“May your mind inhabit life with the sureness with which your body inhabits the world.” —John O’Donohue
There were no lines. No anxious cattle-herding. We walked right into the bright, clean school gymnasium. It had been transformed into a site of efficiency and safety—and clearly hadn’t been used for its normal purpose, for children to laugh and play, in some time. No longer a resident of NJ, I couldn’t get my COVID vaccine that day with my mother and sister, with whom I’d been more or less living for several months. But I insisted on coming with them, despite their protests that I should stay home, or at least in the car, to avoid all possible exposure. From literal sidelines, I watched them fill out their electronic paperwork and receive their arm jams inside the safe, soft privacy screens spread around the space. Maybe this won’t be so bad, I thought. Maybe we’re moving forward.
A few weeks later, back in the city, my own vaccination experience couldn’t have been more different. The instructions on my reservation said to come early, and I did; all of us did. Making my way to the back of an unfamiliar Duane Reade, I met a line of people snaking down the soft drink and paper goods aisle. The sign at the pharmacy desk, a simple print-out from MS word, said the team was OUT TO LUNCH. When their (deserved) break had started, and when it would end, was unclear. So I staked a spot as far away as possible from the people around me and spent 30 minutes memorizing the labels on bottles of soda. When it was finally my turn, the tech asked me if I was ready, and I lost it. I told her about my dad. About how he’d never get the chance to be saved by this medicine. “But you do,” she said. “This is for him, and for you.”
But that hadn’t happened yet when I stood in the NJ school gym. As hopeful as I was about vaccines, I was also terrified of their unknown and unpredictable side effects. When we got home, I asked my mom and sister how they were feeling every five minutes. Any pain? Chills? Fever? SOB? Quickly annoyed by my monitoring, they redirected all of our attention to an unlikely task: Let’s check out the floors.
One of the projects my dad had started, but didn’t get to finish, when he died had been a long time in the making. For years, we’d talked as a family about ripping out all the floors (mostly carpeted) and replacing them with new hardwood. In fall 2019, he’d finally ordered all the wood and stowed away the massive, heavy boxes all around the house, mostly in my and my sister’s bedrooms (we weren’t living at home at the time). Demo and installation started before Thanksgiving, paused for the holidays, then resumed in the spring—just weeks before he got sick. Afterward, the floors, and the new boxes of wood, laid untouched, un-thought-of, for months. Today was the day, obviously, to begin again.
I didn’t think it wise for my patients to be doing any strenuous labor, but I was shushed and told they were fine and would stop if needed (never had “stopping early” happened on any project in my life, but okay…). Besides, we were just going to “see how easy it was to get up the carpet.” Maybe try pulling up a few boards. Right. Soon it was dark and I’d peeled off my sweater as a combination of sweat and dust from 30-year-old carpet padding accumulated on my skin. I met an unexpected new friend that day: the crowbar.
Thinking back, I’ll never really know if these two women didn’t feel any reaction from their shots, or if they channeled the discomfort into taking a first step toward alleviating an even greater one.
“The place you suffer, in other words, is the same place you care profoundly—care enough to act.” ― Susan Cain, Bittersweet
**
After that, floor demo became our full-time job. Room by room, we moved the massive furniture (my first taste of “heavy lifting”), pulled up the carpet, and board-by-board removed the underlying, perfectly good hardwood they had been hiding there for decades. It broke my heart to discard the old flooring, which with a little polishing would have been like new. But this demo felt necessary on many levels. The crowbar wasn’t the only new friend I made in the process; I met my sister, from whom I’d been drifting apart since we were in college, as both the person I’ve always known, my forever-sidekick, and someone I hadn’t had the chance to spend much time with yet. Working from opposite corners and moving toward each other, I observed her perfectionism and dedication—traits that made me feel sometimes like I was working next to my dad; she learned about my nervous indigestion and tendency for low blood sugar (“Oop, it’s rag doll time,” she’d say when I began to visibly slow down and slump mid-afternoon. “Go eat something.”) Eighty percent of the floors came up easily, almost gleefully. I could find a rhythm in the work: wedge the crowbar under the floorboard, push it up with my foot, and toss it off into the discard pile (mindful of the rusty nails). Wedge, push, toss; wedge, push, toss; wedge, push, toss. The remaining twenty-ish percent of the boards could take as long to rip up as the whole rest of the room, but we MacGyver’d solutions with random tools we found in my dad’s tool chest (sorry, Dad). I ended those days famished and exhausted, but in the best way. I didn’t have the mental space to worry about whether dinner comprised the “right” foods—agni demanded attention, and I obeyed. I slept and woke up sore in places I didn’t know could be sore. With each pile of wood we removed, I got stronger. We were.
