Sometimes I get random because it feels good.
I realized something this morning. I started blogging as GoKittenGo in (gulp) 2001 - maybe 2000. On *Diaryland* - - I can't even get to those entries now. I used to link to them through this blog ages and ages ago, but it's all good that I can't get there. I have them archived somewhere. I swear and complain a lot, and make many references to being stylishly intoxicated. They're funny, but also a little toxic. At times I was downright mean.
I've tried on different "names" - the most recent being One Little Yoga Chick. I've had moments when any time I left a part of my past behind or went through some immense event, I would think I needed to take on a new "thing". Seriously? The fuck? Those never last long. I never want to write under them - it's like taking notes in a borrowed notebook. In short, it's not me.
And that's what that was, kind of. Yeah, I love yoga - that's a given what with this yoga teacher and owning a studio thing - but I was making yoga a wrapper of my life. Yoga's not the wrapper, yoga's the framework. It's what everything else hangs on, supporting me so I can get into all the other stuff I love at full expression. Everything, from my love of my amazing superfly dog, Totsi, to my obsession with top fuel front engine dragsters, my daydreams of owning a teardrop camper and a rat rod Beetle, and diving into how my love of music manifests in listening jags to the Ramones, Hank Williams, Chopin, Link Wray, Flat Duo Jets, Patti Smith, Cheap Trick, Small Faces, the Action, and so forth. I practice Baptiste yoga (and teach Baptiste-inspired), and a concept that's addressed is hugging in to create full expression out. (Whoa.)
*THAT*. That, exactly, expresses what I was about to write 1,000 words trying to express. When I hug into my practice, I create full expression out, everywhere. Yoga is as much the framework of my life as my skeleton is to my physical being - it's that integral a thing. If you imagine being without a skeleton, that's what my life without my practice is. And when I let it become the wrapper, I began to limit myself - who wouldn't suffocate when turned inside out? Beset by plastic namaste-coated shoulds, I shut down creatively because I edited every thought, concept - - every single everything. Would it fit my new path? Again - - THE FUCK? I mean, my Toms are comfortable - but they're nothing to my creepers, Vans, and Converse.
And - - - NEW? I've been practicing yoga since 1999. So - new? Not really. Not really at all. A few months ago, I started to see the ways I tried so hard to keep myself in the wrapper - here's an example: There was a sweet tea experiment. I am Southern, so sweet tea is a part of my existence - as much as yoga, actually. It's deep. *I tried to make it with amber agave syrup because I thought I should.* I told myself it was the same. It's amazing how strongly I believed my own damned lie. (There's a topic for discussion!) But, you know, I had to do that so I would fit what I had written on that wrapper. What would have happened next had I not stopped? Sweetening the cornbread? (Actually, hell would freeze before I let that happen.) Or - - the grits? Might I have started putting sugar in the grits? Hold on. I'll be back. I have to go confess at the sacred grotto of Dixie Lily for even having thought that. Might need to make a cleansing pilgrimage to the temple of Anson Mills.
I let my core become the wrapper, tried to make the wrapper look good (ohh, that concern for looking good AND not wanting to be seen), and wound up not being able to breathe. Awareness of that hit me back in February, at Level One with Baron Baptiste in Hawaii. And I said, "Shit." I didn't even realize I had been doing it. But even as I came a little unglued over the spring, facing up to shit that the wrapper was holding together, winding up with gradual re-injury coming to a bang-up crescendo, something in me started to let myself chill and be seen. And now? I'm happier than I've ever been, because my core is back in its place. I have work to do, big trainings coming up, and am out of shape from pushing myself to reinjury - but it's good, because from this place I take ownership. I'm actually happy about the work because I'm not living from that reversed, masked place anymore.
My practice *supports* me again, and from that, I can create damned near anything.
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