A Meditation on the Spirit of Yin
by Yohan Kim
We’re walking along the Moonville Tunnel Rail Trail on an October night, dodging frogs among our feet while searching for ghosts of a boomtown gone bust on the periphery of Lake Hope. Pausing upon a bridge, our guide reaches into her pack for a bottle in the clutches of a severed hand, set beside a lantern harkening back to the travels of railmen, schoolchildren, and townsfolk who once called these dark woods home. Tales are told of life and limb, such as the town drunk lost in eternal limbo, for whom we attempt to commune through radio waves and the allure of a bottled elixir. It is a glimpse of time travel in the world betwixt the living and the dead, where hope and coal and locomotive residue resides beneath the spectral hue of moonlit skies. There are ghosts of our being, of haunted and hunted, much like the hand grasping cravings as we travail towards Home.
In my experience, the ghastly wounds of mind and matter reopen on the mats of yin classes. Amid poses of extended duration, tenseness of arms or legs or core become a physical expression of patterns impressed upon our locomotion. After the body’s acquiescing comes the portal of our past, speeding into a time wholly felt yet beyond our grasp. Group homes, grief, and grudges. Familial abuse and facial scars akin to a wizard’s indelible link with a transgressor of tragic spells. Those who will never be named, but whose clutches remain. Here is the challenge of relaxing into prolonged discomfort to discover the sacred in the profane of the human grotesquerie that waters growth.
On the mat is a confronted presence of the remains of the day. The emotional whiplash of work and wisdom, the vocations that violate our inner sanctums, or the inner turmoil of quiet desperation. Richard Rohr said on Halloween, “We are in liminal space whenever past, present, and future come together in a full moment of readiness. We are in liminal space whenever the division between ‘right here’ and ‘over there’ is obliterated in our consciousness.” We live in communion with the ghosts of past and present, the watchers beyond the veil, atop a mat that serves to conjoin worlds dark and luminous. There I have even glimpsed a life of love and laughter while strolling streets beneath the warm sun. I awake to darkness pierced by candles aglow, like a boy’s adventures in a neverending story between the walls of a school’s attic on a dark and stormy night. John Keating said, “But only in their dreams can men be truly free. ‘Twas always thus, and always thus will be.”
On the mats between the walls of a studio, we face a foreign yet familiar spirit in the slowness of time. As the croc’s ticking clock shadows the heart of Captain Hook, the seconds are a sling blade to the shroud of the self’s spectator. Shame and sorrow, angst and anxieties, brought to the fore in tandem with corporeal constraints. We pause on the bridge of body and breath, where life beats beyond limb.
