What a terrible day to make bread, but I am. In fact at this moment I have 2 loaves of bread trying their darnedest to rise on this dreary and cold day. I would like them to turn out nice and fluffy as I am taking them to a picnic tomorrow to share with friends but like in my yoga classes I have to let go of the outcome and be content with the effort. But that’s not the lesson that was made clear to me today as I baked or kneaded rather. What became clear was that more often the harder we work the less pleasing our outcome is.
Lately I’ve been looking for ways to explain the idea of yoga as a process and respecting each step along that process. Yes we all want to be able to throw our feet over our heads into a perfect handstand or float gracefully in balancing poses. So much so that we skip the preparatory work that builds the proper strength and alignment in our bodies that make those asana available to us. I see many students struggle because they think their bodies “should” be able to do something. I try to explain that there is no one perfect asana, that every step along the way is that asana, but really, no one wants to hear that when they want to be standing on their heads. This is where I find I real distance from my students. I’ve been practicing yoga for long enough that I know my body’s limits; I know where the edge is that I can go to safely to deepen without injury. Or do I?
Today while I was kneading out my dough I remembered the words of a friend, a much better baker than I, to be gentle with the dough. My thought was the more these ingredients are mixed together the better the muffins, to which her response was, “yeah if you want hockey pucks.” Point taken my friend. In fact as I’ve started baking more over the past year or so often recipes remind us not to over work the dough or your bread will be hard as…well a hockey puck. I caught myself mixing flour, salt, eggs rapidly into the yeast mix when I remembered all that advice and I slowed it down, when it came time to turn the dough out onto the counter I very gently sprinkled with flour and pushed, rolled and turned my dough oh so tenderly. Reminding myself that even though I felt like I “should” be kneading harder that by over working the dough the bread will become stiff and hard and then I thought “just like muscles.” Ah ha! There it is the lesson I’ve been looking for for over 3 weeks.
See 3 weeks ago I decided to improve my physical practice. I have pretty limited flexibility for a yoga teach and I honestly felt I was doing my students a disservice by not being able to illustrate asanas to their full extent. So I’ve been working very hard; I’ve been running to increase stamina, extra core work to better my arm balances, lots of shoulder work etc… and you know what? I’m in pain. I’ve been over kneading my muscles and they are turning into hard achy loaves of bread. And what’s worse I’ve not being practicing what I teach; patience, acceptance, compassion. Boy did I fall of the philosophical wagon! In the amount of time it took to knead a dough ball (8 minutes roughly) I had relearned what took me years to grasp fully. Who knew baking could provide not only for our physical hungry but for our spiritual hunger as well. Actually the lesson came to me about 3 minutes into the kneading so I spent the other 5 minutes thinking about how to change my practice and to better respect my body AND my body’s limit. I would like to go into further detail about that but my timer is about to go off.
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