i spent a friday night being spiritual...for real

last week i had an extremely holistic experience. liz and i arrived at [what i hoped was] koanji temple on my bike in the pouring rain. it’s an old, battered wooden building set back a ways from the road surrounded by beautiful gardens. a head poked out of one of the nearby windows urging me to come on in. that’s when i met yuriko, an attractive 30-something who lives at the temple, studying Buddhism and teaching yoga. her English is great. we walk through a couple of doorways into a cold stone room where we left our shoes. then through a sliding paper door into an expansive area of tatami mats. at the very far end there’s a section cordoned off with three mats on the floor facing a glass wall that looks out over a garden, water fountain and other temple structures; it’s absolutely breathtaking. we have a seat and chat for a while over some kum-ba-ya type music before she launches into our yoga lesson. i didn’t realize her English would be fluent enough to teach so much of the mental aspect of yoga technique. in a calm, strong, soothing voice she urged us to taste our body…liz and i looked at each other…could this be for real…it went way cheesy in a matter of seconds. she continued to explain…”i know these words don’t go together but consider what you do when you taste food. you hold it in your mouth, you move it around and mull it over, you consider how it feels, if it’s pleasing to your tastebuds, if you’d like to taste more. in every position, take time to taste your body. do you like what you are feeling? if not, make slight adjustments to the pose, like you would to food, until it tastes good.” after a complete body stretching warm up, we moved on to some bending and a series of positions. some of the poses are extremely aerobic; you feel your muscles quivering with fatigue and just before the moment of collapse we’d move on to something like the ‘half-moon holding a pearl’ position. after a while of this she asked us to lie back and feel our breathing and assess our bodies. she turns off the lights, turns up the time-life series relaxing music cd. she walks us through some breathing exercises in her hypnotic voice while she massages our feet and limbs. i was on the brink of sleep when…on come the lights, on your feet. we did some more difficult maneuvers consisting of 20 or so steps which is a lot to pay attention to while you’re ‘tasting’ your body and watching your breathing and concentrating on your center of energy, etc. it felt glorious though, as did the floor poses that we did next. the movements are so deliberate and well-paced that your muscles feel like they are actually being moved just like they were designed to. it’s such a release, like that first stretch and yawn in the morning. after about 45 minutes, we lie back down to reflect on our bodies in a position which has a Sanskrit name that i can’t exactly remember, like shawarmase. lights out except for a few well-placed lamps, she turns the music up and proceeds to place towels under our heads and cover us with thick, fuzzy blankets. i lie in my cocoon feeling my breath for a few minutes before she places a warm, aromatherapy sachet over my closed eyes. the smell is intoxicating. she then makes the rounds between the three of us, massaging our limbs, then our faces, then our scalps. it’s not long before i hear soft snores. after about 20 minutes she calls our names. we fold our blankets while she makes green tea. we kneel around a little table where she passes out cookies and we discuss her recent trip to Canada and our adjustment to life in japan. because we had dinner plans we had to excuse ourselves long before conversation was exhausted.
that experience represented a union of the body and mind like we seldom make time for. there was of course kinesthesia and superficial body/muscle awareness but also it beckoned us to consider the deeper mind-body connection and how they are inextricably connected, each influencing the others well being. has this gone way too ‘out there’ for you all yet? as cheesy as it sounds, this yoga stuff can only be incredibly positive for mental and physical health. since i spent last weekend desecrating this temple that is my body, i’m going back for more today. it’s a tad expensive, but the overall experience is worth way more than the price.