I'm just home from a 13km run and ready to drop dead of exhaustion. I'm training for a half marathon, something I can never say without either laughing or grimacing. I am not a runner, I don't remotely look like a runner. Neither am I much of a Yogi, but in conjunction with the run training I started Bikram Yoga in November and have stepped into that hot room about 75 times since then. Twenty-six postures, stretching up, stretching down, running for four minutes, and then running for another four minutes. This has become the tempo of my days. Excessive, perhaps, but I'm going for a full immersion baptism here, dunk your whole body in the water and rise up a new being. In order to learn something new I need it to become a consistent discipline. And that requires goals and plans and regularity, committing to it like crazy, forsaking all others, in sickness and in health.

That I'm running and hot yoga-ing isn't really relevant. I chose these because I was somewhat familiar with them and knew that they both push me to the limit of endurance, to a place where my body takes precedence over everything, where my mind is forced to quiet. What I'm trying to practice is awareness of how my body speaks, how it knows what to do and when to do it, what its real limitations are, what pain (or what I interpret as pain) really feels like when I don't move away from it but towards it. I'm attempting to release the vice grip my mind has over me, to strip away negative and positive labels, stories I've always told myself about my body and – bigger – about life. I'm trying to let nature do what it naturally does, to let go and just listen to what's happening now. To muscles and tendons and nerve endings. To my lungs and my heart and the marriage between them. To the flow of blood rushing back into my cells after a compression pose. To the fatigue that settles in after 40 minutes of running and to the mysterious resurgence of energy after 60. To know what "tired" and "doubt" and "anxious" and "euphoric" feel like. My body contains innate intelligence, instincts, and functioning so beyond what my mind can reason. It holds memories in pockets of energy and it can shift itself in an instant when engaged. It has an ancient earthy voice that is attached to a much larger reality than I know, a voice that I'm convinced has profound things to say about Who and Why and What, if I simply continue practicing how to listen to a language outside the bounds of alphabet.

I once watched a film where a man climbed a 2,000 foot rockface without a harness. The only thing that kept him there, attached to the earth by the pads of his fingertips, was an absolutely concentrated connection, a trust, between his body and his mind. I hope one day I'll get to a place of that kind of harmony, a balance of thought and movement. One step at a time, this is all new ground still. For today, it's a progression of awareness that has me steeped in the physical, it's matter over mind, giving governance to my body, letting it hold the leash, testing its functioning, asking it to show me something, something new, something old.