Day 22: You Can Pose But You Can't Hide

I feel like I'm still reeling with the news of the death of my friend's daughter. One minute it feels totally unreal, like I just had a super messed up dream, and then it feels overwhelmingly real. Luckily I had a light load of work today because I couldn't focus on anything today. The advantage to being a freelancer was I was able to push back the bulk of my work until tomorrow which is really for the best. I took me a few hours just to craft a coherent 500 word article which I can usually knock out in 20-30 minutes, an hour tops if I'm super distracted. I just kept worrying about how my friend was doing and thinking about her daughter.

I spoke with her tonight and she's doing . . . well, not good. But I don't think anyone expects her to be doing well; I know I certainly don't. She told me the details of her daughter's last couple days and out of respect for her, her daughter, and her family, I'm not going to share them here. But in talking to her, everything finally became real and stayed real.

With that context for my mental and emotional state, I decided to look up some yoga poses for emotional healing. One site recommended doing sun salutations as a way to kick start and energize the mind to help pull it out of a dark, emotional place. Sure it was late at night but that's never stopped me from doing sun salutations because I have a co-sleeping baby--I don't sleep anyway.

This is my life.

The sun salutations actually helped. I was focused more on my breath than on how sad I felt and it felt nice to have that momentary relief. I also read that hip openers can be helpful for healing since people tend to hold a lot of emotional tension in their hips. If that's true, that might explain why both of my hips were incredibly stiff today. Pigeon helped, as did cobbler's pose and reclined cobbler. Towards what ended up being the end of my practice, I decided to do bow pose. I lay down on my mat and was about to reach for my ankles to go up into the pose and I found myself unable to move. Everything I've been holding in about my friend's daughter's death felt like it smashed on top of me and pushed me down into my mat. I just couldn't move.

Eventually, I found some strength to pull myself into bow pose. It took all of my concentration to hold my ankles and not collapse back down on to my mat. After that, I felt pretty done and decided to close with savasana. If I thought all the feelings had overwhelmed me before, they felt like they were smothering me during savasana. I couldn't help but cry. I cried for my friend, I cried for her daughter, I cried for the unfairness of being the parent of a heart transplant kid, I cried for the fact that her daughter and my son were supposed to grow up together. That little girl was three days younger than my son and between the two of them, they've inspired so much strength and positivity in others. I'm honored to have known that little girl.

Yoga is apparently just causing me to better access my emotions instead of suppressing all of them which is my usual modus operandi. I don't know if I'm feeling emotional healing yet but I'm feeling all the feelings--maybe this just means I'll be able to process what I'm experiencing in a healthy way.

Yoga: it gives me what I need, not necessarily what I want.

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I know I don't have many readers, but if whoever is reading this has a few extra bucks and can contribute towards this family's funeral costs for their daughter, the help would be so much appreciated: http://www.gofundme.com/ryleeswildride