healing, love

What Love Does.

December 11, 2012

Have you ever felt it? That Don’t leave me pang right square in your chest, in that place you didn’t know existed until you did?

In yoga class, someone is pressing your shoulders down in savasana (final resting pose) or rubbing your back as you are in child’s pose, and you never want them to leave, as if a possibility existed in some corner of the world where you two could exist like that: as giver and receiver in some dark space? How it almost feels like the first time you have ever been touched in your whole life. You feel that safe.

That wide open.

This is why most of us love being touched in yoga, especially during passive poses, when we are nothing but a receiver, a net for love. When else do we let our guards down that much? I know I don’t.

Yesterday I got a massage as treated to me by my friend Katie for my upcoming birthday tomorrow. This massage was much needed because apparently a train had been running through my head and had crashed behind my eyes, leaving me a broken heap of steel and muscle. I had subbed out my 4 pm yoga class and couldn’t leave the dark of my room until the massage appointment.

There’s a point early on in a massage where I start to obsess about when it is going to end. As early as two minutes into it. This won’t last long enough. Same when someone touches me in a yoga class, my own shoulders pinned down like some kind of stuck thing and I think I know you are going to leave. You are going to get up and go and my shoulders are going to fly back up and I might even fly away with nothing holding me in place any longer. 

Last night, about three minutes into my massage, I felt myself drifting and then catching myself right on the cliff of pleasure wondering how much time was left. Push me off the cliff, dammit! 

How can I worry about when something is going to end when it is barely just beginning?

In Bali at one point very early in our trip, I looked around at the pool and our house in Ubud with all the little flowers on the towels and the fried cassava in bowls by our feet and I’d said I am sure going to miss this place. My husband, as if I was insane: We haven’t even left yet! It was as if it was the first time I’d noticed that fact. Oh, we haven’t left yet, have we? We are still here. We are still safe. So I’d eaten a “cassava chip” which was oddly like a “potato chip” and sat back to enjoy the way it felt, the salt and the greasy crunch and the way it made me thirsty and I wondered if everyone worried that there wasn’t enough.

Am I terrified of being comfortable? Because it won’t last?

Nothing lasts. Not forever anyway. When a teacher comes over to me and that end of a yoga class to press down on my shoulders or rub my head I always ask can you stay there? sometimes out loud, sometimes not.

That is the crux of it all, isn’t it? Can you stay there? can you not go? Can you make me feel safe?

I want to make people feel that way and I think that I do, at least in some small way, that blanket of limbs and touch and non-judgement and fireplaces and glasses of wine and unparalleled listening skills and here I have you. I am not going anywhere.

I used to think I wanted things to last forever.

I remember my first boyfriend Danny, my first serious love and one of my only serious loves, and how he would call me from his dorm room in Boston and how I would lie in my bunk bed at NYU and ask him to tell me that we would last forever. He wouldn’t. A smart move. And we didn’t.

After four years, he broke up with me one February like someone with no balls! How dare you do this over the telephone after so many years? So naturally I got on the Peter Pan bus, a teary eyed skinny and freezing mess, schlepping all the way to Boston in the snow so he could break up with me to my face. And who am I kidding? I am sure a part of me (most of me) wanted to beg him not to break up with and to tell me that he’d made a mistake. I arrived and knocked on all his friends’ doors until I found him. They’d all had that part sympathy and part I am so glad I am not that guy look.

I spent the weekend in his apartment in Boston curled in a ball and sobbing and when he put my spaghetti limp body on the bus back to New York City, he hugged me for 3 solid minutes, (again I had hope, Maybe he won’t let go.) He did let go and that was the last time I saw him for years. And that was that. We didn’t last forever and I am glad he refused to give me that promise, even as a lie,  because I would’ve thrown it in the river with him and then jumped in after it.

I do want to be touched. (Don’t we all?) But more than that, it’s what is behind the touch, what’s under the fingers and the skin. How the touch makes me feel, and even though I know it won’t last forever, what it will, even is just for that moment, connect me to the world and hold me in place.

