Slow yoga and slowing down

I tried a new yoga dvd today (blessed be netflix).

It was...insightful.

I'm usually a vinyasa kinda girl.
I like the movement, the connection. It calms me because it forces me to be calm. I can either stay in warrior iii, or I can start thinking and fall over milliseconds after my brain starts yelping. I can either keep up, go with the in-out flow of the poses, or I can let my mind get the better of me and then wind up going "wait, what? Crap, I missed something." There's a challenge to not only being in the moment, but keeping up with the moment I'm supposed to be in, and not only being in that moment, but being my body in that moment, not just thinking about downward dog, but what my body is doing in downward dog and what I can do to improve it.

Bugbear has changed that. No more full locks, no more ab work, no more laying on my stomach or back, no arm balances or working toward standing on my head. No more lots of things. Lots of cat/cow, lots of warrior ii, lots of modified push ups, and lots and lots and lots of child's pose.

I had a party in my head when I found Jennifer Wolfe's Prenatal Vinyasa yoga. I loved it. I still love it. But I have trouble committing to things. I like options, to see what else is out there. So my netflix queue still has various "huh, I should try that" prenatal yoga dvds on it. Yoga for Pregnancy, Labor, and Birth showed up in the mail today.  When the warnings included "watch this dvd in its entirety once before working along with it" I went "oooooh!!" because I thought that meant "challenge." It did, but not the sort of challenge I expected.

This one is slow. Three full breaths here, five full breaths there. Child's pose in between. S.l.o.w. And that means more time in my head. In non-threatening, can't fall over, not horribly challenging, poses. I got twitchy. Drop your spine, tuck your tail, freak out about whether your dissertation adviser dropped you and you somehow never got the email, and hold for three full counts. Widen your knees, trust your breath, wonder exactly how you're going to pay the bills for Bugbear's birth, and hold.

Probably not what the instructor had in mind. But I realized it. I worked to change it. And somewhere in the middle of the 746th breath in child's pose, things shifted in my head, too. I was just there. And only there. And it was lovely. I had a dream last night that transferred from frenetic, nearly quest-like into a moment of sheer rapture, caught up in simply being in the moment, one of those rare times of complete community and utter praise. The sort of thing I imagine that fundamentalists might feel during hand-raising worship, or entranced mystics experienced and managed to write about. So hard to put into words, but it's stuck with me all day as a reminder that I am not in this alone, that there has to be some sort of reason for all this, and that I need to change the way I go about my days. And the slow yoga dvd was a moment where I realized exactly how much I need to change.

Not working outside the home has been really difficult on me. I struggle to value myself as an individual and a partner. I fill my time with to-do lists, phone calls, chores and activities. I make myself busy so that I have to stay with the flow lest I miss something, so that I don't have time to think. And in that process, I've lost my ability to center myself in the storm and work through the many difficult questions that still remain. And I need to regain that. I need to re-learn how to be myself in downward dog in that moment and not drift away. I need to be able to slow down in a more complete way so that I have the energy I need to do things and think about things without a heartbeat that sounds like a hummingbird. I need to take from all this the ability to just be.

So as much as I want to put it in its pretty red envelope and send it on its way, Yoga for Pregnancy...is hanging around for the week. I have things I need to learn from it, even if they are lessons I've been fighting for the better part of 3 decades and don't like very much.

How do you slow down? What would you recommend?