exercise is not punishment

My friend wrote this amazing blog,  on exercise,  my response to it on Facebook was just going to be too long, so of course I had to write a blog in response!

I have been practicing yoga for about 10 years now and teaching for about 5. Although yoga is very good for you that's not really why I practice it. I practice yoga because doing yoga feels like going to the playground, except all you need is your body.  I am very athletic and always have been, but I was never flexible and I could not do anything that even resembled gymnastics.  The first time I did natarajasana I felt free in a way I had never felt.  Among the many sports I did soccer and track were my favorite. I stopped playing group sports after my freshman year of high school, but I continued to run for exercise so I was super tight, especially in the hips.  After getting in a good workout it felt so good to open up my body the way natarajasana does. As I continued to practice yoga I became completely enthralled by some of the more acrobatic postures. The balance, strength and freedom that is required to succeed in these postures makes you feel like you are 10 again. I have seen it in the faces of so many students, the first time they try headstand  or full wheel in 20 years.  Usually their first response is to start laughing.

Often times I have students ask me how long it took me to do certain yoga postures, usually meaning how many years it took, which is most often how we define our time.  However, in Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers he points out it is not years, but hours. "The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert-in anything."   My response to my students when they ask me this is not how many years it took, but how many minutes. I have a yoga practice where I actually set aside an hour or so to do a more complete practice, however, I am always doing yoga. (note: the physical practice of yoga is only one small part of a very deep ocean, but because the discussion is on exercise , that's the part I am discussing.) You could ask anyone who knows me or spends time with me.  I will start stretching anywhere, doesn't matter where I am if my body is calling for it I am going to move.  My whole wardrobe is based on whether I can do the splits in what I am wearing and often if I could go upside down in it.  This is how I think we need to start exercising. By minutes because minutes add up to hours and those hours eventually become years.

There are times in my life when I forget about all of this, when exercise almost becomes a form of punishment where I basically try to beat my body and mind into submission.  It never works though, everything in me revolts from this sort of exercise. What ends up happening instead is I beat myself onto the couch where I can hide from my own unrelenting ego. I think this is what ends up happening to most of us. We don't think we can run a marathon or eat "that disgusting health food,"  we see images of unobtainable bodies that remind us how lacking our own is. It has become a shame based system, one that everyone is trying to cash in on, but this is not how exercising should make us feel.  We were born to move, how that movement is expressed through each individual doesn't matter.  My son cannot even watch TV sitting still. He has to get up and jump around and be apart of the show. This is how we are born, we want to be apart of the show. We want to engage in life.  We do not want to watch it go by on a screen.  As adults we have to get so serious about everything we do and honestly it is a bit ridiculous. People are starting to catch onto this, with things like the tough mudder, warrior dash, electric run and many others that are popping up all over the place.  I hope that these things are not a trend, but a movement where we start to appreciate our bodies and their amazing capabilities, no matter the level of that capability.

the death grip

I almost died giving birth to my baby. I was probably the least likeliest candidate to have a complication and everything seemed to have gone extremely well. I had my son in about 4 hours and 3 pushes, pretty great for a first timer. After everything seemed to be over the doctor seemed to be taking a while "finishing up," I wont go into the details of what that means, for those of you who haven't had a baby yet, but things had apparently, not gone as well as it had looked from the outside. My cervix had torn and that organ, much like the tongue, has a lot of blood vessels so when it gets torn you start losing a lot of blood very quickly and it is very dangerous.  At first my Doctor didn't say anything, but then she started asking for towels and she calmly explained to me what had happened.  I didn't understand what a big deal this was until she started yelling at the nurses who weren't moving fast enough and then there was a huge rush of people and the atmosphere in the room began to change.  I hadn't had any medication yet and defiantly hadn't had an epidural, so they were going to have to put me completely under, I remember my son was on that table with the heated lights over him and he was still crying as they were moving me to another room to do surgery. I wanted to hold him and tell him he was ok, but I could not, I asked Byron if he was staying with Asher because I didn't want him left without his parents. I was shaking and still losing blood. In the surgery room they kept asking me if I understood what was happening, I must have not been as coherent as I thought because they all seemed to think I didn't know what was happening. They wanted to me to sign a consent form for the surgery, after they had literally strapped me to a table, finally a very sweet nurse grabbed the form and said she was taking it my husband to sign. I remember the anesthesiologist leaning over very close to my face to tell me what he was going to to, he talked to me as you would to a small child who wasn't feeling well, I remember thinking how nice he was. I asked my Doctor if it was ok that I felt very light headed and she said it was just from all the blood I was losing. I don't remember very well, I think I may have passed out before they even put me under, but I do remember my last thought was that I may never wake up again.  
No one else knew what was happening, but when my mom. my mother and father-in-law came into the room they knew something was not right, I was not there, but there was also lots of blood. This really freaked my mom out and I don't think my mother-in-law was doing much better. Byron, of course, sure and steady, knew I would be fine.  I was fine and am fine, as I am writing this right now, however I still have not been able to fully process through this experience. The thing is that I faced death in that moment. I am not saying like oh anyone could die at any moment sort of thing or that anyone doing surgery is put at a risk. I literally knew in that moment right before I was put under that I may never see the world again, my eyes were closed and there was only darkness, I could not hear what was happening around me anymore, there was nothing and I thought this might be the end. Blackness.  I had no emotion to go along with that thought it was just what I thought, something that seemed logical. Everything had happened so quickly that I really didn't have time for it to be scary. I didn't think it was that traumatic. I thought my parents were over reacting when they told everyone I almost died. The thing is though that I was just too scared to hear people say that to me. I could not bare to think that I almost lost my son before I even had a chance to know him and this feeling only gets worse as time goes on because I only love my son more and more and the fear of losing him and not being there for him gets worse.  I had a hard pregnancy and I am defiantly not ready to have another baby yet, but when I think about getting pregnant again, there is always a small little whisper in the back of my head. This little shadow that tells me I might die. I am scared to go through childbirth again, I am scared that I might die. That is what I think about, leaving this world behind and being engulfed by darkness.