39 Sun Salutes

At one point, you stop sweating, and your body - disturbingly - feels afloat. Muscles don’t seem to respond the way they usually do, and instead they flutter or wash, like liquid under your skin. Sometimes, you wonder if you are controlling the movement, or if the movement is controlling you.

There’s a reason I do yogic sun salutations each year on my birthday (39 this year, 38 last year…). The unholstering of the body from its assumptions creates an imbalance that, after enough repetition, reveals itself to be a new balance. Something about gravity we didn’t understand before; something about inclination that becomes declination, and vice versa. Sun salutations are all about vice versa-ness and the topsy-turvy. It’s exhausting to go through it. My muscles never shake, and I am never sore after; it’s not that kind of exhaustion. Anything so repetitive that requires careful attention to each moment of its repetition is mentally exhausting, and the practice certainly is that. I always feel a little dopey when I’m done. But the real exhaustion is ideological.

Nearly half of the sun salute is spent with the body upside-down, and another portion convinces your body it’s upright when it’s prone, while still another moment in the movement gives you a glimpse of what’s above and behind you while you’re facing forward. The sun salutation provides one contradiction after another. At first when you start, the effort is just effort: concentrating on where your feet are, how your body hinges, where you place your hands and how your shoulder blades meet your back. But not long into the practice, you find that your body knows what it’s doing, and your mind just has to try to keep up. Over and over, you see the world turning upside-down, right-side-up, backwards, and forwards. The feeling of your own embodiment becomes almost foreign, until you look at your feet and think “are those my feet?” and you look at your hands, fingers magnetically drawn together, and think “did I put my fingers together, or did my fingers do this by themselves?” The only way to keep from falling over, really, is to trust in these limbs you don’t necessarily recognize as trustworthy. There’s no end to the disconcert, and finally you either have to resist it by stopping the practice, or accept it and let your mind wander into the resulting gap in reason.

A gap in reason that nevertheless coincides perfectly with reason. But a different reason, a different rationality, a faith.

William Blake loved to use the language of contradiction in order to paint logical arguments. Here’s an excerpt from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:

All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors.
1. That Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body & a Soul.
2. That Energy, call’d Evil, is alone from the Body, & that Reason, call’d Good, is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.

But the following Contraries to these are True
1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3 Energy is Eternal Delight.

Spend some time with these lines. There’s a lot more there, too, if you choose to read the full text. The point I’m making, of course, is that what we see as reason, what we understand as logic, is often deception, cleverness, an order that isn’t an order at all, but a construct. This is not new, you may say, and cite pages and pages of postmodern theory. You’d be right; our intellectual culture has known for decades that perception is indelibly subjective.

What happens during 39 sun salutes is that your mind gets loosed from its need to believe in constructions. Your body feels, as I said, afloat, and so does your mind. The movement becomes the only important thing, and you lose track of time.

It’s a perfect way to start the year: soaked in anti-cognitive activity, tripping on faith.

The nature of faith has been of special concern to me recently. The illogic of circumstance has seemed almost overwhelming - just the odds against the number of bizarre things that have happened in the last several months serves as evidence that something’s afoot. I’ve had moments of doubt that things will ever even out again, that any sort of routine will take hold one day, or that I won’t have to mull over extraordinary - sometimes terrible, sometimes wondrous - occurrences. I’ve said “my life isn’t always like this,” but it has been for going on three years. I’ve been tempted to throw up my hands and surrender to the catastrophe, like someone who stays on the beach when the tidal wave hits.

Though I was raised a Christian, I am no longer practicing that way. I have indefinable beliefs about the existence of God. I have questions about our loyalty as human beings to an idea that immense, one terrifically, utterly beyond our perception or understanding. And yet, hanging upside-down and looking backwards, I get a very real sense of orderedness, of implementation. Our bodies are wonders of biology, our minds vast networks more complicated than we can decipher; and the insistence on a soul is so pervasive across human culture and history that one cannot help but think it more than ether and metaphor. The universe - controlled, monitored, planned out, or none of these things, by a sentient God - reveals itself forgiving. Friendships mend, human beings find comfort in one another, sex is exciting, creatures evolve to pull apart dying trees so new trees can grow, and the earth will survive whatever polluted craziness we’ve visited upon it.

In my last post, I spoke about entropy. Things fall apart, and they do. But the other side of entropy - the mysterious side that’s a whole lot harder to track - can be found in the word’s Greek root: trope: transformation. We can watch something fall apart easily enough. But it’s hard to know what’s being created simultaneous to the breakdown… yet something is. The first law of thermodynamics (the theories of physics that give us insight into entropy in the first place) states, simply put, that energy is always constant; when one thing deteriorates, it lets off energy that is scooped up by something else in the process of creation. Or, as The Sound of Music’s Maria says, “When the Lord closes a door, somewhere He opens a window.”

So, whatever I do or do not believe about God, I can know this: order is inherent and, as long as I can anthropomorphize it, order is forgiving. What goes away comes back somehow. When you are upside-down, you will be right-side-up again. That’s hard to accept sometimes, especially when you’re not sure these are your arms and legs moving. But stick with the movement, trust it, and you’ll see.

So sayeth the 39 year old.