Have You Ever Been Afraid of Yoga?

Five years ago

I was a regular at my local yoga studio.

Downward dog, tree pose, and breathing is what kept me emotionally and physically healthy as I balanced work, marriage, and raising kids.

But even more, I stretched and breathed my way through the grief that still surrounded me from my son’s Hunter Syndrome diagnosis. I often cried through shavasana, the final lying-flat-on-your-back-eyes-closed-release-it-all pose of a yoga class, letting the weight of fear and anger and love and grief flow through me all at once.

That can be yoga too

Have you ever been in yoga or some other workout class and someone beside you was crying?

I didn’t mind if the moms beside me could hear me sob. And sometimes, that’s almost all I did – lie there and cry silently. That can be yoga too. My regular classmates had asked early on about the grief that plainly had etched itself my face as well as tightened my neck and shoulders. Getting past that first explanation of our strange and sorrowful and beautiful life left me more free to just breathe and relate and feel in my practice.

[tweet_dis]To many moms of children with special needs, yoga is not some eastern religious mantra voodoo, but instead is a tangible way to connect our physical bodies with the strong emotions that we often feel and too often, bottle up.[/tweet_dis]

So when that studio closed, I felt a void in my emotional health even more than in my physical health, although that too suffered. I made a feeble attempt to find somewhere else to practice, but it was just easier to let my schedule fill up with the tasks that grew like steps up a mountain whose peak I couldn’t even see. Things to do. Calls to make. Cures to advance.

And because all of those activities related in some way to the disease that threatens to steal my own child and my friends’ children, every task seemed important. And urgent. And attached with guilt if passed over in favor of something as “selfish” as yoga or working out.

But a few years and few pounds later, I knew I needed my yoga back. I couldn’t put my finger on it exactly. It masked itself as a “health goal” but in reality, my psyche knew something I couldn’t even admit to myself.

I had disconnected from myself.

In all the go-go-go, I was compartmentalizing my life into nice little boxes that stacked – one on top of another. What are your boxes? Are they neatly tied and stacked like mine?

Talk to me about homeschooling? Here’s my thoughts.

Lots of things to do for Project Alive? Let’s check things off the list.

Want me to do a speech on rare diseases? Sure, I can whip that up.

The pieces of me were like a puzzle lying on the table – they were all there, but not connected, not communicating. And as long as I left them that way, it was easier to ignore the bigger picture. A sometimes scary bigger picture.

I realized I’d done that on purpose the moment I stepped into my first yoga class in three years.

Afraid to breathe

The intensity of the past four years since we formed Project Alive cannot be overstated. Have you ever had that goal that seemed like you could sprint to get there and then all of a sudden, you realize that you’ve been sprinting for years?

Breathing is completely different during a 100 meter dash than even during a 400 meter dash, much less a mile.

During my previous yoga years, it was one of the only times I’d turn my phone totally off and leave it in another room for more than an hour. And for that hour, I would breathe.

It taught me that more often than not, in my urgency, I took shallow breaths, one after another. Never fully relaxing or taking in what I needed. Just like life, I was taking in just enough to get by, spitting it out, then taking in just enough again. No wonder I felt so tired and so frenetic. But with yoga, I slowly learned to breathe deeply and completely.

But without it, as the tasks creeped up on me over the years, it was too hard to slow down. Too hard to pause, take a deep breath, and just BE.

I sat down on my mat the other day and took a deep breath and realized I hadn’t done that in a long time.

Take a moment. Breathe in slowly – over 5 seconds. Breathe out  slowly- over 5 seconds. That.

Afraid to relate

Yoga is an intimate experience between your mind, body, and if you so choose, as I always did, God. But it is also intimate in the group, especially small classes, as the instructor adjusts you, and everyone pauses after class to really see one another, beyond the jobs we have, the things we do, and the social media that so often colors our world.

When I stopped going to yoga, it got so easy to keep people at arms’ length.

It’s hard to explain a life where you’re running from this doctor to that therapist, where you hope your child won’t die in their sleep (and you have to actively keep that thought out of your brain to not go crazy), and where funerals and disease conferences are where you see many of your friends.

I didn’t want to explain to strangers why I was crying.

So I walked my mat to the farthest corner of the room. I sat down, stared straight ahead, and closed my eyes, willing that no one would speak to me.

Afraid to feel

But if I had to boil down the fear of breathing and relating into one thing, it is the fear of feeling.

Having a child with special needs, and at the same time, a child with a terminal disease, brings with it a host of complex feelings, often all at once.

At the same time as we hope our child lives to another birthday, we are wondering whether to bring him to a grade school party because we don’t know if our momma hearts could handle seeing other kids ignore or make fun of him. At the same time as we’re pouring over beautiful pictures of our friends’ kids on Facebook, we try to stuff the foreboding that we will probably attend their funerals.

I fear that I’m never doing enough for my son, at the same time as I know that I can’t save him.

[tweet_dis]When you have enough things to do, you can easily stuff, stuff, stuff down the weighty emotions. So we fill, fill, fill that time so there are no chances to breathe, to relate, and to feel. [/tweet_dis]

Because it’s all too weighty and we fear it will break us.

At the time my son was diagnosed with Hunter Syndrome 9 years ago, I was training for a half marathon. That may have been one of the few things that saved my sanity at the time. Since the marathon was only three weeks away, I was running long distances each day, and even longer, ten miles or so at a time, on the weekends.

During those runs, I would cry and scream almost the whole time. And when the actual race day came, only three weeks after I first heard the words “Hunter Syndrome,” I did the same. I punished my body because there was no one else I could punish for giving my son this terrible disease.

When you push yourself hard enough and you reach the end of your physical abilities, everything that doesn’t matter fades away and you feel the feelings that you try to stuff away in the day-to-day.

I felt love… and anger.

I asked why.

I pleaded for my son’s life.

But in my exhaustion, I slowly let myself accept, bit by terrible bit:

That my friends’ kids were dying.

That my son was dying.

…

That we’re all dying.

And that’s where I asked that still small voice, does it matter? What matters? Will you remind me what matters? And God met me there.

And so… yoga.

I walk into my first class in a long time, and I place my mat in the far corner.

And I breathe.

[su_note note_color=”#dededc”]This post contains affiliate links. Click to read my affiliate disclaimer.[/su_note]