Rox Does Yoga

Yoga, Wellness, and Life

2012: Year in Review / 2013: Year in Preview January 15, 2013

Filed under: checking in,reflections,yoga lifestyle — R. H. Ward @ 1:25 pm
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Last January, I set out a long and detailed list of goals. Looking back on that list, I kind of can’t believe that I even remotely considered all of those things to be possible when I started out 2012 four months pregnant. I wanted to keep up with all my interests and passions, keep moving my yoga career forward. I was so determined not to lose “myself” in having a baby. I had no idea, about so many things. I had no idea how much I would love being pregnant, or how active a state it is: that I could just sit there and be pregnant and I’d be totally busy. I had no idea how much rest I would need while I was pregnant, or how much energy and mobility I would lose. And I had no idea how drastically and irrevocably my life would change on July 8 when YogaBaby entered the world, how my priorities would instantly rearrange themselves around her. I realized last summer than I wasn’t in danger of losing “myself” in motherhood. Losing my free time and the ability to go out at night, sure. But “myself” is deeper and more confident and just MORE because of my love for her.

So, yeah, 2012 was a heck of a year. I gave birth. My child is still breathing, and despite all my fears and worries, I haven’t done anything to drastically harm her yet. In fact, she’s thriving, and smiling, and generally being awesome. And I learn new things about her, and about myself, every day.

But 2012 wasn’t just the year I became a parent. I published my first poetry chapbook! Which is a pretty big milestone – it just didn’t feel like it at the time, since my copies of the book arrived about a week after YB did. I also published three book reviews at good publications and had favorable responses to reviewing queries at others. I got solicited for poems for really the first time; the editor loved the work and one of the poems will be printed this year in a magazine that has probably a lot more readers than anywhere else I’ve ever published. And I managed to make some forward progress on the new poems – not as much as I would have liked, but under the circumstances I’ll take any forward progress as a success.

And 2012 was a good year for yoga. I taught prenatal yoga, which was unexpected and fantastic, and I taught at Awaken, which was a great opportunity at a great studio. I registered with Yoga Alliance, got my yoga Facebook page up and running, and kept this blog going, albeit at a much reduced pace. I didn’t meet my goal of reading one yoga-related book per month, or of following up on yoga book reviewing, but I did still read four books that related to my yoga goals, which isn’t too bad. My personal yoga practice disappeared for a while, which was sad but necessary, and I worked hard to find my yoga in other places and give myself the space to be imperfect.

So now it’s 2013. I’m at risk of setting another bunch of impossible goals for myself, but I do want to make a few resolutions. I want to get back some sort of a physical hatha yoga practice, and I’ve started steps to make that happen (they involve the alarm clock and YB sleeping well, so it’s kind of a shaky plan at best, but initial experiments are promising). I want to keep educating myself about yoga and spirituality, and I want to take some steps towards reestablishing myself as a yoga teacher, even just in my own mind. I want to keep recording my journey here and maybe try to be a bit more regular about it. Most important of all is that I want to be a good mother to YB. And taking care of myself, regaining some of my yoga and meditation practice -and continuing to give myself the space to be imperfect – is a crucial part of doing that.

 

The Beauty of Imperfection December 28, 2012

Filed under: reflections,yoga lifestyle — R. H. Ward @ 1:03 pm
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I’ve been thinking a lot about perfection lately. Now that I’m at my new job and my good friend K and I work for the same company again, we usually have lunch together several times a week. After hearing me enumerate my woes and personal shortcomings over lunch for two days in a row, K said to me, “You know, I’ve been thinking about it, and a lot of your problem is that you try so hard to be perfect all the time. And you don’t have to do that.”

