Day One

While waiting for my annual physical at the doctor's last week, I perused the riveting assortment of magazines available in the exam room.  Yes, the exam room.  Not even the waiting room! I wonder if the better reads end up there because people carry them along in anticipation of more waiting, or if they simply are the dregs of the selection that don't make it into general public view; akin, I suppose, to bathroom reading material vs coffee table books.  In any event, this is how I stumbled upon a Woman's Day.

I started to read a short piece chronicling a year in the life of a thirty-something, recently divorced, mother of two. The author (the newly single mom) segmented the article by season and titled each according to her overall outlook on life at the time.  These were hokey gems such as 'Spring: Reflection and Rebirth'. The story carried on, maintaining a level of cheese that was beginning to elicit my own running commentary.  I found it especially irritating as she began talking about her discovery of yoga. As a side note, this was an interesting awareness I had of myself, as I have always believed that yoga is something everyone in the world should take part in.  As expected, over the course of a season or two, winter and spring I believe, she found her practice to be more and more healing.  The article was quickly building up to the heavy handed 'yoga as a metaphor for life' conclusion.  At this point, I was feeling very annoyed. I was rolling my eyes, scoffing, and pausing only to think "...how incredibly judgmental of me, maybe I need to work on this..." when she said something I didn't expect. After detailing her journey to accomplishing her first handstand, which occurred rather spontaneously in the park one afternoon, her thought to herself was, "I can support myself."

This is what clicked.

For her, this meant "I can be alone, I can be strong, I can be a single mother, and so on..."  It was the notion of a handstand being a physical act of strength that symbolized her own emotional stability. It is not a ground breaking revelation, I know, in fact I don't think it is a revelation at all but a fundamental principal of practicing yoga.  But as I began to consider this idea of 'support' I came to think of that same act of strength as the act of carrying one's own weight. Not my poundage of course, but my emotional carry-all , my mental load, my never ending To-Do list. These are all things I am not willing to let go of (which may be another issue some day) so it seemed a novel idea to shift my physical perspective in order to support my psychological well-being.

With that, I resolved to make use of my broad shoulders and big hands as a way to hold myself up each day.

And so begins, 29 days of yoga inversions: head and handstands.