MRI meditation

Really, the pants they give you to wear are unsightly.  And not a chuckle at all from the receptionist in the MRI trailer, despite my multiple attempts to engage her.  Just her deadpan instructions: "Bra off.  Pants off.  Underwear on. Jewelry off." Really, she wouldn't even respond when I asked her about the items on the checklist you have to work through before the procedure.  Did you know there was such a thing as eyelid springs?  That's something amazing, right?  But she wouldn't talk to me at all, except the most perfunctory exchange.

So off I went, in my heinous blue elastic-waist pants, Smurf-blue down jacket and cowboy boots, to have magnetic resonance images taken of my lower back.

An MRI is a total trip.  They stick you in this little tube which makes insane noises.  You remain perfectly, perfectly still for the 20 minutes required to take all of the pictures they need.

So that they can see your insides and let you know what's wrong.

It's some serious magic.

I'm not kidding.  For all those of you who need extraterrestrials to keep things interesting, or angels (which are probably just aliens), or God or gods, I just had a supernatural medical experience, so I'm good.  Modern medicine is filled with magic. 

They can see your insides!!

Meanwhile, I assumed my savasana in the tube and breathed in and breathed out.  I was aware of the loud, loud sounds the machine makes and the slight wiggle of the table as they adjusted me between images.  

But mostly all I heard was my own breath, the tempo of my own heartbeat.

I slid into a delicious meditation really, despite all of the racket or perhaps because of it, breathing deeply into the pain it causes me to be prone on my back in one position for 20 minutes, hands crossed like a little corpse, still. Breathing.  And breathing.  And breathing.

When they slid me out, I couldn't believe we were done.  I might even have felt a twinge of, "Really, we're done, already? Can I have just a few more minutes?"  Because for a person like me, a busy little bee,  MRI tubes offer the perfect environment for a little meditation.  No distractions.  No email. No interruptions.

Every situation, every place, every moment is an opportunity for meditation, for yoga, for awakening.

Those MRI technicians now have pictures of my pelvis and spine and the puffy little discs of fluid between my vertebrae.  They have insight, although they wouldn't show it to me, into the mechanics of my skeleton, the interaction of my various miraculous parts.  And soon I'll have answers, I hope, and a course of treatment that will help me navigate my way out of this hole I've been in for two months.  That'll get me back to my mat, into handstand, into backbend.

But I'm still glorying in the picture I got this morning in the MRI machine, amidst the roar and clicking, under my thin little blanket.  I, too, got to see into my own insides, thanks to my own breath and my funny little meditation.  Man, that's a peaceful, beautiful place I carry around with me all day, every day.

Afterward, the tech laughingly told me I could take the pants home with me if I wanted, because I was just sitting there, a little stunned, a bit achey but mostly really content.  I tossed those unsightly things in the bin and walked out happy, loving up my insides no matter what's happening in there.

Miracles! Magic!