As a little girl, from the ages of 7 to 9, I slept at the foot of my parent's bed in a sleeping bag. My nightmares were too intense. I dreamed I was drowning, and lay at the bottom of the ocean watching bubbles and the beautiful fish going past my eyes. I held my breath for a long time. The age of 7 was when I had developed asthma. For years after that, every April and May I slept flat on my back in a croup tent under my canopy bed, with a vaporizer just to breathe. I missed so much school. Friends were hard to come by that would come to visit, except for little Margaret Ann up the street.
In my mid-thirties, a Chinese accupuncturist and Chi Gong practitioner in Chicago, who treated me monthly as I was recovering from mono and battling CFS, told me that in TCM there a four kinds of asthma. One of them, the kind I had, was more psychological in origin, meaning that I could get rid of it, but it would not be easy. I did get rid of it, by telling myself I did not have it, and breathing through the throat constriction if I caught it in time. But two things bring it back: overwhelming grief, as when friends turn out not to have been friends at all, and were 'feeding you to the fishes' behind your back; and if someone is draining my energy concertedly.
My throat is my Achille's heel and it appears that some people are like kryptonite to me. Like the myth of Psyche passing by Cerebus with a cake in each hand, one for her entrance, one for exit, I went to sleep last night with a stone in my hand, and the light of Psyche's lamp burning overhead, so I could see. In the myth, Psyche is told that on her journey into the realm of Hades, she will be asked for help she must not give. I cannot help this former friend I 'cut ties' with last night. He was pulling me back toward the Abyss. I'm not interested in going there...so I hold onto my stone through the night, until morning when I can rebuild my energy even more now that he is no longer connected to me. With him gone, I can focus on the real task, my own doubts about the journey.
I wonder, sometimes, if I'll be able to do what I love, which is teaching, for a decent living. Some people do. When I taught aerobics in the 80s I loved every minute of it! I made my own music mix tapes, relished integrating the long, deep stretches with all the other segments of the class, and especially loved teaching 'relaxation pose', which was savasana...really. I perfected the art of doing visualizations. Then I fell through a hole in the earth for ten years. Even so, teaching back then was for minimum wage. I need to teach privately for this to work, for me to be able to focus entirely on teaching. This is what I want.
But there is also more teacher training that I need and want to take, and I don't have the money for it right now...so, I quit thinking about it for a while and go sit, uncomfortably and anxiously today, in 'my pose'.
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