Tag: yoga

Laughing Yoga Time Travelers by Mary Ray Goehring

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Laughing Yoga* Time Travelers

Six 60 somethings
hold hands, swing arms,
snort, snicker, chortle,
cachinnate,
and find long forgotten
6-year-old selves still here.

We gather to laugh
with a friend undergoing chemo.
No clever jokes,
no judgement allowed.
Just crazy gestures, goofy faces.
While moving our bodies, our bellies laugh
and afterwards, deep restorative breaths.

We strut like chickens.
Giggle like school girls.
Bellies bounce in hoots and hollers.
Our mood rising like rainbow sunrises
lighting the room in lifted spirits.
Magical. Transported to a time
we remembered how to laugh
for no other reason
than it felt good.

*Laughing Yoga is part of a holistic therapy discovered by Madan Kataria in 1995 and is now offered by MD Anderson Cancer Center of patients receiving chemo. “Laughter yoga brings a unique element to the Place…of wellness,” says Moshe Frenkel M.D. medical director of the Integrative Medicine Program at M D. Anderson. “We know from multiple studies that laughter causes a positive physiological response and above all reduces stress and anxiety. This complementary therapy allows us to incorporate humor in cancer care and help patients discover a playfulness that reduces stress and anxiety while increasing their pain tolerance.”

*

Mary Ray Goehring, a snowbird, migrates seasonally between her prairie in Central Wisconsin and the pine forests along the border between East Texas and Louisiana. Grateful to be learning about the flora and fauna throughout the country, she writes primarily about nature, family and friends. You can find her work in several print and online journals and anthologies such as: ONE ART: a journal of poetry, A Path to Kindness – edited by James Crews, The Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Moss Piglet, The Blue Heron Review, Bramble, Your Daily Poem, The Rye Whiskey Review, Steam Ticket Review and others.

I Mention the Unmentionable In the Yoga Class by Roseanne Freed

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I Mention the Unmentionable In the Yoga Class

Inversions this evening,
said the male teacher
at the beginning of the yoga class,
Is anyone on their period?
I put up my hand.
Eight men and six women
turned round to stare,
I’ll give you different exercises.

My convent educated mother,
would be horrified to know
I’d told a roomful of strangers
I was a woman who menstruated.
Mom, who taught me to call my vagina,
my down there, and menstruation
by the Hindustani words mina minna,
was taught the facts of life
—a.k.a how babies are made—
by my father. On their wedding night.

I was so embarrassed, But he was kind,
Mom said, I learned fast.
I got pregnant on our honeymoon.

In the African town where I grew up.
Menstrual pads were wrapped
in brown paper
and hidden behind the counter.
Unable to mention the unmentionable,
I’d walk out the drug store
if served by a man.

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Roseanne Freed grew up in apartheid South Africa and now lives with her husband in California. A Best of the Net nominee, her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in ONE ART, MacQueens Quinterly, Naugatuck River Review, and Blue Heron Review among others.