This is a Covid-19 quarantine story. It dates back to April, when I received a lovely video on the practice of the Deep Relaxation Technique (DRT); all I apparently needed was the floor and 20 minutes to hand. And so I started out on a regular diet of DRT, a calm-inducing exercise I grew to really like. All of it, except the last part. Right up till the instructor said that after the body was totally and completely relaxed (his words, not mine), we must look beyond the corporeal self (my words, not his).
Move your mind away from your body lying on the floor, the man intoned, and that was easy to do, floating my mind above the body lying on the floor, observing it dispassionately from above. Now observe the vast blue sky, the voice instructed. That was where my troubles began. The deep blue sky, the voice continued. The deep blue sky? Sometimes the sky was a cobalt blue, sometimes a bleached blue. On stormy evenings, it actually turned deep pink, then deep purple.
The sky was never just a deep blue one. Not my sky, in any case. Then, I had a problem visualizing the vastness of the sky. Eyes closed, I imagined a vast sky covering my area, covering all of my city, then covering the road to the Nilgiris, up to Ooty and Coonoor. For the life of me, I couldn’t visualise this same sky stretching over distant London, Milan, Prague. No siree, that was a different sky.
This was also when the barrage of questions began in my head. Was it one smooth sky, all across the world? Was it an even-complexioned sky? What about the depleted ozone layer areas… did the sky thin out there? The instructor then advised: expand your awareness as vast as the blue sky. But my imagination wouldn’t move an inch beyond Lamb’s Rock in Coonoor. It was tragic, having such a limited awareness.
The next injunction was even more baffling: Merge yourself with the blue sky.
Was I to rise vertically (in my imagination) and enter the sky? Or was I to float, serenely horizontal till I touched the sky? Was I to keep my eyes open all the time? Was I to momentarily close my eyes at the time of the merger, just in case a passing cloud got into my eye? After the merger, did I keep ascending? At which point did I stop, knowing the (vast blue) sky and I were now one?
Enjoy the infinite bliss, the blissful state of silence, came the subsequent stern instruction. Well, if I was now merged with the sky, what happened when I drifted over the (vast blue?) ocean, the fears of an indifferent swimmer. What if a high snow-clad peak (Mt Everest?) suddenly emerged from a bank of clouds and poked me where it hurt? What if I was passing over the Mardi Gras festival in New Orleans and urgently wanted to de-merge from the sky and join in the parade?
Slowly come back to body consciousness, was the final directive. The epiphany, it came two days ago. The only way to do DRT right was to go with the flow, give up all conflicted perceptions, follow instructions implicitly.See the parallel with personal Covid management? Well, I did tell you this was a Covid-19 story.
Sheila Kumar
Author kumar.sheila@gmail.com.