Spring Juncture with Jagged Edges - by Christina

 Love and thanks to Christina for sharing these significant words. ~ Crystal

Right Now. Today.

There is this puddle on the mat and it is me, melting.  And it is not very enjoyable.  The worst part of it all is that juncture is over. The meltdown should have already happened, right?  Clearly, spring has more in store for me.   In fact, the past three days have been the worst of the season. Things were finally connecting.  I could feel lots of shifts, kapha pushing pretty hard, but I was facing it.  I was confronting it.  I was holding myself accountable.  But the shadowy build-up was waiting for me. The final three days of juncture were beautiful.  I came to this joyful place where things that would normally trigger my anxiety, washed away and it felt amazing.  Euphoric. Maybe the deluge was waiting until I gained the confidence to handle what was to come. What is now on this mat.  This is not a comfortable place for me. But here I am. 

Then. Initiating. Entering & Experiencing Juncture. Clarity of Purpose.

This juncture I set out to focus on my self-confidence. Things in my life as of late kept pointing to my lack of self-confidence.  My lack of fire—pitta.  This was exciting for me, because I felt a bit all over the place and anxious about what the spring would bring this year. I decided that the juncture would be an exploration of what self-confidence meant to me—what it felt like, looked like, etc.  What I discovered in the first week of the juncture was that this intention was continuously challenged in every facet of my life. The first day of juncture I had a tension-filled faculty meeting that required us to deal with unresolved problems in our department. Yet, as I look back at that meeting and the rest of the week, I realize that I was honoring my intention and working on my confidence and my fear of conflict and fear of, well, being who I am in spaces where I know my views, ideas, and needs are very different from those I work with. During the week everything felt weighted, heavy, thick, and eternal. But I treated the heaviness differently. I was not reacting and fighting it. I was not getting defensive. I was exploring my feelings. I wasn't perfect at it by any means. Making the effort to change my normal reactions created an incredible amount of discomfort, which I now see as the first cut of a new pattern. A new groove in the record.

What kept me focused was the routine—the practices outlined by Juliet. At times I would do them without any idea how rubbing oil on my skin was going to help me with my anxiety. Other times I could feel the gooey thickness in my core moving and generating space in ways that helped me trust in the practices. Trust that I was building something new.

Right Now. Again. Today.

Something that Juliet discussed in yoga this Saturday morning helped me release something that has been moving and shifting around throughout juncture.  At the beginning of practice, she asked us to focus on what was rising up for us as a challenge at that moment and to feel where it was manifesting in our bodies.  It was an argument I had with my significant other, although anxiety about work was a close second. The anxiety was located in my heart center.  Tightness.  Shortness of breath.  Panic.  Very typical physical responses to my anxiety. But anyway, at one point we were in a pose, I now forget which one.  I'm thinking it was pigeon and she asked us to think about our typical (and probably unhealthy) response to that challenge.  After sitting with it, victim came to mind.  Things always happen to me.  It’s always my fault.  I always apologize, but with an air of resignation mixed with guilt.  So Juliet told us to engage with the opposite energy.  All I could think of was empowerment. Again, my work of the spring juncture—self-confidence—was coming to me in a slightly different way.  Once I thought about how empowerment felt in my chest, the tightness loosened.  I could feel myself melting.  I did not know what empowerment really felt like, but there was a release of energy. The anxiety that had been building over the past three days melted and softened and I could finally truly breathe.  I felt open. Spacious in that moment.

 Then. Exiting Juncture.  Euphoria. Deluge. 

Over the first week of juncture, everything (and I mean everything) was heavy. My body felt like lead more often than not. Every feeling felt like it was being torn out of my skin.  My classes felt like impossible hurdles. My colleagues were all dragging me down.  I was the victim at every turn. Everything felt like it would take an eternity. In cycling class, it was as though I was pedaling through a foot of thick mud. Meditation kept taking me to images of sitting in cavernous darkness, trying to cross some river that had no discernible end. My meditating mind kept going to that river and kept telling me I needed to stay there and explore it and understand it. Rather than trying to run or escape the dark heaviness, I decided to stay with it, try to understand it. Something in the practices of the season helped me keep going. It helped me keep going back to meditation, helped me keep doing my breathing practice, helped me get up in the morning and keep focused.

Where I found solace through all of this was not in escape, but in building fire. I soon realized that part of exploring my self-confidence was tapping into my core chakra. And it was there I have been staying, trying to build heat in a body that felt damp and cold. Staying focused on that space saved me in ways I was not expecting and it brought together the physical and emotional challenges I was experiencing.

Right as March transitioned to April, something happened. April 1^st started off heavy. Tensions abounded and my anxiety was nearing a breaking point and then there was an unexplainable release. I went to cycling class and I kept asking myself why, why, why was I holding onto all this heavy energy?  I got on the bike and there was this almost immediate shift. I did not feel like I was biking through a foot of mud. Instead, I felt free. I felt open. I started to just let go of everything and I could see light. I was no longer engulfed in darkness.  My classes became fun explorations with my students. I did not let work tensions linger. Meditation shifted from that dark cave to a river flowing rapidly around my body, cleaning me. As my meditation progressed over the week, I succumbed to the flow of the river and floated, eventually finding a waterfall. Then I watched myself contemplate: go over the edge or stay? I went over the edge and found myself in a clear stream of water, sun shining and warmth all around me. It was incredible and clearly a metaphor for the transition that had taken place. 



This juncture has been turbulent and probably one of the most stressful I have had at work, but the intentionality that I brought into the juncture kept building as I kept trusting the process. And I found something euphoric in the middle of chaos.