bodies remember

I did a handstand today.

You may remember that the last time I tried to do a handstand in yoga, it ended in terror and sobbing.

I firmly believe that your body holds memories, it stores feelings.

So when I did an assisted handstand, and it was using all the same muscles that get pulled when you fall down the stairs, and when you half suspect that you didn't used to fall down the stairs so much as you were so fucking miserable you wanted to hurt yourself but you didn't do that any more so instead you stopped eating and being careful on staircases, well. It was upsetting. To say the least.

Apparently those muscles, the ones that had worked so hard to keep me from going arse over teakettle and breaking something, I guess they'd collected a lot of sludge.

It was the same with Friday night. Watching my ex, my heart was getting pulled in the same way it had when I'd first seen him play, or the times when watching him as his purest, best self was what kept me in love through some pretty deep bullshit.

The sludge came flowing out pretty quickly. There was more sitting on the toilet fully clothed and dry sobbing. There was a stumbling walk home with my arms wrapped around my waist and not caring if anyone heard or saw. There was falling: into bed, into blogging. There was CT, three hours in the past, his gmail button still green, to soothe me and send virtual hugs.

I cried more after that. It felt like I'd left a trail from the dance floor to the bathroom to my house to my bedroom, pooled in the middle of the bed; shining in the bar light and streetlamp and moonlight.

It was quite something.

++

Paul joined me at yoga tonight, and on the way home, I was burbling a little about having done handstand. I told him about the crying on my previous attempt.

"Not that it was that unusual," I said. "I cry in yoga all the time."

He laughed, gave me a playful push into the former Metropolitan Bible Church. "You don't mind looking stupid in yoga then!" *

"God, no. I love looking stupid in yoga. Really, though, I've just done it so much I stopped caring." I paused. "Yoga is my therapy."

++

I groaned inwardly when the teacher announced we were going to work on handstand. This was the first yoga class in a long time I'd done with a friend, and the first class that Paul and I had been to together. At that point, he didn't know I was likely to start leaking saltwater at any moment, and it didn't really seem the time to give him the heads up.

One of the ways in which yoga has been therapeutic is that I've stopped pushing myself so hard all the time; have learned to be more forgiving of my foibles and limitations. When to push those limits; when to be kind.

If I were not up to handstand, I promised myself, I would work on another arm balancing pose. I gave myself a white permission slip.

And hoped that the teacher would change his mind.

He didn't. I pulled my mat over to the wall. I put my hands on the ground. I looked at them. Leaned back, leaned forward. Listened.

The lizard voice was quiet.

There was another voice, its words little susurrations falling between my outspread fingers: sokay, sokay, sokay, sokay.

I kicked up. My foot hit the wall. My left shoulder almost gave out. I swore. Straightened it. Kept my foot on the wall. Kept my gaze down.

Breathed. Calmly. Deeply. Listened.

sokay sokay

No more sludge. I don't have to hold on so tight to keep myself upright any more. After Friday night, those muscles have been washed clean.

*Okay, so when I write it like that, it comes off sounding really harsh. In person, it was jokey teasing.

This fact has come up a few times in the past few weeks: I used to fall down the stairs a lot.

I think it's kind of funny, but I'm going to stop saying it. It makes people uncomfortable, like I just told them the black eye is from walking into a door.

Part of it is that I'm clumsy and I used to take the stairs too fast for my feet.

I've never broken anything during these falls, though of course, that's what I'm thinking when my feet first start to slip. I see myself clearly, a heap of fucked up angles at the bottom of the stairs.

My arms shoot out, grab the banister on one side, press hard into the wall on the other. This is enough to keep me mostly upright, landing hard, sliding just 4 or 5 stairs, it grinds me to a shuddering halt, to catch my breath with my head between my legs.

Really, I exaggerate - I haven't fallen down the stairs in a few years now. In fact, there were only two points in my life where I was falling with alarming regularity. The first time I lived with a partner. The second time I lived with a partner.

Two days after you fall down the stairs, it hurts like a motherfucker, your whole body, like somebody beat the shit out of you.

++

The first time handstand came up in one of my yoga classes, I thought, "Hey, no problem, I rocked the handstand in Grade 9."

I put my hands cavalierly on the floor and my lizard brain said "No." Not loud, but certainly assured.

You have to know when the lizard brain knows what it's about, and when it's just flapping its gums.

This, I thought, was mere flapping.

So. Shoulders above elbows above wrists? Check. Gaze between my hands? Check. Hips up as high and as close to over my shoulders as they'll go? Neither high nor far, but check. Pick a leg to kick up with? Check.

"No," the lizard said again. "No no no no no no. No."

Flapping flapping. I kicked and I kicked, but, it must be said, in a pretty perfunctory matter. Turns out I was with the lizard on this one.

It's not even an upside down thing. I'm getting much better at standing on my head and have come to really enjoy doing so. The lizard has never said no to that.

For some reason, this week was the week I decided to actually try handstand. I really kicked, and at one point, my foot touched the wall. A first. I got really excited and thought "There, that's what it feels like. I just need to do that again."

But I couldn't - my body wouldn't. I felt like I kicked just as hard, but I could tell my leg was only going up about 65% of what it had just done.

No instructor has ever tried to help me in handstand before. It's certainly not because I didn't need the help. Rather, I suspect that, perhaps unconsciously, they could tell I wasn't actually trying to do it.

This week was the week that the instructor came over to help me.

He told me he was going to assist, I kicked up, he grabbed my ankle, I tried to come leadenly down, he held me up. I got both legs up, staring at the floor. Trying to breathe.

It was hard and I could barely manage; my chest cavity had filled with viscous terror. I knew that after I came down I'd be heading right to the bathroom, where I would sit fully clothed on the toilet, shaking, dry sobbing.

While I was up there, my arms, sure, were shaky, and my core was wonking all over the place. I didn't realize that until the next day, when my entire body ached, the way it aches after you fall down the stairs.