Garbha Pindasana

It's taken 11 years. Eleven years to get to the point where I pass Garbha Pindasana in the Ashtanga Primary Series. The other day in practice, I finally had a temper tantrum and just looked at my teacher and said those words to him. "Eleven years and I can't get past Garbha Pindasana." He looked at me with a knowing glance and said, "Get the water." Spraying my arms and legs down like a plant, he helped me pull my arms through the legs and work through the pose. "Don't think", he said, as my brow furrowed. I listened and with relative ease and comfort I got past Garbha Pindasana. The rest of the series is cake for me after that pose. I felt complete, at last. And a little saddened.

I realize that my relationship to Garbha Pindasana is not a physical issue. I can sit in full lotus and pull my arms through my legs. I mean, it's not easy, but with some help, I am capable of doing the pose without too many physical limitations. It is the emotional place, however, where I am stuck. It's all in my emotional body where I feel the deepest sensations and frustrations, especially when I'm rolling around to come back to the front of the mat and sit up on the hands in Kukkutasana and I fall over to the side. I have a couple of choices at this point. Start over and muscle through on my own or wait for help as I lay on my side bound in a fetal position because I cannot roll back to the center on my own. I need help, and help is something I am not used to having or asking for in my life. Oh, the symbolism of our poses and our life, our practice and our personality is rich and vast.

And so, today, I was able to roll around the mat nine times and come back to the beginning by myself, but I needed help rocking up onto my hands into Kukkutasana. The inner elbows are so bruised from the pose that I couldn't get up and started crying. The frustration and the sensations that this pose inspires are deep. It's not just being able to achieve the pose. There is much more that is going on within my soul. The cause and effect of the karmic vibrations that make up our existence in the past, present and future begins to make sense as I move through Garbha Pindasana.

My teacher says, "Just feel the sensation. Accept the emotion. We all have them. Let them be." He smiles and walks away and with that I wonder. And, I feel a tear stream down my face. My teacher has seen all my moods over the last 11 years - knowingly, unknowingly - the way a teacher does. The relationship frustrations, the joys of life, the calm, the tiredness, the injuries, the questioning, the seeking, the understanding, the simplicity, the complications. Quite simply, the ongoing and forever changes of a person. He sees all of me, as I am, and as I show up, and I often wonder what does he perceive. Who is the me that he sees.

Garbha Pindasana humbles me and it softens me and it reminds me to return to the seed, the embryo. This is where life begins.