Your Courageous Life

For the past two weeks, I have arisen every morning at 5am. Wait. No.

I have not arisen. My alarm clock has gone off. I have turned it off. I have sat up in bed and braced my neck back to stretch it, and I have almost fallen asleep again more times than I can count. I contemplate going back to sleep. What drives me to get my ass up and out of bed is this one simple thing: I am somewhat convinced that if I arrive to yoga class late and have to put my mat in one of the few open spots remaining at the front of the room, I might DIE.

So I get out of bed and shiver as I pull on one teeeeeeensy pair of yoga shorts and one tank top, then pull on another layer of pants and long sleeved shirt and a jacket over that. Then I fill one water bottle, and grab the other water bottle that I had filled and put in the freezer the night before; it is a stainless steel Kleen Kanteen and it is one hard, solid chunk of ice. My yoga bag with mat and towel are also next to the door.

The idea is to take care of as much as possible the night before, so as to not have to think at 5:30 am.

At 5:30 in the morning, it is very quiet in my neighborhood. Turning on my car feels loud. But there are actually cars on the highways, and as I drive the paltry seven miles to the yoga studio–seven miles that would take at least a half hour each way if I were taking a class later in the day–I’m wondering where they are going. Are they early birds? Going to work? It is still pitch black out, and since I’ve only been doing this for a few weeks, I find myself wondering if I will discover that it is light out when the seasons change.

Fast forward to 6:00am. Class begins. The lights are unflinching. I have set up my mat at the back of the room, close to a window, where I’ll get at least a bit of a breeze if the instructor is kind enough to crack the windows. Arriving late would be a death sentence–the only spots remaining would be front and center, where one imagines the heat pools like the core of the earth.

I fucking hate the breathing part at the beginning, because a few weeks ago I had a neck spasm thing and my neck was in total traction, and while it’s healed up now, I still wake up in the mornings with stiffness. So I don’t want to bend my neck forward while my elbows go up, nor do I want to tip it that far back, thank you very much. Basically, I’m grumpy the entire first ten minutes in that 105-degree heat. I am someone who typically likes heat, loves that feeling of getting into a car on a warm day and keeping the windows rolled up for just a minute. And conversely, I hate–loathe–being cold. Yet that first ten minutes, I’m like a judging factory. Imagine a widget factory with a conveyer belt popping out widgets, only instead of widgets I’m popping out judgements. She sounds pissed off today. He’s too perky today. Quit telling us to breathe louder. It’s fucking hot in here. Why is it so hot? It’s hotter than normal, isn’t it. Did they crack the windows at all? I hate it when people who can’t balance stand at the front of the room and then their wobbling gets my balance off. I’m a good balancer normally, except for when people like YOU are standing in front of me. Ugh. Why is that guy up there wearing paper thin WHITE shorts in a Bikram class? Whoa. Whooooaaaa, buddy. Watch it on that backward bend. That’s more than I wanted to see at…yes. 6:15 in the morning.

And then at some point, usually when I start needing to balance on one leg for something and quit it already with the mental dialogue, all of that falls away. I even stop thinking about the heat. I don’t do any of the postures perfectly. They keep telling us to “put your forehead to your knee” and I’ve started looking around, thinking, “I’ve been practicing yoga for more than ten years now–my forehead just doesn’t go to my knee. Maybe I have a weird body or something?”

By the time the warmup is finished (yes, I too thought, “We need a ‘warmup’ in a 105-degree room?” the first time an instructor called it that), my “block of ice” has melted halfway and now I have ice cold water and a little iceberg that clinks when I tip the bottle back.

And after class, I feel great. Freaking fan-tastic, like every single cell in my body is alive. The second bottle of water–the one that I didn’t freeze–is waiting for me in my car. I drive home feeling really peaceful, thinking deeeeep thoughts, thoughts like:

Water is soooo goooooooood.

I head home, get there at about 8am, strip off sweaty layers, and–look, I’m just going to be honest here–admire my body in the mirror. For real. You cannot get up at 5am to do 90 minutes of yoga in an oven, and then not stop to notice how after only 2 weeks, your ass looks great. And your arms. And your abs. And your thighs. And your calves. And your cheekbones are more prominent. Jawbone, too.

Now, to be fair, I’ve been doing mirror work, checking out my body in the mirror for a few years now–I’ve been doing it whether my thighs were muscular from triangle pose or soft and pliable, all in service of loving my body no matter what state it is in, thanking it for all that it does for me, all the ways that it works, all the ways that it bends, all of the messages that it sends me to let me know how to keep it protected. Looking more and more muscular is just a cool side benefit.

But you know what the hardest part of the entire thing is? Getting up at 5am and getting myself out the door. Nothing compares to how monumentally difficult that feels.

In essence, the hardest part of all of it is simply showing up.

And to keep showing up.

To come, complete a class, and know that the next day I will get up and complete another one.

I’m curious: Where in your life is it hardest to show up? Where in your life is hardest to keep showing up?

P.S. Registration for Across Mediums ends today (Friday!).

This entry was posted on Friday, February 12th, 2010 at 11:05 am |