your body

Doing it out of hate, or doing it for love

/ Elizabeth / Leave a comment

Like writing, health and fitness was something on my list of things to do that kind of fell off the list for a while. I was finishing up the school year — just trying to get through it — and in the flurry of deadlines and things to pack I just wasn’t able to be very physically active. As a result, I’ve gained a few pounds, and I haven’t been feeling my best. In fact, I started to really dislike myself and to feel frustrated and angry about where I was health-wise. That’s not a good thing, to be walking around in a body that makes me feel uncomfortable and even downright mad.

So a couple of weeks ago I had a little talk with myself. I could either continue as I was, mad and frustrated at myself — at my body, really — or I could decide to make a change. I decided to try change (yay for positive decisions!) and then I sat down to spend some time looking at my weekly schedule and overall summer calendar. For me I can’t make a decision and let it wither and fade, sidelined by inaction. It has to be made real for me with things that are visual and tangible like schedules and lists. So I made a weekly exercise schedule and I’ve been sticking to it — with some missed sessions here and there — but I’m working on staying positive, valuing the process and growth, rather than trying to be perfect.

That said, when I was back at the gym for the first time in months I realized in the middle of my workout why I was there — why I was really there. Originally the schedule and list and all that were a reaction to something negative — my frustration and anger at myself — but once I was there, looking in the mirror doing squats or whatever it was I realized I was actually there because I love myself, not because I hate myself. I was there to take care of myself, to spend time with myself, and to invest in myself — in my physical health, of course, but also in my mental and spiritual well being. Because it turns out that I like to move my body and feel strong and see myself grow. I like feeling my heartbeat and having my face turn pink and my muscles get that jiggly-weak feeling after doing something hard and catching my breath before trying it again. I like that timeless feeling of being in the moment, focused on what I’m doing exactly here and exactly now. All of that is a great gift to myself, and a way for me to really experience the fact that I’m here on earth, alive, in a body that supports me, in a body that is my greatest gift and tool.

And I think we all need outlets to get our bodies moving, to reaffirm our connections to our bodies, and to spend some time having those timeless moments where clocks and schedules and even the ideas of goals and perfection fade and become distant so that all we can hear is our heartbeats in our chests, our breath move through our bodies, and that beautiful moment of body and being coming together. There’s nothing better than that — that’s what I’ve been missing, and those parts coming together feel like home.

So I don’t do work outs or yoga classes or bike or swim or run because my body frustrates and angers me and I hate it. No, I do it because my body is my home and I love living in it. I’m doing it for love, love, love.

30-day Yoga Challenge: Four Challenges in One

/ Elizabeth / Leave a comment

Since I’m nearly done with it, I feel safe to share the fact that I’m participating in a 30-day yoga challenge:  30 consecutive days of yoga classes, come hell or high water, from April 2 to May 1. And in some ways this challenge isn’t challenging at all — in other ways it lives up to its name entirely.

Challenge #1:  Deciding — And Sticking With It

For most things in life, the deciding part is hardest. Well, not the deciding part so much as everything else that follows once the deciding has been done. After I decided to do this challenge, a lot of things had to shift in my life to make space for it, the biggest being how I spent my time. My alarm clock has been going off faithfully every morning, no sleeping in on the weekends. Most days I’ve had to either stay late at work or leave most of my work to do list undone so I could fit in a yoga class. I’ve had to rearrange social engagements on the weekends so that I can get to yoga, and sometimes skip or reschedule appointments during the week. This may seem extreme, but it’s what commitment looks like when any one of us makes a decision and then sticks with it. Those things we’ve decided are the big deal things in our lives take precedent — or they should — so they’re setting the tone for the day, the week, the month. Everything else should be secondary.

And I have to say that the “sticking with it” part has been tough when I’ve been faced with a tempting alternative to my decision — most often sleeping in on the weekends or skipping an evening class to go home and laze on the couch. But it’s been a good test of my will, to see that I can be determined and strong enough to push myself out of my habits to I achieve something new.

