Crew, I am about to word-vomit all over the page here, so buckle up and hold on tight, it may get bumpy!
I’ve been going to 6am yoga regularly with Anshu, one of my loveliest new friends. While I regularly bemoan the utter misery of getting up “in the fives,” there’s nothing like starting the day off sweating, breathing, and focusing entirely inward for seventy-five minutes to frame up a little extra positivity - especially on Mondays, especially-especially after a particularly fun weekend. So we went today, which felt a bit Herculean given we had spent yesterday in Sonoma drinking copious amounts of wine with friends, and midway through the class, the audio system went out.
I’m not normally one to be picky about my yoga environment. Once upon a time in the halcyon days of 2016 when I lived in Minnesota, my favorite place to practice was outdoors, at sunrise, at the Lake Harriet Bandshell. I’ve been known, though, to make use of a towel on my living room floor or to pop (obnoxiously) into tree pose in line at the grocery store. For some reason though, practicing in silence this morning was unexpected and, at first, threw me off badly. Hearing my labored, utterly anti-zen breathing through a particularly onerous Warrior series kept taking me out of my head…as did a runny nose and lingering anxiety and stress from last night.
Anxiety and stress have felt like two of my closest companions lately, and I’m fighting to learn to live with them hovering just underneath my ribcage, somewhere in the vicinity of my cardiovascular system. There are certain interpersonal situations in my daily life that are making things a bit challenging - finding out coworkers have said shitty things behind my back. Overloading myself at work in the incessant drive to achieve more and perform better. Learning, always learning, to live with others in a way that doesn’t compromise my happiness or well-being…and fighting to retain a sense of self when they hit me hardest where they know (or, maybe don’t even realize) it hurts the most.
I found myself in bed last night with a racing heart and shaking hands, tears almost-but-not-quite spilling over, and needed to take five minutes to breathe and try to re-center - to rationalize myself through an entirely emotional, visceral panic response to a situation over which I had minimal control. As I closed my eyes, I clung tight to something Nazima said yesterday in the car on the way home from Sonoma. In her posh, cut-glass British accent (I die, every time), she said, completely casually, “I feel that if we cut you open - which we’d never do, as we cherish you - we’d find you full of sunshine and glitter. And sugar. Pure sugar, no saccharine.” I’ll confess, at that moment it wasn’t merely residual petit verdot and cabernet warming me up inside. Lately, it’s felt like if I cut myself open, I’d find thorns and stretched-out rubber bands and maybe an entire ocean of salt and bile. Bruised apples and a linear series of paper cuts, just shallow enough to sting. Maybe a deflated balloon or two for good measure.
But I digress.
At yoga this morning, as sweat pooled in every crevice on my body and my breath grew less zen and more “when will this be over,” Nina, our ballet-elegant swan of an instructor, offered up the mantra for the class. For some reason today, it resonated more than they usually do, and I’m not sure if it was the silence or my sheer need that made it stick. She intoned, just as my right thigh completely burned out and I almost fell out of my chair pose, “Stay in your peace, stay in your power.” Quel coup de foudre, or maybe a coup de grace - the kill shot for that maelstrom of sadness and negativity and anxiety I’d been carrying through the first forty-five minutes.
It’s resonated through my head for the ensuing three hours of my day…stay in your peace, stay in your power. Because that’s the thing, isn’t it? STAY in your peace. STAY in your power. It implies that we all innately have both to begin with, and all I have to do is to find that place within me and stay there. Somehow the thought has knit itself together with Nazima’s affirmation from yesterday, and all of a sudden I’m resting in myself in a space of sunshine and glitter, power and peace, lightness and positivity and grace. (Side note: Squarespace appears to not think positivity is a properly-spelled word, and now I’m in my head.) This mental reset, this wellspring of internally-driven agency and serenity, is starting to wash away the temptation to linger in the places where others have hurt me - the fixation on replaying the unkind words, the mocking jabs, and the cavalier silences. Instead, I’m choosing to repeat the uplift that I’ve so generously been offered not once but TWICE in the space of twenty-four hours, by people who had no idea how badly I (consciously or subconsciously) needed it.
Here’s to the good voices, friends. See you in your peace and power, I’ll be over here glittering away in mine. :)