K is totally right, and I’d never really thought about my actions in those terms before – that I try to be perfect. But it’s what I do. At work I want everyone to think I’m smart, competent, and efficient, and sometimes I put up fronts to make it seem as if I don’t make mistakes. In my writing I labor over my poems, stories, and book reviews for ages, rarely sending anything out to be considered for publication because I never think the work is good enough. At home and in my personal life, this tendency shows itself most strongly. I take housekeeping personally and obsess about the dusty floors; if we have people over then I run myself ragged trying to be the perfect hostess. I guilt myself over every little way I fail to be perfect: forgotten phone calls and birthday cards, wasted minutes on Facebook when I should be doing something useful, every single time I perceive myself as having said the wrong thing. And I can’t even count all the ways that I’ve failed as a mother already. I try to make my appearance perfect too, obsessing over wearing the right clothes and shoes, feeling uncomfortable all day if I didn’t have time to dry my hair in the morning. And that shit should have been over back in high school.

Sometimes striving to be perfect causes me pain on the happiest occasions. I woke up sobbing the morning after my wedding with regrets about things I’d done or failed to do on the big day. It took a long time for that guilt to go away and for me to remember our wedding day as the beautiful day it was, without those distortions. And the most painful area where I failed to be perfect was YogaBaby’s birth.

We’d taken a birth preparation class focused on using self-hypnosis to control pain, and saw all these videos of women calm and peaceful during labor, almost as if they were sleeping. I wanted such a beautiful, peaceful, all-natural childbirth, and with the techniques I was learning, combined with the yoga, meditation, and breathing practices I already knew, I thought that giving birth would be no problem. Of course when the time came, it was fast and intense and hurt worse than anything I’d ever experienced. Some of the relaxation techniques we’d learned in class helped a lot, but the hypnosis flew out the window. As I brought my daughter into the world, I was crying, writhing, and screaming. Her birth was an amazing, magical event, and holding her in my arms for the first time will always be the most beautiful moment of my life. But I’m carrying around all this guilt and shame about how I acted during the labor. I know that I did an awesome job – I birthed my daughter with no medicine, no epidural, and she came out healthy and strong. I know this, and I hate having these guilty feelings in my heart surrounding such a profound, meaningful experience. But it’s still there.

So what I want to say now is, Screw perfect. There is no perfect. I (and all of you out there nodding your heads as you read this) need to let go of perfect. We don’t have to do it all. I’m going to start sending out my poems again, even though I don’t think they’re ready. We hired a cleaning service to come to our house once a month, and I’m going to revel in the relief I feel about that instead of feeling guilty that I can’t do it all myself. And most of all, I’m going to strive to let go of the desire to be a perfect wife and mother. F married me, with all my faults and neuroses: I’m the perfect wife for him just as I am. My daughter’s birth was hard; I worked hard to give birth to her, and I rocked it. I need to honor that. I need to do this for myself, so that I’ll stop allowing guilt to cloud my days, and I need to do it for my baby. If I don’t, she will see it in me, learn it from me, and that’s a legacy I don’t want to give her. My baby girl is perfect just the way she is, and I have to start recognizing that maybe I am too.

 

Anger and Patience December 11, 2012

Filed under: reflections,yoga lifestyle — R. H. Ward @ 1:00 pm
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A week and a half ago, YogaBaby got her first bad cold with a fever. Coincidentally, it was also the first time my husband F had to travel for business since YB was born. My mom came down and stayed home with YB on Thursday, since she couldn’t go to daycare, but the two of us were on our own Thursday night. I was pretty terrified: YB hadn’t been sleeping well anyway, and now she was sick. How would we get through the night?

It was an incredibly hard night, but we did get through it. I was there with my poor sick girl every time she woke up, over and over all night, ready with comforting arms (and boobs) to soothe her. It was the best mothering I’ve done since YB came into my life – I didn’t think about it or complain, I just did. As I rocked her to sleep one more time and watched the sun rise early that Friday morning, I let myself realize that the hard night was over – in a few hours we would go to the doctor, and a few hours after that, F would be home from his trip to help share the load.

Fast forward to Sunday morning. YB’s fever was long gone, but she was still under the weather, and even with F by my side, it had been a rough weekend. We were all tired and grumpy, me most of all, and I wanted a break. No nap or quiet time in the swing was long enough for me. I felt angry and resentful at being so needed, defeated and discouraged about my independence. What happened to that supermom who’d been here just a few nights ago? I hate being angry, and it was even worse to be angry at my little sick baby who couldn’t help being miserable. I broke down and cried.

