Yoga vindicated!

So, what seemed to be pack pain exacerbated by yoga turned out to be back pain, period. My third yoga class following a pain-free hiatus and two subsequent painful classes was ... pain-free! Thank goodness. The prospect of life without yoga hardly seemed worth living. Really.

Crisis of faith

I'm having a crisis of faith. You see, I have a couple of herniated disks and over the summer I did something that exacerbated one of them. My physical therapist encouraged me to continue yoga while he helped me get the pain under control. And after a month or two, the pain was under control—but still present. Then I went to California to visit the 'rents, and I got the flu, and I stopped doing yoga for a couple of weeks—and the pain went away. Delighted, I headed back to yoga two days ago, and the pain returned. Went back again yesterday, and the pain got worse. As a true believer, I think yoga is the answer to every question the universe poses. So I'm going back to yoga today, and if it puts me in a wheelchair, well, by god, I'll do wheelchair yoga. But I do wonder what I'm doing wrong, and how I can do it right. Giving up yoga is not an option.

Things that go bump in the night

One of the awful aspects of having a life-threatening disease is the constant awareness of death and the overwhelming significance it lends to ordinary activities. I remember when I was a kid hearing the word deathbed for the first time and being delighted by the possibilities. My elder brother and I spent a hilarious afternoon coming up with silly death terms: If deathbed was where you died, then deathpanties were what you wore to die in, and deathtoilet was where you had your last elimination, and deathfood was your last meal, and deathjuice your last drink, and so forth. It was excruciatingly funny to a 5-year-old.

But it's not so funny to a 50-something. One of the things I fear about the possibility of getting a diagnosis that my cancer has metastasized isn't so much the shortening of my life, though I fear that, or the pain, though I fear that a lot, but the unremitting awareness that each action might be my last—the last book I read, the last letter I write, the last thought I utter, the last movie I see—and the heavy responsibility of choosing well and making it count. All that hyperconsciousness and hyperconscientiousness would take the haphazard pleasures out of the end of life and make the whole thing so damn stressful.

Lazy woman's yoga

Two random thoughts about yoga slacking:

1. I've been told that just being in a room where people are practicing yoga confers many of the benefits of practicing it yourself. In my experience, you don't even have to be in the room. You can turn on the tube. On mornings when I get ready for work with Inhale (Oxygen channel) playing, I lose that too-early-in-the-morning, empty-stomach, unpleasantly jazzed-up feeling and begin my day on a more copacetic note.

2. Though I hate it when I am forced to take a break from yoga, as I am these past two weeks because of my visit to San Francisco and a cold, and feel I'm losing hard-won progress, I've noticed that a hiatus from the physical practice typically results in greater limberness. Go figure.

Consoling words

The aged, demented mother of my downstairs neighbor died over the holiday weekend. My neighbor's young daughter, in the middle of exams at her veterinary school in Grenada, was distressed that she was unable to come home for her grandmother's funeral. It's no big deal, my neighbor told her daughter. "If she'd been a dog, we would have put her down five years ago." 

Imagine you're a balloon

Since I take so many yoga classes and have a curiosity about the language of the ineffable, I'm always thinking about how I might give an instruction. So here's an idea for savasana, or corpse pose, the final relaxation at the end of a class:

Imagine your body is a balloon. With each inhalation you inflate and become light and floaty, and with each exhalation you deflate and become heavy and sink into the floor.

But then I start thinking about how, as the receiver of this instruction, I would probably slip away from the guided imagery and drift off to consider all the other items I've inflated: medical gloves, condoms, silly putty, bubble gum, that weird bubble glue with the fumes that comes in a tube with a straw, guest-bed mattresses, wading pools, rubber balls, swim rings, swim wings ... and I begin to feel light-headed.

Elderville

So I have an idea for a sanwich-gen video game: Elderville. In it, a woman of a certain age has to race against the clock averting eldercare disasters. It goes something like this:

--Slow-mo shuffle to assist mother in walker to toilet.

--Crash! Something has broken in kitchen, but player cannot abandon slow-mo walk till mother is safely deboarded onto toilet.

--Rush to kitchen, where father stands barefoot among contents of shattered quart jar of rice.

--Ask father to move aside (he's on blood-thinners, so cut can be dangerous), and grab broom and dustpan.

--Ting-a-ling! Bell from bathroom indicates mother has finished tink-a-ling. Tell father to stay put and rush to bathroom before mother can lurch for walker.

--Brrrring! The phone! It's probably doctor you've been trying to reach all day about medicine that's on mother's hospital-release chart but not in medicine caddy.

--Yell to father and mother to stay put, and rush for phone.

--Miss call, and rush back to bathroom to catch mother as she hurtles floorward.

And so forth, with many timed challenges, including fetch the paper, fetch the glasses, fetch the pills, pillow placement, doorbell answering, food-mishap-averting ...