(I’m participating in Laura Lynn Brown’s Self-Care summer blogging project at MakesYouMom.com. Please read her post here.)
Today one of my boot camp friends (the exercise class—not the military) showed up at yoga. At the end of class, I asked her how she liked it.
“I have trouble slowing down,” she said, sweat dripping from her face, because Tuesday yoga is only slow at the beginning and the end. The rest of class we kick butt.
When I went to my first yoga class about a year and a half ago, I cried at the end when we settled into the corpse pose. It was the first time in months my mind had stilled. I’d managed to spend the entire hour focusing on the pose or the flow or on the music instead of the increasingly chaotic situation I was living through.
For those first nine months of yoga, I’d leave class only to have an urgent text message on my phone: “Call immediately.” And I did. I had to. Back then the only two hours of peace I had the entire week were my two hours at yoga. Even in church my thoughts were distracted.
Life has calmed since then. There was a hurry I had to live through, and there was no way around it. In an emergency you don’t get time to ponder. You act quickly to save lives.
That’s not the “hurry” most people are talking about. They are talking about the kind associated with the four-letter word “busy.” And yes, we all are.
But now when I need to move quickly from thing to thing to thing, it’s more like the fast flow at Tuesday yoga: plank, child’s pose, scoop, cobra, down dog, repeat. Do it. Do it well. Leave it all on the mat. Then, rest. Rest well.
When the time comes that I need to hurry, I know I can. Thankfully, I no longer live in that zone all the time. But sometimes something happens—maybe my phone rings in a particular way at a particular time, and zoom. I’m gone, baby, gone. Counting the hours till yoga.