July 5, 2012

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  I haven’t been writing because I have been finding myself exhausting. I think so much and sometimes I would like to turn it off. Also, I haven’t been writing because I can’t usually sit for longer than 5 minutes at a time, and it takes longer than that to write a blog post. 

  My life recently has revolved around managing pain. My back is much better than it was when I first injured it, but it isn’t really normal. I stretch a lot. I do a lot of muscle strengthening exercises. I am determined to get good at the plank. I am figuring out what I need to do to make this something I can live with. It’s working – slowly. I’m getting there, though the sitting thing remains kind of a problem.

  I’m a little bit annoyed and a lot upset, because I feel like I’m too young for this. But complaining won’t do much. And I am beginning to suspect that a byproduct of making this whole thing manageable is going to be abs of steel and… that’s an upside.

  Tonight I went to yoga. I am only ever driven to yoga by unbearable physical pain. I’ve used it at various points throughout my dancing life to help deal with injuries, and did it for a while in university when too much running made my hips and knees a scary mess. I like it enough, I suppose, but I’ve never really been into it for more than utilitarian purposes. 

  This time I went to a hot yoga studio. I prefer hot yoga to regular yoga, mostly because the heat makes stretching a much less uncomfortable experience. I tried a kind of yoga called yin, which to the best of my knowledge is like if you took yoga – an already slow sport – and dialed back the speed a few more notches. You hold every pose for about four minutes, and the idea is not to engage your muscles so much as it is to stretch the connective tissue around your joints? Or so my alanis-morissette-quoting-gong-ringing yoga instructor explained this evening.

  It happened to be the only available class that fit my schedule, but I liked it. You pretty much spend the entire time on the ground – no standing poses – and although it might sound boring, it was almost addictively challenging. Part of the thing is that you can’t move, except to breathe. In each pose, you find a position that is sort of at the edge of comfort – you aren’t in pain, but you’re definitely stretching something – and then you stay there. For four minutes. In silence (except for the Alanis quotes). You don’t itch anything and you don’t wipe the sweat that’s dripping down your face and you don’t shift around when it gets too hard or you get bored sitting in silence. It felt like as much of a mental exercise as it did a physical one. 

  And as the minutes crept by and as my sweaty face pressed against my sweaty knee and as I listened to nothing except for the sound of my own breathing, I could feel myself lengthen without any real effort on my part, except for waiting long enough for gravity to do the work for me. It was a very satisfying thing. 

  When I left the class my back was the most pain-free it’s been in weeks, and I was so busy thinking about not moving that I hadn’t thought about much of anything else, which was a welcome change. I will go again, I think.

  This experience – the back thing – is teaching me a different kind of discipline. I have never really known how to treat my body well. Exercise, for me, was never a health thing. When I danced, exercise was just a part of an activity I loved, and when I exercised outside of dance it was not so much about what would make me healthier as it was what would make me thinner, and those are not the same. I wasn’t sure that I could find a middle ground, but this seems to be forcing me into it. It’s good. I have no choice but to listen to this pain, even though it’s inconvenient and I don’t want to and I hate that it exists, and between the anger and the enormous discomfort, I am very motivated. It’s a good thing, even though it might not sound like it. Frustration is an excellent teacher. 

   

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  • 2:03 am
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