It’s a Stretch!

60: (March 2023)

I started doing yoga again about 18 months ago. First, I tried doing a few ‘therapeutic’ yoga online sessions that were given by a great friend of mine who lives in New York. She is so nurturing and kind, always reminding the practitioner to be gentle and loving with oneself, to “soften” into the pose and “hug” the breath in. Those sessions jump-started me into awakening my slumbering joints and muscles. Ultimately, I decided that I wanted to get back into the more rigorous Ashtanga style of yoga that I had done so many years ago, where the exact same postures are done all the time. I had worked hard to learn them, and the familiarity of the postures can feel like visiting with old friends again.

I decided to do a little yoga every weekday, even if for 10 minutes. Giving myself that goal miraculously provided me with the discipline I needed to stick with it. I searched on YouTube for videos of Ashtanga instructors and discovered that there were many to choose from, with varying session lengths. Watching videos while I did the postures refreshed my memory of the exact movements to aspire to and helped  me to persevere.

I got up a little earlier than usual each day so that I could fit yoga into my mornings before work. For many months I was ticking along and feeling pretty proud of myself. I was exercising! I was becoming more nimble, stronger, stretchy . . . and then something happened to one of my knees. It suddenly became quite painful. I tried to do the yoga a little more gently after that in order to allow my knee to heal, suspecting that I had pulled a muscle. Then I started skipping days to give it more of a rest, and then weeks. The weeks somehow turned into months, as too often happens when a habit or routine is broken.

So here I am, many months later, giving myself a pep talk, telling myself that if I did it before, I can do it again. I can muster the discipline to exercise, to move my body—something that doesn’t come easily to me, but that I know is good for me. I remember my friend’s voice to be gentle with oneself. I don’t allow myself to feel down or discouraged by the ‘pause’ I have taken. Negative thoughts only lead to a downward spiral, so I am my own cheerleader instead.

I did a handful of sun salutes and several postures last week. There will be more on the horizon; there’s always a new day.

40: (March 2003)

It is now almost five years since I started practicing yoga, and I am just barely beginning to have a glimpse of its spiritual component. When I first started the practice, I had to scrape my body off the mat after each class and drag myself home to a soft couch, whereupon my howling muscles would take revenge on my body for a very long time. But like the tortoise, I inch forward, week after week, year after year, ever so slowly working with it. Originally the physical side of yoga was so daunting to me that the subtler, spiritual aspect was something I could not begin to fathom. Yet over the course of time, I have had inklings of this broader dimension, which is said to be the heart of the practice.

I began to have a sense of the impact yoga might have on my state of mind when a family member was diagnosed with cancer. During those tense months of waiting for test results and procedures, a greater awareness of what yoga had to offer was awakened within me. It was often during yoga class that I felt like I was taking my first breath in a week, as if I had been anxiously holding my breath for the seven intervening days.

Breathing is key in yoga, so the practice of consciously taking one breath, then another, and so on during the 90-minute class slowed me down. It forced me to calm myself, as I tried to integrate my body with my inner self. In short, yoga helped me to see how I could get through a difficult period, one breath at a time. Since then, this approach to life’s challenges has proved to be a useful strategy for me on many occasions.

Yoga is ever so slowly teaching me to be still inside, when my emotions want to pull me into a state of distraction. It is teaching me not to give in to panic and fear, to consciously let go of worries, and to learn to accept what is. The practice of consciously observing the flow of air through my body, while recognizing that it is the same air that flows through everyone, has given me moments of feeling deeply connected to humanity, like being part of one gigantic work of art. Ultimately, yoga has the potential to teach its student strength, not just an external strength of body, but also an internal strength of spirit. The body can serve as an avenue to balance the whole self and nourish the spirit, one humble breath at a time.

I sometimes experience these little glimmers of what is possible as I go through the postures, and they help keep me committed to the effort. So I continue to do my best to get to a weekly class as often as I can, with full recognition that I cannot begin to scratch the surface of what yoga has to offer in this lifetime. In the meanwhile, I probably have a fair number of breaths left in me, so I might as well make the best of them!

60-40:

Hmm. I took a rather lengthy yoga ‘pause’ somewhere in between 2003 and 2023, as in the entire decade of my 50s! It’s startling how one day can lead to a week, then a month, and then literally years. You look back and realize that time has piled up when you must have turned your head. The only thing you can do is just start where you are, and begin again.

The nice thing about looking back 20 years is that I know I am generally much calmer than I was back then. These days, I can observe my emotions more, rather than be at the mercy of them; that’s a very good feeling. Perhaps I have developed some strength of spirit along the way. Life experience (I thought I’d say that rather than ‘getting older’) has its benefits. 🙂