Temporary Disconnext

"Bird of Paradise" is the strangest of yoga poses. You point your right foot forward, then open up your hips to bring your left leg all the way back with your left foot more or less perpendicular to your right. Bend into your right knee, then take your right arm, rotate the bicep downward, bend over and bring it through your legs in the front. Take your left arm, rotate that bicep downward, bring the arm behind you and through your legs so the right hand meets the left. With hands clasped between your legs, step the left leg forward next to the right. With hands still clasped (yes, that's right), raise the left leg up to hip height, and then, with hands still clasped, straighten the leg. Voila.

There are simpler ways to achieve a total mind/body connection, even in yoga. But there's something about twisting your entire body into a pretzel and binding your limbs together that really does the trick. Though you are acutely aware of the other folks with you in the room, all of them struggling through various stages of the pose, your mind becomes completely focused on what every inch of your body is doing (or trying to do).

After contorting myself into the rare and ridiculous bird the other day, I joined my two daughters for a mother daughter shopping outing. I looked forward to the connectedness, the joining of three minds and three bodies in a sort of moving yoga pose during which we are at once aware of the folks around us but at one with each other. Yoga "off the mat."

But alas, it's the world of cell phones, and my older daughter was in the midst of a heated text battle with a friend. As my younger daughter and I watched for the heavy pedestrian and vehicular traffic of a sunny Saturday afternoon on Chicago's Michigan Avenue, my eldest tapped away furiously at her blackberry, occasionally sharing with us her friend's increasingly infuriating responses. The more we encouraged her to stop responding, the more intense the finger tapping became. Full paragraphs of venom were being transmitted back and forth between two old friends with the click of a key. Naturally, having an actual conversation was out of the question.

She was "disconnexting." We all do it, to some extent, but this seemed particularly out of control. She had worked herself into such a typing frenzy she didn't flinch when (thanks to a driver who happened to not be texting) she narrowly missed being crushed between two cars. She was as focused as anyone could be, but not on anything in her "here and now." It was annoying, to be sure, not to mention extremely dangerous.

My other daughter and I walked on, munching on chocolates, occasionally glancing back to verify that her sister's body, if not her mind, was close at hand. I slowed down my breathing and tried to recover a connection, at least with myself. I could see, in my mind's eye, three birds of paradise, one of whom had temporarily fallen off the branch. The battery would run down eventually though, and she'd be back.