Love, Yoga, Mothers, and Lost Baby Birds

Tara Judelle began her class called Listening to the Whole Body Instrument on Yogaglo with the directions for the practitioner to ask themselves the question that is most on their mind. (Where should I go? What’s next? What do you want me to do?)

I couldn’t think of a question. What if I was a body with only answers or silence or chaos!?

Then she said, “What is the question that is foremost on your mind?” I saw a picture of my brain, the prefrontal cortex like a bow of a ship, and I heard, I felt, the question, Do you love me? 

Ooof. 

I started bargaining with myself. That is not a good way to approach the world, I thought, picturing a begger with an empty bowl. I imagined the book Are You My Mother? where the newly hatched baby bird walks up to all sorts of creatures and objects—a kitten, an old car, a boat, a plane (Here I am, Mother!), a Snort (Mother! Mother! Here I am, Mother!)  reworked into a story called Do You Love Me? 

I pictured the baby bird going through the same actions, but asking Do you love me? instead of Are you my mother?. I thought about the confused looks it would get from the kitten and the dog and the cow, the silence it would get from the objects made of metal. My heart hurt for the little bird. All it wanted was to go home, and it had to keep asking these strangers a question none of them understood. 

That felt too close to home. I had thought I was just going to do an hour of yoga and now I was digging deep into my soul. But this, of course, was why I was doing yoga in the first place. Yoga is never simply a series of movements. It’s movements and Holy shit where did that thought/feeling come from? I’m going to keep breathing and feeling through this experience because I spent a lot of money on these Lulu pants and this Manduka mat and I don’t want it all to have been for naught. 

What does it mean if Do you love me? is my question? What does it mean if it has been my question my whole life? Am I a begger? Am I weak? Am I insecure? 

And what if the answer is No?

And what if the answer is Yes? 

I have lived both situations. Both are scary. 

What if I flipped the switch in my brain and made the question Do I love you?  Would my life be different? Would I be different? 

In down dog, the palms of my hands were flat on the ground, and the skin communicated with the ground. I was connected to earth through my hands. (My hamstrings are tight so my feet were nowhere near flat on the ground.) Do you love me, Earth? Do I love you, Earth?  What if one question is for the inhale, and one question is for the exhale? Do I get extra points for covering all my bases?

Can I feel enough to know whether or not I love something or someone? When you are adopted and have disorganized or avoidant or anxious attachment styles, questions such as this are not simple. 

Can you imagine being a little kid and looking at your parents who adopted you and facing the feeling in your heart that you don’t love them? Do you have any idea how terrifying this is? They are supposed to be your people!

Can you imagine being a little kid and looking at your parents who adopted you and facing the feeling in your heart that you love them? Do you have any idea how terrifying this is? If your first parents left you, why wouldn’t these? 

If you were this kid, maybe the move that would seem to feel the safest would be to love nothing with your whole heart, to remain suspended in space, to freeze yourself in the nothing place, where you can’t lose any more than you already have. 

Not that I know anything about this.

At the end of the practice, I went into child’s pose and I stayed with the tightness in my low back, in my sacrum, L4/L5 area. I inhaled for the count of 7 and exhaled for the count of 9. It felt like filaments of fascia or muscle or who knows what were pulling away from bone. I imagined tiny fingers holding onto my spine and sacrum, like someone holding on to a cliff’s edge. Let go, I breathed. Let go.  

My body thinks it has to hold on. My back is tight because my muscles and fascia think they have to be tense to keep me upright. They forgot a long, long time ago that my body has a balance all its own and was created to relax into an easy, aligned posture. 

My mother used to drive with her right hand in a fist on her leg. Often I would reach over and unpeel her fingers as if there were a treasure in the palm of her hand and I was looking to find it. I wanted my mother to relax so I could feel that I could relax, too. I was looking for safety. 

Holding her own fingers tightly made my mother feel safe, and so we were at odds there in the car. 

But we both wanted the same thing: to be loved by the other.

And this was so complicated.