There is the laundry, groceries, tasks related to my business, school projects that really involve me more than the two kids that had them, getting the house in order for the two days I had to work following that, not to mention trying to reintroduce myself to my children in a meaningful way after working a long stretch on the heels of being out of town. Interwoven into all of this is the stressors of life's unanswered questions served up in the low lying nagging grief associated with the sudden death of my mom a few months ago. This is the noise that it is a little harder to be selective about.
Despite all of these things, I have a race in three weeks. The Fenway Spartan Sprint. As team captain, with a team of predominantly newbie racers, my training still needs to be consistent, and the tightness and soreness of my right hamstring told me a trip to yoga was probably the best step that day. Besides, my 21 year old happened to be home and he was feeling a stretch today too. I have to admit, I am not generally a yoga person. I tend to take my stress and go balls out on the rower, or lift something heavy, which is quite a change from my younger days, when coping looked more like food. Nonetheless, yoga, for me is the place to stretch and lengthen, the balance the soreness associated with balls out workouts. Admittedly, I do choose to wear yoga pants with skulls on them hidden in a floral print to show I am really more badass Spartan racer, and a little less yogi.
What met us in the studio today, was the usual heat associated with the Baptiste style we go to. There truly is something helpful about more than 90 degree heat to stretch out tight hamstrings even if it does mean saturating the microfiber towel that covers my mat. As class got started we downward dogged and reclined our warrior with the best of them and just got moving through the flow. It was about this time the class changed. We were asked to use a yoga block. This brown 4in x 6 in x 9 in block of foam was to be our focus, or "drishti" in yoga speak. Every movement we did we were not to take our eye off this block. Forward fold, downward dog, chair pose, so many others.... I began to notice my block had a small scrape, an abrasion really. My brain took note of the dimensions, 1cm x 3cm. Being in medicine for as long as I have, with a large part of what I do being laceration repair, means estimating abrasions and lacerations is as ingrained in me as breathing at this point. As I pondered this and the depth of said abrasion my body was moving. Up and down, balance, breathe, don't take your eye off the block... Over and over until it dawned on me the movement and drishti had silenced the noise that ran over my whole brain most of the day. I began to think about how many times I probably let my own concerns over life's unanswered questions stop me from truly moving through the flow of life. That nondescript brown abraded block had suddenly become the sound absorber to my otherwise chronically busy noisy brain teaching me that sometimes, turning the noise off opens up new possibilities for forward motion. Pretty soon, the movements of Sunday's flow seemed to be coming from somewhere other than stretching a tight hamstrings.
