“Hey, I hear you’re doing something new,” says a warm-hearted woman who works at the clinic where I’ve stopped to have my son’s ears checked.
I intentionally look puzzled to buy myself a few moments to scan my life for something other than Let Your Yoga Dance; but I come up empty handed.
“Yes,” I smile, reluctantly, waiting for more words to appear. None do.
“Dancing, I hear,” she says, nudging me along.
“Yes,” I say again with an embarrassed smile.
“How’s it going?” she asks.
“Good,” I say trying to match her enthusiasm, but I just feel foolish.
“What is it?” she says, probing. (She is a wise woman.)
“It’s crazy…” I say to explain, explaining nothing.
It’s funny how it comes–my relationship with myself and this new venture. Some days I’m all over it, eager to share, and other times, I shrink in self reproach. What the hell am I doing?! –I have to face people and tell them that I’m a “dance teac…” I can’t even bring myself to say the word.
When my kind friend asks why I use the word, “crazy”, I just lower my head and shake it. I’ve used up all the answers and I’m tired of hearing them, tired of hearing me back-pedaling in them. “It’s so ego-defying,” I’ve said to others, or “It’s not a career venture, is it!” or, “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
But the truth is I do know, and it’s more than all that, and bigger, and better, and that scares me. Will I measure up? Will I amount to anything? Can I survive vacillating between joy and self-doubt?
At home the next day, I ponder the conversation at the doctor’s office wondering why I couldn’t speak. I ask myself the same simple questions Susan did, as I load the dishwasher, to see what comes
I feel a familiar tingling between my legs–not that kind of tingling, but the zinging feeling in the spot where I was stitched up after my son’s was born.
Ever since that time, the place between my legs speaks up whenever I see someone in pain or even think of someone’s physical pain; as if Aidan’s passage, has left a permanent center of compassion on my body.
But, why am I feeling it now in response to Let Your Yoga Dance, I ask myself, (as I hear my boys coming up the hill.)
It’s another birth, I think–a labor; and immediately, I am transported back to the instant I felt Aidan move through the birth canal–a mind blowing moment, exploding my sense of self, of possibility, of limits.
I remember the burning, that mythologized “ring of fire,” and the relief I felt–rather than pain or fear, because I knew that the ripping meant that the labor was almost over.
What is ripping now?
My limited sense of self.
What is the ring of fire?
My self-doubt.
What is being born?
A radically reshaped sense of possibility and limitation.
A Let Your Yoga Dance instructor.
Me.
Kelly Salasin, 2007
Kelly Salasin 