Gratitude Monday: Namaste

You know, I do not know what to say about last week. Repugs in the Senate whining that, as the minority party, they’re serving notice that they’ll burn the place to the ground if the majority exercises any power associated with majority status. Repugs across the country enacting massive voter suppression laws to keep minorities and poor folks from being able to exercise their Constitutional rights.

And a White guy in Atlanta buys a semi-automatic handgun, goes on a killing spree at three Asian massage parlors and spas, murdering eight. Because he’s White, even thought he drove to Florida to kill more, he’s taken into custody without anyone getting hurt, and tells the cops, well, gee—he was having a bad day and this is what he did.

I gotta tell you, I am hard-pressed to pull gratitude out of that hellscape.

I’m not going to go into the fundamentalist-fueled White misogyny that made a 21-year-old Baptist man so twist notions of sex that his solution to self-loathing was to “remove the temptation” of women. Or the widespread business of human trafficking that deceives and demeans women brought here to work in the sex industry. Or the hypocrisy of government officials and law enforcement who tacitly condone the trade because men gotta have their jollies, but not with “good” women. Or even our centuries-long history of Eurocentric anti-Asian racism.

No, this is gratitude Monday; not supposed to fill my post with fuckery.

So I’m going small—taking it inward instead of dwelling on the fact that it’s 2021 and we still have to protest this shit.

Here it is: I cut the ball of my foot last week. Not too badly (and I’m up-to-date on tetanus), but I bled all over the place and I was worried about opening it up in my yoga lesson, when you plant your feet and push or pull. So instead of the usual, my instructor gave me a yin yoga class, with all the work close to the floor instead of standing.

The deal with yin yoga is that you hold the pose for much longer than you would in other types of yoga. We did two minutes per pose, which I discovered over the weekend really gave my muscles a workout. This is something new for me, and I really, really like it. We did mini flows, like upright swan and sleeping swan (that latter one about killed my shoulders), and I have to tell you: I felt muscles that haven’t been there for years.

It also—as always—got me away from the world for the hour we were in session, and I so needed that, especially at the end of last week.

The horror of our world is still out there, and we need to do something about that. But I’m grateful that for an hour I was able to step away from it and concentrate on stillness and breathing. And, you know, not falling over.