Tag: self-care

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Shedding the Sharp Edges

Moving through J.’s vinyasa sequences again. The post-Covid restrictions class is full but it’s also permitted to use the space at full capacity, so it isn’t a race to get a spot anymore. I have this odd sense that things are falling into place again. I recognize this moving body. This tight-tight hamstring. This good balance and grounding on the right leg.

Getting some self-confidence back. Headstands and bridges. Running. Though everything requires a push now. Every run or class or yoga session is still prefaced by an argument with myself. A frantic little search for good excuses not to.

Extended side angle and J. comes behind me and gently adjusts my ribcage, fingers, head. Somehow even in the hot room, sweating, her touch is like being nudged softly through pillows. A touch that is barely a touch, but full of connection. I think that is what makes us all fall in love with her. We love her like we love Mary Poppins. If Mary Poppins escaped from her sharp exoskeleton.

I do a half-bridge, and she sits behind my head, feet on my shoulders, and guides my ribcage upward.

I miss my morning flows. Alone. And have no good reason to not be doing them. These mornings, though, I am so aware of time. The time I have – and don’t have – all to myself. From four to seven. Yet every day I find it’s not enough.

R.’s best friend died last night. The man he has called his brother, whose parents will bury their child. Young is relative. But he was young in the “natural order” of things. I look at the calendar and am surprised to see we are halfway into March. More than halfway. And I think about B. The week of chemo she’s been through. The next one she has coming. Not that there is hope for a cure, only hope for more time. Weeks. Months. Days.

It’s never going to be enough.

I feel both greedy and wasteful. And maybe this is all the more reason to get on my mat every morning. J. asks us what we dedicate each practice session to. At the beginning and then again just before heart-openers. Is it narcissistic to dedicated it to doing the best I can? To yoking all of the aspects of the physical reality of my being in this world, to make it work somehow for the best I can do in the world, for the world?

All those platitudes: fill your cup so you can fill another’s cup. I am self-conscious of the triteness. But I keep asking my students: are we done with the irony, the sardonic attitude of post-modernism now? Can we finally be earnest again?

Maybe we need to be?

Pirandello said life is so painful we have only to laugh at it. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe life reaches a level of pain where we break through the l’umorismo and stop laughing. Where we take off the exoskeletons and are soft with one another.

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Meditation on a Seesaw

I’ve switched up the mornings: writing before running – or to be honest, run/walking these days on a difficult achilles. I’m not sure I like the new routine. It’s like the pump is primed and ideas come while I am on the trail that I can’t follow through on, and that I forget.

Nothing is perfect, but things are good. Better. I do have a hard time shaking this feeling that I have missed out on these past few months. Missed spring. Nearly all the ferns have completely unfurled their tight, dark fists and the floor along the edges of the grove are lush with a new green, and fairy bells are already past their prime. I think most of all I am sad that for the past few years the ducks and the swans have been so good at hiding their hatchlings one could easily believe there were none. The only sign of renewal is the brown-tinged swan, last year’s cygnet, that has staked out the area next to the bridge. Alone, but for a few bachelor mallards.

But to be honest, I don’t think that I have actually missed out on things. My expectations have just been too high. I’ve been wanting the spring to overwhelm me in some fairy-tale fashion. I’ve been looking for signs. And that is really quite silly. What I am really waiting for is a shift in my perspective.

After a year of near-social-isolation, two gatherings in three days was a little overwhelming. Something of a deluge in a desert. Now just the thought of going to the hairdresser today is a little stressful. Chit-chat is expected, and I have never been good at that.

Now that I think about it, I have always been something of a deluge or drought kind of person. Never quite getting the balance right. Some many words come to mind: temperate, equipoise, equilibrium, symmetry. Maybe the problem is that, although symmetry is beautiful, it is predictable and so often boring. Unless it is a Wes Anderson kind of symmetry. But then the world is periodically on fire, and not everyone is comfortable with that kind of life.

I am.

In the mornings, I meditate for a few minutes on equanimity. Yellow, “Ri” on the exhale. I doubt that the articulation matters, but the vibration does. Accepting and giving. Or sometimes accepting and letting go. All the perspectives, things, concepts that clutter our lives, that come and go like respiration. That should do so easily. Effortlessly. Can they still be wild with energy? Passionate and fallow in equal turns?

The foliage doesn’t fight the winter. It doesn’t resist whatever kind of death winter brings. And it doesn’t hold back in the spring, trying to smooth the cycle into a flat kind of average life year-round. It relishes everything and then lets go.

In circular breathing, there is a moment of waiting (not holding the breath). Then a complete release, that for me feels a bit frightening in its emptiness. Then a so-longed-for, satisfying inhalation.

In another pranayama exercise there are a passive inhalations and forced, energetic exhalations in rapid succession to stimulate the body and the mind.

Leonard has zoomies. Then sleeps on the couch most of the rest of the day. Is the idea of equanimity as a steady hum of tranquility against nature really? I know I am taking Jesus entirely out of context when I say the advice from that hold is to be hot or cold but never luke warm.

