Zona Visphota (part-2)

One day, a popular fidget toy shared among students in my class at Westport Day School (add link to previous blog post) broke. It was a sand-filled rubber squeezy “stress ball” thing, color: purple, and it was in the hands of a particularly energetic student of mine.

I’ll never forget the upset look on his face when it burst, how concerned he was, and his look of disappointment at the toy now destroyed. I, too, felt surprisingly upset, in an empathetic way, and also with a knowing that Ben would be more dysregulated as a result. It was a moment of feeling. And there was a pause, a palpable something wanting discernment.

An intuitive nudge came over me. The purple fidget toy “explosion,” an explosion much like the emotional and behavioral outbursts of my students in times of their anxiety and disorder, was a learning opportunity; a practice on the letting go of things; goodbyes, and endings. 

And my students were ripe for it. They were of an age (11-12 year olds) where they could still give way to imaginative play, to go along with my proposed game of saying goodbye to our favorite stress ball with pomp and circumstance. They, all of them, had experienced sufferings and challenges in their lives that hardened them; born from genetics, family dynamics, and life circumstances. 

Each of my students had been worn down much earlier than anyone would wish.

Moreover, in recent weeks, they had learned and gotten into the practice of reciting loving phrases directed toward self and others – they had learned metta meditation.

“May you be safe. May you be happy. May you be healthy. May you live in peace.”

I picked up the broken toy and I asked my small group of students to put on their shoes. We walked out of the classroom, down the hall, and through an external set of doors to the small fenced in side-yard of grass and sun. They gathered around excitedly, eager for what would come next, and perhaps curious as to this impromptu action of mine. I looked at each one, in this rare moment of calm, fed by intrigue… Spurred on by feeling, and by a palpable potency, I pointed to the four corners of our grassy lot; I identified their cardinal names: North, East, South, West. One by one I brought the broken ball above each student’s hands and let piles of sand form in their grasps. Then, in easy unison and with my guidance, we calmly brought sand to each corner and let it fall to the ground as we recited loving-kindness phrases.

“May you be safe. May you be happy. May you be healthy. May you live in peace.”

We took our visceral feelings of disappointment, sadness, and frustration – born of life’s challenges – and we expressed them through wishes of goodwill, wishes of well-being. We did this over and over, until no sand remained.

It was a way of working with a feeling, and it was a ritual ceremony. In our deliberate choosing, we gave way to self-trust, to instinct, to knowing. 

We walked back inside the school and sat down on our yoga mats. On the large iMac screen in our classroom I pulled up a Sanskrit translator-dictionary and found interpretations for the words “purple” and “explosion”:

Zona Visphota

We laughed. We recited it many times with dramatic flair. Zona Visphota.

At the end of the year one of my students even wrote, when prompted with the question, “What does yoga mean to you?”, Zona Visphota.