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I Was Tricked Into Yoga

I’ve long balked at the idea of doing yoga. Frankly, it always looked boring to me. It didn’t fit the tough-guy image I have of myself, either. Tough guys don’t do a bunch of poses. They lift heavy things. Yet here I am, doing yoga.

Thing is, I’m starting to appreciate and respect it.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:3b04Qs9AoBRBIFu9aDQfqI]

How did I reach this strange place? My therapist tricked me.

For years, he’s been trying to push yoga on me as a tool to reduce stress and get out of my head. For years, my response has been “no fucking way.”

I recently signed up for my therapist’s Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction class because for a guy trying to manage clinical OCD, you need as many tools as you can gather. I’ve gotten the upper hand over the more insidious byproducts of my OCD in recent years, particularly the fear, anxiety and inability to go about my day because of the worry spinning in my brain. Now I enjoy many of the things I once feared, including travel, and I’m able to truly live. But I still get stuck in my head, which is bad when someone’s trying to talk to you. So I signed up for the class.

My therapist didn’t mention there’d be yoga involved. The bastard.

I knew I’d been duped when I walked into the first class and saw yoga mats carefully placed in a circle. He finally sprung it on us at last week’s class, and last night we really got into it.

My first thought was that the beginner’s positions were a lot like the exercises I used to do for a bad back. My second thought was that the poses were a pretty strenuous workout. I didn’t expect to break a sweat, but I did. There was something satisfying about it.

I’m supposed to do this once a day as part of my homework. That’s going to be tough, given my schedule. But I’m sure there’s a way.

Erin has done a lot of yoga in the past but not much lately. Maybe I can get her to do it with me.

If someone told me a year ago that I’d be pondering this stuff now, I’d have laughed in their face. Actually, I did just that to my therapist.

You won’t find me wearing yoga pants, though. That would be gross.

Crazy Yoga Pose

Ouch.
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I’m Stressed About My Stress-Reduction Class

Tonight is the first of eight weekly stress-reduction and mindfulness classes I’m taking. I have to admit the whole thing stresses me out a bit.

It’s not that the description is bad. In fact, it sounds delightful. I’m going to learn how to use yoga and other techniques to keep my thoughts in the present, where they belong. Here’s a little background from the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction website:

Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn developed the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. Since its inception, MBSR has evolved into a common form of complementary medicine addressing a variety of health problems … MBSR is an 8-week intensive training in mindfulness meditation, based on ancient healing practices, which meets on a weekly basis. Mindfulness practice is ideal for cultivating greater awareness of the unity of mind and body, as well as of the ways the unconscious thoughts, feelings, and behaviors can undermine emotional, physical, and spiritual health.

I certainly qualify for such a program. I have a history of stress-induced maladies — Crohn’s Disease, OCD, ADD, depression, fear and anxiety, migraines — and I’m still in the process of making peace with a lot of what happened in my past.

For my back story, check out “An OCD Diaries Primer“.

I’ve gotten pretty good control over the anxiety and OCD in recent years. Heavy therapy, medication and spiritual growth have all played a role. And work, once the biggest source of stress in my life, no longer rattles me. Having a job I absolutely love helps on that score.  I’m also much healthier in my 40s than I was in my 20s and 30s. Crippling back pain is years into the past, and I’ve maintained a significant weight loss. I don’t eat flour or sugar and weigh just about everything I eat. I no longer drink, and cigars and cigarettes have been replaced with e-cigs. I’m also playing guitar again. Making music has been more appealing to me of late than staring at the Internet for hours, which is another addictive behavior I’ve struggled with.

But I still experience stress. There’s a lot of family drama, including a long estrangement from some parts of the family and an erosion of patience that intensified when my father had a stroke last year and we really began the work of helping our younger child manage his ADHD.

No surprises there. That’s the garden-variety stress everyone experiences. Only the names, dates and circumstances change.

While these things no longer incapacitate me, they still make it difficult for me to keep my mind in the present. When your mind is in the past or the future, it makes it very difficult to listen when people are talking to you in the present. The result is that you don’t retain important information like dates, appointments and the like. Worse — much worse — is that you’re robbing the people you love of your undivided attention.

My therapist once told me that there’s no better gift you can give a person than your time and attention. A lot of what he says annoys me. But on this I think he’s right.

That comment from the therapist is what compels me to take this class. I want to be a better listener and less scatterbrained when the house chores stack up.

So why the stress?

It’s yet another appointment to keep every week, shoehorned into the schedule between all my kids’ Boy Scouts activities and various family check-ups, school activities and an awesome but demanding job.

Of course, that’s me thinking in the future instead of the present, which just makes me more comfortable with the notion that this is the right thing to do.

I’ll report back to you on all this tomorrow.