Something bizarre this way comes. And goes.

Last week was the most bizarre week in the atmosphere outside my windows — and also the one in my body and heart.

It went from a chilly Sunday to a rainy Monday (after the school system made a super snafu and called for a snow day) to near 65 on Tuesday. Wednesday brought warm rain followed by winds I thought would whip off the roof like a girl snatching another’s headband. Thursday chilled to the bone, and Friday’s morning snow was blown clear away by afternoon, disappeared like a dream.

As for me, I started the week accepting that my kids were sick. They weren’t too bad off, so I was happy enough for another day at home with the family to finally get out some holiday cards. The accompanying letter began:

“Twenty years ago this winter, LJ and I first saw Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray’s character goes from anger about being ’stuck’ in a rut by living the same day over and over to joy in meeting each Sonny & Cher morning with the question: ‘Who do I get to be today?’

“Two decades later, I am stealing that question. Its essence is captured, I think, in the expectant expression on my daughter’s face on this belated holiday card. It is the question I hope will guide my days in 2013, in the face of potential scary news (and weather), health issues, parenting challenges, ennui or midlife angst.  Now that you know, perhaps I will be less likely to forget it.”

And the letter concluded: “May you have the chance to greet each day with joy whether you see your shadow or not.”

By the end of the week, I wanted to stuff those sentiments into something much less lovely than envelopes. I’d gotten a fever, and it lasted four days. Coughing and dripping from my nose, I felt horrid, then a little okay, then like my head was in a vice and everything worthwhile had been squeezed out leaving only an aching and broken skull. Then I slept so much I surprised myself. And then I could not sleep.

By Friday, my fever had broken, but so had my spirit.

Just three weeks earlier, I had entered the year on some kind of golden breath of possibility. Bringing with me none of the usual trappings of emotional holiday hangover, I really did feel the new day was clear and bright. In the space of two weeks, I got to interview Ayurvedic and Traditional Chinese Medicine doctor Claudia Welch, education and parenting thinker and author Alfie Kohn, and author and memoirist Katrina Kenison. It was a dream to write about them and to hear them speak in person. Their messages were so clear: I felt like the trees in my mind were bending to the side so that I could see the exact trail I needed to take, for parenting my children and myself. My mind was swimming with ideas about how to weave together follow-up pieces — both for my own synthesis and to share with others.

But, as my childcare hours filled with tutoring and a volunteer event and planning for a 40th birthday yoga event that would keep up my spirits on a day they usually drag, I could  never find the time to sit down and write the pieces. It had to be uninterrupted time without distraction, and that was in short supply. The five hours I did have on January 20 I used to work on my novel, which felt non-negotiable, and necessary. And good. But not the entire day and overnight I’d expected before I found out my husband had to work that weekend.

So I guess you could say that my thoughts and passions were a little bottled up. And so, dear reader, were my bowels. After a few months of sluggishness, I just stopped feeling like going to the bathroom.

This is scary territory for me, because the most obvious turn of my health was in 2002 when constipation hit me for the first time. The worthless response I got after a colonoscopy is what led me away from mainstream doctors, but the “irritate-until-you-go” approach from the first naturopath I consulted I now think only made things worse. All of the groundwork had been laid for ill health — my lifelong diet and grain-heavy, soy-heavy diet in my twenties; my lifelong insomnia or poor sleep and generally overactive stress response; a history of eating alone in front of the television from a young age; and all the unhealthy stuff many of us do in our teens and twenties that I started young and did with a vengeance.

That first constipation was a signal that I didn’t heed well. It took another year of floundering and the development of a full-blown thyroid disorder (which then delayed starting a family for another year and a half) to really knock sense into me. So now my biggest fear is taking the wrong approach to get back on track and, as a result, finding myself further down the rabbit hole.

There were other times I didn’t listen closely enough. Before my son was born I was probably suffering colitis, but I figured it just had to do with my eating so much fruit and being pregnant. I did so much more damage before I integrated some aspects of the Specific Carbohydrate Diet and got some healing work to get back on track. But then again, while pregnant with my daughter, I accepted IBS as just part of the territory. I wouldn’t go much, so I’d eat apricots, and then I’d go a lot. By this time I knew more about the GAPS diet, but I still didn’t have the religion to undertake it. I was still okay, I thought. And I just didn’t have the time.

Now I think, if only I’d nurtured myself while I had the time. When I had only one child vying for my attention and before the demands of childbirth and nursing around the clock sent my body into a tailspin. If only I could have just sat with myself and worked on reversing patterns of stress response before my poor daughter had to get born into my messed up world, perhaps then it wouldn’t be so hard now to heal.

When baby A was six months old, I was sitting in debilitating pain in the bathroom several times a day. My carb-eating days, I knew, were over. It was time to start the GAPS diet.

So I immediately purged all grains and starchy vegetables from my diet and set about on a longer journey to figure out what else I needed to eliminate or do to regain my health. I made bone broth even more regularly, started soaking my nuts again, and cut out fruit. I got feeling good enough that I decided to try doing a 10-day yoga challenge in preparation for a trip to Vermont where I hoped to (and got to) report on the yoga event phenomenon Wanderlust. I came home enlivened in my spirit but exhausted and with a non-yogified and equally exhausted spouse. About two weeks later, I sat talking with a friend who was training for a marathon and thought maybe it was finally time for me to get back out on the running trail, something I sorely missed but thought was maybe just around the corner.

Instead, I had an appointment with an osteopath and left feeling hit by a mack truck. For months.

The good part was that it forced me to slow down, but it was also horrifying. I went from feeling light and airy and about to pounce onto the jogging trail to feeling like lead had been poured into my bones and over my shoulders.

