I have been very good about yoga this week. Partly because if I don't do it, now there is someone who will KNOW, and I would rather just suck it up and get it done than admit that I was a failure in completing the task. It's not so much failure I dislike, the acknowledgement of OTHERS of my failure. But this, not wanting to disappoint is actually working in my favor. (Even though, honestly, who would really think less of me for skipping a day? Especially him. Come on now.)
But today is a new moon. Now, this is important for a couple of reasons, but in the interest of me trying to keep similar thoughts together, I will stick with the yoga part for now. Okay, so when I started practicing Ashtanga yoga, I was all excited about the rules. I wanted to follow them all, even though I didn't understand WHY. No inversions on your period. Yoga before dawn. In bed by ten. Take Saturdays and Moon Days (new and full moons) off. On the mat, six days a week.
I was pretty damn proud of myself for being so disciplined. For following all these rules. I was getting up at 5 am to do yoga. I was in bed by ten every night. I did not drink. I did not smoke. I thought that made me something. I thought it made me worthy. Of, what? I thought I earned something, by sacrificing. I thought I had redeemed myself from all of my other errors and all of my other flaws because this, at least THIS, I could do correctly. And consistently. No matter what else I fucked up. I might be a bad mom, a horrible employee, and a lazy housekeeper. But damn it, I could YOGA.
Except...why? One day, to my shock and horror, I realized that in yoga I had become exactly what I despised in religion. Who follows rules without question? Who obeys a command blindly, just because it's written in some book, without having any idea as to WHY? Who performs actions they were told to perform without being able to explain their purpose? Maybe they do have a purpose. And maybe that purpose makes a lot of sense. But if I don't understand WHY it's bad to do inversions on my period, if I'm just doing it because guru somebody said so, what the hell? BAAAAAA. I'm still a sheep -- just in yoga pants!!!!
If we just blindly accept rules and guidelines, following them without question or understanding, it all just becomes so much dogma. It's the same problem I ran away from. No pork on Fridays, no sex before marriage, no women voting in the church, no dancing, no saying, "Oh my God"...why, why, why? When questions begin getting answered with flimsy responses like, "That's just the way we've always done it" or, "That's just the way it is", you realize that even the person who TOLD you to do these things doesn't know why THEY are doing them either! Someone told them to, so they did. And they tell you do, so you do.
What are you going to say one day, when you tell your child to, and they ask you WHY? Can you be brave enough to say, you know what, I have no idea why we do things this way. Just like when Jewel asked why girls can't walk around in the summer with their shirts off. I was honest with her. I tell the kids all the time that sometimes the law is wrong, and sometimes people in authority make mistakes. I asked my son if he thought it was wrong for a black person to marry a white person, and he said no. I told him that at one time it was illegal. Was it wrong then? No. WE were. And so, of course, there will be rules and customs and laws that are wrong, even now. "Because I said so" is never an acceptable answer.
Not even in yoga. So today, when I decided whether I would keep my commitment to get on the mat every day until Halloween or honor the Ashtanga rules, I decided to do some research. I decided to find out WHY we take moon days off, and to see if it was something I agreed with. As far as the explanation for why we don't do inversions on our period, it wasn't convincing enough for me. So I still do. I don't believe that bleeding has an impact on the flow of your prana. It's just the flow of your blood. The rest of your body is still working the exact same way it was before. And you will not suddenly reverse the flow of your period and start bleeding backwards. Now, if I see a convincing case to suggest I should STOP, I will take that into consideration and possibly change my point of view.
The explanation I read, though, made sense. It resonated, because yesterday I had such a hard time motivating myself. I was dragging ass. So, reading this description, I understood. It was from Ashtanga Yoga Center Moon Days. It said "the new moon energy corresponds to the end of exhalation when the force of apana is the greatest. Apana is a contracting downward moving force that makes us feel calm and grounded, but dense and disinclined toward physical exertion." Their full moon explanation also made sense, so I decided to go with it.
Okay, and today being the new moon is also super cool because it has been one complete moon cycle since I first met Joth in person. I can't believe it's only been a month! It feels like a lot longer, but at the same time, it has flown. I'm so incredibly happy.
I'm also super excited for Halloween! This is the first time I actually am dating someone I'm PROUD to bring around my friends. They are going to think he is so awesome. My family...when the time comes, not getting ahead of myself...would LOVE him. He's so funny. I remember in the sister circle, being envious of the other girls. Danielle's husband and Maria's husband are in the same band, Shawna's husband is in a different band, Mikki's fiance gave her a LABRADORITE engagement ring...and he's in the Shamanic Journey group WITH her. I always thought it was too much to hope for, a guy like that. An intellectual, considerate, musical or otherwise creatively inclined guy. A guy who was into weird metaphysical things and vibrated at my frequency.
I thought for a long time about Mikki and Logan -- he spins poi, she hoops. They journey together. They are SO compatible. As long as I believed that type of connection was outside of my reach, it was. But as soon as I decided to wait until I FOUND it, and settle for nothing less in the meantime, it happened. So this is all very magical. Well, I had a lot more to say, as usual...but this will have to be the end. Au revoir!!
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