My New Year’s yoga session has a story arc
I got myself there. My new year promise to self was the 1/1/24 calendar entry: yoga session, 1 pm.
Jaw tight, itching to get to my writing, I can’t say I started the online session with the most yogi of attitudes. It turned out that was the best reason of all for following through.
My 1 hour journey started as described above. Tense, mind racing, thinking non-helpful stuff like, “I’m ADHD, I can’t stand sitting still or stretching slowly or all this yoga stuff.” Katie led the online session, and it’s a good thing, because her calm, clear instructions and demonstrations got something happening. Not just with my body, which does feel so much better now that I’ve finished, but with my attitude.
As story arcs go, I guess the inciting incident was Katie explaining that this session’s focus was “ether”. No, that’s not right—I didn’t start to change my mindset at that point. In fact, my anxious mind decided it was annoyed by the idea of focusing on “ether” when what it wanted to do was plow ahead with some great stretches and yoga magic for my body to feel less knotted up. And then get back to my writing.
So I guess instead the inciting incident was Katie’s moving from “ether” straightaway into breathing to find that state or phenomenon or whatever it is supposed to be. In yoga matters, lion’s breath is a favorite of my grandkids. With Katie’s leadership in today’s yoga episode, I now share the tykes’ enthusiasm for drawing in breath, throat open, and roaring it back out, tongue ridiculously projecting outward from my tense maw.
As my tense maw became less tense with each new stretch and breath throughout my hour with Katie, the idea for this little post came to me. “Each yoga session is a story, complete with an arc and a fundamental change in a character.” The character here—me—changed profoundly between the tiny corridor of time between 1 pm and 2 pm eastern standard time this New Year’s Day. More precisely, my attitude changed.
I may find this little story of 1 hour in the whole of my life is not a change that will last. The change today was tangible, though—I started out resistant and skeptical and wound up appreciative and relieved from my yoga experience. It’s a change like today’s, concrete despite a focus on a non-concrete idea (like experiencing the ether flowing between things we think we know), that changes us for the better over time.
