Day 3: Coming Back

Yesterday was initially not great, as I kind of said in my Day 2 blog. I woke up hormonal and feeling very pregnant after less than 4 hours of sleep for the third night in a row. It’s my first real week back at gym and everything hurts. I don’t know my body anymore and Little Bean has taken over all my biological systems. My emotions are not my own. My body feels like it’s not my own.

This is particularly unsettling because I am a person who knows myself. Like I really know myself. And since being pregnant, I just…don’t. Normally it’s all good and I can deal, but there was something about yesterday that made it more difficult than usual. Which, for obvious reasons, contributed to my morning practice being not so great.

I had thoughts of “Why do I keep thinking I can do this? Obviously I can’t do this. Look at me. I can’t even just sit up straight with my legs out in front of me because I’m that stiff and inflexible. Become a yoga teacher one day? Am I insane? What was I thinking?” Since yoga is almost more mental than physical, that didn’t exactly help things.

But then, in the afternoon, my new fusion mat unexpectedly arrived from Sentiens. Like a gentle little “shut up, of course you can do this” present. So I got onto the mat (which is glorious and amazing by the way) and I did some restorative yoga, and you know what? It was actually incredible.

I stayed with my breath the whole time and I managed to do all the poses while keeping the flow. I even challenged myself a little on one of the transitions and managed to do that, too. And I stayed. With. My. Breath.

And today, that’s all I want. No pressure of doing a specific video, just…coming back to my breath and my mat and my body. Just that. And I can definitely do that. Because now that I’ve found my breath, even this one time, I want to keep finding it again and again until I don’t have to go looking for it anymore.

-firebird

Day 1: Breathing is a Thing

The moment I stepped onto my yoga mat, I knew I was in the right place. All the warm and fuzzy yoga memories came back and I was so excited to get started!

And then my back started hurting. And then I lost track of my breath (which in yoga is really the most important thing). And I got a little discouraged and frazzled. I’m tired from gym this morning, tired from the day, tired from growing a little human in my body.

I took a deep breath and gently pushed my thoughts into my heels, my toes, the arches of my feet. I made myself come back to my breath and focus on how the soles of my feet felt on the mat, forced my toes to spread apart a little. I kept going.

Then came the first downward facing dog, and my hands got sweaty. I slipped a little and thought about how I wished my new mat was here. I lost my breath again and let my mind back out of its focused state.

Breathe out. Bring it back. I breathed into my arms, my fingertips. Spread them out on the mat and envisaged my pelvis being pulled up towards the ceiling. Felt the muscles in the backs of my legs stretching and lengthening. Felt my breath moving through my body again.

And so it went. I didn’t keep my breath the whole time, I couldn’t do all the poses perfectly, sometimes I had to stop and take a rest, and I was kind of distracted the whole way through. But I showed up. I got onto my mat and I stayed there and tried to breathe and focus and maintain my awareness and grounding. I did my best. So I’m proud of myself and I feel good. Even though there are a million little things that could have gone better, I stayed in the moment and I kept going and kept trying.

Yoga is connection of mind and body. No one says that you’ll get there the first time you practice. Or the twelfth time. Or the hundredth time. But you go, and you show up, and you step onto your mat and breathe. If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that if you do those things, you’re doing yoga – and the mat’s not even required 🙂

Yoga Apps and Plans and Things

As I said in my last post, I don’t have a studio that I can go to, so I have to dive in by myself. I wouldn’t have been crazy about the idea of being a yoga lone ranger if I had never done any yoga before (although it is possible), but I feel like I know enough that I can at least blunder my way through for now.

Luckily for me, online yoga classes and yoga apps are more common than ever! Even just a few years ago it was difficult to find any really nice ones and you had to resort to buying DVDs. Now everything is a lot more accessible.

Due to budget constraints I can’t use apps or websites that cost a lot up front or have a monthly membership fee, so I’ve narrowed it down to two: Pocket Yoga and Down Dog. I’ve used Pocket Yoga before and I like it, but it can get old after a while. I haven’t tried Down Dog but it looks good and the content is free! Apparently Down Dog changes up your yoga sequence each time, so it shouldn’t get stale. There is also Yoga with Adriene, who is an actual sweetheart. I’ve done one or two of her videos in the past.

I think initially I’m going to start with Yoga with Adriene’s 30 Days of Yoga. It’s a good beginner’s video series and I like her teaching style…it feels like chilling with a friend. I’ll be on Instagram doing this so join me if you want (with the hashtag #30daysofyoga, like in her videos). Hope to see you there 🙂

A New Start

Well, here I am. After several years of not doing yoga (and then only doing it for about 2 months daily), I’m coming back to my mat. It’s an old mat made of PVC and it’s slippery as hell because I have unfortunately sweaty hands and feet, so I don’t particularly like it, but it’ll do for now. It doesn’t hurt that I just got treated to a brand new mat from Sentiens, but that will take a week or so to arrive. Anyway, that doesn’t really matter. A mat’s a mat, after all.

So…why am I here, exactly? Well. Firstly, I miss yoga. Those 2 months of daily bikram yoga were kind of spectacular. It’s the time in my life when I’ve felt most connected to my body and to myself, and to God. Those 1 1/2 hour sessions were sweaty and difficult, especially for someone like me – I have zero flexibility and have never been able to touch my toes, even when I was a little kid. Thanks, genes. Anyway, difficult as they were, I really loved it.

And now I’m nearly 20 weeks pregnant and in my mid-20s and severely out of shape and less flexible than ever, and like…I’m not okay with this. You know those moments where you wake up and suddenly go, “Hey wait a second, this is not cool and something needs to change”? I had that a couple of weeks ago when I realized that there are some 85 year-olds in our church who are more in shape than I am. So I went back to gym, and now I’m coming back to yoga.

I won’t be able to go to a studio or any classes. It’s just me and my mat and the floor. My breath. My body. My soul. It’s intimidating, but I know that I can. And more than that, I know that I have to try. So. Here’s to a new start.