I imagine you could call what I felt chronic fatigue. I’m sure my adrenals were burned out, and my thyroid was a little off, but that wasn’t all of it. I couldn’t even really explain how I felt. Just essentially not well enough to do very much. Plus my skin was itching with psoriasis. It was all I could do to make it through the day, much less try to rebound.

But again, I got a little better. I worked on a project with a friend and stayed up way too late several nights in a row right before an insanely busy time of our purchasing a home to renovate and going on a trip to Dallas. That few weeks set be back months, I imagine, but I didn’t let myself feel it right away because I’d concocted another project for myself at my son’s school. These were all things I adored working on, but the time to do them in a healthy way simply did not exist in my life. And the knowledge for how to do something without a fight-or-flight approach is something I realize I don’t possess.

So what I love to do hurts me. Living in conflict.

Then I saw a new practitioner and weaned my daughter, both leading to a lot of progress. I turned corners. I got rear-ended and was hit days later with the a profound and unexpected creative concept, one of the only things I’ve ever been clear simply needed to happen. But this was in the middle of a move, the period of the greatest stress by choice I’d ever experienced. I was eating either nothing or everything. It took two months after moving in until I could walk in the front door instead of the basement and until I could put my toddler to nap in her room rather than drive her away from pounding hammers.

By November, I was finally ready to start using the gym membership I had nearly surrendered with a doctor’s note months earlier. It felt wonderful for movement to feel wonderful. After hearing Barbara Kingsolver read at the National Cathedral, I brought Flight Behavior to the elliptical. It was a win-win.

And on top of that, I’d started getting up early to do yoga and and breathwork. I felt light and unburdened, like I was shedding what didn’t serve me anymore.

But, at some point, my sluggish digestion switched itself to “off,” and I realized that my lightness was maybe not so desirable. Even though I’ve had plenty of evidence that I can’t veer far from the GAPS diet, I also started to think another approach might be in order.

I dragged out the copy of Eat-Taste-Heal: An Ayurvedic Cookbook for Modern Living
that my friend Pamela lent me probably almost two years ago. My Ayurvedic dosha is Vata-Pitta, Vata being of space and air elements (and Pitta of water and fire).

My lightness started to seem more like a symptom of my life-force floating away rather than like enlightenment.

I read from a list of ways for Vata to become unbalanced:

- “Eating while anxious or depressed” — I try so hard not to do this, I sometimes end up not eating. I never eat breakfast with the kids because it’s too busy and they’re too demanding. Sometimes I make fresh juice and drink it on the way home from the gym. (See also to be avoided “Eating on the run” and “Resisting the urge to eat when hungry”)

- “Eating Vata-aggravating foods” — Who knew cauliflower and peas and lettuce and leafy greens were so bad for my constitution? And eating either too light or too heavy is a bad pattern for Vata folks, hence the next point

- “Following an irregular daily routine” – Try as I might to set in place some immovable structures, inevitably someone’s head on my pillow or other need switches things up. I don’t think I could tolerate a job at another place around other people’s schedules, but the work I do is sometimes at night and sometimes in the day. Appointments and meetings for my health, for my child’s school, for things I’d like to pursue for some kind of work, they’re all scattered. And so is my energy.

- “Failing to change in accordance with the seasons (especially Fall)” – Too bad I finally felt well enough to get more active at just the time I ought to have been turning inward and burrowing deep for winter.

- “Traveling frequently” - Well, not often, but I did have an early-morning and late-return trip to New York in mid-December followed by a week in Michigan. What to do about the writing trip I  have planned for late February, the possible trip to Baltimore for a Tai Chi workshop in mid-February, and the yoga retreat in early March?

But here’s the kicker:

“Suppressing inner creativity and emotional sensitivity” — Not writing makes me sick. Taking the time to write sometimes feels impossible when there is so much cooking to do and a house to maintain and children’s remedies to administer. But it hurts my soul to put it off.

The more I read, the more sense this all makes, but the further I feel from having a roadmap of how to fulfill most of the things that will help while avoiding the ones that will hurt. I need to pursue my passions to feel fulfilled and in balance, but how do I do that and also “meditate daily,” “go to bed early,” “do gentle physical exercise,” “eat in a peaceful environment,” “take time to rest during the day” (on top of also going to bed early)?

I suppose figuring that out is my next chapter.

It’s been only eight days since I completed my 10-Day Yoga Challenge, but I broke the daily yoga and writing habit in a big way. My last class was on Monday, and on Tuesday night I was up until nearly 1 a.m. preparing food for a surprise road trip to my sister’s on her 50th birthday. Since I have such a specific diet with no starchy vegetables or grain (in addition to no gluten, dairy, corn or soy), everything I would eat all day the next day had to be made from scratch: “pancakes” of egg, nuts and vegetables, turkey burger, apples with no skin, soaked and low-heat-dried nuts, and homemade broth with veggies. This is what I usually eat: I just don’t usually have to prepare it all for a complete day the night before.

My other sister and I began our drive Wednesday morning at 9 a.m.  The trip up I-95 and back later that night took a total of 9.5 hours of driving when it should have taken about 7. It would have helped if the baby had gone to sleep and hadn’t made us stop an extra two times, but the delays were mostly about construction or something invisible but clogging.

Even with my sister riding shotgun and valiantly staying in conversation, I could barely stay awake the last hour. We pulled up to my house at 12:30 a.m. early Thursday morning, and just as I was about to get the baby back to sleep from the carseat into her crib, her brother fell out of bed and split his lip open on the nightstand. He was a wreck, unwilling even to take homeopathy. When it happened, I’d been almost asleep in the rocking chair, exhausted and still feeling the vibration of the road through my weary body. But then all four of us were up with lights on, trying to figure out what the heck had happened.

