The morning after I wrote this post, I woke up at 4:27 — three minutes before Sadhana was to start — with a terrible cough that’s clung to me for two days now. I fell back into my pillows and slept until 7:00 a.m.
This morning, same thing. I’ve been coughing violently all day, trying to hold it together through this Solstice Eve, hoping I have the strength to return for the final two days of Sadhana tomorrow.
Illness and exhaustion have happened to several of us doing this Sadhana. Vera, the studio owner and yoga teacher, said it happens often that participants have similar personal experiences during the seven or forty days of Sadhana, as if a like energy draws the group together, or pervades it, generating the particular experiences they need as a collective.
A Sadhana done as Sagittarius is waning and Capricorn begins to take hold — as the Winter Sun stands still in its path — would naturally, then, bring people who seek spiritual truth in preparation for personal growth. The stillness of Solstice reflects the deepest part of this process, the final letting-go of old attachments, old habits, old assumptions. It is the act of succumbing to the darkest hour just before the long, slow ascent into light. The Sun, standing still for three days, asks us to stand in place, to be quietly where we are, to feel Will, Spirit and Energy shift around us, shift inside of us.
But before the Spirit can move through, the body needs clearing. Illness, though unpleasant, is our way of getting rid of what we don’t need. Not unlike feng shui, illness clears sick or unbalanced energy from the space of the body. It washes our internal pathways clean of debris so energies of a higher order may travel well and smoothly through us.
We might well ask ourselves what the body is trying to clear: If it’s nausea, have you allowed yourself to swallow something that you can’t digest — a belief, a habit, a way of being? If it’s coughing, have you allowed your authentic voice to be swallowed? If it’s an achy back, in what way might you need to strengthen your spine — literally or figuratively? What is the body trying to expel, and how, and what do those things tell you?
As I write, I am hearing my two-year-old son cry in his father’s arms as h
e tries to let go of the day, to fall into sleep. He, too, is trying to reach a new truth, a new understanding of who he is without the constant doting of his mom, without nursing, without the comforting helplessness of infancy to curl up in. He is afraid — as the ancients were afraid, at Winter Solstice, that the Sun would disappear completely — that nothing as good as babyhood will come to fill his cup. He tries to cling to the old times, to the summer Sun, all the while knowing that he must let go.
He’s had this cough, too. Maybe as I creep out of the house at 4:20 each morning, he, too, is doing his own Sadhana in the instinctive way of the toddler.
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