“You need to go as far as you need to go. From my experience, you want to continue until such time as you fall over – either literally or metaphorically too. Until you hit something that shows you yourself. Something other than, ‘Look what I can do.’ So now, I can’t do. Now, how do I feel?”

So, let’s day you take a forced “break” from practice or your thing– be it yoga, running, playing the kazoo whilst riding a unicycle. Let’s say you have almost three weeks off — because you gotta take care of family, give yourself injections, or go to Mars. You have lost the thing that lights you up and keeps you from running off the rails. Now, you can’t do. Oh sh*t.

This one’s for you.

I began what was supposed to be an eight day IVF-stim (i.e., shots) journey thinking for once I’d be conservative and cut practice, on medical advice — and also, what’s a week? But 8 days became 11, then 14, 15 and for the love of almond butter, 16. So I began doing very short modified essential postures after tenty minutes of stationary cardio. When I say modified, I mean I could not twist, backbend (not even cobra or, sniff, up dog) or jump. As one friend put it:

Well…. I can handstand with a wall. I can breathe to the tune of Eddie Stern’s breathing app and I can remember the feeling of aliveness in my veins.

Ok. It sucks.

But it’s been wonkily wonderful too because

My experience (which came to a total of 19 days with very minimal practice, but with 3-4 injections a day, water balloon-sized ovaries in the belly, followed by a little sedation and a surgical procedure, and oh lots of blood draws and invasive ultrasounds along the way) —

has been no less a teacher than my final sticky pose in third or my work on tic tocs—

these are places where I “meet myself”:

Scared. Angry.

Uncomfortable.

Wondering if it will ever change.

If there will ever be success.

What I will do if there isn’t.

Who will I be if I can’t.

Will you love me, if I can’t?

Who am I, anyway?

It seems nothing has been more relevant for growth in my practice than the last 16 days, the loss I suffered last year, my injury last spring. Nothing has served my real life more than the strength I’ve cultivated on my mat.

My husband leaves town. I hold the syringe and deliver my best Coach Taylor pep talk:

Somewhere in the trenches of IVF for real I found a different bind, a different contortion, and within that container, or “life-asana” I found permission

to allow.

“There is an edge where I meet myself and at the edge, on a good day when my body functions really well, then I need to go very far. I need to do all of these asanas and get very tired and very stressed out and push my strength to get there where I start to meet myself. When I start to get angry, when I start to feel self pity. All these things come up.”

~Tim Feldman 

I’ve watched my feelings change like mountain weather from kick-ass happy to fucking lame to sad and raging against things I cannot change (like losing my weekend to needles and sedation); I’ve watched myself jump for the feel-good or rub-in-the-bad drugs of choice, from runaway fantasies I can’t cop to in a yoga blog to hating myself for not being more grateful for my life as it is, let alone my no-one-saw-it-coming successful catch-up on this IVF journey. I found joy in my backbend-free practice, or should I say, I found backbends in not doing them. Through it all I’ve remembered notes from a mindfulness course:

I meet myself — battle-ready with vials and syringes, good natured and full of humor — till I’m not. Not at all.

I sit in that asana; I try.

I fall over. I am shown myself. A lot of my selves.

The world is your mat, life is your practice, the asanas containers that set free who you are and what you may yet be. Continue until such point that you meet yourself, again and again.

Continue until you meet all of your selves.

All of you.

All of us.

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“Love ALL the ones who you are, and then you will know how to love the world.” ~Elizabeth Gilbert