Bodywork, Yoga, Self Help 🙄🙄🙄

Vintage Harbin Hot Springs, pre-Watsu (photo credit: The Guardian, which credits www.harbin.org, where I did not find this photo but found this amazing document)

Around 30 years ago, I went to Harbin Hot Springs for the day with Catherine. We lounged naked on the wooden decks, we languidly swam and floated in the springs, I got a massage, and Catherine ended up in a Watsu session with a gnome of an old white guy (probably no more than 45 or 50, but we had a young person’s sense of old back then). We both now remember him as distinctly creepy, but at the time, I came out of my massage, saw Catherine being held and swirled about through the water, and thought, I want to do Watsu!

That desire was not fulfilled until last month, and even then not exactly. I thought I was signing up for a Watsu session, but Ben, who I thought was a Watsu guy, informed me that while he used to do that a long time ago at Harbin (we were not at Harbin), his practice has evolved since then. Now he does Water Flow Therapy, which incorporates Watsu and WaterDance and Fluid Presence and some other things, but I didn’t care because all I wanted was to be held and swirled about through the water. We were talking in a 96-degree, ozone-filtered pool shaded from a bright blue sky by tall green trees and two triangular sail canopies, so the likelihood was high that holding and swirling were about to happen.

And indeed they did. I had specifically told Ben about the new pain in my right hip - a great shock after years of pain in my left knee that turned out to be a problem in my left hip - but instead of the purposeful bodywork I expected, I got an experience that I could only describe afterward as like tripping on mushrooms. I swirled through the water, the water swirled about me, through my closed eyes I saw changing colors and dancing shapes, and I felt perfectly whole and sufficient. Truly, it was great, but my hip still hurt.

The other thing that happened in that pool was that at some point in the conversation before we started swirling, Ben asked if I was controlling. I replied, “one thousand percent.” Then he asked if I did yoga. “Of course,” I said. “And you work hard to get your poses perfect,” he declared. “Absolutely,” I said, startled and disturbed that I was so hopelessly transparent to a stranger.

A week later, I went to another bodyworker I know a tad better than Ben. Many years ago, my older daughter hurt her back. Karen was the bodyworker who got her started on the road to recovery. Karen also introduced us to Tom, the brilliant and hot chiropractor, who finally cured my daughter and also cured my left knee-hip situation. Unfortunately, Tom has punished the world by retiring - actually the world is still good, for he is now focused on writing great books and marketing his inventions, but I am lost without him. However, I am nothing if not practical, so sans Tom, I decided to go back to the source and see Karen about my right hip.

Karen has her own method, which focuses on the fascia, the Deep Front Line, and the Inner Core. After a long conversation about everything and a careful physical assessment, Karen said that basically I have been over-strengthening my outer hips and now need to focus on my inner hips. She did some wonderful gentle bodywork that made me feel great. Then she reorganized my daily exercises, which were legion and are still legion, but no longer include the standing hip stretches or the theraband-around-the foot knee exercise. They have been replaced by two simple, brief psoas exercises that appear to be well on their way to curing my hip. Karen is a marvel.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the circumstances, Karen also talked to me about yoga. Apparently hyperflexible people, like me, get really into yoga because things that are hard for many people - like butterfly, lotus, putting our hands on the floor in standing forward fold, and getting our heels to the ground in downward dog - are easy for us. So yoga makes us feel good about ourselves, we push ourselves further, we get intense about it all, and we end up fully transparent to the Bens, Karens, and presumably yoga teachers of the world.

Karen agreed that I needed to pull back on the yoga, not the amount, just the pushing myself into poses and trying to take my body as far as it can go. I’d actually been leaning in this direction for a couple of years. I gave up jumping back into plank and then jumping forward from plank as they started to jar my knees and hurt my back. In the last couple of months, I’ve been contemplating the possibility that I no longer want to go up into wheel, which is astounding to me because wheel has been very important to my sense of myself in yoga, as un-yoga as that sounds.

More recently, I spent a brief period of time with some amazing new-to-me yoga teachers who were incredibly creative, precise, demanding, and supportive, which is my idea of nirvana. Though I tend to eschew blocks and suggested props, do all the extensions, do something differently if it’s the way I want to do it, etc. (are you surprised?), I made a conscious decision to put myself in the hands of these teachers, did exactly what they said, used all the props, and it was amazing. Plus nothing hurt.

So I decided it was time to change my ways. Now that I’m back with my usual amazing yoga teachers, I’m doing what they say, unless my body tells me to do something different because it wants to, not because my head wants to or I feel like I should or I know I can take it farther. And I may be getting just a little better at what one of the new-to-me yoga teachers told us one day: no comparing, competing, evaluating, or judging—with others or yourself. So easy to hear, so hard to do, but I am trying.

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Book Thoughts

Note: I’ve changed the title of this newsletter section, because I realized that I’ve been using it as often to think about books as to recommend them and I don’t want to mislead anyone.