So after completing my yoga challenge on Monday, I went way far afield. It was amazing that I didn’t collapse or snap on Thursday, but I actually felt okay. It was as though I’d done a detox diet to cleanse in advance of competing in a hot dog eating contest. The unhealthiness of two late nights and a lot of time on the road probably didn’t hit me as hard because of the yoga foundation and all that extra oxygen I’d stored up.

I kept my son home on Thursday, his penultimate day of preschool and got a taste of summer life without school or childcare. Then Friday and the weekend were packed, not to mention incredibly hot. So, when I learned that Virginia Yoga Week was launching Sunday, I was both excited and overwhelmed by all the opportunities I would probably not be able to take advantage of. So many free and cheap classes! New studios to visit! Different traditions to try! In order to keep track of my options amid other scheduled events for the week, I took one of my son’s sheets of painting paper and made myself a giant chart for the week.

This way I was able to see that it would probably be wise to try out sunrise yoga at Pies Fitness Monday morning at 6:00 a.m. I got everything all ready to go and paid my special yoga week rate of $5 online the night before. But then I got to bed too late. Again. So when my alarm went off at 5:30 a.m., I first decided sleep was more important than another challenge. But then I rallied, convinced I probably wouldn’t get back to sleep or successfully undertake a practice of my own for more than 15 minutes. I was too tired to write and too worried about making noise in a sleepy house to clean.

So I rushed outside in the yoga tank I’d set out the night before and was amazed how profoundly it felt like a new world. It was cool. Chilly, even! It was as though my skin could breathe instead of just push away the humidity.

I zipped to the studio and arrived just a few minutes late. There was only one other student, and the teacher was kind and understanding. After a brief centering, I knew it had been wise to come to remind myself to cultivate a sense of awe and reverence for life. We were called to set an intention, and what came to me was to be grateful and enjoy the life I have with my children and husband.

This sounds simple and obvious, but at a time when I am facing a summer with a non-napping and loud preschooler, and a baby who no longer predictably naps, and a husband who is not at the top of his happy game on the heels of his 40th birthday, I’ve been stuck focusing on how to just make things work and get my needs met. In that space, I sometimes forget to enjoy the moment I’m in.

As Momma Zen author Karen Maezen Miller said when I heard her speak back in April at Lil Omm yoga studio, the present moment is the only moment there is at that moment. It’s impossible not to live in it. The choice is in how you experience that living — as a joy and privilege or as a chore, something to get through.

So the call to set an intention was a gift for me to greet my day from a place of wonder and gratitude.

We did a lot of sun salutations, and I realized I was already out of shape again from the gains I’d made during my challenge, something that gives me some pause if I’m going to attend the Anusara Grand Circle or Wanderlust next week.

It was also clear that I was still way underslept and way overtired. As I am now.

Perhaps tomorrow I will get up early and set an intention and undertake a practice while the house is still quiet.

Perhaps tomorrow I will write about the yoga class took with my son today and last Tuesday. I usually like to return later to my writing before I hit Publish, but that feels silly now, even if this post wouldn’t pass the test in an essay workshop.

Because right now, I am exhausted and need to sleep. I did need to write, and I would like to add links, not to mention go spend a bunch of time in the kitchen to save me time in the morning. But in this moment, my body needs rest. So that is what I will give it.

It felt like a graduation. I completed my 10-Day Yoga Challenge Monday yesterday, taking my fourth class with the Anusara-inspired teacher who told me and the other students that we were all ready to kick it up a notch. We’d all gotten comfortable with her repeated calls to isometrically draw our legs together and to hug in, she said, stroking our egos. So now we could reach for “organic” energy to reach out and beyond, to “party in the pose.”

I was happy to end my 10-day intensive on this upbeat note, especially after Day Nine’s call to “play.” Although I was feeling behind the eight ball from having woken late and frazzled for hearing my daughter start crying the minute the babysitter walked in the door, I took the hint to really charge my practice. I imagined a carnival of colors in my limbs, all enjoying the way they complemented each other.

Not enough time had passed before this 10 a.m. class for me to feel sore from the previous day’s afternoon class, though, today, the day after, I feel my core awakened. I am reminded that one needs to keep working to keep getting stronger.

I will save more reflections on my experiment as a whole for a few more days, when the dust has settled and I get through some other deadlines. However, my immediate reaction is generally of happiness that I not only attended ten yoga classes in ten days but also that I wrote about them all each day. That feels great. Go Jess!

What does not feel great is the sense that, while both yoga and writing practices are incredibly healing for me, it’s nearly impossible to do them both and also live in the real world of my house with two children and a husband, a lot of irons in the fire in terms of work (volunteer and otherwise), and a special diet.

Obviously I don’t have to drive 20-40 minutes to a studio every day. I can take elements of this experiment to a more practical and less extreme approach, like a solo practice in the basement or classes at a closer studio or on the weekend. And my baby will not be exclusively breastfed and separation-anxious forever.

Still, I admit that I had a hard time holding onto the vibe of the “party” as the (hot!) afternoon wore on, and the baby wouldn’t sleep, and I had to go out to attend the last meeting of my son’s Waldorf preschool/kindergarten, which he still doesn’t know he won’t be attending next year.

The vibrant colors that were tired of partying in my muscles later swirled in the more confined space of my heart through the night, getting me out of bed at 4 a.m. to create some semblance of order by sorting napkins and paying my credit card bill.

I hope I can keep cultivating the voices of my teachers during my more challenging times, which I expect to abound during long summer days with a child out of school and another about to walk.