What’s behind everything is love. Whether it is a fear of it, a desire for it, a Fuck you I don’t believe in love or a giving away of it.

Some form of love is what beats our hearts and what carries us through those broken moments in the snow of Boston. Its what we all want and why when someone puts their hand on that spot on our chest or forehead (how do they always know the exact spot I need to be touched?) that we want to put our own hands on top of theirs and whisper in some secret language of the hands, Yes, this feels right. Yes, you can stay. Yes, I love you too.

And then your eyes open and the lights are back and you put on your boots or your sandals, depending on the weather, and your leave the yoga class. And you may get off that bus in NYC after a miserable 8 hour ride in the snow from Boston and you may forget that vow to love and how good it felt but it is there and it will always be there.

If you let it exist as if it belongs to you. As if you deserve it.

You do.

love

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No Comments

  • Reply Casey Johnson December 11, 2012 at 3:05 pm

    Awesome post! I believe we all contemplate on the ending and forget to enjoy what’s happening. We talk about the “if you leave me” and mess up those moments we could be enjoying. One of my favorite motto’s “Happiness is not a destination, but a journey within itself..” Again, Great post! Thank you for sharing!

  • Reply Danny Nicola December 11, 2012 at 3:15 pm

    It makes you miss your bus stop 😀

    But there’s always another bus. Much love!!!
    <3

  • Reply Danny Nicola December 11, 2012 at 3:18 pm

    No, seriously. So much love.

  • Reply Janice December 11, 2012 at 3:31 pm

    Loved reading this! I do the same thing in yoga class, at massages, and on holidays. My favourite moment of a massage is at the very beginning when the person touches my back through the sheet I don’t know how long the massage would have to last for me to be ready for it to end!

  • Reply Michael Bertrand December 11, 2012 at 3:33 pm

    This was such a beautifully written and heart felt post. I read it twice today and both times I was touched by the sincerity and simplicity of your thoughts … Well done.

  • Reply Regan December 11, 2012 at 5:28 pm

    Beautiful.

  • Reply Jo Ellen Corcoran December 11, 2012 at 8:29 pm

    there I was in tremendous transition after the Ojai Retreat (May 2012 Jen Pastiloff)
    and so I jumped out of my box and went to your class at Equinox.. I’m sure I was the oldest and least fit person there, but I reconnected to the intense Love and nothing else mattered.. You persuaded my shoulders to release during savasana.. and I wondered….. could we just experience this the rest of my life?? Love you, Jen..

  • Reply barbarapotter December 12, 2012 at 12:19 am

    This is so beautiful Jen.So true and I love the way you describe touch especially as you know touch is so much a part of my life. Wow

  • Reply Katie D December 12, 2012 at 2:34 pm

    I found myself in savasana last night, hearing your quiet footsteps walking around, coaxing people’s shoulders down, touching, connecting…and I could hear my inner voice saying “pick me, pick me, touch me”. I realize how much I’ve come to cherish this moment in your class. It’s such a small and powerful gesture, and yet it means so much. Thank you for bringing that into the lives of everyone who takes your classes, everyone who comes into your life.
    I think about the simple truth of the words of one of my favorite lines of music (yes, I’m still singing Les Mis songs this morning): “To love another person is to see the face of God”. You deserve ALL of the love that you give to come back to you tenfold!!!

  • Reply Mary Jane Allen December 12, 2012 at 4:53 pm

    I am finding that the better I get to know and love myself, the real me, at soul level, the less I need love from others. Mind you, this is after lots of Akashic Records clearing work which has cleared away much of what I am not, leaving the authentic me. It’s been a journey of profound experiences and I’m SO grateful to be at this place at this time.

    Love and Blessings to you, Jennifer, and all of your many readers. xo

  • Reply Mandy Smith December 14, 2012 at 10:53 am

    I have been single and independent for most of my life, and my close family were not “touchy” souls…but, when it’s right, being touched with love is the best feeling in the world…you made me realize how much I miss that. We all do need love. Thanks for this post.

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