Thank You, Namaste

As I'm doing yoga this morning I started thinking about how far I've come with my practice. I've done it intermittently since high school, but a year or so after getting sick had to stop. Of course I can't remember now if it was pain or fatigue that ended my affair with Downward Dog, but assume it was an awful combination of both. After gaining 50 lbs. of toxic disease and drug weight, spending day in and day out feeling like a sausage about to burst from my casing, and hurting so bad death was a welcome notion, I started doing yoga again. Heavens to Betsy it was awful! Not only did I already hurt so bad I could hardly move, I was so damn mad I couldn't do what was accomplished with ease in my pre-sick years, it made me angry and depressed to even try. Luckily I can laugh at the irony now, because the whole point of yoga is to accept ones natural limitations, and instead of reaching for someone else's ideal, celebrate the peace of what is now.

I guess I had a lot more to learn from yoga than just how to touch my toes. Perhaps simply inserting the expectation into my life was the beginning of knowing I could change things. But looking back at the starting line, all I remember was a bunch of healthy people and doctors lecturing me on the importance of exercise. How if I just moved, Fibromyalgia would magically disappear. None of them understood that simply lowering myself to the floor was an epic feat, and then getting back up again, it wasn't guaranteed! A walk around the block, phlease! Give me the gold medal, I just completed a marathon! Their disdain at my laziness, my unwillingness to try, was a dark cloud hanging over my head, wrapped up in the self-conscious cloak of a woman who had no control over her own health, let alone life.

Last year for Christmas I got the second season of Namaste Yoga on DVD. The unique and challenging series of 25-minute vinyasas were the perfect way to insert yoga back into my life. Short enough that I don't talk myself out of doing it, but effective enough to transform me, it's taken a year to get through the 2-disk set twice. I'm amazed at the increase in flexibility, and decrease in pain, when I compare last year to today. Yoga alone didn't do it, but without it I know I wouldn't be here, now. Namaste. 

Thanks for joining,
Leah      

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Back In The Saddle

Image
Well I got back on the horse. What else am I going to do? Take a long walk off a short pier or go play in traffic? So here I sit ready to try again. Raw, insecure and uncertain, but here I am. As I sort through the disillusionment in my mind I realize many of the sanity-saving tools I employed along the way got dropped in the dust a while back. I fell into my old behavior patterns. I allowed negativity and demands to infiltrate my sense of responsibility to myself. It's a big job, to regain my lost ground. I can do it, though. Not all at once, perfectly or on the first try, but it can be done. Of course this requires a significant amount of isolation and reflection. Accepting some will grumble over the selfish action of me taking care of me. Realizing that is not my problem. In fact, expecting myself to get a handle on my issues and then resume a level of interdependent living is exactly why I wound up back here in the first place.  I have finally accepted I cannot go back....
Read more

Waiting On the World to Care

Image
This blog has sat silent for many moons. For eight full ones, more or less, I've been imprisoned in an exile of my own creation. Initially I was so angry about my health relapse I didn't know what to say, other than to hurl epic amounts of fury at my keyboard. I had no solutions, no answers, and nothing positive to contribute. So instead of spewing hate all over the permanent cloud of internet technology, I donned the hair shirt of self-flagellation and turned that anger inward. It's been a horrible, terrible, no good, very bad eight months. As I got sicker and sicker, I got madder and madder. The angrier I became, the more I sequestered myself. I refused to talk about my problems or how I felt. It seemed pointless, like it didn't matter. Nobody could do anything about it or begin to comprehend my reality. There was just me, an isolated island of misery, who wanted to do anything but talk about being an isolated island of misery. But nobody understood that either. I...
Read more

Incurable Fog

Image
One day while driving down the street I forgot where I was. Mind you I just left Target and was headed toward home so had certainly been there before, but in that instant I couldn't have told you where I was on the planet if my life depended on it. I had to pull over and cry for a while, gnashing my teeth and pulling my hair over the fact that I was thirty years old and becoming so sick with something so unfixable, I was literally losing my mind. Flash forward a few years to when I had settled into the reality of living with fibromyalgia. Working retail was a painful necessity that was quickly running its course, so I set about trying to figure what on earth to do to earn a living. Naturally, this required me to take a Spanish course at the local community college. Not because I wanted to earn money off my non-existent Spanish 1 skills, but because I desperately needed to know if my brain was capable of learning and retaining new information, and I took French in high school.  I wo...
Read more