The Let Them Theory was following me. First Linda told me about it. Then I looked for it in the airport bookstore, but it was still only in hardcover and cost $30. The very next day, I met Marie, who not only was reading it but had done a three-month seminar with Mel Robbins that changed her life. Another person we met that day had also been thinking about reading it. A couple of days later, Marie gave me her copy. Clearly I was meant to read this book.

Except I don’t read self-help books. Not because I’m not into self-improvement…I am so into self-improvement. Give me a quiz that says it will figure me out and change my life, and I am in! Give me a self-help article that speaks to one of the many issues I wrestle with, and I will read it! I am constantly trying to make my life better in some way. Right now, along with my yoga, I’m working on: 1) taking a walk first thing in the morning so as not to start my day by falling into the news and the NYT puzzles, 2) staying off my phone in the evening, and 3) eating fruit every day.

But self-help and self-improvement in book form is another kettle of fish, due to my firm belief that pretty much every non-narrative nonfiction book could have been an article. In grad school, all the cool kids were reading The Bonds of Love and The Drama of the Gifted Child, which sure sounded like self-help for people who go to grad school, but I wouldn’t know because I didn’t read them. Oh, I won’t list all the self-help books I haven’t read, though one of them was definitely The Dance of Anger, but I will say that I believe the only one I have read is Glennon Doyle’s cheetah book, which sucked me in by calling itself a memoir, but seemed pretty self-help to me…then again, what do I know about self-help books?

Well, now I know something about one, because I did read The Let Them Theory, and the theory is great, for real, I use it all the time. Mary was sitting next to me when I started reading the book, and I kept showing her sentences and paragraphs that were so good.

But it absolutely could have been an article. In fact, when I finished it, I went back to the first two chapters to see if I was delusional as I read them and poked Mary every time I came to another good bit. I was not delusional. Those two chapters were as great as I remembered (until their very end, as you will see). But they were enough.

What happens in the rest of the book? To begin with, it becomes incredibly repetitive. Oh my god, she says the same thing over and over and over again, both as she repeats the theory itself and as she iterates it in different sections and endlessly repeats the specifics of those iterations. Also, those specifics get a little dicey once she starts saying the Let Them theory can solve every problem in your life, especially in the relationships section (half the book), which basically gave me the heebie-jeebies in just about every direction.

But ultimately, it comes down to these lines, at the end of Chapter 2: “When you’re an adult, your life, happiness, health, healing, social life, friendships, boundaries, needs, and successes are all your responsibility…You are capable of creating anything you want if you are willing to put the time and energy into working on it.” Which simply is not true. Or, to put it another way: which simply is American individualism, self-made, megachurch, The Secret, bootstrap bullshit.

Sometimes your genes determine your health. Sometimes racism or poverty or both determine your successes and failures. Sometimes floods and fires destroy everything you’ve worked to build. Sometimes you do everything you possibly can and things don’t work out for a myriad of reasons or no reason at all. And, sure, we can control our attitudes about the way our lives turn out, but those sentences are ultimately making a claim about material reality. And of course the idea that ultimately you control your material reality is the insidious myth that grounds self-help and self-improvement. I can ignore that myth for the length of an article, but I can’t ignore it for the length of an expensive, repetitive, over-reaching book THAT EXPLICITLY SAYS IT, even if that book has a kernel of excellence.

Then again, maybe it’s just this book. Perhaps all the rest of them are great. But I won’t know, because I won’t be reading them. Even as I continue to adjust my yoga practice, eat fruit every day, and Let Them all over the place. Because I contain multitudes. And if I can make moves that make my life a little better, I’ll take it. But I won’t take bullshit ideologies.

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Because we still deserve nice things…

Materialists is whatever. An adequate movie to see by myself on a solo Friday night followed by a delicious Moon Pie ice cream cone, but Dakota Johnson is no Anne Hathaway. That said, the final shot of Materialists is so nice.

It’s presaged by a fine tracking shot of Pablo Pascal Pablo Pascaling his way through the beginning stages of a wedding, going into one room, around a corner into another room, and then out to the bar as he glad-hands a lot of people, avoids some other people, and settles down at the bar to eavesdrop on a conversation across the room that turns out to be a precipitating event. Quite nice.

However, not as nice as the final shot, which plays for four minutes behind the credits. I seem to have lost my film vocabulary beyond tracking shot, but Celine Song says the final shot is from the point of view of a security camera, but don’t click on that link unless you are ready for all the spoilers. Anyway, it’s one stationary camera filming a fairly large, crowded space in which all sorts of things are happening that pertain to the movie’s plot and themes. Those things are also delightfully entertaining and absorbing in themselves and probably would be even if you hadn’t seen the movie, though if you hadn’t seen the movie, you would miss the plot and themes, which are a good part of the fun, so it might not be quite so satisfying. Anyway, I was mesmerized, and I couldn’t believe people were getting up and leaving the theater while this wonderful shot was still on the screen. It almost made me want to see the movie again so I could see the shot again, but not quite. Still, it was very nice. As was the Moon Pie ice cream cone.