What I have now, probably for the first time ever in my life, is enough.
I am not complacent about it.
I recognize that relationships are active and therefore require tending. I know that nothing about the strata of society I occupy is immune to disaster.
But in societal terms I have come to recognize as my norm, what I have is plenty. There isn’t a single thing or experience I lack. My emotional well brims and is replenished continually.
Perhaps this is what has been nagging at me of late.
My conscious mind – conditioned as it has been by years of North America consumer driven life-style and middle-class faux career ambition – feels I am not working hard enough to be … what? I don’t know. My inner-self has been quite weepy about it in a pushed around little girl sort of way.
She knows we have enough. Time to acknowledge it and let a few things go.
I have dreams. Modest and unassuming. But they are not deal-breakers for me and really never were.
I have enough. It’s almost verboten to say that out loud as many people fear it invites the active mocking of the fates. That’s flatly ridiculous. Nothing is permanent and fate has nothing to do with that anyway.
Yoga training typically culminates on a late Sunday afternoon with the Sutras. We’ve hit chapter two, which is the meat of the mental practice – because yoga is all about reaching the interior whether it be the muscles and organs or the thoughts and emotions.
We spent a great deal of time on teaching beginners, so Patanjali got shorted. Thirty-five minutes is inadequate to the task of fleshing tapas.
Tapas?
Tapas is all about the pain and the letting it go. Emphasis on “letting it go”.
Patanjali insists that we are only anchored to the physical world through the pesky inconvenience of having bodies. Bodies that are not us. The true “me” of me is not my body at all. Therefore, all experience happens to the body and what “I” should be doing is experiencing, acknowledging and then letting it go.
Everything. Good, bad, meh and bloody awful. Feel it. Know it. Wave goodbye.
“Nothing is permanent,” Cat, our instructor, pointed out.
True. It’s our attachment to the idea that good things should have no end and bad things are unfair (I’m overly simplifying) that leads us into the mud and mires us there.
I just listened.
Not because I have no thoughts or concrete experiences to share, but because I know that this is one of those deceptively simple ideas that become nightmarishly difficult when reality envelopes a person.
“Our reactions are choices,” another woman chimed in.
Essentially, we can shape our lives through letting go or just acknowledging that all experiences are finite.
And here the conversation veered into the anecdotal experiences that, I think, aren’t helpful.
A fellow student was in a serious accident and was told by her doctors that she would never regain the use of her arm. She told us that had she listened to the doctors, she would indeed have no function, but she chose to ignore them and rehabbed herself to the point where she is now able to use her arm – not 100% – but no one could tell by simply looking at her that she has difficulties.
I hate these analogies. They are exceptions and they lead others to believe that we are all destined to be exceptions when we aren’t.
We are the rule. Sometimes reality is what it is. No exceptions.
This doesn’t preclude trying to be an exception but it does mean that more often than not, one will have to accept that they are the rule and then – let it go.
“We can change our reality,” Cat said.
But we can’t. Reality is. Sometimes all we can choose is our reactions and how to live within the reality. There are some realities that can’t be let go. They can only be managed.
Managed isn’t the best term, I’ll admit, but there are experiences that stick even though we have let them go.
Will is dead. I have a dead first husband. Not much I can do with that. Very little to work with. Certainly can’t change it.
But I can acknowledge it and let it go, knowing that its effect on me is permanent and that “letting go” might have to be revisited periodically throughout my life.
Same holds true for my classmate. If she had not been able to regain the use of her arm, she would still have had to let the experience go and live within the parameters of her altered reality.
I don’t know if Patanjali addresses this later on, but letting go is a process and it can take years or a lifetime. The choice – I believe – is the attempt to let go in the first place or to cling and not bother.
With the Jillian Michaels post behind me and things settling back to a boring ho-hum around here, I thought I’d share a link to a board forum where my piece on Michaels was shared.
Well, not shared so much as lifted in its entirety via cut and paste though I appreciated the link back to my blog. That was nice of whoever scraped me*.
The poster actually liked my article until the last line, which inspired her to physical violence which she admits probably made my point, but it was the first few commenters who pegged me for a Carol Brady**.
What they seized on was a throw away line I just put in to see if anyone would notice and they did, but they didn’t find it funny.
I should just give up on the humor thing.
Any time you stretch the lower half of your body to accommodate a small person and then squeeze it out of an opening that normally only just manages to accommodate a … tampon … for example, it’s going to change things.
