At the beginning of September, I started to commit more to dialing myself down after work.
One thing that I’ve done is to de-stress a few evenings each week with yin yoga. In the early-ish/mid-2010s, when I lived in my last apartment and was physically closer to a real yoga studio, one class that I really loved going to was a yin class. I have done yin intermittently since then, but this September is when I’ve really committed to doing it on my own. I already know the poses, and for a long time, I was limited in how relaxed I could get because I used guided videos on YouTube. I probably never needed the YouTube.
The Wong Janice, a musician I started listening to during lockdown, came out with a new album, Cello for the Moon Phases, that I deeply love. I have been listening to it while I do yin yoga. The pieces are shorter than her usual works, but they are still very meditative and beautiful.
One of my ambitions is to listen to Proclus’ Elements of Theology while doing yin yoga — I think that could be an interesting experience of the text — because it’s one of the few works of Proclus that has been professionally narrated. This has not materialized because I have judged music to be a better fit every time I have done yin yoga this month. In the meantime, I’ve been listening to it while at the gym. I have read this work multiple times silently, and I know what is in it, but I do like experiencing things through audio because the information enters my long-term memory more readily. (There are people I know who can very easily call up specific propositions, but I tend to ballpark and either gloss what I know or look at the section in order to recall the verbatim text.) One thing I have realized about Zoom presentations is that they’re actually easier to take in when I look away from the screen and simply listen, as there’s a lot going on between the videos of everyone on the call and the speaker’s voice and the slides. That will likely translate well.
I spent a lot of time this week co-hosting special events at work and was also fighting through medical and insurance bureaucracy on the phone. This afternoon, I ran an errand, and as I was walking home, the bright bluish-violet flowers in someone’s front yard were so visually cutting that I had to look away from them. That was the moment when I realized just how much I had overextended my body. I arrived home, made some lunch, read a lot of grounding Proclus, and spent half an hour or so moving through the slow yoga poses to the lunar music. I never even did a sun salutation.
The other thing I have loved recently is that I’m currently doing a prayer practice for Hygieia — reading her Orphic Hymn after doing the evening meditation. In alignment with the recent post I composed about her, it feels good to take refuge in the Goddess with regards to maintaining a concordant state. (I pray to Eir more than to Asklepios, and I still pray to her with Apollon in the mornings.) Sometimes, when my brain is too effervescent, I try to convince myself that I don’t need to meditate for as long as I know I need to. That’s usually when I actually need to meditate for even longer.
I hope that you are all having an excellent weekend and taking rest however you can. 🌳
KALLISTI 