retracing my steps

I've just reread my last few entries here (it's been a while, hasn't it?). It is difficult to read through the pain because I experience it all over again when I see it on the page. It makes me want to give myself a hug.

I wrote in September: "I have decided that I'm going to open myself up to the universe, to God, and relinquish control over my life's path. I don't know what I'm supposed to do next. And I have decided to be okay with that."

I also didn't know what was going to come next (of course, we never do, do we?), otherwise I might have been a wee bit less willing to relinquish control. I wonder sometimes if I would have given up eating as an emotional outlet -- as way to numb those uncomfortable feelings -- if I had known what surrendering to those emotions would actually feel like. It's not a productive line of thinking, of course, but sometimes you just need a few moments of feeling sorry for yourself.

+++

During the past year, I have lost a lot of weight. And it feels really weird. Not awesome, like I always thought it would feel. Weird. On the other hand, all of this yoga of the past few months has reawakened a love for my body that I haven't experienced since...well, since I was a child who spent the summers swimming in Long Pond, and running, barefoot and whining, across the pebbly lawn of my grandparents' lakehouse.

In December, at my first yoga class in New Bedford (and second yoga class ever), my instructor said: "In preparation for the shoulder stand, please lie back on the mat, feet flexed . . ." and then I stopped listening because I was freaking out. Big time. "I'm too heavy," I thought. "Can't do it." And so I went to the wall and tried it there, and it was very hard for me. And I thought, "I'll never be able to do it."

I guess sometimes I just stop listening to that voice because even though I knew I could never do a shoulder stand, I kept trying, kept practicing until a quite momentous day last week when I rolled back and my legs shot up and stayed. I rolled back down, sat up, and said to the cats, but mostly just to myself, "Whoa."

Here's to knowing you can't do something and doing it anyway.