Ode to Yoga

When I was 8 years old my parents started doing yoga, and had my brother and I get up with them to do it, as I mentioned yesterday. At the time I was pretty neutral towards yoga. I was good at it (natural flexibility), so I liked that, but I didn't much care for the getting up early, nor for the fact that yoga was the latest in a long list of vaguely hippie indignities to which my parents subjected me and which I knew I must never mention to any other children, lest I become a social liability (this list largely consisted of food related events, and they deserve their own blog post soon!). Yoga was not cool in 1984.

The 6am stuff stopped, but the yoga kept up. It became one of our chores, literally. Kenny and I had lists of daily chores, and yoga was on that list several times a week. I stopped doing yoga regularly when I went to Thacher, as I was rarely home, and hence did not have chore lists other than during the summer and other vacations.

When I got pregnant with Zion I started doing prenatal yoga. Robert did it with me, and we virtually never missed a morning for 9 months. Then I had a baby, and yoga went by the wayside again. I tried to do it when I was pregnant with Liel, but never managed to make it a part of my daily routine.

Lately I've decided that yoga and I need to be BFF again. I really can't do it when the kids are awake (the crawl all over, me demand trips to the potty, stories, and adjudication of squabbles), so nap time it shall be. I've never actually taken a yoga class- yoga is entirely home-based in my life.

Immediately after making this decision about getting close with yoga again I got sick. And man, I just didn't have the energy for yoga. Hell, I barely had the energy to sit on the couch and read the kids stories! But a few days ago when I crawled out the other side of this illness I did yoga again. I was still sick- in fact, I couldn't breath out of my nose at all. I did a pretty mellow 30 minutes (mentally cringing at how much better I'd been at some of the poses when I was 9 months pregnant and 50 lbs heavier- yeah, I've got some work ahead of me!), and you know what? By the end of them I could breath out both sides of my nose.

Yoga, I love you.