Simona is on the short side, average body type, short springy brown hair, an indelible happy disposition, figurative blushing rosy cheeks, and some sort of foreign accent I can't place. I'm not particularly fond of Simona as a yoga instructor. I don't think she's quite grasped the necessary flow, the wax and wane of pushing students with instructions and letting the yoga do the teaching. Plus, she's incredibly young. Her voice is immature, and her instruction skeletons seem too contrived. Every once in a while, though, she leads a great practice, and I know she's just a little farther along on the same path I'm traversing.
It was the first time I had done pigeon with Simona, and also one of the first times Simona said something worthwhile. It was something along these lines:
"Pigeon is a difficult pose. It's uncomfortable. There's a lot of sensation, and many people often confuse it with pain. After a while, your body grows uncomfortable, and wants to shift, wants to move out of the position. But you can't listen to yourself. Your mind will tell you all sorts of things to get you to move out of the pose. It will tell you you're in pain. It will tell you you can't handle the sensation. But the most important thing to do is to stay there. You must focus on your breath, and you must breathe through the discomfort."
It's true, too. It's not some bullshit courtesy of another brainwashed yoga instructor. Pigeon is intense. I'm so antsy whenever I practice it. I constantly shift positions. But not matter what, I try to never exit the pose.
Simona continued, my mind tried to force me to outsource my focus. "This is my favorite post, because I like to apply it to my life situations, too. Just because something is difficult, doesn't mean I need to escape it. I must face it. I must breathe through it."
A little platitudinous, sure, but it still resonated with me. Maybe just because I eat that double entendre bullshit right up. Last time, I wrote about why Bikram's heated yoga carried these cathartic implications with me. Hot yoga could transport me back to my weakest, most vulnerable moments. But this yoga, with moments like this, this yoga is a constant struggle and an embedded reminder of the fact that I can't control everything. Sure, I can fall to the side on my hip and release the deep, muscular stretch that the pigeon elicits, but it's not going to help me if I do. Because you can't always just rock off onto your hip and release everything.
It just got me thinking. I still have hard times. I still have weak days, I still feel ashamed of my scars, I still thirst to prove myself stronger than ever. And these vulnerabilities will probably always be a part of me, no matter how small I make them. I'll have to encounter them though. And I'll have to encounter bigger things that will be beyond my control, and I just have to remember to breathe through it and know that there's an end.
And I guess if I took deep breaths and got through everything I've already been through, I can breathe through anything else, right?
It's moments like these though. That's why I like doing yoga. Some days it's such a struggle, but it's worth it to learn these basic life rules occasionally along the way. Even the simplest sentence, like, "Just relax, and your muscles can stretch even farther," even that means something to me.
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