Thursday Night

I went to yoga tonight. My last yoga class was sometime in 2007 – after I started taking karate but before I started kickboxing. I wanted to keep doing it all, but there are just not enough hours in the day. At least there weren’t back then. There might be now, but alas, I am too broken for karate and kickboxing, so yoga on its own it is.

And it was great! Nearly everything came back to me; the breath, the focus, the postures, the way I knew what the instructor was going to say and where she was going with the practice before it happened. Muscle memory, I guess? Something, anyway.

And yes, this is the same instructor I had all those years ago when I used to yoga. We were reminiscing. It was probably 2001-2002 that I started classes with her. Max was wee, Charles barely in school. Her own daughter was just a few years older, and now she is doing a Masters degree. Time goes on.

And my body. Oh dear, my poor old body. I am 10 years older, several pounds heavier, and oh dear. So what didn’t come back? The flexibility. Holy god, I have lost it all.

This is the kind of thing that would have, back in the day, bothered me so much that I would have given up. But tonight I was able to cut myself some slack, work to my limit, and not go beyond that. I was, as a matter of fact, present.

I had kind of a shitty summer, friends. I won’t go into details, but there was a lot of stress, a lot of shit going on that I was unable to control. And, if you ever ask me what level of control I would like to have in any given situation, my answer is typically ALL OF IT. So you can see how this would have been kind of a problem.

When we were asked at the beginning of class what brought us to yoga – or brought us back to yoga – I said I missed the ability to be present, to be mindful of the present. I had lost the ability to focus on the now, and, after this summer, I needed to get that back. I hadn’t planned on saying that. Usually, in those kinds of situations, I say something benign, something generic, so the instructor just moves along to the next person. But tonight, those words – present, mindful – just rushed from me. Clearly, they needed to be said.

The class flew by. Suddenly we were settling in for savasana, and then it was over.

I am going to be SO SORE tomorrow, I know it. I have not moved like that in a very long time. But as I always like to say it’s a “good hurt.” The hurt where you know you’ve done something amazing for your body, so you don’t mind the pain.

My body hurts, but my brain – for the first time in quite some time – does not. I call that a win.

Also? Hi. Thanks for sticking around. I think I might be back for good this time. This too is good for the brain.