How to Prepare to Be a Beginner.

 

Lately I have been pretty consistent about doing yoga in the mornings. Nothing crazy. I am not good enough at it yet to do anything crazy. I also don’t have any special knowledge about it. My qualifications start and end with the fact I own a yoga mat. 

I found a woman on Youtube who has a series of “easy” and “beginner” videos and I have been working my way through those in the mornings. They range between 15 and 30 minutes and she doesn’t come across as judge-y, which is weirdly common, I have discovered.

Now I’m not here to convince you to do yoga, but I do kind of wish that someone had convinced me to do yoga a long time ago. Here’s why:

• It is waaaaaaaay harder than you think it is. I used to be all like, “That just looks like bending”, but OMG, it engages muscles in a way I hadn’t previously understood. It’s like the first time I ever did a plank and ended up shouting, “Why is this so hard!”

• I’m not going to get all woo-woo on you, but I think it is possible that I’ve been calmer this week than I was a month or two ago. And that’s good because my work life has been … a lot this week, but I have felt it less. This might be a correlation, not causation thing, but I have started to just sort of feel better. And that’s good.

• It seems like my cat is getting a cold. I don’t think that is related to the yoga, though if there is some zen spirit energy swirling around my apartment now, who knows how that manifests?

• I’m sleeping marginally better this week. I’ve always had trouble sleeping, but I think I’m getting a little better at it.

• This isn’t initially going to sound like a good thing, but I go through my days with a little bit of that physically exerted feeling in my body. They way you feel when you’ve been going to the gym consistently. It isn’t a pleasant feeling exactly; some soreness in the arms and legs. It is a good feeling though. I imagine this is my muscles busy throughout the day trying to adjust to this new normal.

• I’ve also been using the elastic band thing and foam roller I had to get for physical therapy, except I figured out I can use them to do some light working out during the day. Again, nothing crazy, but sometime sit is nice to take a break from work and go do some reps on my stretchy band that hooks into the closet door. Do you even stretchy band, bro?

• None of these little things seem life changing. I’m not going to give up running or anything; it’s good to sweat and to run your body into the ground sometimes, but this may be the first time in my adult life that I have realized that not everything has to be that. I think that my brain thinks that nothing counts if you don’t end up a painful sweaty mess. Probably this is the fault of high school gym or being raised as a man in America. Not everything has to be dialed up to 11. Maybe slow and steady and consistent is good. As much as I love running, I’m not going to lie, most of the times I do not go out for a run it is because I just don’t have the juice for it. And who could blame me? When I DO go run, I do like 6 or 8 or 10 MILES! And some days I don’t have that in me. Most days I could go do a mile, but what fun is that?? The first mile is the worst part! But maybe it is good to do things that do not require ALL OF THE ENERGY in your body. Doing some light yoga in the morning isn’t going to change my life, but over time, might change my life, you know what I’m saying?

• If I do this yoga thing long enough, I might one day be comfortable enough to go to a beginners yoga class and then I’ll end up being all about green smoothies or something. So stay tuned for that!

• I really like doing the “Namaste” thing at the end of yoga. I don’t know why. It just seems gracious and we could all use a little more of that.

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Ten Minutes at a Time.

This afternoon I’m supposed to start physical therapy on my bum shoulder and I am really excited about it because — I guess — I am middle aged now and that’s the kind of thing I get excited about.

Man, that was tough to type: middle aged.

I have avoided thinking about it that way.

Where have the years gone?

And of course, I know. I’ve had a pretty fantastic life so far. It has been a little inscrutable at times, but I’m proud of (most of) it.

Back to physical therapy though: I’m not sure I ever really understood physical therapy until I had to do it in Portland about three years ago. That was for the same shoulder, but the cause was different. I think I thought at the time that it was going to be sort of like getting a massage, and parts of it were like that, but most of it was lots of small and not that individually different little silly exercises. The guy would be all like, “Here, squeeze this rubber ball for ten minutes.” And I was all like, “Sure dude, whatever.” And then I would squeeze the rubber ball for ten minutes and then he’d come back and be like, “Use your hands to pedal this upright bike contraption for ten minutes.” And I’d be like, “This seems undignified, but whatever dude.” And so I would pedal the upright bike contraption for ten minutes and then he’d come back and be like, “How does your shoulder feel?” And I’d be all like, “OMG, it does actually feel better!”

I have always had a little bit of respect for traditional medicine and things like Reflexology, not because I’m an anti-science magical-crystal hippie, but just the opposite; some of these things do have very long histories stretching back to before we had upright bike contraptions and if you think about the traditional medicines of lots of indigenous people whose cultures were doing their thing for hundreds or thousands of years before what we think of as “modern medicine” came along, you can imagine how enough trial and error over a long enough period of time would likely produce at least SOME usable results. 

One of the benefits we have accrued by existing when we do, is that we have so much built up human knowledge of so many kinds that we can rely on and so many people who know so much about different parts of it. Like, in the Before Times, I could get on an airplane and I didn’t need to know how to fly the airplane, because the pilot knew how to do that. This is a concept called ‘Specialization of Knowledge’. The idea is that over time, the increasing complexity of our world has required that people specialize in particular spheres of knowledge. 

That’s why I didn’t need to understand Physical Therapy, I just needed access to someone who did. And oh man, I am so excited to get access to one again later today.

Wish me luck! I get to pedal the upright bike contraption again.

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