Letting Go of Things That No Longer Serve You

A lot of my teachers and friends - even my kids - have been talking lately of the idea of letting go of things that no longer serve you. I suppose it's that time of year. In New England, we have a very visual reminder that this is what we should be doing this time of year. Trees are doing it all around us. It's only natural.

Many teachers have talked about how we hold onto things - emotional and physical - in our hips - making hip opening kind of unpleasant for many folks. I've got floppy, overmobile hips, but last week in class, Bo found one tiny little muscle that grips for me in pigeon. She poked it. It screamed. I was sore for days.

OK. So I learned that my hips aren't as open as I thought they were.

In her book The Women's Book of Yoga and Health, Patricia Walden says that people who suffer from "overholding" in the neck - symptomatically evidenced as pain, kyphosis, stiff neck and shoulder muscles - are overholding elsewhere as well. I do often have pains in the neck - and a genetic predisposition towards kyphosis (also known as dowager's hump - pretty). So I need to let go of something, somewhere.

In a beautiful yin class this past Sunday, my beloved teacher Carolyn Little spoke to this. It was a celebration class. There was live musical accompaniment on cello and harmonium by Nirmal Chandraratna. I could feel the vibrations from the cello going through the floor into my body. The full moon was shining down on me through the window. Carolyn invoked the goddess Kali - destroyer of obstacles, of things that stand in the way, of things that no longer serve. We were asked to call forth the one thing that may have served us in the past but that we no longer need. I didn't call mine forth so much as it hit me in the head - worry. I want to shed my worry the way the trees are shedding their leaves.

When my twins were toddlers, my worry served me well. They were both the "explorer" type, which meant that any excursion outside of the home ended up with me chasing them each in separate directions at top speed. And they weren't safe in the home, either, despite my Sleeping Beauty-esque childproofing. We were one of those families that was in the E.R. so much that the nurses started to look at us warily, suspiciously. How were these children getting so many black eyes and busted lips? Oh, nothing. You know, they were just LITERALLY climbing the walls.

I developed the stereotypical anxious mother wariness that quickly cascaded into full on panic attacks at the slightest provokation. Meds, therapy, mindfulness training followed. Some doctors just looked at me and said, "Oh, yes. You should be worried. You've got three kids under the age of five!" Hilarious.

Now all three kids are in school. I'm not saying I don't have things to be worried about anymore, but I've seen my now six year old twins cross streets safely. I've seen them look out for each other on the playground. I've even seen them keep a watchful eye on their little brother at times. I've watched them make good choices. I've nervously stepped back, letting them make more and more decisions on their own, and they do a good job most of the time. It's time to let the worry fall to the ground.

At the same time, I am thankful for the path that the worry put me on. Without it, I would have kept my yoga practice safely at home. I would never have gotten involved in the yoga community. I certainly would not have pursued yoga teacher training. And I would have missed out on a lot.