Today is Thursday, a yoga day. This means at noon I will dash away from my computer to throw on yoga clothes, sweat through a 12:15 class, and return home to shower some time between 2:00 and 3:30 in the afternoon, an exercise that will never cease to feel, just, wrong. I did the same thing on Tuesday and will do it again tomorrow, though the timing will vary slightly.
And today, like every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, I sit down at my computer in the morning and wonder why I subject myself to a yoga class that sits disruptively in the middle of my day like an overcooked matzoh ball shedding pieces of itself into the clear chicken soup around it.
Not long ago yoga was the center of my day. It was what I did, how I conducted my life, and everything else fit together more easily because of it. For a time, I set my alarm every morning to make the 6:30 class that started my day (8:00 on Saturdays because I'm not quite that crazy). Then I discovered mysore, and if that class met from 11:00 to 1:00, then so be it. It was the most important thing to me, my daily yoga class. It changed how I felt and thought and ate and loved and approached life. Everything else made way for yoga.
In this sense, taking classes a mere three days a week is a big setback, a slide from yoga goddess to harried mother who rushes off to a few sessions every week with the other yoga-for-fitness women.
From Setback to Progress
The reason my life no longer revolves around my yoga classes, of course, is that it now revolves around Jake. And he's every bit the powerful, magical, heart-opening center that yoga ever was. He's just not quite as easily accommodated.
I had every intention of Jake and yoga sharing equal space in my life. During my pregnancy I put together strong sequences that I practiced in the room that would become his, tumbling him upside down and sideways, opening my hips and heart for him, and meditating on the nearly incomprehensible miracle of his presence.
After his birth, determined to maintain the practice that brought calm to my life, I stubbornly ignored the advice to rest my body completely for four to six weeks. By now my yoga space had been taken over by the daybed on which in-laws would sleep when they came to visit the new family member. So I spread my mat out near the front door of our duplex, hemmed in by furniture and hounds and the limited time I had between feedings.
In these harried, desperate sessions, I lost the calm I was seeking. I had no time to find my center. I let my heart and my mind stay with my new baby instead of with my practice. Slowly, I succumbed to the fact that the best spot I could give yoga in my life was a scant 20 minutes a day during which I was more concerned with maintaining my arm balances than with releasing all the crowded, tangled emotions a new baby brings.
By the time we moved to Asheville when Jake was 8 months old, Mike was begging me to find a yoga class.
"Can't until I find someone who can watch Jake," I pointed out.
When Jake was 9 months old he started the daycare I like to call preschool because even now I feel compelled to explain that I wouldn't send him if he weren't stimulated and happy and doing things I couldn't do with him alone at home.
"Found a yoga class yet?" Mike asked periodically.
"There's nothing," I shrugged, content to spread my mat in the spacious beauty of my new office and lazily execute a few sun salutes. What I meant was there was nothing at exactly the right time of day in exactly the right style offered by exactly the right studio.
More months passed. My moods began to change, first just a little shift here and there, then gaining momentum like a child discovering how to swing. I watched myself become a woman my husband -- who had met me as his yoga teacher -- had never known existed.
It took a great, sad jolt from the Universe to throw me back into a dedicated practice. In early December we found out that the new pregnancy I had entered had faltered. I was stuck to the idea that I would have my babies 18 months apart, get all the hard stuff over with quickly, and then (some day, maybe when the kids are in school, you know, that time when you regain all your independence and they magically take care of themselves) pull my life and my yoga practice back together. Enchanted with this plan, my body refused to surrender the pregnancy.
"Shall we schedule a D&C?" the midwife asked.
"I'd rather try yoga," I answered, confident that it was the solution. All my body needed was to find its rhythm again, match its cycles to the cycles of energy in a yogic flow. If I hadn't neglected my practice, I thought cruelly, none of this would have happened.
And so I found myself at the 12:15 yoga class, challenged and encouraged, if not completely satisfied. Yoga, after all, was something I had to do daily, preferably at the same time every day, with the same teacher or maybe two, in the same studio. All I could find were the Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday classes.
The thing is, these three classes have helped me rediscover my practice, both on my mat and off. They may not replicate what I once had, but they've brought me so very far from where I was a year ago. And I'm proud of myself for finding a place for them so different from the place I was used to my yoga classes occupying.
Practicing Yoga When Your Practice Is Limited
The happy, frustrating, beautiful truth is that nothing will ever again be as important to me as my baby (except, of course, his siblings). I will never again achieve quite the same level of dedication to my yoga practice -- one that encompasses not only a daily practice, but what I eat, how I move, how I approach the other things in my life.
It's easy to think about this change as a loss. A fair trade certainly. But there's no getting around the fact that I gave up something really important to me for Jake. Not that any of us are supposed to admit we sacrificed anything for our children, because that would make us seem ungrateful. Believe me, I'm not. I'm just struggling to figure out how to be me without something that is central to who I am.