I had been hoping to go to yoga class on Sunday afternoon, but after the weekend we’d had, I thought I should stay home instead. F made me go. The baby, feeling fine, was hanging out in her stroller helping her dad rake leaves as I drove away. The yoga class at EEY was taught by a sub, one of the current YTT students about to graduate in two weeks, and meeting her gave me a chance to reflect on where I was one year ago at the end of my teacher training. Throughout the class, I focused on centering myself here, right now on my mat, letting go of all the anger and bad energy I’d been feeling, reaching towards my truest self and the patience and kindness I know live there.

After class, I felt refreshed, as if the reserves inside me had been empty and now were full again (or, if not full, at least not empty anymore!). I came home feeling like I had something to give to my family again. Of course, when the baby cried for half an hour as we tried to eat dinner, I lost my composure again, but anyone would have felt that way, and later on in the evening I reached for patience and was able to find it.

This experience made me think about a few things in yogic terms. First, it was important for me to remember that sometimes I need to take care of myself first. I want to give my best self to my daughter, and if I’m exhausted physically and emotionally, I can’t possibly do that. This is such a vital thing to remember, and such an easy thing to discount and forget.

Also, examining my feelings and realizing I was angry made me think back to my musings on yoga and emotion last year. First, I had to acknowledge that I was angry, not just to myself but to my husband, out loud, and share my frustrations and fears, and let loose some of the intensity of the emotion by crying it out. Too often I bottle things up, which only serves to make me angrier in the long term. Then, according to Patanjali, the way to end negative emotions is to cultivate the opposite emotion instead. For me in this situation, the opposite of my anger was patience, kindness, my love for my baby, and my compassion, both for her feeling sick and for myself feeling tired and worn out. When I was able to focus on these qualities in a thoughtful way through my yoga practice, the anger dissolved.

I also needed to remember that I can’t be a supermom all the time. Sometimes I’ll do a great job, and other times I won’t, but that doesn’t make me a bad mother or a bad person. It just makes me human. We all strive for perfection (and I think I have a separate post brewing on that topic), but in an imperfect world, we have to take the good with the bad. I will never be a perfect supermom, but in all my imperfections, I’m still a super mom.

 

Mornings November 20, 2012

Filed under: reflections — R. H. Ward @ 1:00 pm
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Yesterday YogaBaby had her four-month doctor visit and some vaccinations, which didn’t agree with her, so she was up every two hours fussing during the night. I’ve adjusted to a lot of the changes of motherhood, but not the lack of sleep, especially when I feed her at 5 am, drift off again at 5:15, and wake up with the alarm at 6. I spent a good amount of breakfast time whining to my husband, who had given up on sleep after that 5 am feeding and gotten up, and who had to be at least as tired as I was. The baby, of course, was peacefully sleeping.

After breakfast I went into the bathroom. The sun was just coming up, so I left the lights off, and looked out the window at the brightening sky behind my neighbors’ houses, and the bare tree branches silhouetted against the dark gray sky overhead. It reminded me of how I used to exercise in the early morning: yoga on our enclosed porch, watching that sky brighten through the big windows as I saluted the sun, or jogging in the cold crisp air, getting acquainted with the colors of the trees and the rabbits, squirrels, and sometimes deer in my neighborhood. Feeling my feet connecting, first thing in the morning, with my mat or the sidewalk or the beaten trail through the park. How solitary I had felt, how good and strong.

If this were fiction, this is the part where I’d realize that giving that up for now is all worth it in my new life as a mother, and I’d leave the bathroom window refreshed by my memories and with a renewed sense of purpose. But this is real life, and I am tired. I miss being outside in the cool air; I miss feeling flexible and strong and powerful, in touch with my own breath and my inner spirit. I miss being by myself. I took a long shower and washed my hair. Then I went in to feed the baby, and she looked up at me with her big grey-brown eyes, full of trust, and she gave me her big good morning smile. And I smiled back.

 

[Note for my future reference, and for those following the ongoing sleep saga: this post was hand-written last Thursday morning, after a doctor visit on Wednesday evening, and it took a while to type up. Since then the sleep has gotten worse, and even worse, and then last night slightly better.]

