Ah, feeling better finally with yoga…

Oh, wow. I am lying in bed (i mo leaba?) after my yoga session and I feel incredible like it is everything I have been needing for so long but I don’t even think to try it until my body tells me it is almost too late. I know that my Irish is probably wrong but I am trying to practice Irish every chance I get and I drove by a place where Liam Neeson filmed a really cool movie like four times today so can you blame me?

I went to yoga and ate at a lot of fast food places, LOL, because I was hungry and nowhere was open where I could get real food. So I had hash browns at Burger King and then me resbalé hacia Starbucks where I asked for an iced chai latte and it was so cold this morning the girl at the window thought I asked for it hot. Then I got the goddess caprese melt at Panera after yoga and that indeed was pretty delicious. I almost didn’t ask for it vegetarian because I didn’t know I needed to specify but he asked me if I wanted chicken on it, thankfully, and I said, make it vegetarian.

So I got to yoga class and it was just like the old days except somehow despite how out of shape I am much less of a cardio workout and less of an endurance challenge than it was last time but the best thing I could possibly do for my flexibility, and certainly one of the very best things I can do for my pain levels, my state of mind, and probably my likelihood of getting a good night’s sleep. I was maybe the only person in the class who totally accepted exactly what I could do today without wanting to change or force it and that is probably because I can do way more than I had hopes for and I know the consequences of not taking it gently. When you take it gently, you heal, and you can either learn the hard way or the easy way. Maybe this is the shift in my life these days: I just suddenly gave up wanting to learn the hard way.

I feel like I inhabit a new body right now. Other kinds of not-hot yoga probably would not leave me feeling refreshed like this or in as little pain as I feel now which is none. I do not trust not-hot yoga classes to leave me with less pain at the end but these classes always miraculously do and you might think they woudn’t because it is still moving my body and movement hurts but the difference is this is not athletics but yoga which means there is never a need to force myself but to accept my body for exactly what it can do today or at least that is what Sam says… and also there is some kind of magic in the secret recipe because taking walks, supposed to be good for you, these days it hurts when I walk too much. Every exercise hurts. Except this, which makes it immediately better.

He also says if you go gently with yourself, you heal quickly, and if you don’t you could get injured even more. I love the cracking I feel in my hody durimg and after yoga, when it happens, because it is the good kind of cracking, that means you are one notch more flexible, not the scary kind  that I feel in my knee when I extend it from a bent position, but actually I feel like even this  one class did something for it because my knee hasn’t cracked once since class and I bent and extended my legs many times in class and a little bit since but it never happened!

No, I could not think of any other thing to heal the malaise I feel in my body, but by some miracle there is at least this one thing that works for me and am glad I remembered it or I would probably honestly end up disabled really soon, and unable to explain to anyone how miserable I was and that life didn’t need to be that way, and just sad. I didn’t want to dwell on it and I figured massage would keep me together long enough but I did not think I could ever really be in shape again and now I am remembering my body can do amazing things and this  yoga is a lot of what allows a lot of those miracles to happen.

The possibility of falling apart is scary but it is amazing how little it takes to change things if you know what to do. If it were not for hot yoga I would probably feel pretty dismal about my chances of survival right now. Any kind of exercise just hurts… except hot yoga… and honestly I did not expect it to be anywhere near so beneficial especially after just one class but now that I am very relieved about how much I got out of it and how much I know it will benefit me if I keep going, I have to say I was in a way really scared. I didn’t know what was happening to my body or how to make it stop falling apart and how to feel less pain so I actually wanted to exercise and feel good about movement and nothing else did the trick. Regular temperature yoga, I can’t ever remember it amazing me with how pain free I felt afterwards. If anything just thinking of doing it makes me hurt more, and thay thought makes me wonder if it is some kind of Chinese medicine thing, perhaps, where my body needs to do something, these amazing stretches for the parts of my body that need them most, for example, in a hot temperature… I have no idea why temperature would make all the difference and I am not fond of the heat except for its association with a class that makes me feel good after I experience that heat and conas atá mé, you may ask, well, let me see, Tá mé ag fannacht sa chistin. Sometimes any kind of exercise hurts so you think exercise is not the thing that can make you feel better but it actually is!  To this anyway my body just says yes.

I thought at this point even hot yoga wasn’t going to get my body what it needs again, but after just one class, my body is so relaxed, and pain free, and telling me this is exactly what it needs… wondering if certain things that have felt unchangeable for a really lomg time can finally really change. Flexibility makes all the difference!