There’s a buoyancy to my days lately, despite, or perhaps even partly because of, all the work to be done. There’s marking and grading to do, and conference papers (two!) and curricular revisions and spreadsheets and organizational work and travel plans. The usual and unending stream of obligated communications. But even though I’ve calendared action items and deadlines all the way through to September, I feel more excited than overwhelmed or oppressed.
Lately it’s been easier to recognize the direction of my doing, the activities and relationships that bring me happiness, and the sort of work that I value and that make me feel valued. Such recognition allows me to make quick decisions: to say yes to this and no to that, to reach for an opportunity and let go of another, to accept that invitation or leave this situation… editing my life, as it were, for a sense of meaningful striving, rest, and fulfillment, instead of filling it with thing after thing after thing — a shortcut to exhaustion, anxiety, feelings of inadequacy.
Doing All The Things, Wanting Everything Now — the past decade or so of my life was so fraught with restlessness and discontent and busy-ness, and sometimes I still castigate myself for not being as ambitious and driven and productive as I think I was when I was younger. But now I see that my present is much healthier and happier — I feel more connected with my family, friends, and communities of practice, I get enough sleep, I have time for exercise and play, I have a more relaxed relationship with food, a greater appreciation and kindness for my body, and respect for capabilities and limitations, be they others’ or my own. For a very long time now I haven’t even desired to die. I like my life and where I am and whom I’m with these days, and I’m curious to discover what else I can be and where else I can go, and — and this is new — what more I can do to be in service of institutions and people and goals I care about.
Last weekend I traveled way up north to meet my friend and yoga teacher, who’s based in Ilocos and holds weekend wellness retreats every month or so. I don’t often have the time to while away on 12-hour bus rides, but every May (my birthday month) I try to go somewhere I haven’t been to, and try something I haven’t done before. So this year it was Pagudpud and surfing.
After a day of much walking, eating, sleeping, and backbending, my travelmates and I learned surfing one sunny morning from a guy named Kinglord (“Kuya ang boss naman ng pangalan mo,” I joked, though his parents must be religious). After practicing standing on the board on land, I lay on the board and paddled out to sea, not too far away from the shore, where Kinglord was. King would orient the board and watch out for the right wave and tell me to get ready and shout at me to stand as the wave propelled the surfboard and me on it forward. Yet, for all of my concentration, whenever I felt the force of the wave, I found myself unable to stand. Instinctively my body sought to maintain broad contact with the board in kneeling or crouching position. This, my body seemed to protest, is the safest, most stable orientation for us, so why are you pushing to stand?? That one time I almost got on my feet and stood upright, I fell right off. I think I have to fall off many more times before I can learn to get high up on my feet.
Later, hanging out in the sea with the women I shared a rented minibus and accommodations with, I watched Kinglord and his friends on their surfboards with a wistful envy. How powerfully they paddled, how lightly they got on their feet and coasted on the crest of a wave, how gracefully they fell, with a little hop and twirl to the side, smiling, as if they were only falling to lie on a very soft bed.
A friend I once made on a beach told me that what he liked about surfing was feeling the power of the water course through his body, as if he and the wave were one. No fear, no ego, and no overthinking, just the thrill of being part of a great and indomitable force.
I know I can feel beyond the jitters brought by any situation where I lack mastery and control, but it takes me a long time, multiple failures, and many tries. I know I have quite the stamina for trying, but as I get older (and as I gain more resources, more responsibilities, more connections, more plans, more things of value), I fear that I become more attached to feeling safe, and consequently less willing to risk my hard-earned stability.
When I was in my early twenties (and before mobile data and Google Maps were mainstream), I used to take only a point-and-shoot film camera and a basic phone and a book or a Kindle with me on hikes and travels — I would print/write down all the information I needed for my itinerary beforehand, get physical maps at the port and annotate them, ask people for directions when I was unsure. Sometimes I’d ask people with digital cameras to take photos for me and email them afterwards. This was how I made both passing and enduring friendships and got into (mis)adventures as a solo traveler (as amply documented in this blog for the past decade!). The idea was to be open to strangers and to be very deliberate about what I chose to commemorate, and not be ruled by the tyranny of documentation and “sharing” (though we all know that being networked and communicating in networks is not the same as being connected). Now I comply with the compulsions and the hailing of the smartphone, like everyone else.
We spent three days together, but I didn’t talk much with the women I shared a rented minibus and accommodations with last weekend. Everyone was on their phones practically all the time, everything of beauty and good taste and consumer power and self-making (as this lends itself to self-branding) incessantly documented in static and moving images — an ongoing performance for an anticipated audience. Maybe my vibe was aloof (I don’t often manage or even try to throw that off), maybe it’s an introvert thing, for small talk to feel so pointless. But don’t you think it’s impossible to have a substantial conversation with someone when their eyeballs are screwed to a screen, recording, posting, replying, browsing?
We talked about the food and the weather and how we knew the teachers facilitating the retreat and how long our yoga practice has been. As this was a retreat, we also had designated moments for talking and sharing insights in a circle, but I don’t remember a single deep conversation with a stranger-turned-twelve-hour-friend or two-day-boyfriend. I miss that shit. Talking off tangents, running after a thought, telling stories you haven’t verbalized before, or stories you’ve refined through successive retellings, or stories you’ve made up on the spot just to stake a plot point and get a narrative arc going. Telling stories knowing that farewells are for good and no follow request on Facebook or Insta is gonna come. Philosophizing without feeling dumb because it’s hard to feel dumber and more irrelevant as a human than when you’re facing the immensity of the sea, the ever-shifting horizon, the sunlight and the wind so strong that you can’t help but squint and blink and blink.
