I experienced a whole new way of thinking at the end of yoga class yesterday.
I'd spent the past several days mulling over how I wanted to approach writing about continuing toddler-inspired sleep interruptions; guilty, crying morning-afters; plummeting four-season temperatures; and that frustrating in-between period where the choice between too-big maternity clothes and too-small normal person clothes reawakens all my body image issues, only now in a surround-sound, super-sized version.
The possibilities for enlightening lessons were plentiful. If nothing else, I reasoned, my struggles with winter, approaching-two-years-old, and pregnancy would be fodder for many a YogaMamaMe essay. I could offer endless pearls of wisdom about surrender and letting go of the myth of control and listening to your heart instead of your head.
And then, as Baby Lamar and I settled into savasana for our final relaxation, my teacher invited us to not only let it go, but to let it in.
This was a stunning concept to me, the last thing I wanted to do. I had made my way to class huddled deep in my beloved new winter coat, the faux-fur-lined hood pulled low over my eyes as if to mimic the direction in which my spirits plummet when cold weather approaches.
In the last couple of years before I retreated from St. Louis to southern California—largely inspired by a Christmas day landing at LAX when I emerged from a frigid and snowy St. Louis morning into perfect 80-degree weather—I greeted with cries of despair the slightest bite in the autumn air, the brilliance of the changing leaves, and even the chance to wear a scarf casually draped around my neck (a style I love to curl into but one which felt a bit silly when walking the streets of L.A. in flip flops). I dreaded those nights when I would wander through my house wrapped in a duvet avoiding the kitchen despite gnawing hunger pains because it was the coldest room in the house—and that was saying a lot. I cringed at how easily I would be reduced from a strong, independent woman who could steam the wallpaper off her own walls to a helpless little girlie who felt no shame in asking a visiting guy friend to take her trash cans to the curb on his way out on a particularly wintry afternoon.
The road from more recent California winter afternoons so mild I recall walking seven miles in a skirt and bare legs the December day I went into labor with Jake to persuading me I could survive The Rest of My Life back in winter was not an easily negotiated one. Mike promised me an air tight home where we gave no consideration to utility bills or the environment once the thermometer dipped below 50 degrees. He reminded me of how during our St. Louis courtship he gladly shoveled my walkway, scraped my windshield, and started my car for me in the mornings, and promised such chivalry was not dead. I considered the fact that our current car even has seat warmers, blessed, best-invention-ever, aptly named seat warmers. He regaled me with images of Jake going sledding, building a snowman, having snowball fights—all the things of which my warm childhood had deprived me.
Perhaps this was the clincher: the memory of when I was 26 years old and living in D.C. when snow shut the whole city down for the better part of a week. I was walking by a group of people lined up to sled down a perfect hill near my apartment. They carried flattened cardboard boxes, cafeteria trays, cheap plastic sleds I could easily have purchased nearby and which someone no doubt would have loaned me had I asked. But I didn't ask. I was afraid to. Because, tempting as those whoops of childlike joy were, unexpected as this sense of urban community was, I hadn't the slightest idea of how to sled and was convinced I would crack my head open running into a tree because no one would think to show me how to steer.
So, upon Mike's suggestion, and after careful consultation of charts on weatherchannel.com, I proclaimed Asheville mild enough for me to winter there. At least until Mike and I become rich and famous and can spend whole winters in our second home near Santa Barbara.
There is, however, as we often forget until it's too late, a big difference between imagining what 18-degree winter nights in a poorly insulated house feel like and actually feeling what they feel like.
Let It In? Seriously?
Here are the things I'd like to let go:
My fear, loathing, exhaustion at the very concept of cold weather.
When I was fifteen, I spent my spring break visiting my sister in Boston, where she was at college. This being Boston in April, I was treated to my very first experience of snow falling out of the sky. And I loved it. Despite my inadequate Southern California ski jacket and K-Swiss tennis shoes, I enjoyed the crunch of snow underfoot, the challenge of making it across a slickly iced driveway, the way my ears tingled as they came back to life when I made it back into a heated room. I felt alive and happy and like the air just tasted good—spicy and clean.
Youth and a lack of common sense propelled me through college with a similar disregard for bodily discomfort and, indeed, some pride at discovering that "cold" means when it actually hurts. The only time I was momentarily stymied by winter weather during my four years in Providence was the morning after the first snowfall of my senior year, when I had moved off campus and thus no longer enjoyed the luxury of someone else shoveling a path for me from my dorm to my class. I put on an extra pair of socks under my penny loafers and made it all the way to campus down slushy streets before one too many people said, "What do you have on your feet?" and I slunk home to buy a bus ticket to Boston, where I purchased the trusty Timberland boots still standing by in the downstairs closet for the three days a year I need them.
