yoga diary - entry 18

Did you know 18 is a homophone for life in Hebrew? That's why it's considered an auspicious number. Very often gifts of money will be given for a wedding, a graduation, a birthday or a Bar/Bat Mitzvah in multiples of 18 for that reason.

My birthday falls on the 18th, it may be simply ego but that feels a little blessed, I admit.

Today I let myself off the hook. I still did my regular practice but allowed myself to take the breaks I wanted and modify the poses I wanted as much as I wanted.

The thing is, I really want to be perfect at this. I want to be able to fold my chest right down to touch my knees and place my hands securely on the floor when I do. I want to be able to lift into Goddess Warrior with a lot of strength and not much effort and I want to progress to the most advanced poses too.

I pulled my left hamstring so as much as I may want to go speeding toward all of that, it's not happening right now and so today I decided rather than resent everything, I would just do the sequence from where I am (rather than where I want to be.)

Taught me a lot. For one thing it pushed out the anger at the man in question and replaced it with real forgiveness. Something that has, heretofore been foreign to me. I thought of two things: first, if I love him in any way, even as a wonderful experience I had once or a good friend or an interesting person, then why would I want rancor and bitterness to accompany him through life? And second, as long as I hang on to the heat of that anger and the pain, he is foremost in my mind.

That may be one of the reasons I was hanging on to it. Sad is much harder for me to bear than furious but I can say honestly, I love him because I loved him and I forgive him because we want happiness for those we love. We want to be good to them, not a scourge.

Big lesson. If I get nothing more out of yoga, that one makes it worth it for the long haul. Maybe I'll even be able to apply it to my father someday. Not going there today, not feeling the Freud vibe at all except in the Beethovenesque sense.

So I learned forgiveness. I know I'll forget it again but today, I know it.

The other thing I learned is that it's fine for me to do what I want and I don't have to be rigid and linear about it for it to be fine, useful or productive. Today, I pushed out some fear. Big time. That makes me happy. The practice was all about modifications.

I have also realized over the past week or so that my arms are a little shorter than they should be for my height. That sounds strange but I think it's true, all too often the sleeves on clothes are too long and when I am doing yoga and look at myself in the mirror compared to the instructor? That seems very apparent.

I need to modify some stances just to make them work without hurting myself. And the thing is this; when I accept that and work with it, I can do everything and reach whatever I aim for. When I don't? Everything is just that little bit out of reach and it is difficult, discouraging and maybe would never be possible for me to get what I am grasping at.

These are all good metaphors for my mental processes today.

Things are a bit busy this week. Will return to a more articulate, thorough flow of writing by friday, promise. (I feel like I have to use a little direct address these days as a few people have told me they are actually reading this thing. - the world is full of wonders...)

yoga diary - entry 17

Suddenly I am noticeably thinner.

The sun has made its way beyond the block of apartments that obscures my view of the whole sunset and is moving north now, a little more every day. Actually, we are, the earth is moving but I was raised to think of the sun rising and setting and sometimes it's hard to remember how we spin toward and away from it every day and change our angle through the year.

Yoga has been good for the last two days. Good enough that I considered altering or adding to it. I don't think it's time for that yet but it will be. I'm just not ready to alter a good thing, I want a more solid foundation first.

It occurs to me that the passage of time and my own observance of it might have been one of the things that made staying with the man in Texas so appealing.

Whether I understood it or not, when I was with him, waiting for our life together to begin and trusting him, I could hang on to the illusion of time standing still. It felt like he and I were the only things determining the movement of time. He said time had to wait, so it waited and I waited with it.

Of course that's absurd but think of how we're all raised to see Sunrise and Sunset - something big moves around us, we don't think that we could be moving around it. After all, aren't we always in the same place? Anyway, he wasn't really waiting, he was auditioning, tasting, feeding what needed to be fed and getting ready to move on. Maybe that's my fault. I'm not sure he understood how much of my life I allowed to hang in the balance waiting for the time when I could be open about everything and live in one place, fully belonging there.