During the opening and closing talk-sharing circles, many of the women started crying. They were going through Something, they intimated vaguely, something to do with careers or relationships, their sense of identity. I listened respectfully and thanked them for their sharing, but I could not cry with them. Instead, I said, I am grateful to have a restful weekend. I also said, I am so glad to see my yoga teacher-friend, whom I first met over ten years ago on a trip to Ifugao, when we were both fresh out of college and figuring out our place in the world. She wasn’t yet a yoga teacher nor a single woman back then. How inspiring it is, I said, to have witnessed how she has cultivated her yoga practice and community.
Some women cried again during our final rhythmic yoga class, which set vinyasa sequences to pop tunes. When my teacher-friend played Sia’s “Saved My Life” with its thumping, ponderous melody that stands in for lyrical complexity and emotional gravitas, I felt acute irritation. “Turn your mind back to the time when you felt at your lowest and darkest and most vulnerable,” said the yoga teacher as she raised the volume of the music, the better for us to feel the feels. “Who was there for you?” My breathing went out of synch with my movements when I couldn’t block out the bass and Sia’s voice reciting boom, boom, boom / beats my heart, heart, heart / in the dark, dark, dark / fall apart, part, part. I finished the flow without rolling my eyes. I’m no stranger to shadow work, but this ain’t it.
I kept thinking back to earlier that morning as well as the previous afternoon, when we had sat around idling, waiting for the establishment’s staff to wipe down the floors of the hall before we started the yoga classes. I kept wondering why we didn’t just wipe the floor ourselves when there were so many of us. And while we were practicing yoga in the shade and many of the women were tearing up to boom boom boom beats my heart, surrounding us were day laborers, brown as betel nuts, digging up the soil for ornamental plants to root down under the severe sun.
I wondered if I would attend any more of these yoga retreats for women of a particular class.
We returned to Manila on Monday morning, after about twelve hours of traveling. I was swamped with work that day and I was pretty tired by the afternoon, but still I hauled myself to our biweekly Brazilian jiu-jiutsu (BJJ) training that night.
BJJ’s been my ballast these past few months, keeping me afloat in the midst of the incessant deliverables and deadlines of our fast-paced and packed academic times. I got into BJJ back in March because I was looking to seriously train in some martial art (I flirted with arnis and judo in university, with boxing and muay thai and dragonboat and tai chi post-graduation, and with karate in grad school, but could sustain none of these practices; sports-wise, my most enduring engagements have been with hiking and yoga and the pain olympics of tattoos). I wanted to train in martial arts to rein in the latent and summer-heightened aggression I could no longer inhale-exhale-downward-dog-upward-dog away. Joining a BJJ gym has proven to be one of the best decisions I’ve made this year.
I’ve been monitoring my weight and body composition (muscle mass and fat percentage) since January 2022, doing weigh-ins weekly to fortnightly on a smart scale, and yesterday my smart scale app recorded the best stats I’ve had in the past 18 months — not by any huge margin, but at this age I’m elated by even incremental progress. Guess I’ll be sticking with jiu-jitsu for the long haul, and supplement it with yoga and pilates as usual, and maybe a bit more swimming and weightlifting. BJJ is such an all-rounder activity for me, with its strength, cardio, flexibility, balance, and coordination training, plus it’s really fun and keeps me cognitively and socially engaged too (thankfully, my teammates, almost all of them straight males, are pretty decent guys I actually enjoy spending hours every week grappling and sweating and stinking and bruising and laughing with.) How I am now isn’t the fittest I’ve ever been, but it’s the happiest, I think — at least my moods are a lot more regulated, I generally get sufficient rest, and even when I have a lot of work on my plate, I don’t feel as easily (di)stressed.
It pleases me to exert my will upon my body, to discipline it, as if doing so would also make me more effectively act in the external world. In this way my body functions as a site in which I exercise and exorcize my anxieties, even as my anxieties live within it. This relates to why I am so taken with tattooing too. So much of the diverse range of body modification practices (from piercing and tattooing as well as gender-affirming surgery or hormonal therapy or even working out with the aim of changing one’s body composition) is about progressively aligning the image we see in the mirror with how we feel or hear or see ourselves from the inside, and in so doing more firmly tethering and orienting ourselves in the surrounding world. To me, body modification is about inhabiting one’s mortal coil in this mortal plane with more lightness and ease by cultivating a keener sense of identity and agency.
I think this is also why I enjoy BJJ so much. It’s an exercise in materializing one’s will, exerting it upon not only oneself but also another. BJJ, as I understand it, is all about control — controlling one’s mindset, controlling one’s movement, controlling one’s sparring partner, controlling the game by systematically disabling one’s partner from resisting one’s will. To many, “control” reeks of violence, and yet all this is often done slowly, smoothly, patiently, consciously, judiciously, carefully; jūjutsu (柔術) literally means gentle art or technique. All players are attentive to the tapping that signals the desire to exit the game.
I’m only just starting out, but I feel that this practice will teach me more about stability and risk, hardness and vulnerability, structure and spontaneity, and confidence and humility than what I can articulate now. I consider with anticipation the lessons to come.
tenant on the top floor 