 

The Yoga of Parenthood, Part 1: Malasana October 26, 2012

Filed under: yoga,yoga lifestyle — R. H. Ward @ 3:37 pm
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Malasana, at the beach, with angry baby

This will, I think, be the start of a new series here at the yoga blog. I may not have as much time to write as I used to, but we do take a ton of pictures of our kid, and many of those pictures are tangentially related to yoga in some way. Today I bring you malasana, or the yoga squat, shown here on the beach at Cape May, on a windy September day when the water of the Atlantic Ocean was pretty darn cold and YogaBaby didn’t care who knew it.

To learn more about malasana, check out my much more detailed Pose of the Month post!

 

Balancing Acts October 18, 2012

Filed under: reflections,yoga lifestyle — R. H. Ward @ 2:16 pm
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It’s been two weeks since I posted here. Um. Coincidentally, two weeks ago my husband F started back to work and YogaBaby headed to daycare. Until you have had such things happen in your life, you would not believe how complicated this gets. When I was at home on leave, F hung out with YogaBaby in the early mornings while I caught a little sleep, then got himself out the door to work; when F was at home on leave (and YB started sleeping more), he usually got up early with me and then waved goodbye as I got myself out the door to work. Point being, in both cases there was one person who wasn’t trying to get out the door to work and who could reliably have a baby placed on them while the other showered. Now I, F, and YogaBaby all need to get out the door in the mornings. Admittedly, YB is a pretty easy character in the morning – she often sleeps until or past 7 o’clock, so the grown-ups can get fed and showered in the 6 o’clock hour before she needs attending to. But it’s still a lot of stuff and humans to coordinate. And some combination of sleeping unswaddled, being at exciting daycare, and having a constant low-level daycare cold, has been affecting YB’s sleep schedule such that she was waking up 3+ times per night, so F and I were coordinating all of these morning things while barely conscious. (I think we’ve got that figured out now – the new plan involves feeding her more, and more often – but don’t quote me on that.) And don’t get me started on the craziness of the evenings, or how being a one-car household affects the new babyful commute.  Suffice to say, we are tired, and still seeking the new normal.

Besides the busyness of family life with two working parents and a small hungry hungry hippo, I think there’s been another reason why I haven’t been posting. It feels somehow wrong to write in a yoga blog when I’m not doing any yoga. Lately I’ve been thinking back nostalgically to the days of my teacher training, just last year, when I practiced my yoga every day – every day! – and even meditated on a regular basis. I felt so centered back then! I had so many good yogic things to write about, asanas to discuss and tips to share. And now, even if I found the time, what would I have to say about yoga? If I want to write about yoga postures, I ought to be actually doing them; if I’m going to write about teaching, I should be teaching some classes that I can then write about. How can I write about a yoga practice when I have no practice?

My practice, right now, is different from what it was. Instead of rolling out my mat, I lay a blanket on the floor and play with my baby. Instead of luxuriating in asanas, I remind myself to pee. I sleep when I can, and I don’t guilt myself for not getting up extra early to do yoga, because sleep is just as necessary as downward dog. Two weeks ago, a friend watched the baby so F and I could have dinner and go see my favorite band play a concert, and that was yoga. Last week I got a massage, a whole hour just to relax and not worry about getting anything done, and that was yoga. I ride my bike to the train station and that’s yoga too. There will be asanas again at some point, and even meditation, but right now my balancing act has nothing to do with tree pose and everything to do with responsibility and family and time. My yoga practice, right now, is to do the best I can with what I’ve got.

 

Postnatal Yoga September 24, 2012

Filed under: yoga — R. H. Ward @ 1:53 pm
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My body seems to have bounced back quickly from my pregnancy and birth, but there are definitely still some sore spots and changes to contend with. My hips are very tight, and my abs are still weak. I also notice that my calves are still quite tight – during my pregnancy my calves would get so tight that I’d get leg cramps at night, and that tightness seems to be persisting. I’m also trying to build up some arm strength again after taking a break from more strenuous asanas and exercise towards the end of my pregnancy.