Here it is, the truth about motherhood that we all knew in an abstract sort of way when we got pregnant but that doesn't really make sense until it's happening. Parents sacrifice for their children.
"Everything will change," people warned me darkly as my belly swelled to proclaim my impending new status to the world.
"Of course it will," I pooh-poohed them. "I'm 40 years old. I want a change."
And I did. I just didn't want that change to involve losing a part of myself.
But what if, instead of having a child, I had merely injured myself, say sprained my knee. I would come back to my practice honoring that change. I would have felt gratitude for receiving a new dimension to my practice, a reminder to accept my body's limitations. So why not embrace this bigger limitation in my life as well?
Accepting Our Limitations
Yoga teachers remind us all the time to accept our bodies' limitations, even to celebrate them. Tight hips? How lucky you are to have all that space for opening and discovering what they hold. Frustrated by arm balances? Rejoice in the small moments of progress, that second where you feel weightless for the first time. Unwilling to throw yourself into a handstand? Honor your fears so you can overcome them.
If accepting our bodies' limitations can bring us so many gifts, imagine what will happen when we accept the larger limitations that come with parenthood.
Maybe I can find the time to practice only three or four times a week. That just means I face a greater challenge in maintaining that practice during the long periods of time off my mat. It's no different, really, from how a person with tight hips is going to be far more challenged by pigeon pose that I, with my loosey-goosey ones.
For all the hard work it took to get myself back to a challenging practice, there's so much more hard work to be done. That's one of the things I love about yoga -- you can give up the notion of goals (those things you will never reach because your mind will always find something more just beyond your grasp). There will always be more challenges and all the beautiful lessons you learn as you face them.
So today I dedicate myself to honoring the limitations motherhood has placed on my yoga practice. I open my heart to them because I know I'm going to learn something about myself and my life and how to be an even better mother for acknowledging that loss of self motherhood inevitably brings.
Dirga Pranayama (Three-Part Breathing)
Dirga pranayama, or three-part breathing, appeals to me as a way of recognizing our limitations and then moving beyond them.
1) As with all pranayama, you need to find a comfortable seat, find your long spine and open heart, and breathe through your nose.
2) Close your eyes and watch as you inhale into the lowest third of your lungs. Pause and experience this feeling. Do not exhale. Inhale again, filling the middle third of your lungs. Again, pause and observe. Do not exhale. Finally, inhale a third time, filling your lungs all the way up to your collar bones.
3) Sit without exhaling for as long as it is comfortable. Observe the shape of your lungs, their finiteness, the limit to how much air you can take in. At the same time, notice how your lungs are subtly opening to accommodate the air you have inhaled.
4) When you are ready, exhale slowly through your nose, still calmly watching as your lungs empty.
Repeat at least two more times so you can appreciate how recognizing our limitations helps them melt away.
Virabhadrasana I (Warrior I)
Virabhadrasana I -- Warrior I. I choose this pose because there is something difficult about it for almost everyone, some bodily limitation with which we can work.
1) Either start from standing (tadasana) or, if you are familiar with a vinyasa, perform it and enter the pose from adho mukha svavasana (downward facing dog). From standing, step your left foot back so you are in a high lunge with your front/right knee bent and lined up with your ankle. From adho mukha svasana, with as much control as you can, step your right foot forward so you are in a high lunge position with your front/right knee bent and lined up with your ankle.
2) Drop your back/left foot to the ground. It should point at a 45 degree angle toward the left side of your mat. Your left heel should be in a straight line behind your right heel. Your feet are far enough apart for you to bend your right/front knee deeply.
3) Place your hands on your hips and try to bring your left hip forward and your right hip back so they are in line. If you have tight hip tendons, you will be limited in your ability to bring your left hip forward.
4) Stretching strongly into your left foot with a strong back leg, let your right thigh lengthen so your right leg moves toward a right angle. If you have tight hips, you will be limited in your ability to do so.
5) Once your legs are strongly in place, bring your hands to your heart, relax your shoulders, and then straighten your arms and reach your hands toward the sky. See if you can keep your palms together. If you have tight shoulders, you will be limited in your ability to do so.
6) Sink even more deeply into your strong back leg and let your heart lift toward the sky as your shoulders drop further away from your ears. If you have a tight back, you will be limited in your ability to do so.
7) Stay in the pose and breathe as you acknowledge your limitations and celebrate the beauty of the pose that is yours because of them.
Repeat on the other side and once again enjoy how our limitations bring their own sense of beauty and newness to our lives.
Then celebrate the beauty of this pose that is your life, made so much more beautiful by the limitations motherhood has introduced.
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