I don’t know about you but sometimes a change in the seasons can make me a little melancholy.
Especially as we move from Summer to Autumn, from a season full of light and playfulness to one full of cloudy days and preparations for winter. Now don’t get me wrong, I love this time of year. We get to pull out our warm fuzzy clothes and bundle into them. And the colours are spectacular. But sometimes it’s as though someone flipped a switch overnight and poof! Fall is here. (Mother Nature doesn’t mess around I guess). The change is so quick, particularly in this province, that adjusting to it can just feel downright awkward sometimes.
And that pretty much sums up the week I’ve had-awkward.
It’s funny, even the word looks like it’s meaning, kind of uncomfortable and a little bent. Just like me.
It was a real challenge this week to do something good for myself. It also seemed as though I couldn’t get anything right, professionally or personally, and I could just feel the tension building up in my body. Shoulders tight, neck stiff, lower back a bit sore.
And as if it’s not enough that yoga releases what’s already stored in our bodies now I was adding to the ‘muscle memory’, filling those muscles with even more emotional leftovers, (which are not half as fun as holiday leftovers let me tell you!)
I knew the best thing would be to go to a class but I resisted. Why? I don’t know. It always makes me feel better. It’s difficult sometimes, even when we have the best of intentions, to keep up with the promises we’ve made to ourselves. We want to change, we make plans, we begin to invest ourselves in healthy lifestyles then find before we know it we’re back where we started, lacking inspiration and forgetting the very things that motivated us in the first place. Human beings are funny. We are creatures of habit and seem content to cling to those habits even when they are clearly doing us no good.
So in keeping with the season let me paint a visual for you of my mood these past seven days – I continued to stand in the rain without an umbrella and complained I was getting wet.
After moping around, whining to anyone who would listen and generally feeling sorry for myself I actually had a good friend quote an excerpt of one of my blogs back to me. She reminded me of what one of Semperviva’s teachers had shared with his class – ‘Our tendency is to meet resistance with resistance. Instead of doing this, try meeting resistance with acceptance’.
I felt embarrassed. Gee, why didn’t I think of that?!
So I tried acceptance. I didn’t spend any more time moping around, being introspective or judging myself. I just gave in. It didn’t make any sense to me anymore to stare a solution in the face then turn around and pretend it wasn’t there. It just seemed so silly.
So, I practiced yoga, released some of the tension I was holding, (old & new), and felt more like myself again.
It’s humbling sometimes to realize you’re not always going to get it right. Everything has a cycle, a rhythm, a season. I may like to think that I’ll always be able to stay out of the rain or even think I’m so clever sometimes that I can predict the weather. Fact is there are days, or weeks, or maybe even months, where I’m going to get soaked.
So I suppose then it’s not so much getting caught without an umbrella that matters, it’s not minding getting wet.
Elisa joined the Semperviva team as a YA at the Kits Beach location this past July. She had been working in the film and television industry here in Vancouver as a casting associate and more recently as a television script writer before deciding it was time for something new. Elisa first looked to yoga a decade ago after searching for something to compliment her athletic training and found it to be a surprising touchstone while dealing with the serious illness of a family member. She believes yoga and meditation are simple ways to find answers to life’s complicated questions.