Challenge #2:  Pacing Myself

Unfortunately — or maybe fortunately? — I tend to be a competitive person, even in a noncompetitive setting like a yoga class. Most days I have some form of Rubber Neck Syndrome, where I’m checking out what everyone else is doing, looking at their form, their flexibility, their strength, and then of course comparing it to mine. Maybe it’s from my many years of dance training or my perfectionist tendencies that I naturally start to compare myself to others, but in this challenge I had to really let go of that. In some ways it was good to know that I wasn’t in the same place as most of the other people in the room — there were only about 12 of us doing the challenge overall and maybe one or two in the room with me most days, so that meant that the pressure was off — or maybe not off — but my mindset definitely adjusted when I went into a class. Like I mentioned in last week’s entry, I was really running my own race — or yoga-ing my own yoga. Because of course I couldn’t force myself into the splits and then flip myself upside down into several reps of a forearm stand and then push through a dozen jump-backs from crow pose to chaturanga (first and foremost, because I can’t do crow pose jump-backs to chaturanga) but also because I had to come back to class tomorrow and the next day and the next.

I had to pace myself for the long haul, take it slower than I usually would, and really focus on my own process, listen to my body and my body alone to make sure that we’d get through the month in one healthy piece. Because if I “won class” for the day but felt miserable and sore — or even injured myself — then I’d be defeating the whole purpose of the challenge, and of yoga itself.

Challenge #3:  Imbalance Exposing Imbalance

I mentioned earlier that once I’d made the decision to participate in the challenge I had to reprioritize the way I spent my time, and now that I’m almost through I can look back and see how much this yoga challenge — in some ways its own imbalance on my time — exposed other imbalances in how I spend my time, particularly at work. Without the yoga challenge to pull me away from work and to put some pressure on how I spend my time in the evening, it was easy for me to excuse long hours at work, sometimes up to 12 hours a day. But this challenge has made me notice that work really demands a lot of me, and a lot of my free time. I’m not complaining that I have a job that requires after-hours time, but I’m concerned by the amount of after-hours time I was spending — and am still spending — usually up to 20 unpaid hours a week. This challenge has made me feel some stress, and even anxiety, around time but mostly because there never seems to be enough time for work and also for myself. It’s something that I’m going to be further exploring even after this challenge ends; balance is such a key value that I hold and I want to embody that more.

Challenge #4:  What Happens Next?

This leads to the final challenge within this challenge. I’m almost done with it, but I’m already thinking about what’s next. Do I want to continue daily yoga classes? Do I want to take a break from yoga? Do I want to continue daily exercise and meditation, but expand into to different forms, like gym workouts and more traditional cardio or pick up my meditation practice from months ago? I’m not quite sure yet, and I have a couple of days to decide, but I do know that this challenge has pushed me to make a decision and to make shifts in my life that push me to be more balanced. I’ve also seen that competition is not as important as compassion — especially self-compassion — and that even when I don’t think I’m making any gains I am. I’ve surprised myself this month by becoming physically stronger even when I didn’t think I was, by becoming more patient with myself, and more able to let go, even if momentarily, of the demands of the outside world on my inner life.

After this challenge ends on Tuesday, I look forward to Wednesday and the days that follow and the decisions I’ll get to make that will quiet the outside world and amplify my inner voice, one that is still keenly competitive, but also more compassionate and striving for balance.

Christmas Shopping & Gender

/ Elizabeth / Leave a comment

This past Friday I was about 1% prepared for Christmas in all of the possible ways:  no gifts purchased, no decorations hung, no cards written, no cookies baked. But it was on the list of things to do for Saturday and my wife and I really got it done. At some point I just decided that this year all the adults were getting socks and all the kids were getting books, so I think that helped. Sorry, family members, if you’re reading this. Maybe I should’ve put a spoiler alert at the top for you. Either way, let’s move on.

Besides the socks and books, my wife and I did some other in-person shopping and as we zigzagged between the boys’ and girls’ clothing sections the contrasts were pretty stark. Thankfully a boy I was shopping for only needed clothes in navy and hunter green — but if he had wanted anything in an even slightly peppier hue, it would have been a challenge. At one point I stood in the tiled aisle facing in towards the clothing racks, boys’ side on my right and girls’ side on my left. The girls’ side looked like a a balloon had just popped and as many sparkles and frills as you could imagine rained down in colors like pink, soft purple, white and yellow. Since it’s Christmastime, there was also a good mix of red, green, and black, but when my eyes moved over to the boys’ side, it was like all the color had been leached out. Gray, navy, hunter green, black, more gray, a few spots of white and royal blue. That’s it.