Some of the women seemed to think that I was referencing vaginal intercourse and the fact that things can get a little loosey goosey in the old vagina after a natural birth. Natural birth being a relative term that in reality means pretty much anything in terms of the circumstances under which babies emerge from the womb.
Okay, so they caught me on that one. I was in fact referring to what it reads like I am referring to in a way too cute to be tolerated from a feminist anyway.
However, I did not mean to imply that I thought women should forgo child-bearing to keep their “love-holes” tight. There is a lot of muscle in the pelvic floor. Loose or tight is more a matter of a woman’s fitness level than the number of children she’s born. Kegels, ladies. And yoga. But not for your partner, for you. A weak pelvic floor means that all manner of internal organs are going to start sagging and dropping out your opening when the aging process – aided by gravity – kicks it into high gear.
Here’s my favorite comment and a fave of others too judging from how many of them cut/pasted it into their own replies (or it was their reply),
I don’t think I agree with a single thing this blogger is writing especially that pregnancy is a negative for a woman’s body. Um, ever heard of aging? Your body is going to change over time, period. Aging serves no purpose but pregnancy brings a life into this world.
As for being “less tight” – are we really as women going to allow a man’s pleasure to determine whether we have a baby? Is that feminism? Men should just DEAL. It’s not as if their stamina and ability to get it up doesn’t change over time…what’s their excuse?
To address the aging, I won’t. I don’t think the OP had any idea of how old I really am. This forum is at The Knot, which is a bridal site, but is in their Nest forum, young marrieds mostly. I imagine there are middle-aged brides there but the board read young to me.
Age is a given. Sag is a given. No one escapes.
Pregnancy is a choice. Um, in the West, it is primarily a choice. Hmmm, among the privileged it is a choice. Probably.
It’s a choice with a roulette element because going in, one has no idea how the hormones and gestating are going to affect one physically or emotionally. Some people simply don’t want to go there – male as well as female. It will change you. No shame, nor should there be, in declining, and points should be given for being honest about your doubts and reasons.
Here’s one that gave me a giggle or two:
XXXXX said it far better than I could. I really disliked this article. Perhaps that’s because I haven’t yet had and really want kids, and have just now gotten comfortable with my body, so I’d like to keep that. But I think it is also the exaggeration of the difficulties of pregnancy and raising infants: yes, sleeplessness impedes workouts, but that impossible phase passes in a couple of months. Law school sometimes impeded workouts, too, but I didn’t drop out just because finals would make me skip the gym.
And re: the “tightness” issue, I imagine we were all tightest in our teens and early twenties. I’ll speak only for myself in saying that I don’t think that’s exactly the best sex ever. Experience counts a lot more than a few millimeters in diameter.
Soo boo to this article! Not slamming the op in that. I love to read things I can disagree with. 🙂
I remember being childlessly naive. She brings it all back. Sigh.
We all think that we will have the easy pregnancy. Gain ten pounds and jog right up to the hospital door. Our baby will not be discolored, have a misshapen head or monkey hair. And she’ll sleep through the night in no time at all.
Sure. Taking care of a newborn is not equivalent in any way to going to law school. If you fall asleep over a textbook, you won’t suffocate it, and sleeplessness during finals is finite – a kid will be keeping you up nights for the rest of your life.
Life has its own ideas, just as babies do. When Dee was two weeks old her father was already losing his mind due to his yet to be diagnosed terminal illness. Needless to say, my fantasies about getting back into shape were just that. Good intentions sometimes play out and just as often, they come to nothing.
Like the non-hating on me – the “op” in her last sentence. Unexpected sweetness of spirit on the Internet should be applauded loudly whenever it is chanced upon.
Loved this one too:
As far as tightness, that doesn’t just go to a man’s pleasure.
Sing it, Sista!
I am an inconsistent warrior in the feminist trenches at best. That I will admit to, but I don’t think taking the Jillian haters to task or pointing out that the female gender is more divided than the male makes me Phyllis Schlafly.
Let me leave you with a classic episode of Maude – a make believe woman who was more feminist than I am.
*That comes off as ungrateful, I know, but cut/pasting excerpts is okay while plastering someone else’s post on your space isn’t kosher. Even on message boards, it’s a dicey practice.
**Let’s face it, even with the pants suits and the shag hair cut, she was so not a bra-burner.
anniegirl1138 