I love frog pose. I do. I am flexible and I love the hip openers. Frog has brought me to tears at least once. But mostly I experience strength, and power, and release, or so I thought.
Today I experienced the gift of frog pose. Today, I keenly felt this truth: that we hold ‘stuff’ in our joints and soft tissue and if we are holding on, then we can let go. I moved into the pose, confident in my expectations. I know frog. But today, frog was different. My breath quickly became intense and steady, today I really had to use the breath to stay in the pose…the feeling in my hip joints/groin was sharp, sharp sharp. Breath, gail, breath! My arms reached out to grab the floor. What? What did she say? Tip your tailbone? Oh my god. The yoga begins when you want to leave the pose. What am I holding on to so tightly? Breath, drool, I felt so loud in my breath. As I continued to breath, something subtly shifted. I felt the breath take me deeper into the pose. The breath carries us deeper if we let it. The breath transforms the body. It was just so intense. I could cry. Breath instead, Let go. Breath. Go deeper. The breath, for all its intensity, was gentle nonetheless. More breath. Let go. When it was time to release, I could barely move out of the pose.
I lay back to take rest and felt tears, again, fill my eyes. I wanted to fall into a sob, a good cry. I breathed again and knew intuitively that what had been released needed no tears. The tears would want to take all these feelings back into my body and feel it all again, wallow in them, feel justified, and, oh, wouldn’t that feel so good…Instead, I named to myself what had been released: anger about a situation, judgement of that person, fear of scarcity in the face of a job loss, and more. I felt the heat in my groin, a vibration, as if these feelings were rising off my body like waves of heat. They were truly gone and so tears were no longer necessary. I breathed and felt empty and so very open. I felt no resistance. Rest came over me and Peace filled my being.