I hope to play, shine, radiate and all that good stuff, even when I fear too much indulgence in “partying” is going to come with a hangover of dirty dishes, unpaid bills, and piles of laundry.

–

How do you literally find the time to meet your own needs and keep things moving along at home without making uncomfortable compromises?

Other posts in this series:

Day One: The challenge begins!

Day Two: “Let your bottom blossom”

Day Three: “Shine!”

Day Four: “Surrender”

Day Five: “Root and reach”

Day Six: “Brighten the belly”

Day Seven: “Reveal”

Day Eight: “Expose your heart”

Day Nine: “Play”

Day Ten: “Party in the pose”

It didn’t take me long to get off my game. I finished class #8 of my 10-day Yoga Challenge at 8:00 p.m. on Friday night and spent Saturday virtually yoga-free, except for one sun salutation in the morning. When I finally returned today at 4:00 p.m., it felt at the start like that 44-hour break might as well have been a year.

I tried to live like a yogi in my being during my off day, but it was difficult between planning for a kitchen remodel, scurrying to find the belly-decorating henna I was supposed to have bought ahead of time for two friends’ motherblessing, waking up my baby to go to her babysitter’s wedding, and then leaving after 45 minutes because the ceremony hadn’t started yet and I had to get to the motherblessing where I would for the first time in over a year see a friend who “broke up” with me when I was 7 months pregnant.

I do credit my yoga this past week with helping me rally and actually stay for the blessing though I was in tears upon arriving. I knew the “story” I was telling myself about myself not belonging there was not going to help my friends feel honored or loved. It would serve only my own self-sabotage. So I tried to let it go and hold onto the higher purpose of the evening.

I’m so glad I stayed. It was important to my pregnant friends, and I actually felt a little bit healed. I did have to take my exhausted baby and my hungry self home before the festivities concluded, but I made it to the end of the ceremony. As I drove home on a gorgeous June evening in a quiet car with a sleeping baby, I envisioned the little darling would play sleep catch-up and be out for the night.

Ha.

The baby appreciated the lovely evening so much, she wanted to give me a chance to enjoy it, apparently, because she woke upon returning home, which led me to the conclusion that I’d just take her for a walk when it got a dark. I was glad for the opportunity to be out but could not believe she lasted a full half-hour in the stroller before she shut her eyes at 9:00 p.m. On top of that, my five-year-old son had, for the first time in over a year, actually taken a nap, of course while I was out. Having been, in my husband’s words, “unwakeable” for two hours, the little devil was still wide awake at 10:00, outlasting his dad while hockey played on the TV despite my husband’s shut eyes.

It was like the world tipped its head to the side and laughed at us.

We made the best of it, though. Both LJ and I went to sleep in the boy’s room so we wouldn’t wake the baby, still in her stroller insert in the big bedroom. It felt a little like old times, just the three of us, and I enjoyed snuggling with my boy, a rare treat.

My kids know how to PLAY!

So, when I finally got back to class this afternoon and the teacher asked us to set an intention, the word “Play” came to me in half a beat. If I take everything completely seriously, I’m missing out on letting it be fun. Why can’t I approach all this stuff I am so passionate about from the perspective of how luck I am that I get to “play” with so many “toys?”

It can feel like a burden to have so many interests, pursuits, friends, and communities, but I really am privileged to be able to stay home and pursue them. They are luxuries I would likely pine for if I were working outside the home at a job that wasn’t miraculously addressing everything I love. It can be both a blessing and a curse to never be able to turn of my mind or to rarely say no to anything. But what if I decided to just count my blessings as blessings?

It was helpful that the teacher reminded us several times to stay true to our intention. And then, late in the class, she had us approaching crow, a pose I have never done because I have never had the upper body strength. I had to smile when, noticing that folks were not exactly moving into it easily, offered, “Just play with it.”

Yoga can be about many things, and one is joy. I’ve known for a long time that doing bridge pose does something to my adrenal glands that makes me feel awash in a warm, calm happiness. (That’s why I did it the morning my daughter was born, ostensibly to help me get back to sleep at 5:30 a.m. Instead it broke my water, and 4.5 hours later, I had a baby in my arms!)

I have to give props to the teacher for her amazing “savasana assist” in which she raised and swung my legs like a lymphatic chi machine and then pressed a few points on my feet that gave me the impression she’d found my “play” button. It was as though she’d released a rush of serotonin or oxytocin or some other great body chemistry cocktail. I would come back just for that!

So by the time I left, I felt much more integrated and back in the game. One more day to go before I have to start paying for this stuff more than $1 a day.

—–

Have you ever had a clear and profound physical or emotional change that seemed directly connected to a yoga pose?

Other posts in this series:

Day One: The challenge begins!

Day Two: “Let your bottom blossom”

Day Three: “Shine!”

Day Four: “Surrender”

Day Five: “Root and reach”

Day Six: “Brighten the belly”

Day Seven: “Reveal”

Day Eight: “Expose your heart”

Day Nine: “Play”

Day Ten: “Party in the pose”

The theme of yesterday’s post was “reveal,” but I waited until this one to close that loop. I am not going to yoga on Day Eight. Instead I went back to a second class on the evening of Day Seven.

This does feel like cheating, I admit. But looking at the day, with a wedding at 2:00 and a mother blessing 4-7 p.m., and commitments to my family and my home in the morning, it is just not feasible for me to go to either of the Saturday classes offered. If there were a 6:30 Sunrise Yoga, I’d be there. But 8:30-9:45 is just too late for all we have to pack into the day, including my preparing all the food I will need to eat all day to accommodate my special grain-free, starch-free GAPS diet. My friends and family need a nourished, rested mama, and that is already a little sketchy.

