Self Loathing Masked As Self Care

This post is difficult to share.  My yoga practice and healthcare journey are a significant part of my heart and soul.  As much as I hear that my yoga/physical/dietary/spiritual practice is an inspiration and motivation for others (for which I am immensely grateful), I hear comments in the negative.  I am often told I am too skinny.  That I need to be more lenient with my diet.  That I go too hard or do too much.  Those comments wouldn't bother me if it didn't give me pause to consider if there is truth there.  However, the fact that I will question myself and re-examine my approach to these things doesn't mean that the path I am on is the wrong one and that the comments about my body or my discipline are warranted without there being compassion attached to them.  And, honestly, unless you want to confront me about my weight because you're concerned I am not healthy and you want to offer me help or hear me out, you have no business commenting on the size of my body.  Unless you are willing to hear about why I am so disciplined and what I see in my patterns in regards to my physical practice, including the risks I'm willing to take to achieve certain goals (including why those are goals I want to reach), there's no need for you to comment there either.  So, I do welcome compassionate observation, relaying of experiences, advice, and research sharing in regards to this post.  However, comments about my body or practice without compassion and only judgment are not necessary.

My current and slower, more deliberate practice.  I'm finally feeling stronger again.  I am working on not repeating old patterns in different ways.

I was going all out.  I was going to push to the point of dripping sweat, shaking muscles, the feeling of my entire body turning to jello.  That, in and of itself can be a great workout goal, but for me, it was a way to punish the anxiety beast.  It didn't matter that I was already tired.  I hadn't slept well for days.  Waking up nightly with adrenaline rushes was common.  It didn't matter that my body ached or that I was sore from my Buti Yoga practice the day before.  Chronic polyarthropathy means my body always hurts to some degree.  To find my capacity for strength and endurance in middle age would obviously be to do the work regardless.  I had even asked about fatigue and working with shaking muscles and was advised that both were goals to achieve when strength building from both yoga teachers, trainers, and online yoga groups.  They weren't wrong.  Pushing was not giving in or up.  It was refusing to let my rebellious body get beyond my ability to control.

I rolled out my mat.  I was already out of breath.  My heart was pounding.  I had the cliche overwhelming sense of dread that those of us who live with anxiety either choose to give in to or actively ignore.  I was practicing a familiar sequence.  I was practicing in my living room.  What the hell was wrong with me?  I was having a panic attack.  It felt like I was turning inside out.  I didn't understand.  Yoga is my passion.  It saves my life.  I tell my yoga clients all the time that if they are not with the breath that they are not doing yoga.  It was hard to breathe.  I ignored my own advice and went on with it anyway.  Yoga couldn't be the trigger.  Yoga was the tool.

I decided that what I was feeling was related to something I wasn't conscious of and I just needed to move.  I completed the practice.  My legs didn't want to lift, but I made them go.  Every time I felt I was about to reach my limit, I pushed harder.  Mind over matter.  If I didn't land a movement on beat or my balance was off on one side, I fought the urge to go back and repeat.  I tell my yoga classes that our bodies are different every time we get on our mats.  I took this advice, working on meeting myself there.  Except was I?  

Yoga is not only a workout for me.  It is my spiritual discipline.  It is my worship of Source with my entire being.  It is my alchemical process.  It is my medicine and my magick.  Yoga is the ever present part of my attempts at self care.  Can self care exist without self love?

In the hours after my practice, my fatigue made the day feel like I was moving through it wearing cloaks of weighted blankets.  I needed more coffee.  The caffeine made my heart beat faster (exacerbating my symptoms of my heart condition - POTS), 

but it didn't burn off the fog in my brain (another symptom I have grown accustomed to with Hashimoto's).  My muscles ached more and I couldn't initiate movements without wincing and stiffness.  Normal aging?  I had been told.  I looked forward to bedtime.  I was glad to know I had worked hard.

If you follow me on social media, I've recently posted about being injured and having to come to terms with changing my practice from high intensity intervals mixed with yoga to a more "traditional" vinyasa practice that is little to no impact.  My injury was with my SI joint and piriformis, but has been nagging as many muscles around them began to spasm to compensate for moving through the pain without pause.  I don't know if I'll be able to return to the strenuous schedule of training I kept before, or if I will desire it.  With functional strength movement, pelvic floor and core training, and bodyweight movements, I am adding the slower is stronger approach to my practice.  Floating and flying.  What I am doing now is equally as challenging, but in a different and more grounded way.

I've learned a lot since the original injury this past August about the ungrounded and unconscious patterns that brought me to injury.  About a month ago, I realized that those panic attacks I had started having before my sacred practice was my body's way of resisting the abuse I was inflicting upon it.  I have been angry at my body.  I sometimes still am.  Self love is not known to me.  As glorious, cherished, and sacred as my yoga practice is, I had begun to use it as a way to work against my body instead of with it.  I was a bully.  A dictator.  I had allowed self loathing to masquerade as self care.

I gave in to fears that I conjured to sidestep the real work that I needed to be doing which was embodiment and learning to love myself.  I had begun to fear gaining weight because I had developed an association between that and my thyroid hormones being sup par.  I was angry that I can't sleep at night without pain, so I sleep propped on a loveseat where my cats and street lights keep me awake.  I was/am scared that one day I'll wake up and this body that I currently have... this strong and useful body... will be gone and I'll once again feel like I inhabit an alien body that looks nothing like the me inside of it.  I've worked hard to bring my body to represent the temple in its physical expression.  Always more work to do.  I have vowed to be as healthy as I can.  This, I often feel is akin to holding water in cupped hands.

In this fear, I held myself to standards that were not sustainable.  Rest has become lazy and unproductive.  I used the fact that I had a lower income to criticize myself for all the things I've failed to accomplish because of this mission I've had to heal myself and help anyone who asks.  I let fear of rejection keep me small.  The unknown controlled by my experiences of lack.  I hated chronic illness.  I hated my self sabotage.  I am ashamed.  I am embarrassed.  As long as I could "succeed" at reaching my yoga goals, I could feel ok about something.  There was no compassion in this scenario - only loathing.

I have trained myself to override intuition and bodily cues in favor of a prescribed plan that I didn't develop for myself, but adopted from another's idea of fitness and health.  A rigid formula, an overly analyzed schematic.  I took literally the instructor's cues to "push, push," "dig deep," and "keep up."  I had become a slave to the idea that I cannot trust myself or my body.  That where I am is not enough.  In ignoring my body's signals and in my own self disgust, I have gained another opportunity to learn.  I'm not a quitter when I am passionate.  I want to break these harmful cycles/patterns.  I want true healing, or at least contentment rather than an identity as someone on the healing path.  I am being diligent to opening my eyes to the shadow side of me, and to use it to transform to truth.  To acknowledge that I created this scenario for myself in order that I remove my own blinders.  My basketball coach always said, "You have to make Hansel mad to get her to play ball."  Do I step forward in freedom?  I am stepping back to yoga.