And so I continued for several years, the California girl who declared herself impervious to cold weather, who trudged to work across the Boston Common wrapped in about 16 layers of clothing so she could save the subway fare; whose idea of keeping her feet warm in law school consisted of Doc Martens and tights; and who made it to work in D.C. on frigid days in a suit and tennis shoes.
Still, at some point I realized that, to be honest, I didn't like the cold so well. Maybe it was having to be out in it twice a day walking my basset hound Roxanne at something less than a brisk, blood-circulating pace. Maybe it was that holding a leash meant I had to keep at least one hand at a time out of my pocket, which is how I discovered I have Reynaud's Syndrome—a rheumatological disorder in which the blood vessels in my hands, apparently confused, constrict when they get cold. This means that, conveniently enough, my hands get colder whenever they get cold. Maybe it was paying $300 heating bills while walking Roxanne with my Reynaud's, scraping my windshield and shoveling my walk with Reynaud's, and crying when my hands hurt and my whole body slipped into a state approaching hypothermia in my own living room.
Whatever the reason, by the time I stepped off the plane at LAX on that 80-degree Christmas day, I decided that the Los Angeles I had abandoned at age eighteen was, truly, paradise.
And so, as the wind whistles through the windowpanes of my lovely, poorly insulated, orginal windows, craftsman home, I logically tell myself to surrender. The Dalai Lama, I remind myself, would suggest I not feed my feelings—not spend time dwelling on how I feel when it's cold, not let it conquer me. That I simply let it go, see it as nothing more than the way the world works, and move on.
The fact that Jake has plainly decided he prefers to sleep in our bed and will awaken us every night with this demand. And, oh yeah, the obvious truth that it is our fault.
This one, as anyone who has spent any time reading YogaMamaMe knows and is sick of hearing, is a big one. Jake has, with the exception of a few very brief periods, always been an admirable sleeper for someone his age. As an infant, he could be counted on to awaken only once a night. He couldn't be counted on to go back to sleep again, but that's not such a big deal when it's your partner's job to whisk the baby away to the living room to let him fall asleep in the battery-powered swing while his father snores on the nearby couch.
We went through a fraught but successful bout of sleep training when Jake was five months old and suddenly awakening three or four times a night. We used what those who have been through this angst know as Ferberizing: Let the baby cry for one minute that feels like three days, then go to him, comfort him, let him know you are there. Before leaving him again to let him cry for two minutes that stretch into eternity. Return again, comfort, give back rubs. Leave for five minutes of crying. Five minutes is a very long time, as anyone who has ever, say, tried to take up running well knows. Happily, we never made it to the ten-minute round, and Jake got the message pretty quickly.
Problem is, the Ferber thing takes on an entirely different dimension once your child hits a year or, say almost-twenty-three months. Now it's not just a matter of Mommy being out of the room and coming back when you cry to show you that she does indeed love you. Now it's about Mommy deliberately abandoning you as you scream—first angrily and then with great, neglected gulps of sorrow. When she returns it's only to add to your frustration by refusing to understand what you are clearly communicating to her: that you would like her to pick you up and cuddle you and get you out of this horrible crib. Pretty much every night for the past two weeks.
So we don't do the sleep training thing. We don't do the sit-by-his-bed-until-he-falls-asleep thing either because he has this organic mattress that's just a shade too big for his crib so the side rail doesn't release to a level lower than chest height and, consequently, there is no way to sit in a chair while reaching into the crib to comfort my child. I must, instead, stand on the cold wood of his bedroom floor (because a thick, warm rug would be an allergy concern, don't you know) leaning my increasingly big belly against the sharp rails of his crib, and pretending I can rub his back until he falls asleep even though he is jumping up and down becoming more and more frantically awake as he tries desperately to climb onto my neck and out of his crib.
It's much easier to just take him back to bed with me.
Plus, as I've mentioned, our upstairs has been feeling rather tundra-like these past few nights, so maybe he's cold. And maybe, when I put him to bed in two layers of fleece jammies and turn on the space heater, he's too hot. And maybe he's going through a crazy growth spurt and just doesn't feel right. Or maybe he's just discovered nightmares.
Okay, maybe he's just almost two years old and feeling powerful with the new ability to articulate what he wants, and what he wants, quite logically, is to sleep in bed with me.
