Ongoing Openings
I am on my lounge room floor, the carpet underneath my legs slightly scratchy; synthetic grass. In front of me the large blank television screen, cumbersomeness looming large, dominates, demands my attention. Surreptitiously it seems to watch me, feigning the innocuous. Somewhere in the house is my mother, creeping around like a spider. On this floor, what I am doing is strange to her; I have to hide it. She has already verbalized her “concern” of it – and other evidence of “weirdness”- to my father and in bewilderment I experience a level of shame. But such joy! Such awe and wonder as I manipulate my limbs, turn my left hip in its socket, thigh rotating inwards, knee flexed, playing with the sensation of flexing and extending my ankle…….. “if I turn my foot this way……….ahh!” A different sensation. I am an explorer. Exploring my inner terrain, from the inside out. I am completely immersed in the subtle gradations of sensation; tensile, infinitely adjustable; fine-tuning my instrument. This experience of myself in a body; vast landscape, where are the edges, how do the edges feel? The shock, disappointment and indignation of limitation. Panic rises. In my choice to stay here, to anchor myself, to experience, I watch my whole body moving as it breathes; a ripple. Yes, I can be here a moment longer, in this body. Calm. Sensate. Alert. In this space, and from my curious passionate inquiry of my body, a emergent question burns: How is it, how does this bit that is “who I am”, get to “be here”, to ‘interface” with physicality? I am five years old.
I am on Santy’s knee. He’s asking me what I want for Christmas. He terrifies me, this Huge Being. He is God. I tell him I want those see-through models of the body that you can pull apart and put back together (but that you cannot really “make work” by pushing any hidden button to set the circulation a-coursing). I hunger to touch, to see, this hologram that is my body, to discover its architecture, the rivers of my body. Cathedral of my being. Somewhere deep within the interdigitating, mobile laval plates of my cranial bones – each a continental drift - lies the magic place: the brain. This, I reason, is where the energy of who I am gets to filter down, and I am here. This year I get several Barbies and a baby-doll.
I do not know what “yoga” is. I do not even know there is such a thing. What I do know, is that there is something called “dance”. Of course, I already know the intrinsic experience of joy incarnate that this is both a natural expression of and that engenders such movement, but I am yet to learn its structure; its contained language. It seems there are rules, precise ways to articulate my instrument. This is called “technique”, and in my quest for precise inquiry of experience I am good at it. It is a game and as such it both delights and frustrates me; it makes me laugh. But best of all, you get to do it to MUSIC. Ahhhhhhhhhh: Sound! And Time. I feel the sound impact on my structure, literally vibrating my cell membranes, moving the fluids within my body; I feel it resonating through my bones, pulsing a rhythm through my musculature. Rhythm!?! Spaces between sounds: time and sound playing. Constant reference and return is my body in gravity; what a strange thing that I cannot leap – and fly! That each limb, each component of each limb, my very organs, my HEAD, are so a-tuned to this embrace of the earth, as if we were hard-wired together. Threaded through dance is still this exquisite thing that now has a name: “Stretching”. But the way I engage with this activity has changed vastly. It is now “how far can I stretch”, “how good does it look”. I am becoming numb to what it feels like, the experience of it. Experience over-ridden. An external aesthetic is asserting itself; I have become an excellent “dancer”. I am 13 years old.
I am in a dark place. Not a physically dark place, for I go to work in a bright hospital Pathology laboratory (Biochemistry and Histopathology) by day and university by night. Chambers of the heart, vault of the skull, I am studying this structure that is my body. I can no longer feel my body. I don’t want to. My skin and flesh have shrunk onto my bones. I do not “stretch” and I do not dance. I work with the chemicals of the body, the tissue blueprint. I am lost. I have left home to live with my boyfriend, to escape the cloying stifling oppression of a home that does not allow me to breathe, to have an experience of myself. Access denied. But I have stepped into a void; I am a boat adrift. My boyfriend driving me to work one morning, I look up into the sky. I see birds. Birds in flight forming the shape of a “V”, like an arrow. Something shifts in me, finds the freedom that is my birthright. I am “severely clinically biochemically depressed, with psychotic episodes”, or so a Physchiatrist will tell me years later. But something within me asserts itself and I embark on something rudimentary. Something so very fundamental it challenges me every second. I bring myself back to my senses – literally. What can I see in front of my eyes, what do my fingertips touch, can I feel my own breath? Yes. Yes I can. A place to return to. I am 21.
I am seated on a swing in a park. I live in Wentworth Falls, in the Blue Mountains. I am talking to a calm, gentle woman, called Wendy. I am doing most of the talking, as I did those days. Wendy is smiling, listening. I am looking for something. It seems Wendy is offering a training, aura-balancing or something and I think I am interested. I’m not sure what I’m looking for, well I am, but I don’t know its form or where to find it. I know Wendy has it, I can see it in her. I want what I see, what I experience. I have forgotten it is already mine. I have this notion that I want to be a “Healer”. But echoes of something else are resonating. Something remembered from childhood. Something more simple and real for me. Something basic and fundamental to my being: the simple truth. I start to ask questions of Wendy.
I learn, through this asking, of the existence of a retreat/training called “Openings”. At first I am apprehensive; I do not want to “ get into something”. Some “group”. Some “cult”. Some anything. I don’t want to lose control. Tight, carefully carved out control. My safe-hold yet prison of protected perception. I have begun to reclaim myself, mother of two small children now and re-exploring dance, re-investing myself in the beginnings of the rudiments of yoga as a formal practice and teaching. But something is still and resonant in this space of my questions to Wendy. I want more and I decide to simply trust, and “get in the water”. A simple thing.
Day One: I am walking into the room and there is music playing. I feel such joy to be here, I feel like skipping. And my heart is pounding; apprehension. I have to walk right past this big guy; there he is, bloody Santy again. He watches me as I walk in. I am terrified. The guy is Adam, who runs this “Openings”. And later there will be the question of what do I want. What do I really want. I know what I want. And I can have it.
This is what I get
Simple. Space. Stillness that hums.
The freedom of the birds in the “V”.
Joy.
Peace.
Experience.
Alert and sensate. Awake. Vibrant. Potent.
Fifteen years later and its still unfolding; ongoing. It never stops.
I am on my mat. I am in Trikonasana. I feel each tendon, constantly resolving dialogue of each opposing muscle streaming onto bone, guiding and containing symphony of ligament: alignment. Reverberation of each breath echoing up the curving river of my spine; fine sensitive threads of spinal nerves emergent; sensing. The truth of the soles of my feet, dried watercourses whispering my history here, searching the truth of the mat; my architecture falling and rebounding through gravity. I am electrified. Fully conscious. I am in my body. Here. Now. Home. Opened. Opening.
What do you really want?
- Narelle Carter-Quinlan, January 2006
Openings contact information
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