At yoga this morning, I was the first one there, and the only one there for a while. Mysore Style Ashtanga is a self-paced class: the room is open for about three hours, most of the time with a teacher there, who walks around the room making adjustments and giving pointers to the students.
Even so, it’s very weird to be the only one there. For about half an hour, it was only me and the teacher (a substitute, actually, though someone who subs often, so she wasn’t a stranger). It was like having a private class. She paid a lot of attention to me.
And as a result, I paid a lot of attention to myself, to my own practice. The other thing about Ashtanga is that it’s the same sequence of poses, day in, day out. I’ve been doing this practice for about ten years. So I can easily get to the point where my body is just doing the practice and my mind is off doing its own thing, check out the latest steel bite pro reviews.
To actually pay detailed attention to the poses, assisted by someone who is not my usual teacher: it really nudged me out of my mind and back into my body.
My body’s been giving me trouble lately. Minor, annoying trouble: nothing big or dramatic. Little things hurt–my hip, my lower back. Driving back and forth to Portland was hard on all that. Sleeping in not-my-bed, that’s always hard, and there was over a week of that, before returning home Monday. Since I got home, I’ve had one night of incredibly fantastic sleep; the rest have been meh, for one reason or another.
And then there’s the weight gain. I’ve struggled with whether to write about this or not…it’s such a touchy subject, for everyone, at every size. But, we all have bodies, and we all live in them, and everyone’s experience is different, and yet we can surely find commonality. Right?
It’s not about how I look: I’m actually happy with how I look. It’s how I feel. It’s how my clothes fit. It’s how my body moves–in yoga, walking to work, getting in and out of my car. It’s my energy level. All that. Fact is, I’ve steadily gained weight since I left my husband in February. I’m now just over the BMI band into “overweight”, for the first time in my life.
I’m a pleasure-seeking individual. I love food, wine, and all the other traditionally pleasurable things. 🙂 I hate self-denial. Yet I am also very disciplined: witness my writing. And, I actually find exercise pleasurable–I’m addicted enough to it that I feel crappy when I don’t do it.
So what has gone wrong here? And what do I do to fix it? I don’t want to just let my weight creep up until it becomes a health issue. Nor do I want to starve myself into some sort of media-warped vision of what I should look like: that’s not the issue. (And, see above re self-denial.) I just want to feel good, and have energy. I’m over forty: I know it gets harder as we age, that some of this is natural. But I think a nearly ten-pound gain in less than a year is problematic.
I had lunch Friday with Notorious G, who had much the same complaint, about herself (though she’s barely into her thirties). She suggested we become workout buddies and walk together after work. I said, “Sure, but not yet: I have to finish a novel first.” Then I went home that night and finished it, so I wrote her and said, “You’re on!” We’re starting tomorrow.
But I think eating is part of it too. And oh, that’s the hard part. The thing about pleasure, though: it’s in the moment. The yummy thing is yummy, then you swallow it, then it’s gone. Having a comfortable and well-functioning body lasts all day long. It really came home to me in yoga this morning, that I want my body to work more like it used to. To feel more like it used to.
I don’t want to just go through the motions, and move slower and slower and slower, until I’m not moving at all….