So instead, I went out for a second time on Day Seven to my first evening class at Centered Yoga. It was Yin yoga, a class described by the studio as using passive poses and the breath to create a “sense of balance, harmony and inner peace.” Sign me up!

Even though I was dragging a little all day, and it was so lovely outside I might  have rather taken a walk than spend as much time in the car as in the yoga studio, I knew that I would feel better for having had the meditation and relaxing stretches. And I knew that I would feel almost I wasn’t a cheater if I doubled up on one day but certainly like a failure if I didn’t go on Saturday or Friday night. My husband was going to be home early, so it was the one time I could get to an evening class.

Aside from the yoga, which I’ll get to in a second, one eye-opening part of the experience was seeing what life is like for the hundreds of people who work in Georgetown and live in Virginia. The post-work and Friday night scenes are foreign to me these days. It felt like cultural tourism just to sit on Key Bridge at 6:15 p.m. And then, on the way home, to sit on Canal Road at 8:15 p.m. That was the most exposure I’ve had to over-20/under-30 humanity and to external combustion I’ve had in a long time. Witnessing it — while listening to classical music — was an exercise in anti-narcissism. It’s important to be reminded that your own individual issues are not being obsessed over by everyone else in the world.

But I’m avoiding talk of the class, I see.

Early on, the teacher invited us to dial back our intellect and to “turn up the volume” on our intuition. She said a lot of provocative things, and sometimes the music helped me get out of my head and let her words take me to their essence.

The first time she said, “Our hips tell our stories” — that they reveal a lifetime — I could only think of boys and things you do with them in the dark. But on the second side in pigeon pose, I thought of giving birth to my daughter, 10 months ago yesterday.

In the birth pool, I had my left knee down and my right knee bent, up and perpendicular to the ground. My labor was short — just 4.5 hours from the pop of my water when I went up into bridge pose at 5:30 a.m. to her birth at 10:08 a.m. — but I was pushing for too long. I’d been unpracticed in the art of breathing through intensity; as soon as it came, I wanted to match it. But three hours later, I was tired and the midwife’s tone got just a touch stern after my daughter’s head was out that the rest needed to come along, too. No longer feeling the inevitability of the next contraction, I had to finish on my own, and quickly.

And when I did, I was cautioned not to pull the baby too high out of the water because of her short cord. My son’s cord was so short, he’d been breech and delivered via c-section. I’m not exactly a fan of short cords. I got a little freaked out.

Then I remarked that, while my surgically-delivered baby’s head looked quite intact and non-smooshed, and this baby’s did not. It looked funny, her eyes and ears seemingly set wide apart. She also didn’t cry right away. I didn’t know what to make of this near-flaccid baby who looked rather like Gollum. My first thought was a worry that she might have Down Syndrome and that I would not know how to be a good mother to her. I worried I wouldn’t love her enough, that my heart was not big enough to envelop this being I’d spent nine months worrying about and loving and feeling move inside me. What would this reveal to me about me if I stopped short of adoration?

We can never know who are children are, but it is striking to me how much with both I just looked at them in wonder. And with my daughter, I had a nervous first two minutes wondering if anything had gone wrong, chromosomally or otherwise. Here I’d had my successful homebirth in barely enough time for my midwife to make it to my house and relieve her backup. But what would happen now? Who were we all going to be?

In yoga class, I felt my hips expand in pigeon pose and thought about my story. The teacher told us, before folding, to expose our hearts, and I found that sob at was hiding on Day Four. And I cried. Mostly it was in my body, but some tears fell on my block, the floor, my cheeks.

I hope the teacher wasn’t concerned if she noticed. It was an important release.

I came home wanting to embrace my baby and her father. They are precious.

And yet, life is not just a Lifetime movie. The baby would not go to sleep. When I pulled her off my breast, she writhed like I was sticking her with a hot poker. I gave her homeopathy, Rescue Remedy, an herbal calming tincture. My husband tried again to get her to sleep. Finally I put her on my back, did some watercolor painting for the motherblessing books, and there she lies, her neck cocked over in a way that probably feels as uncomfortable as the extra 20 pounds feels to my back while I sit with horrible posture.

But it’s what is working right now. I don’t want to challenge it. Sometimes you just have to go with that and have faith that things will all work out as they are meant to be.

Right?

Other posts in this series:

Day One: The challenge begins!

Day Two: “Let your bottom blossom”

Day Three: “Shine!”

Day Four: “Surrender”

Day Five: “Root and reach”

Day Six: “Brighten the belly”

Day Seven: “Reveal”

Day Eight: “Expose your heart”

Day Nine: “Play”

Day Ten: “Party in the pose”

Today, I am tired. I had trouble focusing in the Anusara class on this, my seventh day of my 10-Day Yoga Challenge. I did not feel strong and bright.

I’d gone to bed too late, the baby had woken too often, and I hadn’t gotten up early enough to eat enough to sustain me through a practice.

So I was actually grateful that the teacher was stuck in traffic so I could lie down and wait.

And then I was grateful when she told us to just go on our bellies for our first cobra pose from something else low, admitting that sometimes she enjoys “cheating” and getting to do a cobra without having to go through chaturanga.

I was grateful for her honesty, especially on a day when I couldn’t focus and kept lowering my knee when she said foot or getting something else wrong by doing what I imagined would make sense instead of listening to the actual words being spoken in the room.

It was still wonderful to breathe. And my down dog toward the end of the class did, I’m sure, look different than my first one. I got some great adjustments that made me feel taller and open. But I also felt a little jealous of like daughter who was sleeping in the car with a babysitter and open windows on a beautiful morning.

