It has been such a fabulous long holiday weekend, and tomorrow is Monday, and I am too tired to write this post and do it well. Still there is This-Which-Is-On-My-Mind, and I am afraid if I don’t get it down now it will be gone, replaced by tomorrow’s stuff.

I have had a night alone. While making some Christmas ornaments (isn’t that a perfect quiet Sunday night?), I clicked on the television to find a TIVOed episode of Oprah’s Soul Series. At the end of the show Oprah introduced a new show feature called Sacred Spaces. In this premiere video, yoga expert Seane Corn gave us a look at the place she goes to reconnect with inner peace— a yurt high in the California hills. Then she said this about the holiness of an isolated space that allows (forces?) her to spend time alone, confronting the decisions she’s made in her life:

I take a deep breath, and when I release the tension, I feel more vulnerable. When I feel more vulnerable, I am more apt to surrender. When I surrender, I am certainly in the presence of God.

It stopped me dead.

I hold in. I hold tension in. This is not a revelation to me—any moment of any day, I need merely have the conscious thought relax and my shoulders drop a good two inches. What has amazed me for years is the fact that I know this and still can’t seem to change it. My body stays in a braced position, a modern coat of armour spontaneously generated to protect me from life’s incessant INCOMING.

Or such is the story I have told myself. Seane’s perspective causes me to wonder: Could this be, for me, an unwillingness to release? To be vulnerable?

To surrender?

I’m pretty sure I know the answer. But I plan to give some study to this one.

Perspectives invited, and welcome.