Posts Tagged ‘pregnancy and yoga’

slow lane

kim on 1:48 pm March 10th, 2010 / 1 Comment »

In a previous post I suggested a couple of after-swim poses, which I did again yesterday, and which felt great again.

Yesterday, after an all-night bender with the daughter, I was exhausted and honestly interested in splashing around in the pool instead of trying to keep up in the Medium Lane. (That organization, by the way, seems to keep people sane in an East Coast Pool. Otherwise, Grandpa with the snorkel isn’t in the way of Type-A-even-in-water-Guy lapping everybody in .5 seconds).

So it was Grandpa and me. He, with the snorkel and flippers, and me, with the bags under my eyes and a kickboard. This Pitta woman has a hard time slowing it down, and later, in yoga class as my teacher instructed this pose and this pose and this pose, I was, again, in the slow lane.

I am slowing down, of course, because I just had baby, and the first of the problems in a postpartum body is a weak core. Add bouncing baby 10+ hours a day, and you’ve got a tight neck and shoulders, and often, low back pain.

These physical issues, though, sound like a lot of America. So it occurred to me yesterday, as I observed the others — from pool to yoga classroom — speeding past me and creating shapes beyond me, that there are advantages to slowing down and looking around.

Slowing down gives you the opportunity to create a reality with (probably, but not always) more intention, and in the asana (pose) context, it gives you the chance to observe more deeply what what’s really happening in your body. To be sure, John Schumacher was instructing poses deliberately and slowly, and most of the class had few problems manifesting his information. But what worked for me in class, especially, was watching the others make these shapes based on his instructions, and to imagine that information ultimately making its way into my body.

I will find these shapes soon by taking it slowly. You will, too.

i crave them like tastes

kim on 5:24 pm June 10th, 2009 / 1 Comment »

I’ve had to back away from my advanced yoga class, which is hard enough. And today, in the class I now take–still not a prenatal yoga class–I laid on the floor at the end of class, exhausted, and watched as my fellow classmates did pindasana and then its twist.

Ideally, the yoga practitioner, in my case a yogini, observes the fluctuations of the mind as they pass by the observing eye. In this particular case, I now observe and express the craving that came into my mind as I watched these practitioners do a pose that not too long ago, felt safe, comfortable, and challenging for me. I sought poses like this, in fact, because they quieted my mind and challenged the physical body simultaneously.

This experience led me to think: Surely we know now, as a yoga “culture,” what we know intuitively. Yoga is not about mashing the body into a shape for that goal alone, but rather, to stay in the pose and watch the reaction(s) of the mind. In my case, until the end of 2009, I will be watching my mind as I watch others’ poses. I post this reflection in honor of the attachment–ones that surprise me daily as my body swells and the lil’ lady grows–to what used to be “my practice.”

Yoga is indeed about letting go.

Weeping in Shoulderstand

kim on 8:42 pm May 20th, 2009 / Be the first to comment! »

So a big reason I haven’t posted anything since early February is because I could just as easily puked my way through the event, or fallen asleep before it was over. The lil’ lady growing in my belly has had other plans for my creative output; as my main creative output of 2009, she is in fact a drain on all the others.

This morning, in yoga class, I wept after shoulderstand. It was the first time in two months that it hasn’t made my head feel like it’s going to explode or created a warm sensation in my uterus that was probably fine but still scary in the moment because I’d never felt it before.

So I cried. It was more a release of tension than anything else, because this pose, salamba sarvangasana, has been my favorite for many years. The extra 15 pounds I’ve rapidly gained has made this pose, more than the other inversions, challenging and uncomfortable.

It’s a full-circle experience, because when I started yoga in 1994 in New York City, no one used blankets for sarvangasana, and I walked around with a stiff neck for days after doing this pose in class. But it became my favorite solace in asana once I’d worked the alignment out, and I can always stay there longer than in any other pose.

So soon after I got pregnant and the runaway train of weight gain left the station (and the hormones, and the other shifts), I avoided the pose thanks to its new discomforts. And yet, I knew it wasn’t harming me or the lil’ lady, so I convinced myself to try it this way and that way, a shorter time, or piked, and finally, this morning, it changed and became an informative, still challenging, but mentally relaxing pose as it has been for more than a decade.

From a yoga point of view, this brings up several questions: What happens to our practice when something so dramatic shifts it? What do you do when the poses you loved are no longer accessible to you? Or they “feel” different all of a sudden?

I’ve found in this process that “practicing yoga” has had to change. I’ve found that I was far more attached to my performance in asana (poses) than I thought — in fact I’d convinced myself that I wasn’t attached at all! I’ve found that there is a necessary grace to be found in change when you don’t fight it. The observation of all these things, as always, is the work.