yoga diary - entry 16

On the wall in my kitchen is a calendar from Austin's Half-price books. It's about dogs and books. It's not pretty and not particularly clever (in my opinion) either but it is rooted in Austin and it is a calendar.

Every day, when I finish yoga, I take a sharpie that I keep right under it, and make a big X in the square for the day. No yoga, no X.
When I left Austin with this calendar in my suitcase, I thought I would be marking off 153 sequential days, the amount of time I must spend in the province before I can travel again. I thought I would be marking off time between my departure and reuniting with the man in my life. That turned out to be wrong and it looks like I might be marking off more than 153 days as well.

From the looks of it, I have a project here that will keep me until at least October. That's ok, I can manage but what really was hard to accept was that the calendar and those X's have nothing to do with reunion.

For me, he was my mate. For him, I was a friend with benefits.

One of the things he insisted on throughout the four years we were together was "discretion." This was exercised to suit his tastes of course, in some circles we were a couple, in others, just friends, in still others, very affectionate friends. At the end of it all, I discovered I was not the only "friend" in his life. Hell, the others received formal Christmas presents, I didn't.

All this is to say, I am not only doing a daily yoga practice for the exercise and the mental clarity, I am also doing it to expunge anger and hurt from my life. Every memory I have of him is tainted by his actions, the things he was doing when he left, the things he must have been thinking when he was with me - it all has this undertaste of bitterness and I am trying to rid myself of it so that I can remember only the good because I truly did love this man. With all my heart.

I am having terrible trouble learning to do the lizard poses. Those poses where you have one leg stretched behind you with the knee resting on the floor and the other leg bent between your hands? That seems nearly impossible to me and it hurts. I have different strategies to deal with it every day. Sometimes I let myself modify it sometimes I only do it for a breath or two and then revert to child's pose, sometimes I just promise myself I won't do it if I don't want to and then I find I move around in it a lot but I still tend to give it my all.

I don't know what I learned today. My practice was middling to good, I prayed for compassion afterward, to have my heart washed clean of anger and soothed, to be gifted with some small taste of compassion for that man, for every person, for the world and for myself - to both give it and receive it. (I miss Austin terribly.)

Right now it's all I can do.