Perhaps all the extra oxygen I get in the 75 minutes I seriously breathe does compensate some for the lack of sleep, but woman cannot live by breath alone. Well, at least breastfeeding woman can’t.

The teacher called on us to “reveal” in our side angle twists, opening our chests and side bodies. But really, the whole practice reveals us to ourselves.

Other posts in this series:

Day One: The challenge begins!

Day Two: “Let your bottom blossom”

Day Three: “Shine!”

Day Four: “Surrender”

Day Five: “Root and reach”

Day Six: “Brighten the belly”

Day Seven: “Reveal”

Day Eight: “Expose your heart”

Day Nine: “Play”

Day Ten: “Party in the pose”

I might have missed my exit if this were my first day driving into the District. The rising sun made it impossible to see the sign for Rosslyn/Key Bridge. But by now, this sixth day of my 10-Day Yoga Challenge, I feel like I know what I’m doing, and I know where to turn.

And I feel good.

The soreness of the first few days has faded. My arms are stronger. My belly might be a little flatter. My legs are more solid. My heart is lighter.

So when the teacher gave us the choice to do a “connecting vinyasa” or to just stay in downward-facing dog, I was actually glad for the opportunity to lower down into chaturanga and then rise into cobra — and even up dog a few times. I’m sure my form could still use some work, but what a joy to enjoy rather than dread this powerful flow.

I admit, though, it also helped that the teacher started the class slowly, with us in lying back in bound cobbler, or supta baddha konasana, and then a few other gentle poses. Since the class was only one hour, 6:30-7:30 a.m., I knew that there could only be so many minutes of active poses! So I enjoyed them in the moment.

And isn’t that really the message of yoga: be in the moment, and don’t think about the future? But I have an intense need to put things in context, like I did today: “I can do this now if I get to rest later.”

I do it all the time parenting, too, and when my expectations are so far from reality, it’s easy to get thrown off.

For example, I thought to myself that I would write this piece after the baby went to sleep. But she must be about to welcome some teeth, because nothing is working with her this week. Sleep needs to be initiated by riding: in a car, in a stroller, or on a parent’s back. The idea of accomplishing a certain set of tasks is thrown out the window many times a day.

I recently attended a workshop with Karen Maezen Miller, author of Momma Zen and Hand Wash Cold, at Lil Omm studio. Miller wouldn’t let us take notes, so I’m a little hazy on what all she said when. But I know I breathed a lot, and well, and I know she said of the phrase “live in the now” something like “But now is all there is.” Of course. But how rarely we live that way. Instead, we live like the now is unimportant; it will soon be over and we will finally be on to the real thing, the New Now.

Sometimes that looking ahead serves our sanity, like telling ourselves a baby won’t always need to suck on something to fall asleep. Sometimes it allows ourselves to take on something that might seem daunting, like a vinyasa when you know their numbers are limited. Or ten consecutive days of yoga when you know they will run out.

Knowing I have this challenge to fulfill — this specific thing in the midst of so many half-projects and unclosed correspondence loops — has made me happy. I love looking forward to the practice and to the process. It feels so good to breathe consciously, to find new spaces and to cultivate compassion and confidence to do things I never think of while washing dishes or changing a diaper, like “brighten my belly.”

Tonight, I don’t worry too much about only doing a few stretches before bed because I know I will get a full practice in the morning. Now is acceptable because Later will be good.

What if I gave myself that gift of commitment on a regular basis, not so that I would constantly live in the future but just so that a healthy pattern would just be how we do things instead of something I have to squeeze into small spaces, spaces I can’t force into being and that might disappear?

I just forgot to breathe. I remembered.

There is only this moment. And now this one.

Thank you, Day Six.

Other posts in this series:

Day One: The challenge begins!

Day Two: “Let your bottom blossom”

Day Three: “Shine!”

Day Four: “Surrender”

Day Five: “Root and reach”

Day Six: “Brighten the belly”

Day Seven: “Reveal”

Day Eight: “Expose your heart”

Day Nine: “Play”

Day Ten: “Party in the pose”

I cannot wait for tomorrow’s 6:30 a.m. yoga class. Seriously.

I’m tired and sweaty, and at 9:00 p.m., both my kids have just gotten to sleep. I have miles to go before I can.

But, when I look ahead at tomorrow, I think about crossing the Potomac just after sunrise and about arriving home at 8:00 a.m. after having been out of the house by myself for a glorious two hours filled with yoga and NPR. That sounds like bliss. And even if I have to drive the baby to get her to nap or her brother melts down after I pick him up from preschool at noon, I know I will come to any frustration upon a foundation of freedom.

So maybe I’m starting to get a little addicted to yoga. There are worse things, no?

It’s surprisingly fun to have this daily dose to look forward to. It feels special, like the days of early pregnancy when you’re sitting at a red light and suddenly remember you have within you a miniscule little secret is going to change your life in ways you can’t imagine.

I do hope this little experiment results in some new habits, or at least new ideas about the possibility of developing good habits. I have always been one of those people reluctant to commit to always doing x or y on A or B day. But I know routine serves my son well, and I bet it would me, too. I mean, so what if the only thing I counted on as a kid was watching General Hospital at 3 p.m. ? You’d think that I might have evolved into some self-regulation in the past three decades.

Today — Day Five of my 10-Day Yoga Challenge — was another Anusara-inspired class. Two other women were there to practice with the same teacher I had on Monday. The first down dogs again threatened to do me in, sore as I am from four days in a row of way more upper body work than I’m used to. But once we warmed up, I found bliss in each dog coming on its own or between poses.

