Sacred body part 4: Loss

by Theo Wildcroft

“Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong…” David Whyte

I have learnt, over the years, that I come to my physical practice not when I have it all worked out – not when I know what ritual, what offering to make. I rarely know that.

I come to practice not when I am whole and complete, but to find wholeness and completeness – to become the being I already know myself to be: a child of the world; and for generation upon generation,

a child of this land and of my tribe, such as it remains.

When I move and practice in this way, it is rarely in a nice, neat yoga studio. It is, instead, in forests, on hillsides, under rain and storms or sunrises. In my heart I see myself crawling back, running back, laying all of my confusion, all of my doubts and my deepest confessions, at the feet of gods I cannot even name. Gods I know intimately, and who know everything I am and can be. Spirits of the air and land and sea that I move through and which move in me. Spirits that I meet in my skin and in my bone. I start out with poses and movements that I know that have worked before, and I move from there into the unknown, to the wordless, and into wholeness.

It’s less graceful than it sounds when I’m falling out of a hand balance, or scraping my feet on rocks, or just cursing the tightness of my hamstrings. But that’s important too. It’s too easy for me to float about waving my hands in the air, thinking pretty thoughts. I need a practice that grounds me in the reality of my body and my world. I need a practice that I have to work at; that I’m a bit crap at; one that leaves me with bruises and wanting more.

Because this is the only kind of practice that has begun to heal the loss of connection between my deepest self and the world I chose to be born into. It is in physical practice that I leave behind the invented, conceptual prison of material separation. I shy away from the cold, grandness of a Created world and my smallness at its indifference. Instead, I don’t just remember, I feel. From my marrow to my breath I experience the world evolving from the actions, the practices, the living and dying, of everything in it.

The animate divine is present with me then: immanent and intimate. It is built from waves moving on water, hares running from combines, with handshakes and tar sand extractions, in crows mobbing red kites, and gulls squabbling over landfill. All of it meeting with my breath in the wind, and the stretch in my muscles.

It’s a small offering I make, but healing that connection is a sacred and lifelong task for me. This is what works. And so for my current dedication for the Order of the Yew (http://druidnetwork.org/yew), I wrote these words:

“In this eternal moment of renewal between breathing out and breathing in,

Surrounded and overcome by the embrace of the World Tree, the ever living Yew,

I renew my dedication.

I pledge my self to the quest:

For the dark womb of potential beyond the reach of light,

For the furthest known truth beyond the reach of proof,

For the riches of expression beyond the reach of self consciousness;

To simplicity beyond the simplistic,

To creation beyond creativity,

To language beyond words,

To a single step taken in absolute awareness

Of the pulsing star in the heart of all things,

Dancing. Laughing. Dying and being born.”

And after nearly a decade of practice, I still have so much to learn about how to take that single step of absolute awareness. So I keep coming back to the mat, and the forest, and the storms and sunrises.

A very intuitive friend of mine, Suzanne Askham (http://www.suzanneaskham.com/),

had a vision last year of the Roman invasion of Britain. She said she saw the British, the English as they would become, in the face of the sheer might of that invasion, giving up our souls for safekeeping. It was as if we sent them away, so that our bodies may do what needed to be done; and suffer what needed to be suffered. It was how we survived. Maybe, she says, we got really good at it, until we learned to live without that connection, and until we couldn’t even name that which was lost.

And her vision touches me most deeply, because I have lived that story in my own life. Whilst heavily pregnant with me my mother was in a car accident. She was driving, but she blames my father. Their friend’s legs were broken but no one was killed and my mother was lucky, coming out mostly unhurt.

But I wonder if that shock delivered in the heart of the womb left me viscerally ambivalent about being born into a dangerous world. I’ve lived most of my life as if I was visiting here never quite landing with both feet, if that makes sense?

And I was 10 when I first gave in to that call to separate from the physicality of existence. I left my body to its pain and violation; floating around the ceiling somewhere. All because I couldn’t fight my way out of a situation in which my sanity, and possibly my life, was at risk. Like my friend’s vision of the invasions, it’s how I survived, at least until I could leave home. But the habit of separation has been hard to break.

I spent my adolescence hiding and dreaming in books and my early adulthood in intellectual debate. My university tutors even thought I would join them in an academic life. The truth is, I was wasting away, almost literally, increasingly lost inside my head and even out of it. I’m not saying a life of the mind is incompatible with a life experienced through the body, But for me at least, it has taken me years to relearn the simple signals coming from my body of hunger, thirst and even the need for breath.

Find Theo here – http://www.wildyoga.co.uk