Learning to Breathe

Sometimes I go to yoga classes at my gym, and sometimes the teachers say something about honoring your body where your body is today, not how you felt last week or last class or how you want to feel next week, but actually honoring where you are on the journey today.  I get that.  And I'm generally pretty good at being patient and understanding with my body.  Sidenote:  I feel that is one of the benefits of yoga as exercise.  Instead of beating my body into submission one crunch at a time, I'm partnering with my body.  Anyways.

I forget that this idea of honoring where we are today as a means to keeping the journey alive and moving forward also applies to journeys beyond that of physical fitness.  I am on several different journeys right now, not the least of which is a journey of grief and loss as I learn to live in the reality that my mom suffers from dementia.  Tonight, I went to see the latest Nicolas Sparks movie, Safe Haven, and at the end (spoiler alert?), there's the narration of a woman hoping for her family to be whole.  By this point, there were sniffles coming from most quadrants of the theatre, but I lost it.  I mean, really, lost it.  The movie ended, the lights came up, and I turned to my friend Lacey, buried my head in her chest, and sobbed.  I don't cry like very often anymore, and in retrospect, I can see it having built up over the last few weeks, but today, I needed to grieve the loss of a whole family, and good ole Nicolas had just the right things to to say to get me there.

Most days, I'm farther along in my journey of grief, usually somewhere closer to acceptance.  But today, I let the sadness out of the box I keep it in most of the time, because that's where I was on the journey.  And I'm not beating myself up about it because, aside from trying to be more zen or whatever it is yoga is trying to teach me, I'm learning that it's ok to touch the sadness- it won't overwhelm me and I won't drown, and it's there, so I might as well acknowledge its existence.  The thing about us westernized people is that we can use the vocabulary of journey, but we still picture a straight line marching us directly to our goal.  Today was a reminder that I can still be moving forward on my journey, but not necessarily objectively forward.  The journey is a bit more like the path I ran with my dog today- lots of switchbacks, and crummily paved spots, and not a few ridiculous bends in places I personally wouldn't have chosen.  But that's the journey, and since I didn't get to choose it, I can only choose how I take it, and fighting all of those challenges rather than learning to live and work and play and breathe within them, that's where real backward movement occurs.  And that's not who I want to be.  The journey is before me.  And some days I'll laugh and enjoy it, and other days I'll cry.  And that's just fine, because I'm still traveling, and I think some day I'll really understand that that was the point  all along.