Noticing Where I Resist

Thursday, July 10, 2025

I felt irritable this morning

Tension in my body

Wanting to do a lot of things but being brought back to how I feel

In my body and honoring that.

I did some yoga. I went slow and felt like I could live in these poses alone. I took three breaths. It felt like an eternity.

I don’t want this to take so long. Tears came to my eyes.

I want to move on and do other things, all the other things!

But my priority is to be in my body. That is the work.

To listen to myself. My inner most demands.

My heart. My muscles begging me to allow them to release what they are holding.

I thought of moments in my podcast episode with Margi.

“Even if you don’t want to,” she said, “come back into your body.”

I thought about a book by an osteopath who reminds readers as well, that our coping mechanisms are there for a reason. And to honor those too.

We don’t have to do anything. When something is ready to shift. It will.

The body knows what we have to do.

And when.

Today I needed to lay on my mat. Legs, one at a time up in the air, helped by a strap. A deep squat. Legs apart. Happy baby. Figure four.

Savasana.

I have been doing yoga 22 years and haven’t committed the yoga names to my memory for these poses.

I realized I should probably have been in yoga for trauma survivors all this time.

I thought of the moments when I was trying to hold myself back from crying as I introduced Margi and she gently said, “it’s ok to cry.” But I resisted, my goal to be to ground myself as I spoke, instead of give myself time.

I wanted to get through it.

Slowing is hard. I realize Beethoven’s most slow moving passages try the patience of the most prodigious pianists.

I haven’t wanted to focus on being a trauma survivor. I don’t want to do their basic grounding techniques. They make me angry.

A lot of my yoga is done at home, where I can cry.

I come to yoga class in the studio, once a week, maybe, to be in community.

The place I go to I have gone for over 10 years and I don’t want to change.

Even as space and self compassion open to more gentle expectations of myself.

I resist.

April 13, 2023