Love and Hate

Not feeling strong, but open, and unarmored

I rang in the New Year in a new way this year -- practicing yoga -- and not just any yoga, yoga led by one of my favorite teachers and accompanied by live musicians. The songs they sang that I was familiar with I have blogged about previously -- powerful, beautiful songs like Purple Rain and Hallelujah -- the latter brought out the cleansing tears.

People often ask me why I call yoga a "practice", and my teacher spoke about this last night. It made me think of an article I read in the New Yorker, in which the author notes that the word practice is meant to signal an ongoing, daily ritual in which one gains incremental expertise and wisdom over time. This is as good an explanation as I can imagine, and it's exactly why it's a practice. I just don't think that's the way a lot of people in the West think about it.

I started practicing Ashtanga yoga in earnest after the New Englander left. It was something I could pour myself into, and man, did I ever need something. Like a lot of the pain that his departure catalyzed, this need to devote myself to something ended up teaching me things I never could have learned if the depth of my need hadn't been so great.

Practicing Ashtanga allows me to be committed to showing up for myself every day. It keeps my body strong and healthy -- well, mostly healthy -- I'm having more struggles than normal in that category at the moment -- and it keeps my emotions right-sized. I don't overreact to things because of underlying and often old emotion when I've practiced because by showing up on my mat every day, I am dealing with the underlying emotion on a daily basis. Not stuffing it or numbing it so that it comes out in a outburst.

So today, despite feeling under the weather, I'm about to get up and practice Ashtanga. Inviting whatever is hampering my immune system to make itself known. Letting myself feel it. Just as I did in that beautiful class last night.

I heard this song for the first time on my way home from yoga last night (or early this morning):

Standing now
Calling all the people here to see the show
Calling for my demons now to let me go
I need something, give me something wonderful

I believe
She won't take me somewhere I'm not supposed to be
You can't steal the things that god has given me
No more pain and no more shame and misery

You can't take me down
You can't break me down
You can't take me down

You can't take me down
You can't break me down
You can't take me down

Love and hate
How much more are we supposed to tolerate
Can't you see there's more to me than my mistakes
Sometimes I get this feeling - makes me hesitate

I believe
She won't take me somewhere I'm not supposed to be
You can't steal the things that god has given me
No more pain and no more shame and misery

You can't take me down
You can't break me down
You can't take me down

You can't break me down
You can't take me down
You can't break me down

I can see a place of trouble
And I'm on the verge
For the love of everybody
I did something wrong

Now I feel some days of trouble
In the hospital
For the love of everybody
But behind a wall

Standing now
Calling all the people here to see the show
Calling for my demons now to let me go
I need something, give me something wonderful

And I like it to mark this first day of 2017 for a few reasons:

1) It's new (to me), and it's a brand new year;

2) The intention that I set in class last night was to choose love, and the title of this song reminds me of the importance of that choice;

3) It's a song about the resilience of the human spirit, and that, more than anything else, is what I'm celebrating as we welcome a new year. Without it, I might not be here at all, and for sure I wouldn't be able to wholeheartedly embrace the path of interdependence with my love that lies ahead this year, and neither would he;

4) Those last couple of lines feel like an appropriate mantra for me right now:

Calling for my demons now to let me go
I need something, give me something wonderful

May 2017 be the year that my demons continue to let me go -- I already know it is the year that I get what I need - an amazing partner in my day-to-day life -- and I know it will be wonderful...

To Be Alone

Yesterday was just plain hard. I have the sense that I have to keep pushing through this discomfort -- showing up to it -- instead of covering it up again. But it sucks. Before I went to sleep last night I just yelled F*#% as loud as I could, which was pretty damn loud, given that I was alone in the house and it's winter so my windows and my neighbors windows are all closed. In fact I yelled it a few times. It just really seemed to perfectly express what I was feeling.

Once again, I woke up to an early morning, internal alarm in the form of the chorus to Take Me to Church playing in my head. And again I felt confusion about the message. So I employed the same frustration routine I'd done just before going to sleep last night, and that helped a little.

I also tried just being as gentle and loving toward myself as I possibly could. And that helped a little bit too, as did dragging my ass out of bed to go to practice this morning.

When I got home, it occurred to me that maybe the message isn't literal - - that it's time for me to go to church -- maybe it's an invitation to find out more about the artist. So I did some poking around, and I found another Hozier song that seems to express what I'm feeling right now:

Never feel too good in crowds,
With folks around, when they're playing
The anthems of rape culture loud,
Crude and proud creatures baying
All I've ever done is hide
From our times when you're near me
Honey, when you kill the lights, and kiss my eyes
I feel like a person for a moment of my life

But you don't know what hell you put me through
To have someone kiss the skin that crawls from you
To feel your weight in arms I'd never use
It's the God that heroin prays to

It feels good, girl, it feels good
It feels good, girl, it feels good
It feels good, girl, it feels good
Oh to be alone with you

There are questions I can't ask
Now at last the worst is over
See the way you hold yourself
Reel against your body's borders
I know that you hate this place
Not a trace of me would argue
Honey, we should run away, oh someday
Our baby and her momma
And the damaged love she makes

But I don't know what else that I would do
Than try to kiss the skin that crawls from you
Than feel your weight in arms I'd never use
It's the God that heroin prays to

It feels good, girl, it feels good
It feels good, girl, it feels good
It feels good, girl, it feels good
Oh to be alone with you

And for now, for better and for worse, I get to be alone with me, and try to do what may be the very hardest thing to do: kiss the skin that crawls from me. It's soooo much easier, for me at least, to attend to those outside of me...