychologists have named it a peak state or flow state. Is it possible that our ancestors lived at that level frequently? That doesn't sound logical to me. Whatever our lives are about, there is the routine.
Maslow said that we can maintain a peak moment for 5 minutes at a time. Then we have to come back to the ground. Meditation helps us achieve this state without the threat of death looming over us. Some people think the whole purpose of meditation is to achieve this state. As I understand it, the purpose of mediation is to achieve this state and accept the loss of it, the reappearance, and the loss, over and over and over. The purpose of meditation is to achieve that state without having to put ourselves in jeopardy. The goal is to live life safely, achieve these states, and accept the loss of those states.
Someone in the TED talk spoke about the state of flow achieved by people involved in activities from the mundane to the sublime. The speaker described a man who spent all his working hours butchering salmon. He turned this into a flow experience. We usually associate the flow experience with a creative act with its unique moments, not a repetitive activity. However, the salmon butcher sees each fish as a different experience.
I remembered something I read in Graham Greene's Mr. Johnson. (I checked his bibliography and can't find anything by that name. Whatever, the point was important to me.)
As I remember, Mr. Johnson is a local man who served as secretary to a British bureaucrat in some African nation. The bureaucrat's wife comes from England to join her husband. Mr. Johnson has the job of showing her around. They come across a man throwing pots with a group of people standing around him transfixed. After watching the potter throw one or two pots, the woman wants to move on, finding the activity boring. Mr. Johnson is surprised by her attitude 'because each pot is different.' The wonder is in watching what each pot becomes.
The flow state is described as a state 'when we get out of ourselves.' It is an attention issue. I see our attention as a bull's eye. We are at the center. Anything outside of ourselves is in one of the surrounding circles. Things that command our attention daily are in one of the rings close to the center. Our mates, our children, are in those rings. They are never out of our minds, but neither do we 'forget' ourselves in most interactions.
If incidents are intense enough, we can focus intensely on an object outside of ourselves that is important to us: if our child is in danger, we move with fantastic strength and speed; we become something other than our usual selves.
However, there are two types of 'forgetting 'ourselves. Thank God I haven't had many experiences like the one I'm about to describe. I remember a studio dance performance where I was in a mental state where I couldn't feel my body as I moved. It was weird. I have heard that victims of regular sexual abuse describe this out-of-body state. We can forget ourselves and leave ourselves, but it's not pleasant, no less joyful.
In a healthy flow state, we are not just highly focused on something outside of ourselves, but we are also uniquely focused on ourselves. What we are not is out-of-body, duplicating the mental state of victims of sexual abuse.
The ability to focus in a concentrated way can be a gift or a curse. As with anything, it can be deployed in situations of danger or achieved in a controlled state. Some people can focus but are not in control. A spinning object might capture their attention and leave them transfixed. People with no control over their focus are unhappy and probably not even functional.
