Lorena's Epiphany

Hearing Silence

February 3, 2010 at 9:21 am Leave a comment

For fear of sounding like a new age hippie in this post, I’m going to do my best to avoid.. well, sounding like a new age hippie!

It’s true what they say about yoga. It helps reduce stress and makes your body more flexible, blah blah. I’ve already started noticing the difference and I’m hooked. Every class I feel my confidence in my body growing and I want to see how far I can push my body before I fall off balance. Some moves are very complicated and it feels like a very evolved game of twister.

You become a human pretzel with your right hand on red, left foot on yellow, left hand on green.. Soon you lose sense of what foot is where and begin to wonder why you can’t feel you hand that’s knotted behind and under your back. Guess that viewing yoga as a challenging game of balance makes me feel like less of a hippie for doing it.

Something strange happened during my last class. The Monday class I take is brimming with people. Your hands and feet can’t help but smack the person next to you – it’s that crowded! We always start with breathing exercises in the famous Buddha sitting pose (legs crossed, fingers on knees). Some people hum and others breathe freakishly loud while I muffle my giggles. At one point the room grew completely silent, and I don’t know a better way to say this, but I heard.. silence. It echoed through my ears in a way I’ve never heard.

It was weird and I felt kind of uncomfortable. I had to open my eyes to see if the room had unexpectedly emptied out, but there we were 25 people and our teacher.. still, unmoving. Freaky.

And my yoga studio is right on Gemmayze’s main street where sound always manages to trickle into class. Beirut itself is a very noisy city. If it’s not drilling and construction, then someone feels the urge to honk their horn. (sometimes on beat to a political chant) Where I work now is especially noisy. There’s 4 construction sites behind my building, traffic on the main road facing the building and tons off honking during rush hour. Maybe that’s why I heard “silence” during yoga.

This weekend I’m going on a weekend meditation yoga retreat in the mountains. I’m very curious to try it, but I’m keeping my car keys handy in case the silence there drives me nuts. How will I make it through 3 days of meditation, vegetarian food and new age philosophy?

Entry filed under: Floating. Tags: breathing, Gemmayze, Lebanon, meditation, poses, retreat, silence, twister, yoga.