Momentum

Over the years what I’ve learned to be true about myself is that I’m heavy.

I’m not talking about being fat. I can sometimes be called fat.

I’m talking energetically heavy.

This is a blessing and a curse. Until a couple of years ago, I almost always subconsciously felt it negatively. The turning point for me happened when a began a yoga instructor training at Tejas yoga in Chicago. I cannot speak highly enough about my experience at that studio and the many gifts that came into my life via Jim Bennett and James Tennant and my classmates in the program. (I’m aching to go back or at least take class with them virtually, but I’m either teaching or parenting at the class times currently available. Boo.) In the very beginning of the training program, we were given an Ayurvedic assessment by James. The results are derived from a health questionnaire, an in person consultation, and a pulse reading. What you receive is an explanation of your prakruti which is sanskrit for your “essential constitution.” You learn what qualities are present when you are in balance. You also learn how to systematically approach rebalancing these qualities through embracing opposites to decrease something and embracing similar qualities to increase something. It was a lens that I had never looked at myself through before, and what I learned was a detailed picture of my true self. My recipe is somewhat equal parts Vata and Kapha.

(Side note: I originally voice to texted this blog into my phone and it typed” half butter and half pasta” for “half Vata and half Kapha” …which post COvd-19 is also very accurate.)

There is an immense amount of self revelation I could unpack about my prakruti, but for the purpose of this blog, I’m going to focus on the aspects of Kapha and how that changed my perception of self. The qualities tied up with Kapha are many that I have spent time being ashamed of: heavy, dense, thick. However, when I view the personality traits associated with Kaphas: reliable, comfortable, trustworthy, grounded, stable; I begin to see the merit of being heavy. These are qualities that I have seen in myself and consider valuable, but I had never made the realization that these things were synonomous.

Overtime, I begin to embrace being heavy as I saw how much my friends valued my grounded authenticity.

Unfortunately, this groundedness is also the thing that slows me down. Translated into fitness, it can really feel like a heavy boulder. It feels murderous to start rolling it. I usually need a little help. Once it’s rolling, it takes less and less to keep up the momentum, but I can never completely stop without having to start all over again with the heavy push.

Lately, I have needed a lot of help. Coming back to work has taken away all of my workout time. Thanks to Covid-19, I no longer walk to the train. I drive. When I get home, I barely have the bandwidth for dinner, spending the quality time with my son, and getting him to bed. Couple that with the fact the the nutrition habits I had worked really hard to form went the way of the dodo when I had all the time in the world to bake and make homemade pasta. I became a busy, barely moving, glutton.

I was sinking into a heavy, moist, dense swamp of imbalanced Kapha.

A few weeks ago, I had a health scare. After my husband left for work, I had woken up with a challenging cramp that evolved into a debilitating pain. It inspired me to call him, have him come back, get our son take him to school and drop me at the ER. The pain was so bad they gave me morphine and Zofran and then sent me for a CT scan and an ultrasound. When the results came back, the doctor happily told me that everything looked really good. Nothing required emergency treatment. If I could digest food, I could go home so he gave me a pile of graham crackers. An hour later, I was heading back home. In my follow up visit with my primary care doctor, we went through things that he saw, and she told me that they were very minor and didn’t explain the pain. It felt humiliating. I had gone to the ER in the middle of a Covid surge with pain so bad they gave me Morphine and nothing was wrong with me? We were trying to come up with an explanation, but there really wasn’t a root cause that could be pinpointed. I was determined not to leave there with some sort of plan.

Sadly, it really wasn’t that hard to figure out what my plan needed to be , I needed to lose weight. I also needed her to look at my foot which I rolled and injured very badly in June and self treated it almost to recovery. It’s still swells a little from time to time. It’s been part of my excuse for exercising less. The conclusion that we both came to is that I’ve been lazy about exercising and rehabbing my foot. I was glad that she didn’t direct me towards some sort of medication or other medical and intervention. She validated what I’ve known all along. The stay at home order was very comfortable for me, and I sunk down deep in the muck and mire of my Kapha stillness. Luckily I am still healthy, save for the extra weight, but if I stay here, the needle on my health barometer is very likely to cross over into disease. I feel very fortunate to have caught this now.

Thankfully, I was able to be honest to myself, and I know what my constitution needs.

So here is how I found my own momentum.

1. I accepted the help offered to me. My boss and a colleague invited me to lift weights and box with them. I did a full body selectorized machine routine yesterday for the first time in probably 15 years and I feel like a million bucks. I’m also stronger than I thought.
2. I scheduled my workouts on my calendar like any other important meeting. I was skipping them more often than doing them because I kept saying that I would do them when I have time. You won’t have time until you make time, silly.
3. I started packing my lunch when I pack my son’s before I go to bed. I had been only packing his because the baby HAS to eat. I realized that I have to at least put my oxygen mask on at the same time.

Since the beginning of the week, these three simple shifts have resulted in more focus and productivity. I mean, look, you guys are getting more blogs. This means that I’m on top of my work day and can spend a little time writing each night instead of catching up on work after the kid goes to bed. Ironically, cutting into my workday has proven to be more fruitful. I’ve been thriving on the notion that I would get less done if I took time to work out. It’s a strange thing, productivity.

I know it’s hard. I just typed you several paragraphs telling you about how challenging it is for me. If you’re struggling to get started, you might be heavy like me. It’s okay. It’s actually a beautiful, noble thing to be. The good news is, once you get rolling, you will feel so much better. I promise.