The Yoga of Letting Go

My sister-in-law is a yoga instructor. She’s good too – I can vouch for her. Over the summer, we did sunset yoga on her rooftop, and it was single-handedly the best class I’d ever taken. She has a way of making you feel like you don’t have to strain to find the pose; the pose finds you. That mindset eliminates all of the anxiety around yoga: you stop thinking about whether you’re doing it right, or why you are so inflexible. Your arms and legs and torso just float and wobble until…click.

Your body finds the pose.

Today, I am sad. I am very very sad. Like I’m sad in my body – my chest feels sad, my limbs feel sad, my neck doesn’t want to support my head…It’s crazy. I feel like there’s an invisible drain that’s sucking my energy away. I’d give anything to get out from under this cloud. As I type this, I wonder if these feelings are my own…

Hopefully, by the time this reaches your inbox, I’m on my way to get a morning massage. A marma massage – which is supposed to specifically target the 108 points in the body where mind and emotion meet.

Trust me, I need it.

Anyway, this sadness is disempowering. I don’t know what to do with it. Nothing – not writing, meditating, getting angry or acting out – nothing seems to assuage the feeling. Typically, if I’ve done something to someone, I can change it, I can apologize and compensate for my transgressions, but what happens when both parties have missed the mark so many times that there’s nothing left to do? You can’t tell who is in the right or wrong anymore? Your apologies are smothered under layers of your own pain?

I think that’s when its…over.

So today, my life feels like a super uncomfortable yoga pose. Tree pose? Sure. Downward dog? More or less. But I’m not sure how to master the “Over” pose. I’m not sure how to master the yoga of letting go. I’m balancing on one foot, flailing my arms in the air and desperately trying to find this balance. I wish my sister-in-law could ‘yoga-instruct’ my life.

Breathe into it, she’d probably say. The pose will find you.

So I’m breathing into the discomfort and hoping balance finds me. At this point, toppling over would be better than this.

The floor might suck, but at least it’s stabilizing.

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