It hit me somewhere around the time I was half-heartedly kicking my right foot up toward a handstand in the middle of the room. Something had radically changed in my life.
Part of it was that I wasn’t trying very hard. I had resigned myself to never, ever having the courage to attempt a handstand without a wall very close by. And while many years of thinking I might one day have such courage had not brought me much closer to it, I had at least at one point in my life been willing to challenge myself.
My response to challenging asanas these days is far more subdued than it was before, say, Jake was born. In the pre-Jake era, yoga class was a time of supreme focus, a serious matter even when I was laughing, a place to challenge my mind as much as my body. The days I felt “off” were few enough that I could let them be lessons; on those rare occasions when I had to admit that I really, truly did not have the strength to make it into headstand at the end of class I serenely told myself to honor my limitations.
Now it’s the rare yoga class when I don’t guiltily give a mental shrug and tell myself that, gee, I have to honor those pesky limitations. Even if what’s really limiting me not having the energy to try.
The Challenge of Finding the Energy
What I think was creeping its way into my mind during class yesterday was that I will never again have the yoga practice I once did. As I sheepishly drag my mat over to a wall for nearly every inversion (upside down pose), I feel both ashamed (even though I know I shouldn’t be) and resigned to be relegated to the part of the class that is just not, you know, the strongest.
When I returned in earnest to my yoga practice last December, I was able to be cheerful about my position. I had, I eagerly explained to all my new teachers, given birth just a year before and was just finding my practice again. And, sure enough, my body got stronger and more flexible — and did it pretty darned quickly. Sometimes, I even thought I might one day be as strong and as flexible as I was when I had the time to spend two hours nearly every day in a sweaty yoga practice that squeezed every last ounce of energy out of me.
But now I see that it’s the rare class when I feel that good. Most of the time I’m just not focused enough to progress in the way to which I’m accustomed. I don’t want to put in the extra oomph it takes to get that back leg really flying in eka pada koundiyanasana. I don’t really pay much attention to my breathing. And, biggest of all, I don’t bother to chase thoughts of Jake out of my mind. “My heart is opening,” I tell myself laconically. “So of course I think of him.” Never mind that in failing to quiet my mind and focus on my breathing I’m turning my practice into one big session of aerobics — after all, I could use some postpartum toning.
The bottom line is that my yoga practice, dear as it is to me, just doesn’t hold the same place in my life that it did before I became a mother.
Which, really, is my point, since I don’t exactly expect any of you to shed a tear for my diminished ability to perform ridiculous, gravity-defying arm balances. What I do think is worth sharing is the way our energy gets dispersed when we are mothers. How whatever it is that was central to us before we had children necessarily has to take a place in the wings.
The thing is, if yoga has lost its place on my center stage, what does that mean for me? It was once the thing that defined me — and, in many ways still does. If yoga is what makes me feel most complete, have I sacrificed completeness for motherhood?
Life Is Change
There isn’t a one of us who hasn’t remarked, on some particularly satisfying day when everything felt right, under control, happy, “I wish things would never change.”
Of course, they did.
Change is a constant. The Universe is made up of energy, and energy is movement. Movement begets change. You can’t stand still, no matter how much you might think you want to. And, chances are, you really don’t or you’d still be wearing that bad perm from the early ’90’s. (“Nice ‘fro,” a friend of mine commented a little while back when I proudly showed him the picture of me in a “Women at Columbia Law School” pamphlet I had unearthed.)
Thinking we can make things stand still — and make them do so right where we want them — is a manifestation of the belief that we can control the world around us. Only if you could stop the seasons, the lives of your co-workers, and, yes, your own body aging, could you hope to keep things right where they are right at that moment that suits you.
The more we accept the truth that we have no control, that things are constantly changing around us, the more apt we are to tap into the great things that change will bring us. Logically, our minds will tell us to cling to what we have in this moment rather than gamble that if we let it go something even better will come our way. But logic doesn’t make it so.
For me and my yoga, this truth is pretty hard to deny. My body, sadly, oh so sadly, is past forty. Thanks to yoga, it’s a young past-forty. But it is not, as it once was, a yoga-fortified pre-forty. Much less a yoga fortified pre-forty that had never had its rectus abdominus split apart by a small human being carried in a basketball-sized uterus. Don’t even get me started on the permanent changes wrought by a vacuum-assisted delivery.
And it’s not only my body that’s changed. Quite obviously, my circumstance have, in the biggest way possible. “Your whole life is going to change,” people told me ominously when I was pregnant.
Well, duh. That’s why I was having a child. Because I wanted a big change.
But what’s hard to fathom is that even the parts of life that are central to who you are change after you have a child. There isn’t the space for them to be central, but as they shift to the side, so does a piece of yourself. And it seems like you will never be yourself again because you will never have the time and the energy to do what made you feel so good about yourself before you had a kid.
Here’s where the lesson of change comes in. Acceptance. I need to accept that, yes, my life has changed, and that means I have changed too. It means accepting that I will never be the person I was when my asana practice was a huge part of my daily life. And it means accepting that without that asana practice — and with the normal passage of time — I will indeed enter the dreaded middle-age, when I finally have to admit — for real this time — that I’m not the one turning the cute young guys’ heads when I walk down the street in a short skirt. If, indeed, I have the courage to leave the house in one.
But this change would have happened even if I had never had Jake. I’m fooling myself if I think he’s the only reason I’m no longer the crazy astanga woman with the relaxed take on life and the killer triceps. And if I’m doomed to droopy upper arms anyhow, aren’t I lucky to have Jake to distract me from them?
A Pose of Transformation — Bhujangasana (Cobra Pose)
It’s sort of disingenuous of me to suggest that there is one asana that brings about transformation. It’s the asana practice that does the trick. Or, more broadly, a yoga practice, that daily attempt to be conscious, to let go, to open our hearts. All of this is part of the process of change.
But bhujangasana feels like blossoming to me. I focus on lengthening my spine and my heart opens. I press my feet into the floor and my shoulders release their tension. One small change in one part of the pose begets positive, beautiful change in another part. And that’s a lovely way to embrace how change happens.