I Did It!

I yelped with glee as I floated up.

It was the first time I did it on my own without being spotted.

Without really even thinking about it.

I just did it.

I did a full wheel in yoga class today.

I was so excited I yelled out loud, “I did it!”

Then slightly muffled, “sorry.”

Then.

I laughed, “not sorry!  I did it!”

I was super happy.

I was also really grateful to have my favorite instructor for class.

He’s the best and he’s going to school out-of-state, but back and forth frequently enough that he’s still teaching a class here and there at the studio.

When I saw him on the schedule for today I immediately signed up.

It did not matter that it was not an optimum time for me, I did not give a fuck, I wanted to go to his class, see him, give him a hug and have a good session.

Man.

Was it a good session.

His partner was there too, beautiful people, gorgeous, the two of them, one, a yoga instructor the other a Pilates instructor.

Stunning.

But sweet, and so approachable and kind.

I have always felt that it didn’t matter that I was old or not quite as flexible as the lissome 22 years old flocking to the studio, my instructor always gave me great feedback and also humored my profanity.

Like earlier, when I mumbled under my breath, “aw fuck,” as we also did one of my hated posed, broken toe pose, hate it, hurts so bad, but my feet generally do feel better after doing it.

The first time I did the pose, about a year ago, I could hold it for brief seconds and I cried out in pain.

I can probably do the pose now for about a minute, it’s still painful but it doesn’t make me burst into tears when I do it.

The wheel pose though, alluded me for a good year and a half.

I remember doing it when I was a kid, no problem.

It’s mostly just having a flexible back, but it’s also strong core and breathing and maybe, I think now, also a mental thing.

So too is crow pose, which I fell out of trying today and yes, swore under my breath.

I swear a lot in general.

Not in front of my charges at work.

Not in front of my clients in session.

But in general.

Yeah.

I’m a bit profane.

I fell over trying to do Crow pose, lost my balance doing half-moon, on one side, but managed to do it on the right side, my left shoulder has been consistently tight and sore for months now, like an obscene amount of time, since last November, sometimes I think it’s getting better, then it will get stressed again, so my left side tends to be a little off-balance.

Anyway.

When my teacher asked at the beginning of class what the class wanted to work on I piped up, “heart opener” and someone else said, “twists” and for the first time ever, no one said “core.”

Which always annoys me, core work, but it’s needed to be strong in the poses and I get it, but it’s also in every fucking pose, you have to use your core, it seems idiotic to also request more core work on top of the core work, but that’s just my opinion.

I suppose if I was younger and into wearing midriff flashing clothes I’d be hollering for core too.

But what I like to work on is heart openers.

I can access emotions when I do yoga.

Not always.

But.

When I have a good instructor, and my teacher today is the best I have had, I can.

It can unlock emotions in my body, the practice and I felt it was a good idea to have my heart open wide today.

As though I could have closed it down.

My heart is wide open.

Nonetheless I was not expecting to do Wheel, I was expecting Camel pose or something of that ilk.

So when he said we were going to first do a bridge pose I knew we’d be doing Full Wheel.

And there was something in me today, a push to go further and I made up my mind that instead of staying in the half bridge I’d go for the full wheel.

I lay on my back, squared my shoulders, made sure my hands were turned around up by my shoulders, my knees where hips width apart and I breathed in and pushed up with my hands.

And suddenly.

Out of no where.

I was floating.

“I did it!”  I said with much excitement.

I was over the moon, I was floating.

And yes, my heart opened.

Even further than it had before and I could feel it.

My breath expanded in my chest, it felt as though I had breathed in and floated up like a balloon, effortless and easy.

It was amazing.

Then.

I came down, rolled out my wrists, rested for a moment.

And.

Yup.

I did it again.

The second time was harder, my arms didn’t want to quite hold me, but I breathed into it again and mustered it up.

A second time.

When I finished I was sweating and joyful and teary.

I lay with my hand on my belly and my other hand on my heart with in a supine butterfly pose with my legs.

I felt joyous and light.

Then we did corpse pose.

And all of it.

My heart, my body, my mind, floated up.

Images and ideas sprung from me and drifted by.

I had love images impressed upon the backs of my eyelids.

I drifted into those images and sent that love out to the world.

I composed poetry.

I felt tears slide down my face.

It was just amazing.

I can’t quite express it without sounding like a complete idiot.

But I was amazed by what came to me.

And I’ll get to do a little more yoga this week too.

The family I nanny for doesn’t come back from vacation until Thursday, I’ll have my first day back with them Friday, so I’ll get in a couple of extra yoga classes.

Not tomorrow.

I have supervision in the morning and a client at night.

But Tuesday for sure.

I want to see if I can replicate the full wheel again.

It’s nice to see progress in my practice and even though it’s always a challenge to get myself to go, my brain resists, not my body, I do tend to go and when I do.

Such surprise.

So much gratitude.

Yoga.

Who the fuck knew?

A Good Cry

And then back to living.

I saw my therapist today.

Yes.

A psychotherapist has a therapist.

Especially since I am a therapist in training, although, let me tell you, I felt like a therapist today, seeing clients, filing paperwork, checking all the boxes, circling all the things that needed to be circled and doing the work.

