Follow Your River
Photography by Nicole Leoné Miller
“I thought how lovely and how strange a river is. A river is a river, always there, and yet the water flowing through it is never the same water and is never still. It’s always changing and is always on the move. And over time the river itself changes too. It widens and deepens as it rubs and scours, gnaws and kneads, eats and bores its way through the land. Even the greatest rivers - the Nile and the Ganges, the Yangtze and the Mississippi, the Amazon and the great grey-green greasy Limpopo all set about with fever trees - must have been no more than trickles and flickering streams before they grew into mighty rivers.
Are people like that? I wondered. Am I like that? Always me, like the river itself, always flowing but always different, like the water flowing in the river, sometimes walking steadily along slowly, sometimes surging over rapids wildly, sometimes meandering with hardly any visible movement, calm, soft, sometimes gurgling with pleasure, sometimes sparkling brilliantly in the sun, sometimes weeping, sometimes impassioned, sometimes mysterious, sometimes heavy, sometimes smooth, sometimes separate, sometimes subdued, sometimes lively, and always, I hope, loving and tender.
Do I change like a river, widening and deepening, eddying back on myself sometimes, bursting my banks sometimes when there’s too much water, too much life in me, and sometimes dried up from lack of rain? Will the I that is me grow and widen and deepen? Or will I stagnate and become an arid riverbed? Will I allow people to dam me up and confine me to a wall so that I flow only where they want? Will I allow them to turn me into a canal to use for their own purposes? Or will I make sure I flow freely, coursing my way through the land and ploughing a valley of my own?”
This quote has stuck with me for years. I feel as if it is written in my own voice. It says, “Will the I that is me grow and widen and deepen? Or will I stagnate and become an arid riverbed?” Don’t you feel this statement, “will the I that is me,” perforate your bones? I do. We all have our own rivers flowing within and a voice to speak of that river.
The “I that is me” has a river and the “I that is you” has a river. This river is flowing from the moment we are born to the moment we meet death. The ability lies within you to follow it, to notice it, to feel it, and to love it. Consume these words, “the water flowing through it is never the same water and is never still. It’s always changing and is always on the move. And over time the river itself changes too.” The undercurrent of our being is like this – we are never the same and never still. Then as moments pile on each other, one day we notice we are different, and can recall how the river used to be.
I have applied this quote to my physical self and my emotional self; I have used it in my yoga classes as a metaphor for asana and practicing asana over time, and as a metaphor for our emotional layer and observing the emotions over time. In this metaphor, it is perhaps not important to know where the river is flowing, but to see the river in the mind’s eye as it exists in the present. The quote asks us to consider how our rivers will be influenced. Our environment shapes us, and other people contribute to how we flow in life. How often do we zoom out and observe our own river?
Yoga can teach us how to take inventory of where we are so that we tap into our own sense of direction. Our asana practice provides a starting place. We move through sun salutations and the same postures over and over so we can compare the states of our outer and inner body over time. There is a beginning, middle, and end of practice that mimics the cycle of life. Go inward and dip your fingertips into your river. Trace the water. Does it have a pulse? Do you feel your water flowing steadily or is it agitated? This is a practice of going inward by using imagery and descriptors to label somatic sensation.
Perhaps the next time you are in savasana, you can lay at the shores of your river and listen.