Balance poses abounded today, connecting one half of my body and my brain to the other.  A good description or a well-placed touch makes such a difference. The teacher was generous in her adjustments, and, by softening the inner front of the back leg, I found a brand new openness in triangle and side angle pose.

Much of today’s work came from spiraling legs in opposite directions and from rooting and reaching: opposite reactions serving one purpose.

Only when you’re grounded can you truly reach for the sky.

The plants that wilted in this afternoon’s hot sun later bowed in the wind and rain and then, when the skies cleared, sprang to life, blossoms open and wide.

The baby who was exhausted when I took her upstairs during the darkening of the sky smiled with wide eyes after nursing, uninterested in sleep and happy to return to the brightened-again downstairs.

As evidenced by the hyphenated title of my blog, I pretty much always feel more than one thing at a time.  I tend to act limited by too many choices or being “pulled in so many directions.” What is nice is to feel those opposing reactions serving the same purpose.

This day, I felt integrated. I didn’t feel leaden in my legs but fizzy in my heart. I didn’t hungry but stuffed. I just felt full, turgid, consistent.

And so glad I have the chance to start my day with yoga tomorrow.

—–

What do you look forward to and why?

What does it take to fall in love with a habit or a routine?

—–

Other posts in this series:

Day One: The challenge begins!

Day Two: “Let your bottom blossom”

Day Three: “Shine!”

Day Four: “Surrender”

Day Five: “Root and reach”

Day Six: “Brighten the belly”

Day Seven: “Reveal”

Day Eight: “Expose your heart”

Day Nine: “Play”

Day Ten: “Party in the pose”

“Rest your shoulder blades on the back of your heart,” the teacher said. But what if the heart is tender?

“Surrender,” she said later, in what felt at once like a welcoming to take a breather and at the same time, almost a dare. Am I capable of surrendering? Can I ever not try so hard?

Today was Day Four of my 10-day Yoga Challenge, and the class was Sunrise Flow, 6:30-7:30 a.m. The previous evening, I had prepped most of what I needed before I left for an 8:00 p.m. tutoring session (my last of the school year!) and the rest after I returned at 10:15: yoga clothes ready on the couch, water bottle full, wallet and phone in yoga mat bag. I’d put my veggies in a glass in the fridge but hadn’t put the juicer back together. I had apple slices and nuts ready for the road if I needed them before or after class. I’d washed the spinach and red pepper to cook with my husband and son’s eggs.

All I had to do was somehow get out of the house by 6:10 a.m. without leaking breasts and without disturbing the rest of the family. But I also had to get my heart stuck from my throat.

When I’d gotten home from tutoring the previous night, I sat in the driveway to get through a few emails on my phone. One was from a friend with whom I fulfill a school volunteer commitment, and she wasn’t exactly pleased with the way I’d handled something with other folks. I knew I hadn’t meant any harm, but I also could see why she bristled.

“There I go again,” I started to think. It’s been exactly a year since a good friend wrote me a Dear John letter asking me to respect her wishes not to be in touch until/unless she reached out to me first. This time I’m not seven months pregnant, but the story of me not being a great friend isn’t new. While I find the Pony Express approach regrettable, to put it mildly, I can understand why that friend was probably sick of me. I wasn’t — am not — exactly easy to be around. Things are always a production with me. Here I am, going on a 10-day yoga binge instead of just signing up for a weekly class.

And now I’ve pissed off another friend, I thought. But I tried not to get spiraled into negativity and just sent out compassion to my new friend and forgiveness toward myself.

I slept hard, and after a very awake and peppy baby watched me hydrate, dress, and start her brother and father’s breakfast, I handed her over around 6:15 and zipped away in the car hoping to believe it was, in fact, a new day.

I’m sure that people who cross the Potomac every morning are inured to it. My commute was easy, but radio reports told a different story further out from the city. Plenty of people were on their way to Regular Life. But this was revolutionary for me: to be out alone in the morning. Seeing the sun rise somewhere other than through my kitchen window. Imagining a world outside my tiny one.

And yet, that tiny one is precious, and it is mine. NPR ran a story about women saving their eggs for future babies, and I had the epiphany that — surprise! — I am so blessed to have two healthy children after two healthy pregnancies (and one fast and natural birth). This is what I wanted, right? When I was praying and struggling to heal my thyroid years ago, I wanted to be a mother. I wanted to create a home, a family.

And yet somehow it feels like everything is in the way of — instead of in service to — mothering.

But it’s all in the attitude. Like hearing “Surrender” as an invitation instead of a dare.

The class was good, and very similar to the other three except that all three other students were men. I am certainly sore but still enjoying everything and feeling stronger. I was so glad to have made it to class, if a few minutes late. It felt both safe and challenging to enter the studio for my fourth guided practice in a row after months of almost nothing.

I got home a little later than I’d promised, but my husband had survived with the kids and then made it to work without missing any meetings. Within 25 minutes of my walking in the door, I made my juice and nursed the baby; I got my son to finish his breakfast, get dressed, pee and brush his teeth; and we left for preschool.

In the parking lot, I got to hug my recently offended friend and, I hope, right things up (even though I interrupted her conversation with another mom to apologize. Old habits die hard.). I came close to tears and glistened with them on the way home, but I never did find my sob. I think it may surface soon.

Before I drove away with a sleeping baby in tow, a mutual friend who recently completed a yoga teacher training said she felt like she was just starting; there’s so much to know. Nothing is ever “done,” I offered, explaining that I’m trying to just embrace the unending process of things instead of looking toward some unattainable end point, which is my more natural inclination.

