You may notice that there has been no blog entries for a week or so. Due to the difficulty of writing with an infant in the home combined with a strong hormonal flux, I have stayed away from publishing my blog entries. I did write, but I chose to keep them as a draft. For now anyways. In spite of it all, I practiced yoga every morning. On my familiar mat. At my studio or at my home and I am better for it. My hormonal rush has retreated and I feel like a normal human being again.

This is yesterday's entry:

I have tried to write about other things for this blog this past week, but at the end of each blog entry, I chose not to post the entries because they felt false. I wanted to sugar coat them so that each blog entry would be sweet and palatable but in the end this wasn't me. This morning I write what feels like a combination of truth with some niceness to make it palatable:

Each morning, the world is still dark outside when I begin my yoga practice, when I sit down on my mat with the word "beloved" written at my feet. The shades are drawn up and the glow of the street lights are my visual backdrop. The world is just waking up outside. Inside my studio, the fan of the heater hums and blows it gentle heat onto my yoga mat, assuring me that the room will soon be warm. A soft flute is playing on my ipod. There are no other sounds except for the familiary of my own yogic breathing.

As I connect with the texture and depth of my ujaii breath and begin to move slowly into my warm-ups, I become aware of a familiar uneasiness. I feel as if I am stepping into a dark cellar. One where I have been before-where the monster lives. In the pit of my belly, I sense a vague nagging and self-loathing feeling welling up inside of me. I hear the voices of shame telling me that I am not good enough. In my yoga practice, as I perform the slower and longer holdings of my warm-ups, these voices get extremely loud. They tell me the familiar- my body is fat and I am ugly and and I should be thinner and prettier. They tell me that the studio I am practicing in is going to fail. It should be better. The studio is going to fail all because of me. I never do anything right. I never do enough. These ugly thoughts don't seem to go away unless I begin to practice my yoga strong and hard. Sun Salutations A's and B's with lions. Deep lunges burning my thighs coupled with handstands and wheels. Sweat needs to be dripping off my body onto my mat. I need to feel spent in every muscle in my body and then the thoughts retreat, at least for the moment.


Do these feelings of inadequacy really retreat? No of course not. They show up again and again and during my day, I manage to find ways to ignore or numb them. Sometimes it is with food, sometimes it is with more self blame. Sometimes, it is with blaming others for my uncomfortable feelings. It wasn't that long ago that I used to believe that someone was going to come and rescue me. If my saviour didn't show up then I would go into my "if only" cycle. If only my house was completely organized and clean, if only I get my body at the perfect weight, if only I got every bit of my life in perfect financial order, if only, if only, of only. Sometimes, I choose not to numb these feelings at all and ride them like a wave. The intensity eventually subsides but they do come back. They come back to say, "Here I am, I am the ugliness, I am the dark sister, the monster that resides deep inside. Now deal with me."


At some point during my childhood, I believe I learned to separate myself from emotional and physical needs. I do not think I am alone on this and I feel that society expects girls and women to put her needs second especially if it will make someone else uncomfortable. The unfortunate result of this is that I do not always recognize what I am feeling and what I need. Yoga can be challenging for me because it brings me face-to-face with my emotions-not always an easy place to be. Lying still on my yoga mat with no place to go, nothing to achieve, and no one to impress, there's nothing to stop my emotions, sensations, and feelings from coming to the surface. Sometimes this can be exhilerating and sometimes this can be frightening.

The connections between thoughts, feelings and language are formed at an early age. It is during this time that a child learns to think about right and wrong and also to feel these concepts in her body. Healthy connections between thoughts, feeling, language and the physical body are essential for a child to be able to express her thoughts and feelings out loud-and also to know which thoughts and feelings support her fully and which don't.

Our yoga mats offer us a safe place to explore our feelings. This starts on a physical level with the body. Today I stayed in a deep Warrior 1 for over ten breaths. As always, when I connect with the breath and physicality of the pose, I learn that I can stay in the pose and be fine-even when it feels uncomfortable, even when I want to bail or run away. I relearn each time that I don't have to act on every impulse, that I can be patient and that I can trust my body to tell me what it needs.

The body is the first place in which we feel emotions. Fear is embodied as a sinking sensation in the solar plexus, a stomachache, sweaty palms, or a racing heart. Anger may be accompanied by clenced fists, overall muscle tension, and a red face, or a scowl. The key to a lifetime of emotional and physical health is being able to name the emotion and, evetually, the event or thought that prompted that emotion in the first place.

The emotion needs to be validated and felt fully. It will then move through the body spontaneously once its message is heeded. Very often, once the emotion is named and vaildated, a spontaneous solution to the problem or situation will arise.

This week I went into some of my dark places. Familiar, ugly, and filled with shame. This week I practiced my yoga anyways. I feel as if the darkness has moved on and out. I understand that some of this is a cycle. I have confronted what has been building up inside of me over the past month. I have felt it, I have let it live and let it release. I feel new today. Alive, sexy, creative, and energized. Thank you yoga for letting me stay in the process, for allowing me to give attention to the shadow side of me. Thank you yoga for letting me be merciful to my dark sister.