A Puppet Story

Written by Shanna Willie, Yoga North ISYI 200+ Hour Teacher Training Program Student

A  Puppet Story 

With the best yoga teachers, I feel like a puppet. Their gentle cues and guidance nudges me into movement. For once I am not the one in charge of every single decision. “What should I eat? What should I wear? How best can I spend my free time?” I’m just along for the ride, taking comfort in knowing the next hour is planned and I wasn’t the planner. 

Oh to start in corpse pose! 

Just laying there! 

Surrendering! 

 No matter what might have happened or what may happen, this is what is happening now. Feeling the spine settle gratefully into the floor. The limbs thankful to be off duty even for this bit of time. The breath slowing or deepening or both, finding it’s current best practices for keeping the soma optimally functioning. The mind quieting and forgetting, comforted knowing there is a list waiting. Nothing will be forgotten about when it is time to do all the things again.

 A moment of peace.  And then a quiet movement. 

 The pelvis tilts slightly towards the sky, luxuriously, opening the front body to the world. Moving with breath, moving with mind, moving with intention and ease and peace, I am a puppet along for the ride.

 I am a puppet who knows not where it goes next, and I don’t want to know! Blissful ignorance. Glorious ignorance! For once I don’t hold the road map! The teacher I trust; they know where we are going. Surely we will explore some peaks and valleys and straightaways and long stretches with some familiar starts and stops and beloved tourist attractions along the way. 

 My mind is a puppet as she takes me through a guided mediation. Asking me to imagine all the different parts of my body one by one. My puppet body and mind turn into a puppet consciousness as I find less of me present and more of the infinite allowed to flow through for once. My soma is a puppet. This puppet is flowing down a river. The river doesn’t have a start or an end or a name or a place. The flow is as it’s always been: an embodiment of light and love. Emotions are useless to describe anything here. 

 I want to always be this puppet. I will always surrender to being this puppet. This worn, used, old, broken, happy, sore, grateful, fallible, silly, cute, little puppet.