At one point toward the end, I was standing in the middle of a room we’d just finished—maybe it was my own bedroom. The thin plywood was soft beneath my feet. A rush of memories flooded my body—all the times I’d retreated to that room in teenage protest, the posters of *NSYNC I secretly taped to the walls, the ballet exercises I practiced on the pink carpet in the narrow strip between my bed and dresser, sleeping on the floor surrounded by piles of my college books when I graduated and came home totally overwhelmed by what came next. “You realize we’re literally tearing up the floors from under us?” I asked my crew. “That can’t be healthy.” My comment was serious, but it was also a joke—the kind of joke God plays when you make plans. Or, when you practice yoga for a decade, focusing all of your energy on “grounding,” only to find yourself treading water in an ocean of grief literally without a floor, actively removing the floor that could hold you up . . . and somehow even better than you expected.
Sitting on a soft seat,
Or lying on your mat,
Experience the space below
As offering no support.
You are simply suspended,
Floating in space.
Structures of the mind release.
The reservoir of habits dissolves.
In an instant, lifetimes of patterns
Vanish.
—The Radiance Sūtras, 59
**
There are beginnings, and then there are beginnings. January is like that—a tease of what the “new year” could and should bring. Even if you approach the new year the way I suggested, by listening for intentions/resolutions before acting, you’d have to be superhuman to not feel the urge to jump into that new and exciting something. I admit I did, and while nothing terrible happened I find myself here, just a few weeks later, sighing “Oh, Jennifer, we knew this would happen” as we start over.
The beginnings promised in January, or the very start of any new project/being/adventure, have a certain quality to them. Amorphous and immaterial, they’re pure energy and therefore elicit a reflection in our energy body. There’s a quickening of the breath, a flutter in the stomach, goosebumps, dreams. The potential that’s concentrated in pure space—the element associated with sound, from which we hear those sweet-nothing whispers of our Calling—is overwhelming, irresistible. It has to be that strong, enough to pull our attention and animate our matter out of its preferred state of inertia.
And then there are the February beginnings, which have a totally opposite quality, but are no less overwhelming and irresistible in their own way. In February, reality kicks in. The visions of Puruṣa (pure consciousness, aka Śiva) cohere into the awe-some/awe-ful material form of Prakṛti (the manifest universe, aka Nature, aka Śakti). We have to start acting on our Calling, wrangling the potential into a shape that can do work here in our five-elemental world, walking our talk. Progressing the longings of the mind into the realm of movement—being moved to move, then actually moving—is the domain of our next sense, touch, which will be the focus of this upcoming six-week season.
This moment exposes us to the last victory lap of vāta doṣa, which has been building steadily since fall and is never willing to give up its dominion as we move toward spring. Like many of us are experiencing in nature, late-vāta has an intensity that brings us to our knees. Where I live, we’ve had record-breaking cold temperatures and snowfall that have put a stop to even my dedicated walks; my poor fingers and toes can’t handle it, and there’s nothing more ungrounding (even standing on a plywood subfloor) than numb feet. In many other places, a different kind of ICE is breaking families, hearts, and the very vision of our country as a place of refuge and belonging.
These conditions drop our attention to the other end of our gross and subtle anatomy: from the throat and ears, where we experience space and sound most acutely, into the pelvis. One could argue that the pelvis is a space-y place, too; it’s also famously home to the water element and its Ben-and-Jerry’s flavor menu of emotions. But we can’t forget about the layers of earth that build up the pelvis: the root chakra (if you’re into chakras), the “center of gravity,” the pelvic floor. Oh, and there’s all the fire. The fire of so may hormones and neurotransmitters that send directions to the brain on how to move us into action, how to regulate the rhythms of our organism, how to build and how to eliminate. The fire of love that literally defies logic, engendering a reality where 1+1=3.