It was a lovely dream and I have been interested to observe it's something of a family pattern. We bloom late and we only seem to bloom when we are married, if I'm honest I have to admit, I really don't want to succeed alone. That's one of the reasons I have done such a strange little dance with my own success. Success alone, to me, is condemnation to a life of solitude and that, honestly, is the very last thing I want - so here I am, living it. Irony = life I suppose.

We are moving from life to death. That's true every minute of every day. It's not a terrible thing, it is the nature of life and nature itself - we're part of that, it has to be ok.

So here I am, back in the flow of time, life spilling past the rocks and over the sluice gate and on to the ocean somewhere in the distance.

Here I am with the earth turning beneath me and the sun fixed overhead, we spin away and then turn back and each time we do it's just a little different from the last time. The pattern is called an analemma, there is an excellent explanation of it here at a blog called Field Notebook, written by Curtiss Clark, whom I do not know but who seems like a pretty smart guy.

So the weather changes, the sun has its arc and I have mine. And today I didn't think of anything but yoga while I was doing yoga. They call that being "in the moment", I suppose.

I'm doing it right.

That's the conclusion I've come to today. I'm doing it right and that's fine but coming out of years of doing it wrong, years that were then iced over with a layer of four years of being lied to, sometimes it feels like too little too late.

Here I am in frozen tundra-land trying to make some meaning of it all and I guess today the meaning is this. Look at what you're doing as you do it and do that thing right. It will have results but you might not see them for a while. In the meantime, it's not going to be fun and it's not going to be exciting, it's just going to be going through the motions and trying to remember, every step is a step toward the end and you are always moving.

Even when you're standing still.

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.

yoga diary - Day 14 & 15

Downward facing dog is becoming a resting pose for me. That's a good sign.

My mind is always wandering during my practice that's not so good. I am still wondering if this is ever going to make a real difference. I'm up to 28 days interrupted only by my body's non-negotiable demands and I feel less sure that I understand the benefits of this every day.

I think that might be natural. Human beings seem uniquely capable of finding something good, making it part of their lives and then looking around for a bigger thrill, a better thing - more. I think that's why some people reach a point in a love relationship where they just can't help but start flirting and/or cheating or at least getting close to it. There's no excitement in something that is consistently good, it becomes nearly invisible. The sizzle, the zing, the thrill - all that comes from starting something new and seeing the potential in it from the first try.

So this is a lull. To add to it, it reflects a lull in my own life as things move slowly toward a resolution. I am trying to understand that while I might be doing all of this for a resolution and hoping to launch into a new phase of life, that phase will also level off and become familiar.

The sequence is still challenging, I still break into a sweat by the halfway point, warrior pose and goddess warrior still challenge me to the point where I feel I can't hold the pose for even one more breath. The work is being done and that must mean the benefit follows but maybe that's it - the benefit follows the work and that makes the work harder.

There are people in my life, some of them very close, who would really benefit themselves and me too if they could grasp this simple lesson but for the moment, I am only capable of learning it for myself.

So I did my practice, put the X on the calendar, had my shower and went on with the day.

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.

yoga diary - day twelve

Down day.

I don't mean that in any bad sense but if you're a woman, there are going to be two or three days a month where some things are out of your reach. For me, today, it's yoga and the sweat lodge I had hoped to attend.

For the sake of anyone who reads this and only knows the news stories about "sweat lodges," that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a traditional First Nations sweat held in the country, supervised by Elders and not ever arduous much less harmful. If you can't take it, you can leave the lodge. You do not fast for days in advance and you feast afterwards. It is a kind of cleansing and it's tied deeply to the land. Women in "their moon" are filled up with energy that is powerful and pretty chaotic so traditionally we do not participate in sweats or other ceremonies when that's going on.

Same is true of yoga. That's enough said about the nitty gritty. The question for today becomes then, how do you carry on a daily practice when your body has limitations?

