Your Courageous Life

tears

Image from yogalifestyle.com

Some of you may remember that a few months ago, I started a Bikram yoga practice. It has been a really transformative process–everything from just noticing how I sometimes have resistance to setting myself up for success (my resistance most often shows up as wanting to sleep longer, even if I’ve had plenty of sleep) to noticing my judgements about instructors to noticing my fears to noticing my breathing.

The last time I posted about yoga, I noted that Fixed Fern Pose and Camel Pose were the two I was most afraid of. My fear? That my kneecaps will pop off. Or that the tendons will tear. But in essence, that something BAD will happen to my knees.

I’ve been working into that fear, such that now I do Fixed Fern on most days. But Camel? Oh–that one has been rough. I’ve been easing into it by not doing the full backward bend of resting on my heels. Instead, I bed back partially, tightening my butt cheeks until you could bounce a quarter off of ‘em, and leaning my hands on my hips. This is a perfectly okay way to start getting accustomed to the posture, yet I’d notice that I kept feeling engulfed by dizziness.

Then, the dizziness stopped being quite so prominent–there was lots of breathing through, coming out of the post as necessary, and not always doing the second set–and what replaced it was a wave of nausea that would start just if I stood on my knees, before even going into the pose. And I’d breathe through that, too, still not doing the full pose, still just doing the first part of leaning on my hips and tightening those cheekies (things are looking fine on the backside, if you ask me) and staying really present to that edge between what I could do and what I could not do.

And then, today?

I felt nauseous just standing on my knees, waiting for the instructor’s move to start actually doing the backward bend. Normal. I took some deep breaths. As per usual, it was overwhelming to be in that bend so when I got to a place where I felt “done,” I went ahead and eased my body forward, coming out of the backward bend.

And right there in class, this wave of total EMOTION swept over me and I was trying hard–very hard–not to cry.

The anti-Bikram peeps would probably see this as a sign that “the heat is bad! it’s bad yoga! it’s your body telling you something!” However, that wasn’t the experience I had. The emotion felt like a release of sorts that was, while a little uncomfortable to have coming up in a room with all these other people, not bad in any way. I stepped out of the room during the next pose, cried a bit in the hallway, took deep breaths, and headed back in.

What I noticed when I headed back in surprised me at the time, though looking back it does not surprise me at all. I would have thought that I would have had to “push” through the rest of the class. Instead, I felt lighter and completely re-energized, as if I’d just walked in. I finished the class feeling completely motivated and fulfilled.

It has been a journey to learn how to honor my tears. I don’t know what exactly happened in that room today, but something did open up and lift, and I’m incredibly grateful.