Yoga Diary - Day 13

Back to it after the monthly three-day break.

I came to the mat a little angry, again. It's hard to form a fitness habit that you can rely on when your body keeps grabbing hold of you and shaking. I have what have sometimes been described as "catastrophic" cycles. So in my case anyway, all those "feminine" ads you see on TV are dead wrong. I've been hospitalized for it several times and have been asked to consider a permanent, surgical fix on more than one occasion. I may choose to take that route this year but until now I have not wanted to run the risk of making a bad situation even worse. Better the devil you know...

This one's my devil. It makes me anemic, weak for a few days every month and it means I must remain very quiet and relatively still for two days every month. Almost invariably this is a weekend so it's really not that big a deal except it is pretty alarming and now that I want to maintain a fitness baseline, it is truly unworkable.

Physically, I start from scratch every month.

Of course there are many much worse health problems to have but I am not writing about health problems I am writing about being an ordinary woman trying to engage in what is for me, an extraordinary practice. This is a major hurdle to overcome.

When you add in the hormonal impact, it becomes an emotional storm and by the time I am able to be active again, the hormones, to be fair, are still very much in play.

So today my mind was all over the place. I was annoyed at having lost ground, determined to let myself go at my own pace, surprised at how slow my own pace was, (nearly had to pause the DVD) dismayed at how I already seem to have lost some flexibility in my legs, dismayed to think this might be my full range of mastery over yoga - get good for 26 days and then lose it all in the flood (so to speak) then get up, get back on the mat and start again.

You see? All over the place.

I guess, at the end of it, what I take away with me today is that I am always going to have to deal with where I am, even if it is not where I want to be. There must be ways to make progress toward my goals, ways to keep the momentum going and I am going to begin looking for them but I haven't found them yet and I have to accept that until I do, this is what I have.

I start.
I try.
I stop,
I wait.
I start again.

Breathe.