A Lenten Offering from the Tabletop of My Body

My knowledge of Lent has not progressed very far since I once gave up chocolate until a trail of shiny wrapped candy lead my sister and I to our Easter baskets. This year, I intend to spend some time understanding the real significance of this season starting with Andrew Harvey’s Son of Man. In the meantime, I have tried to focus less on abstention and more on creating the life I want to lead for a set period of forty days. How many days is it that you have to engage in an activity before it becomes habit? I am making an attempt to wake up early enough to write or meditate every morning and to practice some form of yoga each day.

At class tonight I was able to move deeply enough into my breath, beyond the soreness of muscles that took me through a vigorous class yesterday to a place closer to my spirit. After a series of postures that brought to my core what instructors sweetly refer to as “heat” and what I bet many part time yogis like me know as screaming sinews, the teacher guided us into reverse tabletop position (I can’t seem to find the Sanskrit term – any ideas?). It is a relatively simple pose: hands and feet planted on the mat; stomach flat, facing the ceiling; head and neck relaxed back towards the floor.

In this moment when a position I would never adopt in everyday life seemed comfortable and effortless in comparison to the the other things I was asking my body to do, I was able to feel my heart open to the Universal. An circle like a great bowl that was without color or weight, merely marked by a sense of space, glowed from my chest. I felt as if my being was offering itself to the Divine. I was a table upon which a feast of worship was spread.

An unorthodox to begin to understand what it is to surrender to God in this season of Lent? Perhaps. But I know in that moment I shone with the purest sense of my true self.

~ by girlwhocriedepiphany on February 7, 2008.