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A day in my life
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Source:
Adults
Author:
Rhona Aitken
Title:
Peace be upon you
This is the story of a Yoga class. That beautiful, relaxing hour of movement and peace, when we think lovely thoughts.
Jenny is a lovely lady - she dragoons us with astonishing levity - fifteen or so unbendable, creaky, elderly residents into becoming smiling, relaxed, supple senior citizens.
Once a week we troop down (zimmer frames and all) to the main lounge, where we choose a chair from the circle around Jenny, who stands cheerfully in the middle, cajoling us to take off our shoes, and helping those whose bendability doesn’t stretch that far; we all oblige and there is much wriggling of toes as we place shoes under chairs and our feet onto the comfortable foot-rests from Jenny’s cavernous bag of tricks.
Everything is done to soft, gentle music that has a comfortably oriental air.
As we are elderly ’sitting subjects’ Jenny gives a lot of attention to our feet - so underused and often stiff. We all oblige, and the exercises progress to our knees, backs, tummies, and a lot of meaningful deep breathing. We haven’t got a large lounge, so chairs tend to be close to each other and one or two movements can bring you into nudging distance with your neighbour. But as we are mostly contributing our versions of Jenny’s more active movements in hopeful unison there is not much bumping as a rule. The odd muddling of left and right can occur - but not too often.
One popular exercise starts off with each person being given one of Jenny’s stretching scarves. We hold them by their ends and place the middly bit under our toes. Then we find wecan stretch our legs much further than with just the use of a leg muscle. Christine has, today, taken a dislike to her scarf.
“Its grey - and I hate grey. Hers is pink, and I want a pink one.” Jenny asks the owner of the pink scarf if she’ll change. She won’t.
“Well I won’t do the exercise” shrieks Christine. She was offered a green one - but hated it.
“What a pity.” says Jenny - and midst a lot of gristling the class continues - still to soft oriental music!
The class progresses until near the end .
Says Jenny - “Now for our final exercises. A time to show our love of the world. Place your hands in Namasi - (prayer position) - then stretch out your arms to fill the world with goodness and peace”. She shows us how by holding her hands together in front of her before stretching her arms forward and opening them wide to include the world, and then lowering her hands into her lap.
Sitting one side of me is George, who loves his Yoga class; he is large, cheerful and enthusiastic. Sitting next to him on the other side is Christine, who does not tend to have a peaceful nature and is still cross about the scarf. She is small, does not pay much attention to what goes on around her and frequently falls asleep.
George’s gestures are expansive; he brings his arms up and out in a wonderful arc - full of ‘love for the world’ - smiling happily he delivers an energetic slap over the head of the dozing Christine - who gives an enormous yelp of rage and shouts “He hit me - that horrible man - he hit me!” and attacks poor George with her copious hand-bag and clenched fists - in that order.
Jenny leaps to stop the flailing fists. Several other rush to placate the bemused and truly startled George.
(He is very popular!)
The gentle oriental music continues. As a back-ground it is lovely - but now - punctuated by George’s bewildered apologies - he has no idea he hit anyone - and Christine’s mutterings of ‘brutality’ -even half an hour later after our reflective period, where we close our eyes and and transport ourselves quietly to tropical islands (we still hear Christine’s rumblings.) or try to do so - we are a bit restless. A lady next to me sighs and says “Usually I soon find myself spirited to my lovely tropical island.. Today I never even got off the ship.”
Ah well……next week
Published on writebuzz®:
Adults
> A day in my life
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