I’m not really the “___ has totally changed my life!” type of person. But I will say that, in fact, yoga has pretty much changed my life. About a year and a half ago, I started realizing that I was really struggling with feeling okay. I had a 5 ½ and 2 year old. I’m a firm believer in the idea that it takes many years to recover from having a baby (not the 3 months that our society tends to suggest.) And sometimes I think we kind of have delayed reactions to things. You hold it together for a long time and then you just… can’t. I also believe that we all have stuff we were meant to learn on this journey. These are the things that keep smacking us in the face, but that we are really, really slow to grasp. We’re kind of learning-disabled about ourselves. My friends in college used to make fun of how good I was at figuring out everyone’s life for them, but couldn’t seem to get a handle on my own.
I started having these kind of random, scattered “symptoms,” including feeling dizzy and light-headed, having low energy about mid-morning (which I solved with more coffee), feeling high-strung and anxious in the evenings (which I solved with alcohol), and just not feeling balanced at all. I wasn’t sure what was going on. I started doing some reading and decided that whatever I wanted to call it, my body wasn’t quite right and it was time to make some changes. I wrote about the things that drained me, the things that fed me, and how I thought I could achieve better balance. Fitting yoga into my life was at the top of my list. I had done it on and off for years now, but had never established a consistent practice. Yet, I’ve had a hunch that the physical and spiritual benefits of it would meet many of my needs. I found a studio that was walking distance to my house (to eliminate the excuse that I didn’t feel like driving somewhere); I enlisted a friend to join me (to impose peer pressure on myself); I figured out a schedule that was manageable (two evenings a week- no excuses.) Perhaps because I put so many supports in place, I did it, and it has stuck. For the last 18 months, I’ve been doing yoga twice a week. It really has changed me.
Yoga teachers often speak of your life “off the mat”—and how yoga is less about the hour that you’re practicing, and more about applying what you learn to the rest of your life. Over the months, there have been some messages that have slowly sunk in with me. One of the things I never really understood about yoga, as an occasional practitioner, was when instructors would say that there was no end goal. I would look around the room at these experienced, flexible people, doing triangle pose effortlessly. I would be aware of my own body, awkwardly bent sideways, ribs aching, barely able to breathe, and I’d think, “ya, right—no end goal… those people are doing it right; I’m doing it wrong.” Over time, though, I have come to accept the idea that there is always room to grow in a pose, and that there truly is no final, correct way. How about that for a good life lesson? There is always room to grow. There is no end goal. Applied to my “real life,” this takes the pressure off. As a mom especially, knowing that there is always room to grow has helped me be much kinder to myself. I’m not perfect. I’m working on growing.
Another phrase I hear spoken by instructors has to do with the idea that maybe we could try a little less hard. They say, “Is there a place in your body you can soften? Can you try less hard?” I have begun applying this to my life. When things feel way too challenging, I ask myself, “Am I trying too hard?” If I plan an activity for the kids and it is falling apart, we scratch it. If I’m starting to make dinner and I’m stressing out over it and the kids are driving me crazy, I pour us bowls of cereal. Trying less hard is quite refreshing.
Last week in class, we were in “tree”, which is a balancing pose. Sometimes you get in these poses, and you try really hard not to fall, because you think falling is “bad.” I’ve come to understand that it’s okay to gracefully fall and then just try again. My yoga instructor said, “Trees sway. This pose isn’t about being rigid and still. It doesn’t matter if you sway or fall; it’s how you recover that matters.”
