Every time I look at my tumblr description these days I wonder if I should change it. Change it to “Meh…”. I mean, that’s what I have going on. Meh.

Sort of.

It’s just that the magical mystery tour that was my experience a couple years ago has turned into a deep crawl through muck. Two years of intense ashtanga yoga got my body all strong, and then massage therapy school took me in the direction of healing others, and then, womp!, my body started kicking out some hard backfires.

In the midst of that I was also raising a toddler and struggling with myself over various relationships because that’s what I do, what I get hooked on is struggling with relationships.

Over the past year I’ve learned to haul my body onto the table and let my healer women in the form of massage therapists and chiropractors and energy psychologists work blood, flesh, bone, and etheric matter around into a more sensible alignment.

I can’t do yoga like I used to. The thought of 90 minutes of ashtanga sounds like torture, and doing it in a room full of sweaty others, awful. They don’t need a sobbing midlife puddle working the dread and shame and hurt and love out of her body in their presence. Not really.

So I substitute it with 30 minutes or less of very very gentle hatha full of forward bends and absolutely not one single chataranga. The hard core former ashtangi in me is huffing and puffing her righteous little sun-salutation self into a dither, but I’m not her anymore.

With great shame to the parts of me that had worked so long to prove how physically strong I was, I have had to admit that I am not strong. I am full of weakness. There are things I cannot pick up. There are knobs and lids and handles that I cannot turn. I know them when I meet them and I don’t try. It’s getting easier. Although, right now, writing about it, I’m looking at it wondering how I can have some frail old lady in this not-that-old body. What happened to my strength? Really? How did I lose my strength like that?

Somewhere around my 39th year, going into 40, I just dropped a lot of stuff. People. Ideas. Dreams. Strength. Need. What? A lot. I had pulled a lot of people into my life and realized that many of them didn’t quite fit right. Also, I wasn’t going to try and fit myself to them anymore. That path has kept on. Along the way, I’m learning to love the people I love. Trust the sense I have of people. Trust that when someone shows me who they are, that they are showing me the truth and not just momentarily fucking up.

Over this year and half of allowing healing into my body I have been opening up little notes from myself. Small unwindings of who I am and what I need and what I lost and what is now mine to find.

It’s amazing stuff. Descriptive that. Yeah.

Amazing to be able to see myself as I don’t follow through on asking for what I want and then sitting in disappointment and dejection when I see I could have had it. Simple things that I can’t seem to ask for. Sometimes not so simple things. I never learned how to connect voice to desire. I never learned that I could ask, that I had the right to ask, that it would be ok. There’s a depth to this that is all about my experience in my life and some belief I have around asking for what I want. It’s also multifaceted and teaching me a lot about voice, desire, questing, demanding, deserving, taking, lack, abundance, and will.