Went to my first yoga class today since the injury last year and … whoa. The teacher was amazing: not too chatty or new-agey, calm, and as engaged with each student as he or she signalled the need for.
I couldn’t believe how emotional I was … and was surprised by what the actual emotions were. I struggled with poses that used to be easy. I struggled to calm my mind. I struggled to feel okay with struggling and to remind myself that this was a work in progress … that everything is a work in progress. I did not feel joyful. I did not feel proud. I did not feel peaceful. I wondered if I should blow the joint and hit the gym for some cardio. Or find a boxing ring and punch something—inanimate, I hasten to add—into smithereens.
Then the teacher said, “Ask yourself what your relationship is to challenge.”
So of course I cried. And then I couldn’t stop. Quietly, in my little corner, but wet things spilled out of my eyes. I guess that’s crying. And it felt really good. Not good as in happy happy but good as in I needed it. Badly.
From that point on, things got a little easier. When the teacher told us that all we needed to think about was about being here—that that’s all we had to ask of ourselves for the moment—I bought it. Had she said it a half hour earlier, I might have laughed, frazzled as I was by everything I had to do and wasn’t getting done and when am I ever going to do what I need to do and how can I be three things at once and how is any of this okay and when will I ever write and do I still have anything to say …
It’s okay. I have things to say. I’m writing.
