Breathing fast and slow

New York Poet Laureate Marie Howe wants us to learn to pay attention. As a daily caregiver to her brother when he was in the process of dying from AIDS, Howe learned how to notice "the particulars" of objects and sounds and sensations. She found that she learned to live in time again--in the present--by becoming aware of these particulars--everything that is ordinary, in other words. According to Howe, we can only really describe what is happening or what transpired by talking about what we have observed. Then, when we talk about the bed, the garden, my daughter's bathroom floor covered in beach sand, or the kitchen sink full of last night's dinner plates, we know there is a space between all of that where "what the living do" unfolds. I stumbled upon this insight of poet Marie Howe a couple of days ago while at the beach, again, with my daughter. Give me a moment, and you will understand my emphasis of "again." In the summer issue of Tricycle, ...

Here I am at the keyboard, and I am working overtime in my attempt to be mindful of my spine, my shoulders and the broad space between them that is my upper back, and all the while I am assessing whether I am seated squarely on my sit bones or dumping into my lower back. This, my friends, is not the chatter of a brain afflicted with OCD. This is what it feels like to sit in dandasana , also known as staff pose or seated pose. If I were to write as Hemingway did, standing at a podium, I would adjust my awareness accordingly, shifting from my sit bones to the soles of my feet where I would end up in tadasana , mountain pose ( samasthiti ) or standing pose. Let's face it, if I really attempted to write while in tadasana, I'd break a sweat before I wrote the first adjective. Writing is tough enough. In yoga, if done correctly, standing and sitting can bring on a sweat as well. As an advanced yoga practitioner, it is good to be mindful of the basic and most essential poses. Here ...