Deterioration on one front, Crazy-fun arm-balances on the other
The deterioration is happening on the front–the battle-zone–of my little struggles (read: not “little,” “HUGE”) with not letting the negative thoughts and discussions that go on in my head mean too much to me, and not taking in things that aren’t truly about me, and not deciding that everything is a sign of my shortcomings and failure to overcome them. Okay, so that sounds totally pathetic and also melodramatic.
I don’t like feeling pathetic, and I thought I didn’t like to be melodramatic, but I think that last part is more than I really like being melodramatic (in an obvious and intentional way, not to puff up myself but because it’s energizing to overstate and overdo things, or so I seem to feel) and I just don’t like to be so melodramatic that it’s completely annoying or seems a bid for attention. Actually it is a bid for attention, but what I mean is I don’t want it to be an icky veiled manipulative one; I’d like it to be an obvious, utterly unsubtle, playful one. I must like attention some–it’s not like anyone is making me write this blog stuff, for instance, or work as a teacher, or make scenes, or wear cycling jerseys with big dots all over the place.
But then I also do, at the same time sometimes, want to disappear or at least hide. Shame. Shame for having wanted attention, ever. Shame for what I don’t even really know. Myself, my existence. I’ve learned a tremendous amount about how this works in me (and others, I believe, which helps too), and have made some very real progress around it. But I’ve been hit with too much too quite manage in the last couple years, or something, and things feel like they’re sliding back, sliding down, slipping, the ground liquefying beneath my feet.
Okay, I better stop with imagery already–I’m scaring myself. And I’m actually in a nice cozy (and solid) bed, not quicksand or at vortex’s edge. But it feels so, inside, sometimes. Anyway, at least I’ve illustrated the melodramatic imagery habit for you, though if you’ve read any other posts, you already know all about that little policy of mine–the melodrama policy, the purple prose protocol.
I was writing a bit about a thing I was having trouble dealing with on our group blog vortex surfers, but basically it’s a thing that hadn’t happened before with a big situation/escalation/fabrication that I handled okay (so far, that is) but felt all icky about. I think the other party really has more cause to feel icky about it than I do, but that’s a difficulty I have, that sucking up the ickiness another doesn’t want to avow and isn’t even necessarily aware of–I slurp it right up and it, of course, makes me queasy, as well it should, and it isn’t even mine.
But then there were the crazy-fun arm-balances–a great yoga workshop session of anusara yoga–yoga of the heart–with lots of talk and practice involving feeling how we feel and not trying to wrench ourselves away from it but rather to work with it. And also to do some crazy-fun arm-balances. “So first, you hook your right leg over your right shoulder, and then. . .”–that sort of thing–lots of things beyond my ability and some suddenly within my ability, unexpectedly. These kinds of play/discovery sessions, the joy of movement, the fun of working with each other in a group, these are the things that make me want to be alive. There seem to be some things that do not make me want to, and a few that make me not want to (the different between the two phrases is not small, not small at all; it is life-or-death, in fact). But then there are the things that do, and this was one.
Tags: boundaries, joy, life, self-criticism, Shame, WoYoPracMo, Yoga
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