I don't want to go entirely without it in case I break the habit and lose ground, however there is no question that physically it's not something I can do today. I slept in for one thing. Then fooled around much more than I should have on the computer. Had breakfast, talked to a friend and then finally settled in here.

The lack of discipline in every aspect of my life except yoga is beginning to eat away at me. Working for yourself, you can go through phases where you do exactly what you have to do and not much more. This leads to anxiety and all sorts of other complications - the mind gets noisy and you end up desperately seeking peace anywhere you can find it and at the same time being sort of garrolously eager to pounce on social and potential networking situations. It's uncomfortable and unattractive. (And I had cake for breakfast so I feel doubly gross and lazy.)

Alright - no yoga to help me so I have to do the yoga in my mind and in my breathing.

Singing helps, to a point. Doing all the mundane household stuff helps too. Trying not to worry though, well, actually getting beyond worry, that helps the most. Singing can get my beyond worry for a while and if it's challenging enough it helps my breathing. But worry will stop me dead in my tracks.

I'm not thinking of yoga in terms of moving anything but the weight off my body. I like the idea that it is calming and so far, my muscles seem a bit more defined but people do ascribe an awful lot to the practice and so far, to be honest, all I seem to have gotten from it that way is a sense of guilt and alarm at how easy it is to slide into being unproductive.

Maybe I'll come back to this. The desk isn't helping.

yoga diary - day eleven

It was hard again this morning and my first thought was, "oh no, not another angry yoga day."

Why isn't this getting easier? It was hard to get to the mat but I got there. Once there, I expected to be rewarded for my efforts with some good feelings, maybe some more graceful stretching but the first moves of my practice were harder than they have ever been.

It was hard to get my knees anywhere near the floor when I sat down, honestly, I don't think they would have been lower than my hips if I'd been sitting with my butt on a chair, much less a pillow or a rolled up towel. Then the first bends and stretches? No way, the backs of my thighs were resistant to the point of pain. It was harder than doing this on the very first day.

I still don't know why that is but what I did about it was to decide, fine, if it's going to be this hard, I'll take breaks, I'll make it easy, I'll cheat but I won't stop.

Red tide is immanent, it's natural for me to be impatient and angry about everything. This is the point where Kali energy peaks and destroying things, especially things that will shatter, is an attractive thought.

So I gave myself that permission and carried on.

About halfway through this difficult practice I started noticing the instructor's breathing was not perfect, she would say four more breaths and then actually instruct two or she'd say "deep inhale" then wait for solid 30 seconds, (and breathe the whole time) and then finally "exhale slowly." Not possible, I would have passed out.

She sometimes gave instructions twice. "Take one more deep breath and then lower your leg to the floor, now one more deep breath and lower that leg to the floor" speaking of the same leg.

Then I realized I wasn't reacting the way I expected. Instead of being annoyed and frustrated I was thinking to myself, "see? nobody gets it all right all the time." It's ok for things to go wrong.

I wasn't in the usual rut.

Suddenly I started thinking about life and love and how it all starts perfectly in ease and comfort and how we resent effort and resist it all the time and really? who wouldn't effort is pain, it's hard, it's sweat. Then I started thinking - what's the opposite of sweat and effort? It's ease and comfort and stillness, ultimately it's sleep. But sleep can be disturbed so I suppose ultimately it's death - which is like before birth, which is perfect and contained and still and (for the most part) solitary.

Which one do I want?

I was thinking I was at some sort of breakthrough point and becoming very wise when we reached Savasana (corpse pose) the last pose of the practice, lying there still and as "dead" as possible I heard the instructor say, "this is your most important pose."

Right.

It's not all about stillness or avoiding that and it's not about all about effort and extending myself, it's about finding where I am for the day and making the most of it. In love, it's about effort sometimes and repose at others, in life - same thing.

So on what is likely to be the last day of my physical practice for the month, I am back to where I started. Stretching for balance, looking for answers, trying to get somewhere with all of this.

It's not a line, it's a labyrinth.