Rearranging the Chi

Yesterday I wrote about the transformative powers of Yoga. Today I'm going to write about house cleaning. Dear Reader, they are the same thing!

My third revelation about Yoga -- and my big revelation about life as a human being -- is that we are all shape shifters and we don't even know it. In fact, we resent it. As children, it literally hurts to grow -- remember all of those achy nights when your bones were growing? Adolescence is scary because we are literally changing form. Later on we find it so difficult to stay en forme. And how many people do I see looking wistfully at the bodies of young people and remembering when? I never hear middle aged people saying things like, "Yeah, my skin doesn't glow like it used to, but now I finally feel at home in it." And that's not even what happens to us emotionally and spiritually.

I think of my surroundings as an extension of my self. It isn't that I find validation in my book shelf, or I think that because I have this very cool PowerMac that I am really cool, too. No, it's because my surroundings are the space in which I live. They determine what shape I take on a daily basis. Am I cramped? Am I able to expand? Am I hording old things that I no longer use?

Since I have been teaching the summers have become a time of cleaning. Calderoj thinks I'm obsessed, and that since I'm smart I need stimulation and I'm really bored and am channelling my anxiety into rearranging the closets. I think he's right about the anxiety -- he's a perceptive guy, that Calderoj. But I think he attributes it to the wrong cause. It is the anxiety that comes with the excitement and anticipation of a new vision of oneself. That's what house cleaning and rearranging is -- a new vision of who you are -- a different space to occupy in a different shape.

Yesterday I wrote about how taking different shapes in Yoga channels the spiritual energy of the universe through your body in different ways, releasing emotions and leading to epiphanies. I think that rearranging the closets and cleaning the house does the same thing. It lets the spiritual energy flow through the house in a different way, through a different channel.