A week later...

Since I posted a week ago, lots has happened but nothing really. I drove to Jasper, and then from Jasper to Lake Louise and then from Lake Louise to Edmonton. During that week, I was in some of my favourite places but, with the exception of a few minutes during my drive along the Icefields parkway, I was not present in those places.

I have been in my mind way too much this past week. I was trying not to but that is what happened. I tried. I tried and I tried, and then when things weren't working out, I tried to fix them by thinking. As I did at Christmas, I felt tension arising from within me and rather than allowing myself to feel and observe, the tension triggered old coping mechanisms. Toward the end of the week, I recognized the old patterns. I felt particularly tense, squinty-eyed, and low one morning. I recognized that I needed to alter my energy and decided to do yoga. The only private (?) place was a public washroom so that's where I went. I felt much more at peace but within ten minutes, I was flooded with anxiety again as I received a well-intentioned comment and started thinking about it.

That said, I am not bringing out my figurative baseball bat to whack myself into my senses. I have moments where I think about what happened this week and tell myself stories, but then I notice my thoughts and feel better again. A friend of mine once said that she felt like she had remedial karma when she left one coporate behemoth and joined another only to find the same patterns repeating. I suspect I will see these old patterns emerge in my life many more times. The key is to see them and not fall into them.

Life gave me other lessons this week. They are not clear to me but I am gaining insight into my journey from anxiety into consciousness. I received kindness and empathy from people I don't know and that is a real gift. I also realized this morning that as much as I love skiing, I may have focused too much on it over the past weeks, leaving me out of balance. I knew I missed yoga. I knew I missed cooking good meals. I knew I missed the companionship of friends. I was so focused that my sight narrowed, leaving a breadth of opportunity unseen.

The tension that I felt over the past weeks is dissipating. My lower back no longer hurts. I still feel tense in pockets throughout my body but the clenching is relaxing and I am allowing spring to come (even though Edmonton is still covered in deep wet snow from a blizzard over the weekend and has had three days of record low temperatures).

P.S. When I was doing yoga in the washroom of a ski lodge, I really was in the moment, focusing on my breathing and asanas. When I left the washroom, though, I chuckled to think what someone else would have thought if they had walked in to see me prone stomach on the floor, ski boots on, lifting into cobra pose. Sometimes even thoughts have their moments.