All this is true, and yet Āyurveda is clear that the pelvis is the sthana (home) of vāta—specifically the air element of that dynamic duo, given that its the place where movements of all sorts, from dancing to digestion to breath to life itself, initiate and end. It’s the place where we feel our dreams becoming real: when the butterfly wings of a new idea transform into an anvil that drop hard in the stomach, that clench of the pelvic floor when we realize this is more than we signed up for, that gasp of “here we go” that means you’re actually doing the thing.
So the pelvis is the home of all the elements (and by extension, the central headquarters of all the doṣas). Vāta is like that—it can mimic the other doṣas’ qualities, and moves them around the body while it tries to settle itself. When a doṣic imbalance advances to a certain stage, vāta is always involved because of its role in transporting what’s in excess. You can think of it like this: in its attempts to protect the vital functions of the body, of prāṇa, vāta ushers what doesn’t belong to a place where it will be out of the way. But if you’ve ever taken a similar approach with random stuff you’ve accumulated but don’t want to get rid of—put it in the closet, the drawer, under the bed—you’ll know that only works for so long. Vāta will get angry when it fills up all the space it needs to move with doṣa. The full force of Mother Nature as Prakṛti, as Śakti, is vitiated. And then we have an issue we can’t ignore
Just as all the elements live in the pelvis, conducted by the rhythmic baton of vāta and prāṇa, the sense of touch—governed by vāta and the air element—plays a distinct and encompassing role in our systemic well being that we can refine this time of year in preparation for spring. Touch is its own sense, perceived through the skin and enacted by the hands, but it’s also involved in every other sensory perception. The little hairs in our nose and ears are grazed by molecules and frequencies when we smell and hear—a kind of touch. The “skin” of our GI tract, from tongue to anus, gets to third base with our food as we ingest and digest; even the cones of our eyeballs are touched by wavelengths of light when we see. Without touch, we’d feel nothing.
tatraikaṁ sparśanamindriyāṇāmindriyavyāpakaṁ , cētaḥ- samavāyi, sparśanavyāptērvyāpakamapi cacētaḥ; tasmāt sarvēndriyāṇāṁ vyāpakasparśakr̥tō yō bhāvaviśēṣaḥ, sō’yamanupaśayātpañcavidhastrividhavikalpō bhavatyasātmyēndriyārthasaṁyōgaḥ; sātmyārthō hyupaśayārthaḥ||38||
The sense of touch is present/pervades in all the senses, it is associated with mind. The mind is pervaded in sense of touch, the latter in turn in all senses (indriya). The anupashaya (unwholesome objects) of sensual faculties are divided into five types further sub divided into three each (non-utilization, over utilization, wrong utilization). This is known as asatmyendriyatha samyoga. The favorable reaction of the senses is satmya (adaptation/wholesome conjunction of senses with their object). ||38||
—C.S. Sū 11/38
And, as modern science has proven, touch is necessary for humans to thrive—and live. Depriving a baby of touch is akin to starving them. Touch, vāta, the pelvis—they’re life as we know it.
In the pelvis, space and air (vāta) meet their partners in earth and water, providing the material substance from which we can build our reality through the longings of our consciousness. It’s the soil in which we plant the seeds of our heart, and the ground that supports us while we wait for them to sprout.
This synergy only happens because of the counterpoint we find to the base of the spine at the top of the spine—the lifeline of our kundalini śakti. The throat (specifically, the soft palate) and the pelvis (specifically, the pelvic floor) together create the bookends inside which we can experience the first flickerings of satisfaction as manifestation begins. In the pelvis, we feel the results of what we might have perceived, received, or conceived in the throat. Even when that feeling is frustration, effort, or overwhelm, it’s what motivates us to keep going through the February-stage of whatever cycle is playing out in your universe.
What we feel, specifically, is a form of agni (fire). We perceive the efforts of transformation that have been quietly stirring under the surface and now have the complete container—space + earth—to grow. There are little (and big) fires everywhere in our worlds, but for now we might remember the dhātu dhara kalās, the fires between tissues that direct nourishment. While we can appreciate the end results of their efforts, these fires are themselves residents of the in-between. Spending time with them there is a profound act of reverence, a synergy of desire, action, and satisfaction that were usually too busy to behold.
