Good Belly Yoga

I learned something very important from my yoga classes and please forgive me if I sound redundant.

Because I did yoga so much and for so long I thought I was relaxed, but I wasn’t.

I was very flexible from doing yoga all my life but there was a little part of me that was tense and not speaking to me.

I didn’t have the blood flow needed to support my growing belly.

My wardrobe had to change. No tight clothing.

I am not the beautiful slim young person I used to be, but I am more inside my body than I used to be.

I know I still have value because I work at being calm and thoughtful, and try to listen to people.

I often felt misunderstood and undernourished in some essential way.

I’ve learned that is my anxiety talking.

I am looking to understand. Even though I eat very healthy foods and exercise regularly, I still look fat. I struggled with having a good weight and a clear mind.

I also knew that when my heart beat too fast and I felt overwhelmed I had to slow down and try to think more clearly, despite my circumstances. I didn’t need to be a strong and independent person all the time, and making decisions for other people: I needed to be working with the environment I was currently inside of and in the time I was allotted.

Sometimes my yoga teachers were right: I worked so hard on being perfect, I forgot my belly.

When I took time to do a body scan I found I was tense in my midsection. I was trying so hard to be the most perfect yogi that I forgot to focus inward into sensing my body’s responses to yoga and life.

I try not to chastise myself when I did my practice, I just want to be here.

I had to accept my imperfections as my wholeness.

This is a drawing I made on the day I got in touch with my mixed up belly, hormone imbalances, and judgements about this old woman I live with in this body full of foggy thoughts, and with aa cranky pelvis.

Luckily, I had a great yoga teacher who taught me how to do restorative yoga so I could get in touch with this part of myself.

This is the pose I go to when my belly gets cold and tense. I put my feet up, my legs and butt against a wall, support my sacrum, and breathe for a while until my belly gets warm.

That was the first step: I also use a heating pad to warm my belly when it is cold.

I had to work for a long time to change some of my habitual thoughts that were not helping me. Some of my thoughts I wanted to move away from were: “you are fat, you are ugly, and you look bad in your clothes.”

The trick to learning to love yourself is to not control it, but to strive for understanding. There are no pills you can take, no magazine article you can read, or affirmations you can tell yourself to get the love you need. It has to come from within. It takes a lot of work on being at home in your body.

The truth is, you cannot get rid of your unconscious thoughts, they bubble up to the surface and you may want to be rid of them, yet what if you could learn to live with them and use them to guide you to a better place? You might get really good at living your life if you understand your motivators.

Mine are food, people, and fun.

One of my favorite tunes I play myself while I workout (and I workout a lot) is “The Heart Wants Pleasure First.” Once I understood this simple principle of pleasure and effort, I got what I needed to do to be happy with myself.

This is the thing about bellies: they need warmth, they need love, and they need relationships that nourish them at all the levels.