Thoughts

The breeze flows through an open window in the upstairs studio. Heavy with the scent of honeysuckle, it cools the sweat on the back of my neck. I'm amazed at my ability to notice this at all considering I'm laid out on the ground, my legs behind me in a position I'm not sure I can get out of, my face smashed into the mat. I don't know what my arms are doing, and though I'm willing them to simply pick up the top part of my body off the floor, they aren't listening. The girl in front of me has her legs gracefully twisted around her head, and I hate her. Hannah asks us to reach down, put our arms through our legs from behind, grab our faces, and pull them between our knees. "Breathe," she says. "Feel your spine lengthen." I'm still trying to feel my arms. Somehow I manage to get back into a standing pose; and just as quickly I'm back on the floor in another contortion I wasn't expecting.

Hannah, my teacher, is five months pregnant and rubber-band like by nature. She is also one of those people you can't help but feel drawn to: she is calm, she is cool, she is comfortable in her own skin, her perfectly imperfect skin. She is a wonder. I don't think I know what that feels like, to be comfortable in my own skin. If I do, I don't remember.  As I try to get myself in an extended back bend from a side plank position, I can feel my stomach slouching from one side to the other. I suck it in, not sure it makes any difference. Discouraging thoughts run circles around the space in my head where my efforts to focus on my breathing are fighting against a death wish.

As my face finds the floor again, any pretense of enjoyment I may have had is gone. I want off this mat. Hannah's calm, intentioned voice emerges. It pulls me from the chaos in my brain. "If you are miserable now," she says, "you need to change your thoughts." My body keeps moving, but my mind goes silent. I hear the echo of that phrase, "If you are miserable now, you need to change your thoughts." It's ricocheting back and forth between my ears. "None of these poses matter," she continues. "Don't internalize them. It only matters where your thoughts are."

"If you are miserable now, you need to change your thoughts." I know immediately how broadly this applies to so many situations in my life, but right now I just want to remember the exact sentence so I can think about it later. I turn my attention to my breath, and repeat the phrase over and over. I don't want to forget the exact way she said it, her tone, the inflection. It matters somehow.

I push through the practice, my body applauding its sprawled out position on the floor as I finish. My limbs tremble with relief, and my mind races. I'm thinking about earlier today, at work. I see myself at my desk, my mind running through twenty different scenes of my past. I'm unforgiving of things unsaid, wishing for chances to do over. Convincing myself that I'll never be able to say the right things when I want to, when it matters. I had to stop myself. And I did. Only to let my mind go back at it twenty minutes later, this time arguing all the reasons why I hate my body, and then yelling at myself for doing that because, shallow, insecure people think those things about themselves, right? Maybe that is what is wrong with me – I'm shallow and insecure too. And I can't focus, I never finish anything, and I don't really know what I'm doing. I'm a fraud. No one will ever want to be with me, they'll figure it out, they'll see all the cracks, and they'll leave. The dominoes fall until all I can do is distract myself with some inane task like writing up case notes, trying not to think about the fact that my brain does this routine every day, every day.

Why? This is not me. I don't think I believe most of these thoughts. And if I do, I don't want to. All of this self-deprecation is exhausting, and not very helpful.

"You need to change your thoughts." I know this idea, this is not new, I teach it every day to children swimming in a sea of loss and grief. "What can we control?" I ask them. "Ourselves." they reply. They don't believe it yet. Apparently neither do I, not enough. But they are right, and so is Hannah.