I can get super caught up in how much longer this road is and how the hell am I ever, I mean, ever, going to get 3,000 hours, but I can’t, I just can’t focus on that.

One hour at a time.

Fortunately I have some practice living a day at a time and when I reflect on how those days add up and all my accomplishments have come in small increments, but come they have, then I don’t have to get too caught up in the numbers.

It’s just a numbers game and I’m doing it the best I can as fast as I can without killing myself in the process.

I mean.

I still have to process all my own stuff, plus carrying around my clients in my head.

I do that now.

I have them in my head and sometimes I will think about them and once in a while I have a momentary flash, a connection, a thought or feeling and a little aha moment, that feels pretty special.

But.

Yes.

I do have to process my own stuff too, I have to look at my own emotional life sift through the chafe and dander and see what is needing to seen and what is needing to be let go.

I knew.

For instance.

I needed to titrate my social media intake today.

I woke up a bit emotionally hung over.

I cried a lot yesterday.

On and off all day, with one really big cry in the evening when I was talking with my person on the phone and going over the shock of what had happened and how the death of my friend had not just hit me, but many others, the numbers of people who showed up to be present for each other and for the family of the deceased was extraordinary.

Not to mention all the people in so many other places he had affected, who’s lives he had touched–Portland, Seattle, Memphis, New York, Los Angeles, Austin, Oakland.

Gah.

I can hear him saying “West Oakland” in my head and such joy at his goofiness suffuses me.

For he was joyful.

Oh sure, sad and fucked up and scared and young and insecure, who hasn’t been those things, but also bright and kind and funny and so there for you and warm and sweet and musically talented.

Oh the music the world has lost.

So.

Seeing all the pictures, all the photographs, all the expressions of heartbreak, my social media feed was just awash in tears and sadness.

I really had to not look after a while.

And I knew when I woke up having felt puffy eyed and sluggish and a bit off kilter that I wasn’t going to allow myself to wallow in the emotionalism of social media.

I needed coffee, some ibuprofen, and a good breakfast.

Sounds like a hangover, right?

Except instead of booze or blow it was emotion.

And as I expressed to my therapist today after plopping down on her couch and telling her I was going to cry and then immediately doing so, I also realized that some, a lot of the emotion I had in my body, on my heart, in my head, was not mine.

It was the communities.

And I’m grateful.

Really grateful.

I got to feel it and touch into it.

But.

I could not continue swimming in it any longer.

So I talked it out, processed it, linked it to other things, made traverses, expressed emotions, cried a lot in the beginning, but by the middle of my session I was going other places.

Oh.

It was all interconnected.

I am good at making connections.

And it was honest and insightful.

I am pretty good at those things too.

Not always.

I am a work in progress, people, don’t expect perfection, I am far, far, far from perfect.

But.

I am loving and kind and sweet, I would hazard.

I am compassionate and more importantly, I am empathetic.

Sometimes too much and I get overextended and I give too much, I have been trained well in that way of life, being my mom’s caretaker, taking care of my sister, my oldest niece, an ex-boyfriend of five years who might as well have been my mother for all the caretaking he required, but I have grown a lot.

Oh, so fucking much.

And I know when I need to caretake and when the other person needs to do the job their own damn self.

And there’s no irony that I am in the care taking profession.

A. I am a nanny, I care take all day long.

B. I am a psychotherapist.

But it’s not my job to care take as a therapist and that’s a really intriguing thing for me.

I am also not there to make my client feel better, to sugar coat, or to shoo away uncomfortable feelings.

Uncomfortable feelings need to happen.

There’s nothing wrong with them.

I like to look at them as signposts, directions, “hey this thing you do, it doesn’t work for you.”

For instance.

There’s nothing wrong with anxiety or depression.

They are signs that the way things are going, the tools being used for living, well they might not be working so well.

I mean.

Booze was one hell of an amazing solution for me.

Until.

It was not.

So was cocaine.

My God.

I remember the first time I did a line of good blow.

It was like I had all the answers.

ALL of them.

And I was fine with the way those answers were conveyed and I rather scoffed at a friends warning that perhaps I like that drug a little more than was perhaps healthy.

Um.

Yeah.

But when those solutions failed I had to find a better way, a different way and there was depression there and there was anxiety and all sorts of other juicy psychological terms and conditions.

And slowly.

One step at a time.

I got to change what I did.

What I ingested.

What I thought and felt.

For something else.

I was given a significant solution to my problem.

Of course.

I won’t tell that to a client, they have to find their own way, I think that I am a mirror, an attachment figure, a person who can and will have to withstand the disappointments and anger and discomfort of others so that they can learn how to use that information and devise their own solution.

Therapy is not for symptom relief.

Just like alcohol, ultimately, and every other drug I took, weren’t for symptom relief.

I had to find a different way.

And I did.

And today when I walked out of my therapist office I felt a lightness and a joy.

I am alive.

I am not guilty for being alive

I have so much joy and passion in my life, such happiness, I felt light and though there is still sadness for the loss of this beautiful person, I have also a deeper connection to how alive I want to be and how alive I am allowed to be.

To be alive, in this moment, sober, and free.

It is amazing.

Happy.

Joyous.

Moved beyond words for my experiences and this amazing place I have been lead to.

Grateful.

So very grateful.

Thank you for being a part of my journey.

May it bless you too.