A BodyFul Bridge Home
by Elenna Rubin-Goodman
Following an almost 2 year descent into anxiety, depression and insomnia that refused to yield to any amount of love, devotion or healing practices, my life was achingly bare as 2018 ended. I strongly doubted I’d see the new year.
Yet, January came and I was still here. For the first time in what seemed like forever, I felt tricklings of interest move through my body. Sensation and emotion began to unthaw my frozen heart. Anxiety became less of a constant companion and I could once again imagine a world beyond the next 10 minutes. With these gifts also came the recognition that I needed to find a way to hold this return to life.
Three possibilities found me that January. Among them was an all you can take yoga offer that caught my attention while walking down Piedmont Avenue late one afternoon.
New Student Special: 30 days of unlimited yoga for $49
Something in me seized on the idea that taking as many yoga classes as my body could manage would become the way to organize and motivate my days. I’d trained as a dancer for decades. Yoga had been a regular, if on and off, part of my world for years. And I instinctively understood that any true return to life required that I re-inhabit my body for it to remember itself.
In 30 days I took 28 classes.
It is humbling to be reintroduced to your body after its gone missing In inaction. It requires forging a whole new relationship with what was once familiar and at times, letting go of ways of moving that had once served me well. My natural turnout and flexibility, a boon as a dancer, was now destabilizing and something I had to release as I reached for balance both in and through my body. For weeks I was sore. And though continually encouraged not to judge our practice, I was often frustrated at what no longer came easily. But trusting something about the reliably warm welcome I received as I checked in at the front desk, and again as I laid out my mat in class, kept me coming back.
During those first 30 days I both sampled a variety of classes and worked most regularly with 3 teachers whose classes I attended faithfully. Similarities in their training, coupled with impeccable commitment to asana and breathing practices, provided the structure I needed while variations in their personal and teaching styles kept my initial deep dive into classes lively.
A shift I couldn’t have known to look for showed up about half way through the month. I was developinga felt understanding of the inner architecture of my body. The repetition of instructions, metaphors and suggestions had worked their way into the cells of my bones, fascia, tendons and ligaments. I could feel my pelvis as never before. Each breath became linked to an expanding sense of inner spaciousness. I remember the class, standing in Tree Pose, when I knew I was again present in my body, and present as never before. I’d found my way home in the most elemental way possible for an embodied being.
A fuller life these days, along with the occasional stirring of old injuries, now also shape my growing practice What remains as an unwavering constant is the foundation laid by the those first 30 days. It continues to grow me as a yoga practitioner. It supports my ability to meet with kindness what shows up in the present moment even when it is uncomfortable or not what I might prefer. This is an invaluable gift both on and off the mat, particularly given the times in which we are living.
To the Nest, its yoga instructors and this community of practitioners - Namaste.
Elenna Rubin-Goodman and her husband Garner McAleer are loyal and beloved members of our Nest Community. You can find them several times a week enjoying a wide variety of classes.