The thing is, I can let it make me angry, I can berate myself for letting us get into this situation, I can cry when I think how very long it will be until he is mortified at the thought of sleeping with his mother. Or I can figure the only way to break him of the habit is to get storm windows and buy him his own bed where I can lie down with him instead of bringing him back with me. And until I can get those things, I can surrender. Not feed it. Not keep myself up all night crying about how my life has gone all wrong.
Wouldn't it feel better just to let it go?
The whining and crying that are an integral part of a toddler's vocabulary, no matter how extraordinarily goodnatured your toddler is.
Said whining and crying are particularly annoying when you're not getting enough sleep. Even if they are a normal part of healthy development.
So really you have no choice but to let it go or go seriously crazy.
And being exhausted all the time. Which I've written about so much I've exhausted the subject.
If I were to write about any one of these subjects independently, my yoga offering would be the same: Let it go. Don't feed it. Be like bamboo and sway without breaking.
Only now, thanks to yesterday's yoga class, I've got this whole other realm to move into. More precisely:
Seriously. Letting It In.
By "letting it in," I'm not talking about letting these things get to me—or letting their parallels in your life get to you. I'm talking about letting them in. In a way that means embracing them.
I think often about how the Dalai Lama describes his ability to feel compassion for the Chinese government. He doesn't merely let go of the pain the Chinese government has caused him and the Tibetan people. He doesn't move beyond it. He embraces it.
Not, obviously, in the way I so love to embrace Jake when he'll have me. ("Nother hug!" he declared about five times yesterday morning in a successful attempt to get me past the breakdown I had in front of him after giving him a kind-of-cold-but-mostly-lukewarm shoulder for refusing twice during the night to return to his crib.) But embrace as in truly letting it in, without flinching. Being open. Confronting it. Learning to live with it, not in spite of it.
And, most importantly, to allow his embrace to lead him to compassion. Which, when you're talking about the exiled Dalai Lama and the Chinese government, is so extraordinary you feel like a jerk complaining about pretty much anything in your own life.
This is rather an advanced concept. Not in intellectual terms, but in terms of practice. We can, after all, spend our entire lives learning how to let go, quieting our minds when they start chattering around a bit of annoyance and building it into something that takes us over. We practice our asanas in order to let go of our reaction to discomfort—the desire to get rid of it. As if we could ever get rid of every little discomfort in our lives.
But, like any yoga pose, once you begin to master the practice of letting go, you're merely prepared to go deeper. You can now practice letting it back in, in a way that doesn't set off the negative feelings but allows you to examine what's getting to you, to even learn from it. And, yes, embrace it.
So, okay, I'm thinking about embracing winter. Which brings to mind how it feels to wrap your hand securely around a metal fence post on a freezing morning. It feels really stupid. Like something you just shouldn't do.
But maybe, just maybe, I can move past accepting that it gets cold where I live and learn to embrace that first chill in the air, the beauty of the leaves as they turn and then fall. Maybe I'll bundle up and join Mike and Jake sledding down the hill on which we live. Or at least be there to watch, even if I'm not quite up to getting my butt wet.
And maybe I can enjoy this brief time when Jake wants and needs my cuddles. Maybe when he kicks me awake I can roll over so my head rests next to his and enjoy the jagged line formed by his eyelashes and the pristine roundness of his flushed toddler cheeks. Maybe I can find the space to laugh at how he can so earnestly cry over a Cheerio dropping on the floor and laugh at myself for picking it up and giving it to him, instead of just picking it up so he'll STOP ALREADY.
And maybe, just maybe, a few short minutes from now, I can embrace my exhaustion in the best way possible. By taking this time when I am alone in the house with the hounds to put my feet up and read a book.
I can guarantee you that wouldn't happen if I were busy just letting things go and getting on with my life.
Work on the Embrace—Reader's Choice
A bunch of poses ran through my head when I paused to consider which one would best allow the practice of embrace.
And then I realized that it depends. It depends on where your body is tight and what pose you most resist. So now that you've immediately thought of your least favorite yoga pose, I invite you to practice it. Spend a few moments accepting the discomfort. And then spend a whole lot longer embracing it.
For example, if you are plagued by tight hips, try agnistambhasana, also called double pigeon or fire log.
If hamstrings are your nemesis, spend a good long time embracing a simple pascimottanasana, seated forward fold.
To embrace your upper back and shoulders, work with setu bandha sarvangasana (bridge) or, if you're feeling daring and strong, urdhva danurasana (upward facing bow).
You get the point. It's not about the pose—it never is. It's about practicing acceptance and then experiencing a true embrace. Think of all the things in life you will open yourself up to.
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