Yoga: A Two-Prong Approach to Self-Care

Want to listen to me read this post? You can here.

Sometimes I just like to reflect on what's happening in my life and in my practice. Here I will read my writing out loud.

I got onto my mat tonight for the first time in two weeks.

I was emotionally threadbare, and my body stiff and rigid. Not only did I have a headache, but pain in my neck and hip, but also, my breath was shallow and shaky and my heart a little broken as my brain circled endlessly on the same thoughts of failure over and over.

The best way to describe my state of being is “weak.” And I don’t mean physically weak (although one might define stiffness and soreness and pain as weakness). No, it’s actual more of a mental weakness. It’s the kind of weakness of spirit that ends up with an emotional day spent crying. The kind of weakness in letting someone else spin me out of control. The best way to describe it is that over the course of the two weeks living my life in the absence of being fully present in my body, I had lost my center—the epicenter of my drive and resiliency of spirit that enables me to push through and remain stable despite the turbulence. This disconnection from my “center” makes it really easy for someone to come and push me over, and I had spent the last two days in an emotional tumble (over and over) all… day… long.

Coming home today was reminiscent of what I used to call an “emotional hangover” when I used to fight with my former partner until late in the night. I was too emotionally drained to bring the kind of levity and joy I prefer to bring to my life and my time with my kiddo. I felt shitty about the experiences that I couldn’t stop thinking about and even shittier about my inability to stop thinking about them. And then I felt shitty for feeling shitty. You see, I had fallen into a rabbit hole that kept reinforcing the idea that I could do nothing right and was doing everything wrong.

And my wisdom of my years and training was that I should hold tight until I could get to the studio at 6pm for class. Getting to my mat would give me a chance to work it all out.

Now, Eric is one of my favorite teachers (gasp) because he was one of my students and we earned our initial certification under the same teacher at Yoga Pod in Reno. So taking his class is like eating fruit from my own lineage of learning in that there’s something familiar  and comforting about his cues and his sequences. For me personally, the heat of a 95-degrees class allows me to “sweat it all out.” It is through the heat and movement that I am able to empty the pockets of emotional crud that my body has been storing.

Because let’s be clear: our bodies store emotional crud whether or not we are aware of it. Every experience that you have, comes through your physical body, and the residue of stress lingers in the fibers of muscles and tendons in the form of lactic acid and cortisol, among others. Now evolutionarily, the purpose of these chemical compounds reminders are there to remind our bodies of the threats from our environments in order to help us make informed decisions about how best to protect ourselves. Although this was helpful for our survival in more primitive days of human existence, the effects of stress (or chronic stress) and have lasting impacts on the body and can produce pain and illness if left unattended in our bodies. And really, there is little benefit for me to remember the day-to-day stress of being a teacher. I would argue that a teacher should rely on their training and not their stress-inducing experiences to execute properly (but alas, that’s a topic for a different post).

So tonight when I stepped on my mat, I had TWO weeks of emotional experiences to process and move through and out of my body and my spirit. I had to clear the clutter of the stress residue so I could get back to a stable center.

And it isn’t just about detoxing from stress chemical, because getting to the mat is also about rebuilding a broken psyche that has lost all sense of efficacy.

For the last two weeks, I have been running through life: juggling a demanding and stress-inducing full-time job, a passion-project part time job, my daughter with her soccer and other extra-curricular commitments, my role as a partner, as well as the abundance of personal and professional commitments I make- banquets and free classes and community events. Although these things are the fiber of life and things that I do feel deeply proud of, they demand my time and energy. In the last few days, I had begun to drop balls of little and sometimes not-so-little consequence.

And in the course of all this running (and subsequent dropping of balls), I was really feeling pretty shitty about how “well” I was doing life. What does that feeling shitty about myself look like? Well, my diet was crap, my water-intake was non-existent, my car was a mess, my room was covered in clothes that needed to be put away, my email inbox overflowing with unread emails, my desk strewn with unkempt papers, and my fuse and capacity for stress short with exasperation only thinly veiled under a façade of positivity.

I was feeling pretty lousy. The kind of lousy that starts to make you wonder what you’re doing at all with this life thing if you’re going to continue to fuck it up. If you’ve been there, you know what I mean.

So… when Eric told us to “Step to the front of our mats and find a forward fold,” my body welcomed the chance to do this ONE thing well. And you know what? I was able to execute this task with precision and efficacy. By focusing on my breath and my alignment, I found myself, for the first time in weeks, doing something “right” and needed no apologies, no excuses, and no facade. I just was doing it and I was doing it for me.

And there’s a tremendous amount of power in that.

One breath, one cue at a time, my teacher led me through an experience where I stepped back into my body. In 60 minutes, I reclaimed my nervous system and my sense of self. I was able to see life as managable again.

Why am I saying this? Well, mostly to remind myself!

Yoga provides us a chance to build a sense efficacy in such a way that we might find impossible in the real world. Because a modern human life, and especially one with many facets and demands, is about doing too many things at once or doing them too quickly to really appreciate them—“checking off the boxes” – so to speak. But in yoga, we take each moment, each breath, each posture for what it is. We find the pose and the shape with the efficacy of our foundation of what we currently have to offer. No more. No less. This not only allows us to cleanse the body of physical impurities and residue of stress, but it also allows us to build up the idea that we CAN do things well. Through a practice, we can see measurable, meaningful progress in our actions and that builds up our state of mind. It makes us feel accomplished and capable instead of spinning and weak.

And this is huge. Because when you feel like a failure, the only way to feel better is to find success… eventually. Failure after failure beats down the spirit and makes you wonder what the point is. So tonight on my mat, I found success and in that, I re-established the fact that I knew but had somehow forgotten in the last few weeks: I can do hard things. It was on my mat that I remembered that I am strong, and I am capable. I remembered that although I may not be good at all things, there is a space inside me that feels strong amidst the chaos.