I did an hour of yin yoga over the weekend.
If you’re not familiar, yin yoga is a slower yoga, one in which you put your body into what are considered restorative poses. Then, you just stay there…
Because it’s not the power yoga that we tend to associate with the practice – there are no balancing poses, no contortions, not a Warrior I, II, or III in sight – my brain sometimes codes it as cop-out yoga, a thing to do when I really just want to relax.
Except, that its rigor is of a sneaky variety, a countercultural variety.
To just stay there…
…and stay there…
…past when your mind says, “Seriously, we’re just going to stay here?”
…past when your muscles are like, “Yeah, okay, got the gist. We can move on now.”
You stay until you feel what you didn’t even know was tight in your body, what you didn’t even know was resisting relaxation, until you feel that start to melt toward the earth.
Though I’d had pretty regular yoga practices here and there in the past, this latest jag – four years of almost-daily practice and counting – was kicked off at the beginning of the pandemic lockdown when a friend invited me to join her in at 30-day challenge.
And then we did the next one.
And the one after that.
Until we got bored with that YouTube teacher’s style and started branching out to other YouTubers, to classes, and even one retreat that we took together last summer, a year and a month ago, a retreat that we hated except for the green-winged bugs that clustered on the outside of our cabin window, evoking unexpected amounts of laughter while we spent hours reminiscing and laughing, talking smack about the retreat and about cancer, which had taken her hair just days before, which would take her life not a year after.
Yoga was a thing we could talk about when we didn’t want to talk about treatments, didn’t want to think about upcoming scans. It was a thing that reminded her of her own strength until it highlighted for her her growing weakness. Only of body, though; she never lost her strength of mind.
Now, I do my almost-daily practice on her bright pink mat, purchased during one of those first 30-day challenges, a few bucks of which went to breast cancer-related charities. She bought me a purple one from the same company, I don’t recall for what charity, only that Ella tore a chunk out of the side and then, just when I thought she was over that fixation, tore out more, making the mat unusable.
That was the first of the cancer gifts. That is: She started giving me gifts that were a little bigger, a little more frequent than had been our habit in the decades prior to her diagnosis. I didn’t need or want to be thanked – verbally or through gifts – for showing up. I was where I wanted to be.
She, though, needed a sense of reciprocity and so I practiced saying, simply, thank you.
In the last few years, my feet have become tender which sometimes makes yoga tricky, a little extra painful.
Particularly painful are toe squats. They look innocuous enough: You just sit on your shins with your toes tucked under and spread out. It’s almost impossible for me to sit still in this pose. I rock forward to relieve the pain; I stand up on my knees to reduce the pressure.
And then I sit back again, for as long as I can, because I’ve discovered that when I do these horrible, painful stretches, my feet feel a whole lot better for a time.
All of this is about yoga but only in so much as yoga is about life with the movement – asana – as only one part of a complex whole.
Slowing down…
Leaning into community…
Doing the hard, brief thing for the deeper nurturing…
Yoga reminds me of these things, connects me to these things, but they are only as meaningful as my ability to take them off the mat.
And you, friend, how do you regularly remind yourself of what’s important to you in this brief, beautiful life you’re living?