I got lucky with a carseat napper, and I felt great just drinking water and eating some apple until after the baby woke at 11:30. My recent obsession with eating until way beyond full (because who knows when I’ll get to sit down to a quiet meal again!) seemed to have faded today. No longer was I a squirrel storing away calories for the winter (or, in this case, a flabby belly). I felt cleansed and satisfied with a lighter plate than and through the rest of the day.

When I picked up my son, I was quicker to laugh and smile than to snap and shush. The three of us had a lovely afternoon together, a welcome change from the long holiday, hot, bright (for so many hours!) weekend that we struggled to fill without the four of us driving each other crazy.

It’s 11:05 p.m., and I find it a little hard to believe that it’s the same day I drove across Key Bridge at 6:25 a.m. But it is. And it was good.

Time to surrender, to sleep.

Day One: The challenge begins!

Day Two: “Let your bottom blossom”

Day Three: “Shine!”

Day Five: “Root and reach”

Day Six: “Brighten the belly”

Day Seven: “Reveal”

Day Eight: “Expose your heart”

Day Nine: “Play”

Day Ten: “Party in the pose”

I made it to my third yoga class in a row today in my self-imposed challenge to go every day for 10 days on my $10 ten-day pass at Centered Yoga.

This class — the 9:30 a.m. Anusara-inspired yoga — was what drew me to the studio. I like what I know about this style, thought that is admittedly not a lot. I get the sense that it balances a focus on alignment and on being in the pose with a heart-centered openness to joy.

Today there was only one other student, so we got lots of adjustments and personalization, but it was still about the experience and not about us as though it were a private session. If I closed my eyes, I might be in a full room. The teacher used a lot of the same language as the one who taught my previous two classes — puffing the kidneys, description of rotating and spiraling, softening the mid-back. The room was quiet, filled only with the sound of instructions, our breath and the A/C.

There are so many differences between doing a home practice and going to a class. Obviously, a teacher is probably going to have you do things you might not do at home. But she’s also likely to have you hold poses longer, especially if you are a wimp like me who can barely hold her 18.5-pound daughter in one arm for more than 42 seconds at a time. It’s been great to realize that even if I think my arms are going to fall off with the very first down dog of a class, I can actually keep coming back to the pose and find it restful and enjoyable over and over throughout the class.

And there’s that language I was talking about yesterday. Listening to someone put images in your head of how your body can be in space makes a big difference. I do think I was trained well at Unity Woods, an Iyengar studio I went to years ago; I know a lot more about alignment than your average gym yoga rat. But if I’m not hearing my own internal voice at home, none of those subtle, yummy adjustments get made.

And beyond hearing descriptions and watching demos, classes offer the opportunity for physical adjustments. Many times today I found length and openness thanks to the teacher’s pressure, support, or even soft touch. It’s wonderful to have help to find something that you didn’t even know was possible and maybe didn’t even understand you were trying to attain until she helped you get there.

I forgot to mention in yesterday’s post that the Sunday Hatha teacher gave me my first “Sivasana Assist.” We could opt out by putting our hands on our bellies during this final relaxation, but I am all about assistance, even if I don’t know what it is going to feel like! I was so blissed out by her pressing on a few points on my feet, I can’t even tell you what else she did. Something about pulling my legs, I think, followed by pushing on my shoulders so that they opened more. At any rate, it was a delicious ending to a great class, and I got some of that shoulder-opening today, too, along with so many helpful adjustments during the class.

It is so fun to get disciplined about this. It feels good to be a little sore and to know I’m getting stronger.

Tomorrow I would have to find a sitter to get to the 10:00 class or hope that my husband would get home by 6:00 and be ready to take on two kids if I wanted to do that 6:45, which is likely to be more full. Both are vinyasa flow, which scares me a little. I don’t know that I could keep up! Maybe toward the end of this experiment.

So the thought right now, husband willing, is that I go to the 6:307:30 a.m. Sunrise Flow class. Traffic should be light, so I could probably leave as late as 6:10 and get there on time and, going reverse commute, be home by 7:50 so that LJ can scoot out to work. It’s a little later than ideal, but it’s no later than he might get out anyway, especially after a hot three-day weekend. He even said he’d make breakfast for the boy and for him. But I tutor tonight until 10 p.m., so it might be a push to get up and hydrated and out the door around 6 a.m.! And I can’t predict how happy the baby will be about that, but her sleep has been such a crapshoot lately, I can’t work too hard to preserve something that doesn’t happen. Last week, I nearly lost my mind trying three times in one morning to get her to sleep, plus a walk, only to have her fall asleep the instant we got in the car to pick up her brother.

It is so hot here in the D.C., I wonder if the studios and gyms will fill up in the post-holiday week to come since you’d have to be insane and a glutton for breathing problems to work out in the outdoors on a day like today. A cool studio was the place to be this morning! LJ just called me from REI, where he said there must be more people than on the bike trail. (I’m at home with a baby who fell asleep in the other car on the way there, so we just came home).

One thing teachers always correct on me is my arms, which I can never get very straight or leave up for very long in poses like Warrior 1. But in my mind’s eye, I now can picture just letting them “shine” out to the corners of the room while I looked out the sunny window in the white painted brick studio.

Maybe it’s also the studio’s yellow and green sun logo that’s subliminally working on me. Or perhaps I’m thinking of the photo I put up to go with yesterday’s post.  What matters is only that I feel centered and shiny.

And looking forward to tomorrow. Even if it is going to come early.

Other posts in this series:

Day One: The challenge begins!

Day Two: “Let your bottom blossom”

Day Four: “Surrender”

Day Five: “Root and reach”

Day Six: “Brighten the belly”

Day Seven: “Reveal”

Day Eight: “Expose your heart”

Day Nine: “Play”

Day Ten: “Party in the pose”