Vortex Surfers

[I posted this on sparks in the night also, but I'm revisiting and adding a bit here.]

They capture shame, but also the joy of movement and the shape of the world.

I feel like writing about movement today, no thinkies. Those haven’t been going so well, lots of “I failed” at this or that or “I suck” in various ways. Some of it must be fictional–it seems like one person can only suck in so many ways at a time–one would think.  I seem to be deteriorating a bit in this area, regressing some, for the first time since I got sober.  Maybe it’s just a dip (if not, I’m in trouble), but it’s strange to have so much of the I-suckery going on in my head, like it always used to be.  I got all worked up over another work thing, a student complaining about my appalling cruelty (Note:  I don’t think this is one of my qualities, in truth) to all sorts of higher-ups.  Luckily, she lied about them failing to respond to her at all (they had responded to her) so that helps my situation.  And I think I had handled it all well and had a record thereto, but I had some difficulty not taking it in, not taking it to heart.  This was a constant problem before and had gotten better.  I guess revisiting the “I suckery” and finding it startlingly unpleasant means some change had occured, which is good, but it does drag at my feet, threatens to pull me down deep.

So no thinkies.  Movement, territory, rain.  I went running the other day, 16 miles I’d guess, WITH HILLS. And I do mean hills–there are some big ones where I was. They actually make it more interesting, more of a journey with different terrains than some sort of tiresome grind. It was a bit moist, which is to say raining for much of the time, but not so cold. I ran through some semi-rural areas, with horses peering at me as if puzzled by my going by, and saw some grey and soggy but lovely views.

Yoga-wise I’ve been mostly keeping up at least some basic yoga poses/stretches each day, sometimes more, sometimes less, but more than I was in the habit of doing before WoYoPracMo. I do definitely notice some new looseness/mobile-ness that is strange with such as escalation of running going on at the same time–must be the yoga. I’ve been to some new classes, including my first all-ashtanga all the time class which was great. It kicked my butt, but it was great.

Dynamic, fiery and vigorous, intense. The first yoga instructor whose classes got me hooked had an ashtanga influence to his flows and poses, so it reminded me a bit of when I first started. That was such an intense time–I was quitting drinking, learning all kinds of new things, getting overwhelmed, living life again. They say the body remembers trauma, and so it does. It remembers other things too. It remembers renewal, the joy of movement, the pain not of injury but of aching muscles being stimulated to develop, the forms it has shaped itself to, the rhythms it has followed.