LINING UP

The last week was a humdinger, I wrote in my journaling email, one of our assignments in teacher training.  It was.  H was teething his molars, he woke up every two hours and was inconsolable most nights.  If I learned anything from the newborn era, it’s that I do not function well without sleep!  I cry, I cannot think, everything is hard!  I arrived to training on Thursday in a daze to discover we were going over anatomy.  Not only did I not have my book, I had failed to do the reading.  I searched for it furiously the next day.  It was gone.

And my lip allergy came back with a vengeance.  I definitely believe lack of sleep and stress activates it.  My lips burned and itched without relief.  I had to dig out the steroid ointment I had been prescribed almost a year ago.  H  slept till 1pm on Saturday night.  I woke up feeling like I could start my day right then, that’s how rested I felt after just 5 hours of sleep.

Before this sleep we meditated for a half hour that morning.  My thoughts weren’t all of the to-do lists type  of thoughts like I usually struggle with.  It was all about beating myself up.  I went into childs pose after it was over and our teacher announced we had 40 minutes until we started back up.  The fact that I had not accounted for this free time, as in I didn’t know what to-do task to finish felt maddening.  I was tired and wound up way to tight. The tears were right there, but I held them back.

This dude in rehab years ago used to say, don’t be a vic.  His little slang word for victim.  I was struggling, I knew I would come out of it eventually, I knew in the long run my brain would work and I would sleep eventually.  But in the meantime..?  Was it okay to say and admit that I was struggling?  Someone shared last night about the same thing with completely different circumstances.  If I had not just gone through it, I wonder if I would have felt that she shared too long, or without  any solution?  Being a mom in sobriety has given me a whole new perspective on judging others.  You don’t know until you know.

Oh Sunday, day after sleep, how much I loved you (until around 4, let’s be honest, I was ready to go home).  We worked on inversions, alignment, and verbal cues.  I did manage to remember one thing from anatomy, look at what’s going on beneath the skin.  I brought up some knee pain, our teacher had me stand in tadasana and reworked my posture from the ground up.   Later we were practicing cues and I was in a seated pose.  I had always thought my bad posture was in my upper back.  Again my teacher cued me to straighten at my waist.  Posture solved.  In practice I am constantly trying to line everything up  according to what I just learned about my body, my bones.  The first thing to look at when teaching someone how to do a pose?  Alignment.  I could easily benefit from more training after this one.  We are just scraping the surface here.

On Monday during meditation at home, I did allow myself to cry and release all the angst from the former week.  We did a lot of hip work in class, too.  I’ve yet to really explore the correlation between emotions and hips, but I know I’ve heard for years that they are connected.

Pictures from the last weekend during training at Three Sisters Yoga, on my to-do list and crossed off:

My days off have been great.  I’ve been resting and focusing upon H and homework.  The last week has taught me to let go more.  To judge others and myself a little less.  To be more balanced.  To be lined up.