As I try to rebuild my yoga practice, I’ve been naturally gravitating towards asanas that will stretch my hips. Pigeon feels great, and it’s nice to be able to rest on the floor again! I also love cobbler pose, especially because I can hold and play with my baby in this posture. I practice downward dog to help open my calves, and plank pose with repeated vinyasas to build back my abs and arm muscles. I’m also finding that standing postures like the warriors work all of these areas.

These are some of the asanas I’ve been focusing on, but I was also curious about what asanas are recommended for postnatal yoga practice. Here are a few resources I found:

Postnatal Yoga: Conditions and Cures for Both Mama and Babe (YogaJournal.com): I like this article because it gives a few suggestions for simple poses that might be helpful to your baby too. I know I put YogaBaby into knees-to-chest and it seemed to feel good to her.

Postpartum Yoga for New Moms (BabyZone.com): This article discusses some of the same postures as the YJ article, but it adds a few more strenuous asanas as well, good for when Mom’s feeling a little stronger, and a few different postures to try for strengthening the abdominals. I love practicing cobra again!

It looks like Shiva Rea has a few popular DVDs for new moms. Her Postnatal Yoga DVD has received some good reviews on Amazon, but it should be noted that the DVD doesn’t include any “mom and baby” postures. Rea addresses this in her new DVD, Mama & Baby Yoga. This looks to be brand-new for 2012!

 

Back in the saddle September 17, 2012

Filed under: checking in,reflections,yoga lifestyle — R. H. Ward @ 1:00 pm
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I haven’t blogged much in recent weeks because I’ve been preparing to go back to work. Last week was my first full week back at the office, and already I feel swamped, overwhelmed, snowed under by the work. My colleagues did their best to watch over my projects all summer, keeping things going and responding to author queries, but I’m now responsible for getting things to the next level. I’ve also had to travel for a business meeting already: just from Philly to DC, and only for a quick day trip and lunch meeting rather than an overnight, but still. All this while I’m still trying to adjust to pumping breast milk and lugging my Medela InStyle everywhere (including to DC); working out transportation/commuting issues now that my husband F, temporarily home with YogaBaby, can’t just run me to the train station; crying every night when I see my sweet little one look up at me and realize I just missed a whole day of her brand-new life. Discovering, in short, what it means to be a working mother.

The main thing on my mind lately is time. Time has separated itself into two distinct categories: time with my daughter, and time doing anything else. The “anything else” is often necessary (like working is necessary for keeping the little one in diapers), but I’m finding that I want to keep anything not involving the baby to a minimum. When we’re talking about shortening my commute time (by getting me a bike so I don’t have to walk to the train station – which by the way is really fun) or taking a 30-minute lunch so I can get home earlier, that’s one thing, but how do I prioritize yoga and meditation? They’re things I need for myself, to be a healthy person and therefore a good mom, but how do I take that time away from my child when I already by necessity have to be away from her so much? And how do I justify healthy social things – meeting a girlfriend for a drink, or going to a lecture at the library or museum – when first of all I feel like I barely see my kid, and secondly I’m not making enough time for yoga and meditation? It all has to fit in somewhere, right? How? (That’s not a rhetorical question. If you have the answer, please tell me!)

I think, in the near future, that I’m going to try to revisit what the yogic scriptures say about time and reflect on what that may mean in my situation. I’ll post here when I can, and only when it won’t drastically interfere with my baby time. (For example, I wrote this post by hand in the “mothers’ room” at the office while I was pumping, and I’m now typing it up six days later with a sleeping sweetie in a milk coma on my lap.) In the meantime, I’ll try to take a lesson from my YogaBaby and keep my focus on the present moment.

 

Mom and Baby Yoga August 14, 2012

Filed under: yoga,yoga lifestyle — R. H. Ward @ 3:06 pm
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Mom and Baby Yoga Space Now that it’s been a few weeks and I’m feeling stronger, I’m starting to think about getting myself back in shape again. I definitely gained 30 pounds during my pregnancy, which seemed like the right amount – I stayed vegetarian and mostly ate a healthy diet (other than the vanilla milkshakes), but I definitely didn’t try to limit my eating in any way. I don’t know what my weight is now, but other than my massive baby-feeding appendages and a little bit of tummy, I’m back to what feels like my former size. Also, my pre-baby jeans fit again at only three weeks post-baby (they’re snug, but they button!), so thank you yoga and vegetarianism for that.

