Flesh and Bones: Meditations on Flexibility and Rigidity

Flesh and Bones

As my ankle heals, I am reflecting on the duality in our bodies of stiffness and softness, of stability and movement, of stop and go.

These things live in constant relationship, affecting each other and depending on each other.  These apparent opposites NEED each other in order to do their jobs well.  Firm and flexible, strong and sweet.  Furthermore, a loss or imbalance in one creates a corresponding loss or imbalance in the other.  For example, the loss of stability in my ankle makes me stop being able to move with any flow.  The return of some stability brings back a return to some flow, but my flow is in constant negotiation with the pain and resistance in my ankle.  Stop and go. Go and stop.

And balance is what we want. 

We need both our bones and our flesh.  Bones can seem to get in the way of stuff, but look at any yogi, and tell me bones get in the way!  We need the firm rules, AND we need the creative soaring beyond the "box."  

Okay.  Enough with the metaphors.  Let's get specific.  Let's get concrete.

What are BONES?  Bones are rules.  Bones are guidelines and laws.  Bones are the police and locks and barriers. Bones are STRUCTURE in all its forms.  Crappy structure equals system collapse and nothing can get done.  NO rules means no order, no sequencing, no clarity, no direction.  (That's an extreme, because there are always some rules in some form, like gravity.)  We need "bones" to be stable.  We need them to hold up, to support, to carry, to anchor, and to withstand. That is their purpose and their job.

What is FLESH?  Flesh is intention and desire.  Flesh is CONTENT.  It is the WHY.  (Hmmm.  Not very concrete....)   FLESH is the stuff that happens in the hospital building, as opposed to the building itself.  The ability to provide medical care is the flesh.  This need requires a place and it needs tools to be fulfilled.  The building and equipment are the bones for the flesh of getting the job done.

Abandoned buildings are like skeletons.  They have no life. Maybe that's why we make skeletons a symbol of death.  They are a concrete symbol of something lifeless.  We all have seen the horror of bumping into "stupid rules"---where we completely see the lifelessness of a barrier or law that is obsolete.  We have all seen someone enforcing a rule without understanding its deep "why," and how much harm that can do.

Isn't it funny that a pile of muscles doesn't have that same archetypal resonance with death?   It might evoke something kinda creepy, like "the blob."  But it just isn't energized the same way, eh? Though it is hard to imagine how I could accomplish anything without any bones, we don't use "bare muscles" as a halloween image.  (Sounds more like the Chippendales!)

Anyway, it is the metaphor of the interdependence of our bones and flesh that is interesting me now.  It is the need of the one for the other and the other for the one.  I get mad at my physical inflexibility sometimes, the same way I get mad at the inflexibility of some aspects of life.  But my inflexibility isn't actually due to my bones.  Bones don't bend, sure.  But it is my soft tissue that is overly tight, or weak, that gives me the inability to move every-which way.  Yoga has been showing me that.  It is my tissues and ligaments that can learn and be trained to be more expansive, less tender, more strong AND more free.

Just some thoughts.
Alison