on My Hips, My Jaw
There’s this one yoga practice on Glo, by Felicia Tomasko, which is basically a half-hour practice dedicated to two enormously long pigeon poses. Somehow, Felicia is the rare instructor who is both hippie-crunchy-new-wavey AND really grounding and soothing. When she talks about Ayurveda and energy flows and compassion, I can actually still hear her. Sometimes when (especially white) people talk about Ayurveda and other Eastern philosophies, all I hear is bullshit.
According to Felicia, the hips are where we often store feelings we haven’t dealt with. They are the juncture of the body and, as such, all kinds of stuff gets stuck there. I have, for at least the past ten years, had the wonkiest of hips. I was a very flexible little kid and put that to good use as a medium-core gymnast from elementary school until I quit just before I started high school. Then I got really into yoga in college; it was a great match for the strength and flexibility that also made me a good gymnast. But I also did a lot of what yoga instructors will call “hanging out in my joints.” Because I was so flexible, I could really let it all hang out in any number of poses.
Then I got pregnant, and all that relaxin (the hormone that literally relaxes ligaments and muscles) combined with my already pretty stretched out pelvis to create some real significant problems. Lots of sciatic nerve pain, super uneven hips, and general pain throughout my pelvis. Then I got pregnant again! Even though it was irrational, I was afraid that second labor was going to do permanent damage to my hips, so painful and wobbly were they. Literally afraid something would break in a horrendous, snapping manner.
Nothing has ever been the same for my hips, though the effects of the damage wax and wane. Right now those effects are waxing pretty heavy. So I’ve been hitting the chiropractor and doing lots of pigeon poses and reclined pigeon and figure four and all those hip stretch-y poses in the hopes they will get my one hip to rotate back to straight again, instead of pointing slightly out and to the side. (Probably it is always gonna be rotated wonky, but if it could at least stop HURTING, that would be great.)
So, you know, I’m lying there in pigeon, at least five minutes into what is probably a ten-minute hold, and Felicia is telling me to release whatever energy and emotion I’ve stored up in my hips. She is telling me that is there is magic in having compassion for myself.
The election last week seems to have broken my brain. Maybe I’m climbing out a little now, given that I have actual words to write again. But as everyone talked about how relieved they felt, how they could finally concentrate and breathe and celebrate, all I could think was how I was mostly fine before but now I’m not. Or maybe it’s all the stuff I’ve been shoving down into my broken hips that is now breaking out.
I spent a nice amount of yesterday morning crying at my computer, trying to figure out how to make this dumb filtering software work on these dumb chromebooks I bought my kids so they wouldn’t use the school iPads that absurdly do not block YouTube and are filled with GAMES. And my son was upset, again, upstairs. And my daughter was upset, again, downstairs. And I’ve never been so sure I’m doing an awful job at being a mom, and now I have no work (at which I am almost always good) to fall back on. Or so sure that my own depression is a black, toxic sludge creeping across the house and infecting my children. I’m sure my son sponges it up off me, and probably my daughter does too. So that gives me depression PLUS guilt PLUS a real strong sense of helplessness because nothing seems to help solve the myriad problems presented by parenting during COVID times. Of course my hips, dealt a maiming blow by pregnancy, are falling apart as my walking, talking children are falling apart in this extended lockdown. My hips continue to accrue the damage of mothering. The damage of mothering. Shit is bleak here, people.
So then Felicia started talking about relaxing the jaw and how there’s magic in relaxing the jaw. Another online yoga teacher once talked about relaxing the jaw to relax the hips, so I suspect there’s some kind of psychic connection there, too. Hips to jaw to emotional baggage. Felicia said that the jaw is where we hold our self-judgment, and it was not lost on me that the more I feel like a failure, the tighter I clench my jaw. Also not lost on me that my body struggles when my mind struggles.
It was sunny and warm, so the depressive fog was not SAD. I am as far away from both ovulation and my period as possible, so it’s not those hormonal shifts, either. (Is it fucking perimenopause?) I can tell my brain isn’t fully chugging along at full strength because when I thought about writing this blog post, in my head it had some structure. In reality, it is a ramble with the bits that I thought could be structural just plopped here, inert. I’m not even sure how I could make them into signposts or weigh stations because nothing recently has been making sense—nothing leads anywhere.