In the days that followed J’s death, I could not even look at my yoga mat without having a full on melt down. It took months of getting my mat out of it’s bag and rolling it out onto the floor before I could even step onto it. It took baby steps and time to get my practice back. Even now, fifteen years later, I can sometimes still hear my Mom’s shattered voice when I am in pigeon pose. That’s where I was when she called me to tell me something had gone horribly wrong and that memory is imbedded deep into my right hip now and forever. Sometimes I wake with an ache in that hip. Clinically, that ache is probably a bit of arthritis, but I know it as trauma.

When we were still in the hospital trying to figure out a way to fix Chris, I had my yoga mat with me. Every day they wheeled him out of his room for some lengthy test or surgery and I would unroll my mat in the corner of our room. The methodical motion of flowing through poses gave me something to do while my brain whirled with all possible outcomes of Chris’s illness. I never laid down for savasana. My excuse was that there was no way I’d ever be comfortable on the cold, hard, tile floor of a hospital. Surprisingly enough, I still managed to get on my yoga mat every day after Chris died. My flowing routine was the balance to the exorbitant amount of time I spent laying on the couch, drinking. I still left savasana from my routing though. My excuse was that I didn’t need a final relaxation when I spent so much time merged with the couch. When I finally did lay down for a savasana, it was in a yoga class I was attending. The moment I was still, a bubble of panic filled up in my chest and then I exploded into sobs. This would happen every time I laid down for savasana, until one day it didn’t. Again, baby steps and time. I learned to relax with my grief.

The last few weeks, whenever I have gotten still in savasana, that bubble of panic shows up followed up with the tears. Final relaxation feels a lot like it did after Chris died. It came to me a few night’s ago why this might be. We were watching the first episode of the new HBO series ‘Lovecraft County’. The first half hour was calm and almost slow, but then the episode started to build in tension. The last ten minutes or so of the episode had me jumping in my seat and clutching the dog. I believed I even screamed at one point. This year has felt like watching a horror flick or walking through one of those Halloween houses. There have been jolts of terror followed with calm moments. You relax a little and then you get hit with another jolt of terror. Just when you think you’ve almost made it safely out of the haunted house, another ghoul jumps out at you from out of nowhere. The thing is, is that it’s nothing really life threatening, except for the few things that were potentially life threatening. It is just scary. Like the dumb meth-head who climbed into the spare bedroom window of my mom’s house early Saturday morning. He snuck passed my sleeping mom to the dining room where he took her purse and then stole her car. See? Terrifying, but meth-head let my mom sleep. So I don’t really care about the rest.

These little scares and jolts start to add up. That bubble of panic and the tears that follow that keep brewing up whenever I am finally still is my body reacting to all of those little traumas. I have come to terms with this and have made it a point to settle into this pose at the end of every practice. I prop myself up and make myself comfortable. Then I set a timer for twenty minutes and force myself to stay put until that timer chimes. The wave hits and there are a few moments of discomfort and tears. Then the wave moves on and I am still and quiet. Instead of learning to relax with this new trauma, now I am learning to allow my body to react to the trauma.

Baby steps and time.