Lots of people say if you do yoga it's not really helping you maintain your weight because it's not aerobic, that you need to run or whatever for aerobic activity. They need to go to a Bikram class.
I had a long spell of no yoga.
I gained about 15 pounds, and I was already way up.
So now, after years of feeling like the biggest girl in the room, my body matches what my head has felt for a long time. It makes doing a lot of poses harder.
I can't even tell you how oddly freeing it is.
For so long I've been competing inside my head, pushing myself, comparing myself.
I've competed myself into multiple hip & shoulder injuries.
Now I come back to yoga knowing that I'm going to have to modify everything.
So instead of modifying and feeling less than, I've got this detachment that is ok with just showing up for myself as much as I can. I'm babying my shoulders. Because it turns out you really need those.
I'm just feeling more compassionate and gentle with myself all around. Letting myself be more like 47 than 27.
So I took some time off after this shoulder thing last Fall but before I'd stopped I signed up for this yoga and writing retreat at Esalen. The retreat was in January, so I didn't cancel because I thought I'd be ok by then.
Katchie Ananda was the yoga teacher at the retreat and she was terrific. She gave me some great advice about protecting my shoulders by squeezing shoulder blades. She said that doing the sort of work that I do where I'm hunched forward a lot makes all those muscles in the front of the chest shorter and the ones along our backs longer and weaker. So in order to protect the shoulders from coming out of place we need to strengthen those back muscles. I'd heard this in class before, but had nothing to hook the idea to until I heard it from her.
It was also a writing retreat with Diet for a New America author John Robbins. We did all these writing prompts. I remember writing about breaking up with yoga, and that I wanted to make up. Katchie's teaching and her kirtan, and these great talks she shared about the divine feminine helped me want to do that.
It's funny that this whole awakening to the divine feminine was my big take-away from that weekend.
Funny because Big Sur has this whole rustic masculine Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller vibe.
I went to the Miller library on my way down & got some books, & soaked it all in. Then you get to Esalen and it's this time machine of a place that's just this hippie compound clinging to the side of the continent and there's the ocean almost surrounding you you're so close.
And in that place, this tall intimidating swiss woman talking about strength and being a warrior and then the flip side of that, this eternal, nurturing, receptive Divine Mother where all things originate and where all things return. That is where I started to let go.
I encountered the receptive, supportive, create-ive face of divinity. I encountered that presence that says whatever has happened, whatever is going to happen, whoever you are, I've got you. That ocean under and around us was the metaphor for this... what? I'm having a hard time finding words for it.
Source, Sustenance. Divine feminine. Spirit? Tao.
I came back full of this idea. Growing up Southern Baptist, we didn't really have a good equivalent to this idea, or if there is I just never heard it. I liked the enormity of this. Being a mother myself it was something I could really rest in, surrender to, feel sure of. Fall in love with.
I think it was going there that I realized that I'd started doing yoga 20 years ago.
I started just about 10 years after my last gymnastics class, so it felt familiar, and comforting. And in a day to day life where I was at the bottom rung of a very shark infested ladder, it was somewhere I felt a little mastery. I was one of those jerky girls you hate who could still do a walkover out of wheel at 27. But it taught me how to calm that monkey mind.
I went to classes regularly wherever I lived: Houston, New Orleans, Los Angeles. Hatha, Kundalini, Bikram, Pre-natal, Post Natal, Vinyasa, Pre-natal, Post Natal again. I even worked with the reigning queen of Ashtanga at the time, the Material Girl herself, fitting and making her clothes for a movie where she plays a yoga teacher.
Then we move to Madison and I plugged into classes right away. Wherever you go, find the yoga and that sets your routine. The kids started school and their schedule dictated the only class available at the time I could fit in between drop off and pick up was at Bikram studio 20 minutes away. I could just make it. It ordered my weeks. It restored me. It was one place that I connected to my body, where I felt nurtured, where I felt powerful. It smoothed over some growing depression that was bubbling to the surface. I was now 40 and was beginning to feel my life unraveling due to years of resentment that I wasn't busy enough to ignore any longer.
Bring on the pharmaceuticals. Then more. Different combinations. Oooh, this one's like a cup of coffee and a glass of wine all in rolled up in one little pill.
You weren't supposed to mix those with Alcohol. But where's the fun in that.
Then all I wanted to do was nap. Just needed to sleep, just a little more sleep. I'm just going to take something and lay down for a little bit. Ok?
Then came the church basements and the coffee. Uncovering layers of pain and resentment. Working steps. Making amends.
One day my husband, and special guest star in my resentment show, who'd never in all those years expressed any interest in yoga called me at work. This is the husband who said when I wanted to go to yoga teacher training, "well you can go but I won't support it." Who when I briefly taught at two venues that he would have been welcome at declined to come be a part of the class. That was ok at the time, it just wasn't his thing. It was my thing.
So anyway, he calls and asks, would I like to have lunch with him? No I'm going to yoga. But you can come with me.
I'm thinking: "Yeah, right. See ya later."
Ok. Sure. I'll come with you.
So we go to a Bikram class. This should kick his ass, I think. And it does, I think.
It kicks his ass so much, in fact that he really likes it. This wasn't what he expected at all. This was really something challenging!
Then he starts going regularly. Then he starts going more than me. Then he starts meditating and doing yoga all over the place.
Ok wait a minute. This is my thing.
He was off to the races.
First it was a 40 day challenge, then maybe he would give up meat. Oh brother.
Next we are listening to MC Yogi in the car, oh and Krishna Das. Lots and lots of Krishna Das.
Meditation ensues. Incense, mala beads, you get the picture. There's a sweetness that I've never noticed before in him. Where did that come from?