I am wondering if all the advice regarding “balance” is not really aimed at a good life, but at an unobtrusive life. It’s more about social control than personal, or even inter-personal experience.

A seesaw is all about balance, after all.

it’s the almost edge
of ripe – it’s the almost void
of new beginnings

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Disruptions

This morning the broken ice rang out like cowbells where the water runs from the fields and spills into the lake. It rained last night. And is still drizzling. But I slide the hood of my jacket down from my head so I can better hear the morning.

The ducks and the crows laughing. I always like to think they’re laughing. Probably not though. At this time of year, they are probably squabbling over territory and partners.

I take a deep breath. This is beginning again. My thighs a little sore from the previous run. The trail seems just a little bit longer than I remember. And afterward, my body moving through the yoga flow sputters and spits mild curses.

Leonard’s wet nose on mine while I’m trying to chant and visualize a still, blue body of water. I guess routine is something that we all need to wriggle back into. It’s ironic that by the time my medications kick in, it won’t be possible to know if it is the medication or the strict routine they require that will make all the difference. Not that it matters, and not that I care. All that matters is finding the middle path again. Away from the jagged edges, the thorns and the ice.

I wrote “I pour a cup of coffee” and then deleted it. I put a cup under the shiny spout and press a button, actually. And for the first time, I think about that tiny, lost ritual: pouring the coffee.

Don’t people in movies and books always say, “Shall I put the kettle on?” Maybe I will buy a tea kettle that whistles, just to listen to the hot water gurgle from the spout when I pour a cup. Loose tea leaves in a metal cage that clinks against the ceramic. A greenish haze in the water, escaped bits of stem. The word “shall”. Yeah, so a bit of appropriation — anachronism at best -: a bit of play-acting. But there’s comfort in that.

Instead, the coffee machine grinds the beans with a rude noise. Dumps water into the little glass coffee cup embossed with IKEA on the bottom.

There are some changes I would like to make in my life.

Every winter there are weeks we stay away from the morning route, to avoid running on ice and risking injuries. The dry cold never lasts long. February softens. The snow disappears. But always, we see clearly along this tiny stretch of landscape, that the earth is changed — every time. The path floods at different spots. The hen moves her nest.

We know we need
the familiar we crave
the novel and 
the woods provide attention
demands participation

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Twisted Friday

An evening run. Because
the morning slipped
between a coffee cup
and God-knows-what.
And I need to run.

I’ve showered now and pulled on a wool bra and cashmere lounge pants. There’s nothing like cashmere lounge pants. I own one pair because I stumbled over them – misplaced in rack in an H&M- marked down to affordable.

Is this what it feels like to be wealthy? Wrapped in cashmere?

I had an angora sweater in high school. I bought it myself with the money I’d earned from my first job – selling hot dogs at the local rally-cross track. I knew it was out-of-place in my life: it shrank in the first wash.

But now. … Why don’t I always dress like hugs? I’m a grown woman and should be in full control of these things. I want to be the woman who empties her wardrobe and dresser drawers of all the fast fashion clothes, and fills them with nothing but quality fabrics in neutral colors that tell the world she definitely has all of her soft, yellow ducks in a row.

When I was a teenager we didn’t have ducks. But we had finches in bamboo cages in our mobile home. Some in the living room, some in the my mother’s bedroom in the back of the house. And they would sing to each other. Pitifully.

They make these small bamboo nests to put in the bamboo cages so finches will lay perfect little eggs. We had one hatch once. Have you ever seen a soft, naked, newly-hatched finch? It burns in your mind when it is dead on the newspaper tray at the bottom of the cage.

My point is… I’ve never had my ducks on a row.

These cashmere pants were marked “sleepwear”. Are there really women who sleep in cashmere? I sleep in cotton exercise pants that are too napped to wear in public anymore.

I feel guilty wearing cashmere around the house. It seems decadent. But they were marked “sleepwear” and I wonder if I wear them out (you know, feeling all elegant-like) people with think I’m an idiot for wearing my pj’s to dinner?

I wear them for yoga now. Kind of like dressing up for church. Not for the Holy Spirit, mind you – but for Buddhist idea that we should enjoy the pleasures of the present moment so long as we do so without clinging. And I have no illusion that these cashmere pants will survive the wash more than a few times.

At any rate. Here I sit in bed. Leonard curled beside me, dreaming of chasing hares – small, inaudible barks puffing his cheeks. I’ll have to wake him to send him to his own bed before I turn in for the night.

E. is offshore for a few more days. He may as well be on the moon. And only half the moon is visible tonight.

It’s been raining all week and the lake has flooded its usual banks. The bench roses weirdly from the water, and I stopped to take a photograph. For a moment I thought I’d stop and sit there for a while, watching the moon. But then a man came walking with his two schnauzers, and I was worried he’d think me insane.

And I was wearing my new shoes.

So… there’s that, at least: new, serious-ugly running shoes.

I’m that kind of woman.