Last week, out of the complete blue I was STRUGGLING in my yoga practice. The entire time I kept thinking ‘How do I escape this quicksand before the tide comes in’?
Nothing bad happened to me and there is no explanation for it other than just being in a funk. It all started when I went to class on Monday night. I had one irritated thought about how it felt SO HOT and each posture was being held FOREVER. This led me to the next negative thought about how I’m not making progress in my postures and can’t even fully flex my foot in standing head to knee, which led me to the next self-destructive thought about how everyone in the universe has babies now but me and I’m about to turn 30. Then came the tears that luckily disguise as sweat and I missed the next posture (I don’t like missing postures and had only once before: enter a flood of self inflecting wounds of negative thinking).
It amazed me how this one irritation could ignite a ripple effect and suck out my soul. How this one irritation could dig and fester and find my sacred insecurities and expose them to me when I was shattered the most.
This is a great time to introduce my interpretation of the most well know battle in the universe: the battle between good (positive) and evil (negative). In my own words: the battle between the happy makers and the soul suckers, respectively. You know them well. The happy makers are the kind of people who love each other and care for each other and treat each other kindly. The soul suckers are the kind of people who hate everyone and only think of themselves and do everything in their power to spread their gloom and doom all over the place.
Now that you are reintroduced to their personalities, this is how the soul suckers attack: they find the fear, self doubt, and humiliation that negatively infect the happy makers and they use it to weaken their spirit in hopes of recruiting and converting more happy makers into soul suckers. And it works; they have a very powerful religion. But, the happy makers have an even more effective strategy: they poison their arrows with love and display what it feels like to be happy and enjoy life (like Korben Dallas and Leeloo).
This is a powerful weapon, Love. The tricky part is you have to believe in it to experience it. A lot of soul suckers don’t believe in love, it’s not part of their faith. Ok, Neo and Agent Smith lovers (and chemists) you can argue that for every soul sucker (negative charge) there is a happy maker (positive charge) so they strive to balance each other out and everything is driven towards a neutral equilibrium. I support that, but without judgment all I want to do in my life is maintain all that I can to ensure that I walk on the path of the happy maker.
Back to my yoga story:
At this point of my negativity (get it chemists), I realized that I had pushed myself into a state of pure survival and things started to change. I was panicking mentally more than anything else and I decided to let go of the negativity and let my body do what it needed to do to survive, even if it meant leaving the room (I haven’t yet done that either). This is how it went for the rest of the class. I did not leave the room but I skipped a few more postures. Overall I ended the class very happy that I had overcome a meltdown. I feel like I better understand how my body, maybe the human body, or more generally any biological body handles stress. Once infected and overtaken by the negative effects of stress, perhaps the body enters a survival mode: it just does what it needs to do to survive… to stay in the room…to escape from the quicksand. I feel now more than ever that I can fully trust my body, to do what it needs to do. No matter how long it takes, it will find a way. The babies will come.
The next class on Wednesday afternoon was not much better for me though. I had no negative thoughts or irritations but I continued to struggle physically. I missed at least 3 sets of postures, but I didn’t care. Body: “Just do what you need to do and what you can do, do it 100%”. My legs were still stuck in the mud; my arms constricted around me as I was being swallowed into the earth. My body was not doing anything at all. How do I escape from this quicksand?
It wasn’t until Friday’s class that I finally wiggled my way free. I was hoping for some epiphany or great lesson to forever remember so I could get myself out faster next time, but it wasn’t like that. I had no control of it. I just had to wait until it passed. Finally, I felt strong and free of mud and I got a little scared. No survival book will ever say: when suck in quicksand just wait it out, it’s something you can’t control. But maybe in my survival book I can make a note: avoid quicksand all together by avoiding the pathways of the soul suckers = negative thinking.
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