A Little Disruption, Please (Blog #254)

Y’all aren’t going to believe this. It’s 9:30 in the morning, and not only am I awake, I’m blogging. Jesus, keep me close to the cross. I’ve actually been awake and mostly functional for an hour and a half. Yesterday evening I got super tired, maybe because of all the antihistamines I’m taking, maybe because God didn’t intend for us to be awake during winter. Either way, I was in bed by midnight. Still, despite the fact that my body said go to bed, I couldn’t fall asleep. What the frick, body–haven’t you ever heard of the boy who cried wolf?

Anyway, I think I finally drifted off around three.

I’m up early today because I’m going out-of-town to see some friends. I’ll report more later, but I really need to be on the road in a couple hours. Considering I still have to eat breakfast, shower, and pack, this blog really needs to be quick. I love it and everything, but I honestly don’t want to pick it up again until tomorrow. But aside from the pressure of writing–believe it or not–I’m enjoying being up so early. Y’all, the sun is shining. It’s quiet. I can hear myself think–or at least I could if I were awake enough to do so. Earlier I practiced chi kung. My teacher is always saying, “Relax more. Now–relax more.” Well, for someone like me, this is a lot of pressure, but this morning it actually worked. Apparently relaxing is easier to do when your brain is still sleeping.

A couple years ago I had a yoga teacher tell me, “Your new favorite pose is rabbit.” Well, since I hadn’t done rabbit pose before, I pretty much forgot about it. Maybe I tried it once or twice. But for whatever reason, I thought about it this morning. I’ve had this pain in my shoulders that won’t go away, and I thought, Let’s give that a whirl. Oh my gosh–first–it’s the most awkward thing ever. You have to sit on your knees, grab your heels, put the top of you head on the floor, try to keep your forehead by your knees, then lift your hips. (Right.) All that being said–wow–it exactly stretches the muscles that have been a problem for the last six months. Finally.

My therapist told me recently that she thought it was funny that my blog was called Me and My Therapist, since she doesn’t introduce herself as a therapist. “I think of myself as a disrupter,” she said. “I disrupt the untrue. I challenge maladaptive behaviors and people’s erroneous perceptions of the world.” Having gone through this process, I now think of therapy like rabbit pose–it sucks. I mean, at the very least, it’s often uncomfortable as hell. Change is hard for a reason. Of course, whether it’s a pain in your shoulders, a bad relationship, or whatever, that’s uncomfortable too. (Maybe sucks is a better word for your particular situation.) So if a different type of discomfort is the way out of the original problem, then it’s certainly worth the effort. In this sense, perhaps we could all use a little more disruption in our lives.

Quotes from CoCo (Marcus)

"No one comes into this life knowing how to dance, always moving with grace."