So, time to get myself moving. I took a walk a few days last week, in the mornings when it was cool enough to take the baby out in the stroller. I’ve only been going two blocks; I was exhausted after the first walk, but a few days and a few more walks later, I felt pretty solid.

I’ve started practicing some yoga again too: just maybe 20 minutes, and I’m starting off gently, but it feels really good, and it’s easier on my body than walking, interestingly. I’m surprised at how quickly my strength and flexibility is coming back to me. I had thought I’d lost a lot of strength during my pregnancy, but I guess there’s a difference between having the strength to lift my regular weight and the strength to lift my weight at nine months pregnant.

I’m including a photo here of my current yoga space. In order to do yoga at all, of course I have to work around the babe. Rather than waiting until she sleeps or sticking her in her swing, I’ve concocted this setup where she can hang out on her little jungle playmat while I do my asana practice. At first she was not into this at all, but I think I first tried it when she was a little too young for the playmat. A week or so later and she was way more interested in looking at things. The past few times I’ve tried it, she’s been cool looking at her little parrot and butterfly friends for a good 20 minutes, which is enough for me to get some yoga done, at least at this point. Eventually I’m going to want to get back to the yoga studio – I’ll have to, to get myself back in good shape physically and for teaching – but this setup is perfect for home practice.

 

 

Baby Meditation August 8, 2012

Filed under: reflections,yoga lifestyle — R. H. Ward @ 9:00 am
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At one month old, my baby is a lot more wakeful, and much more alert, now than she was before. She’s awesome, and I love watching her discover the world. The flip side, though, is that hanging out with her can get a little monotonous. Don’t get me wrong, being with her is amazing and every flail of her tiny arms is miraculous, but watching her flail for an hour straight when she doesn’t feel like sleeping? Even as I hold her and rock her and talk and sing to her, I keep finding my mind drifting. When will she nod off so I can wash those dishes? I just got the schedule for the monthly lecture series I went to all last year – will I be able to go to any this year with a baby at home? I half-wrote this post in my head at least three times before I was actually able to get to the keyboard. And the baby knows she doesn’t have my full attention. When I one-handedly check my phone, she fusses, even though I’m still holding her and rocking her. I catch myself getting distracted and it bothers me – this is likely to be the only period in my or her life when I have uninterrupted time to devote to nothing but her, and I don’t want to cheat either of us of that. Yes, laundry and dishes are important, and so are my other projects, and I can do those things while the baby sleeps, but when she’s not sleeping? Other stuff should fall by the wayside and she should get priority.

But that’s easy to say and harder to put into practice. I know every mom must get distracted from time to time – moms have a lot of things to juggle – and I’m not going to beat myself up about that, but I do genuinely want to enjoy this time with her. And it occurred to me: I can treat spending time with my baby as a meditation practice. I have the perfect object to center my attention in the present moment. I can’t sit in a traditional meditation position, since I have to follow the baby’s lead and shift positions or walk around as I hold her, but I can still focus my attention and try to avoid distractions.

Yesterday I tried it. The baby had slept all morning, and by the afternoon, it wasn’t doing either of us any good trying to get her to nap because she wanted to be awake. I decided that, rather than forcing her to sleep so I could follow my distractions and do something else, it might be better just to do what she wanted, so that’s what I did. I challenged myself to stay focused only on her for half an hour. I kept catching myself trying to do other things, wanting to check email, worrying about the future, even just reaching for my water glass or wanting a snack. It was incredibly difficult to sit and pay attention only to her. But it was also pretty awesome. She was calm for that entire 30 minutes, no crying or even fussing really. She looked at me and gurgled and flailed and kicked, and I looked back. By the end, I was counting down the minutes, but putting in the effort to be truly present with her was something we both enjoyed. I don’t know if Zen masters would recognize it as meditation, but it was excellent practice at focusing my attention in the present moment.