Then he wants to do teacher training. After like a year of practicing. Sure, I think, go ahead. Get it out of your system, you'll see, like I did. Being a yoga teacher isn't all lavender eye pillows and ohmming, it's pretty tough. You have to be thinking about what's coming next, while giving people right and left and when to breathe directions all at once. Not as serene as they make it look, just so you know.
He's talking about sequencing and the yamas and the niyamas. Ahimsa, saucha, aparigraha... we discuss. We have a common language, this is going to be good, lovely, very nice.
But he did teach. And he was really good at it. Hmmm.
Then he starts correcting me.
Oh no he didn't. WWIII.
Thus began my slow break up with with yoga. It wasn't the refuge it once was for me. It was a source of resentment and pain.
Needless to say there was lots of counseling and talking through and well, you get the idea.
I really really tried to put that all out of my mind. But it was a tangled up mess of bitterness and hurt pride, and just sadness. It was a loss of something that had made me feel grounded and happy, calm and serene.
Without the chemical relaxation and without the yoga, the next best comfort was....FOOD.
Insert everywoman's food saga here.
And the weight kept climbing, so I wasn't only the yoga teacher's wife, I was now the conspicuously chunky yoga teacher's wife; less than motivating to squeeze into the old sports bra & bike shorts and sweat my way through a vinyasa class.
So each time I went I got more and more angry and felt less and less like going. Then my shoulder went out.
Ahhh, finally. A really great excuse not to go. "I have a shoulder injury"
I couldn't lift my left arm above 90 degrees without stabbing pain in my shoulder.
Physical therapy, no yoga, keep eating your feelings and voila! The perfect recipe for what I like to call my oompa loompa days.
The bigger I got the angrier I got. The more I needed to go to yoga, the less I felt like I belonged in those hot sweaty rooms. I'd go and be completely angry at myself for not being able to do what I could do 20 years ago.
So this husband of mine decides he's not only going to be a yoga teacher, he's going full on yogi and studying Ayurveda. Lord help us all. The last thing I needed was someone telling me what to eat now as well. The neti pot and the Dosha diagnoses ensued.
My only shield from the inevitable barrage of advice that I was bracing for was to get my own practitioner. Not just any practitioner either. His teacher.
And then this crazy thing happened. I started seeing this practitioner and she didn't tell me what to eat at all. I told her about all this anger and resentment and rage from way back into my childhood and she nodded and cooed this lovely divine energy and love that was not to be fucked with. I was getting a glimpse of nurturing and compassion that I'd never really encountered before. She recommended these digestive herbs that helped with the IBS I'd had for as long as I could remember. She told me to do some sort of art project just for me, not for work. She recommended gentle mind calming herbs that would help me focus. There was this lovely rose scented cream that I was to apply to my feet and hands. It was Ashoka cream and it was supposed to alleviate grief.
It started to soften, but it was still there.
One night I was fighting with Mr. yoga dude and he said "Why are you still so angry? You've done years worth of therapy and step work and read all these self-help books. Shouldn't you be over it?
You've done things that I should be angry about but I'm not holding on to those things."
"You're not?" I said.
"No. Really. I'm not." He said.
"I can't forget."
That's when I realized I was just hanging on to everything anyone had ever done to hurt me, like a prize. I was nurturing and protecting the hurt, the blame for everything I perceived that had been done to harm me. Not just from him but lots of people. I was protecting that anger, saving it to take out and polish and say, see, I'm just a victim of this person, and that person. Me. Blameless.
But that wasn't true. I wasn't without blame. And just like I hoped and wished that I could be forgiven and life could move on for those people that I'd hurt, I needed to try to let it go.
In that moment, having that realization, I remember thinking I should feel relieved. I'd just had this big epiphany. I stared up at the skylight in my room and thought. "I don't feel any different." There should be some feeling that goes along with this. It was important.
That's when I realized that I couldn't feel my way out of this. I had to act my way through it. I had to act as if I didn't hold grudges against these people. I had to behave as if I there was this clean slate and that no one was going to be keeping score in our relationship even if I didn't feel like it was a clean slate. I had to take his word for it and treat him like he wasn't out to somehow get me.
After years of being defensive, on guard. Finding and attacking any perceived attack on me, I started to remind myself. "no, I'm forgiven, and I'm forgiving. Everything is new and it's ok. No one wants to hurt me, I don't need to fight."
I used my new magical powers until the anger started to lift. It took less time than I could have imagined.
Now yoga is just yoga. I go, I don't go. It's just between me and myself. When I'm there I'm relaxed. I have nothing to prove. I'm just glad to be back.
In may I did a little challenge at this great neighborhood studio. It wasn't about going a certain number of times in a month but just about being a person who does yoga again.
Of course anyone who practices very seriously will read this and see throughout that I could have had a home practice all along. Of course. When I went to the Yoga Institute of Houston 20 years ago, Lex taught us that the stuff he was teaching us was really just so we could have a daily home practice.
But I've never been able to do that. I have no idea why. I think it was that I always thought it had to be a certain way. This many of this asana, this many repetitions, in this special order, and at this stifling temperature, that many breaths. Overwhelming.
I went to a hot class on Monday, it was good. Tuesday I went to a 6:00am Flow class taught by Mr. Yoga Dude himself without a hint of bitterness. Just gratitude. My muscles are talking to me.
This morning they said, you should go again. But I had to work.
So I got in the floor and did a good enough practice. 20 years later.
I wont do it every day, because as soon as I say I will I won't and then well, you know.
As I lay on the floor this morning I imagined the floor rising up to cradle me.
Good enough felt really good.