And what does this tell our boys and men? Because it’s the same thing when I walked the women’s and men’s sections, if not even more pronounced. Women’s racks were strewn with dresses that looked like silver and gold disco balls and the men’s racks had black, gray, blue, dark green, more gray. Just looking at color, and not even more detailed things like fit or design, to me it looks like boys and men aren’t supposed to have any fun. They’re not supposed to see their bodies and their clothes as a way to express themselves, to be viewed in a decorative or showy way, to play with color, pattern, or texture.

To me this small detail, a wardrobe drained of color, portends that men cannot have — are not culturally allowed to have or are not “supposed” to have — a relationship with their own sensuality. Think about it — when you picture a “bachelor pad” in your mind, what do you see? Over the years in person and in media I’ve mostly seen hyper-minimal looks, lots of black, white, gray, and stainless steel, maybe some raw or dark wood, maybe some sports memorabilia. Colors are often bland and dark. It’s often feels hard and in many ways lifeless. Sometimes even a bit cold and empty.

And what does male clothing or home styling have to do with anything? Well, we’re having this national “moment” about men and their bad behavior towards women — not all men, but enough men towards enough women that it’s made its way into many of our daily conversations. It makes me wonder:  if these men, who were once boys, had been allowed to get in touch with the full range of their sensuality by playing with color in something as mundane as their clothing, what would have happened — what could have happened?

If men had had the chance, the permission, to wear yellow, orange, purple — gasp! pink! — what would that have felt like? Would it have sparked a change, a tiny shift, into asking the simple question:  What else? What else can I feel? What else can I experience? And what if the what else didn’t end with color and clothing, but with putting aside other hyper-masculine attributes to explore something else, another side of who they are and another way of being in the world? What if they asked what else when it came to expressing affection? What if they asked what else when they wanted to express sexual desire? What if they asked what else — how else can I deal with this — when they felt sad, lonely, rejected, isolated, unattractive, unwanted?

Because beyond being male, each individual person, regardless of sex or gender, is so much more — and there is always something else, something more to explore, something more to see, another shade or angle to experience.

And if you’re a man or identify as male, it’s very likely that if you’re like most of the men I know:  you haven’t had a chance to explore your sensuality, your creativity, your way of being in the world that isn’t highly dictated by very strict masculine norms. And what a thing — to miss out on all the shades of life. How dull. How boring. How gray.

Thank You, Body

/ Elizabeth / Leave a comment

This week, again, was spent working in my classroom so what I planned to write about got a little derided. However, I think the things I’ve been thinking still apply. So, here we go.

Even though I’m female and I’ve been raised in an American culture that encourages girls and women to be their biggest critics — and even despisers — of their bodies (too fat, too skinny, too tall, wrong hair, wrong skin, blah blah blah) I love and appreciate my body so much, especially in weeks like these.

My body has been my lifelong companion. I mean, duh, obviously, but really — think about that — your body is the only living thing that will be with you your entire life. Not your parents, your siblings, your spouse, even friends or pets. Maybe a tree or a sea turtle, but for argument’s sake let’s just say it’s just you inside your body. And the fact that your body is alive and functioning means you’re alive and on this planet, living a life. Your body is your host and home for the life you’re living and simultaneously it’s a living organism with needs — just like any other living organism. And the profound thing is that this body is yours — and my body is mine — and that body goes with me and does pretty much whatever I ask it. Get up at 5:55am everyday? Okay. Walk briskly and stand in lines and carry heavy boxes and lift bins overhead and climb a ladder and get down from a ladder? No problem. Go five, six hours without food because you’re busy? Well, why not. And in some ways this is an everyday miracle. The fact that I can do and do and do and think and do some more — all while nearly forgetting about my body, having my body be a transparent tool that does whatever I want it to do, is a tiny miracle. And I am so grateful — my body is strong and loyal.

But loyalty reminds me — I have to be loyal, too. My body, my beautiful, miraculous, ever-giving body, needs some loyalty and care, too. Just like any other type of companion or friend, the relationship I have with my body needs maintenance. The basics, yes, like sleep and rest, nutritious food, clean water, a good dose of rigorous exercise — but also love and appreciation. I really do believe that my body, just like any other living organism, can feel the energy of love and appreciation and flourish in that love — and conversely — the energies of dislike, disappointment, frustration, irritation, shame, disgust can bring a body figuratively and literally to its knees. So why not just do it? Feel love for the body — for your body.

Because even when the body gets sick, when the body gets tired, when it falls short in some way that you deem, it’s still there for you, working for you and doing its best to keep you living — so that it can be the tool you need to live the life you desire. What’s not to love about that?