***
Now is the time to pause in this in-between. Nature gives us little choice about it when we arrive at the beginning of February at a cross-quarter festival known as Imbolc (the eve between Jan 31 and Februrary 1). This Gaelic word means “in the belly,” and is often connoted as the “stirrings” that a pregnant woman feels of her growing baby in the womb (also, the stirrings of milk production as ewes prepare to birth their lambs). The patron of Imbolc is Brigid, who represents the archetype of the maiden. Brigid is represented as a true triple-threat—a poet, a smith, and a healer (VPK)—though is mostly associated with fire. Indeed, now, smack dab between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, the sun steadily pushes toward equilibrium with darkness, offering us healing and inspiration through its light. There’s a noticeable shift in the quality of light—I’ve been tracking how the sun blazes through the windows during my 7:30 am classes. And there’s a noticeable energetic shift—a change in our inner light. The frustrations with winter and cold stir up as liver energy starts to turn on; but we also might find ourselves committing to our new year’s goals with new focus. We approach them with the wisdom we gathered from observing where we succeeded, where we overpromised, where we failed, where we were led astray by some marketing lie. We feel ourselves standing on a different earth, with the sun at our backs—on a floor we’ve had the chance to tear up a bit and bask in the burn of our muscles afterward.
This February sun isn’t new, but it’s the first time we’ve really been able to notice and feel it. Life never went away, but now we have stronger material proof that what may have felt like just a whisper, a dream, an idea is becoming. Still, as we feel in nature in February, this fire isn’t fully cooked. The sun rises earlier and sets later, but it’s not enough to really break through the snow and ice—yet. Like the expecting mother, the stirring of Imbolc prompts us to wait. It’s a reminder that we’re in an incubation period, and the task at hand is to be patient and still and stable to protect and anticipate the new life. The desire takes on a new quality—one grounded by faith. Entering this space of waiting is possible, tolerable because of the earth we know—because of the stirring of movement, the invisible yet palpable power of vāta—has been established inside of us. We are our own floor, and the space that’s under and above it; we can feel fear and trust, grief and joy, simultaneously when we look at the spark of life straight in the eye and see all of the possibilities, all of the truths, it holds.
“But longing is momentum in disguise: It’s active, not passive; touched with the creative, the tender, and the divine. We long for something, or someone. We reach for it, move toward it. The word longing derives from the Old English langian, meaning ‘to grow long,’ and the German langen—to reach, to extend. The word yearning is linguistically associated with hunger and thirst, but also desire. In Hebrew, it comes from the same root as the word for passion.” —Susan Cain, Bittersweet
**
February is famously the month of love, though the narratives we get about Valentine’s Day are often narrow bands of the full spectrum of love that the pelvis can help us experience. Most of the time, we focus on the bookends—the notion of realized love OR the very gross manifestations of love in sex, saccharine and cliche gifts that require no presence or personality. What if we idealized the part of love that feels like just “stirring,” that hadn’t yet fully become, but is everything because it is in-between? This is where we feel ourselves, excited and terrified, dwelling in the space where “you” and “I” could stay separate and merge, who knows? It’s where find yourself, inexplicably, pulling up the floorboards in the perfectly good and solid home of the self you know, to prepare to dwell somewhere else, and to be someone else in that space, on that ground.
This love isn’t reserved for February 1, February 14, or romantic partners. It’s a love that exists in the space between the initiation and fulfillment of any desire. It exists in the space inside every moment, between each breath and heartbeat. It’s the space in which the psoas—the queen of the land of the pelvis—can choose to contract or relax, to move us into a posture of guarding or of intimacy, of defense or play. We’ve all but collapsed that space in our culture of instant gratification, algorithmic satisfaction, and constant distraction.
But we have an opportunity to pause, or at least slow down, that tide of lost attention, lost feeling. The first time might be hard, but keep at it and soon you’ll find your rhythm. Give it a try: right now, go to your pelvis. Be there. Put a stake in the ground of your reality and claim it as your own. Prāṇa has already built the ceiling and floor of the house of your life. Now, dwell in it. Now, begin—again. You have come home.
