Inversion class.

Thursday night's Inversion class has become one of the high points of my week. Its a world away from anything I have ever learned at a gym doing yoga.

For starters, we warm up doing a swift series of this beautiful dance like agile vinyasa flow unlike any I've ever done before. In about 7 minutes you are sweating.

(Kindov like this, but I have boobs. And no chest hair. And a shirt.)

 Then you move directly into a 3 minute headstand. 3 minutes sounds like it isn't a long time. Till you are on your head. And your instructor is....well....not exactly taunting you......but making you uniquely aware of how far away from three minutes you still are :).

 First headstands. This isn't the headstand of your 5th grade gymnastics class, where you tripod your hands and head, pull your knees up to your elbows, and push up your legs. You choose from one of six arm positions, walk your toes in close to your body with your legs straight, and slowly and gracefully lift your straight legs up overhead.

(You look like this, just before you start to raise your legs, and just as you lower your legs. Minus the sunset. we are just in a room. Inside. At night)

At the end of three minutes you lower your straight legs back down to the ground, lightly and gracefully. At least, thats the goal. Its intense.

Last week we started with headstands and worked through all 6 arm positions. Think, arms straight out in front of you, hands up, arms straight out at your sides, crucifixion style

, arms folded in front of your forehead, arms folded next to your head so your elbows are on the mat and your hands are on the back of your head, etc etc.

We then moved into forearm balances. For forearm balances your head is off the mat, and you kick up into the posture, like a headstand, rather than lifting into them handstand style. They are hard. Last week I was having a hard time with arching my back too much and relying on my spine, and this week I started to get the hang of using my abs and butt to keep me upright. Its a wild feeling when you "get" it and suddenly all of the effort goes out of the posture and you find yourself feeling weightless, upside down, and balanced on your forearms!

(Like this, but no arrows. These thoughts, are racing through your mind. If they AREN'T racing through your mind, some wild Australian woman is yelling at you "Thats IT Melissa! Pull your FRONT RIBS IN! TIGHTEN those BUTTOCKS, YES Melissa EARS, head between EARS YES Melissa RIBS IN now RIBS in YES MAGIC Melissa MAGIC". So, its like arrows, really).

From there we moved into handstands. Handstands are pretty self explanatory.

Again, I have no problem getting up there, but my tendency is to overarch my back, so its hard to trust my body ~ when I engage my abs and am actually upright I feel as though I'm leaning backwards towards the ground. What is more comfortable to me is being overextended through the spine and curved towards the wall, if that makes sense. Again, when you trust your body, and engage your muscles rather than rely on your bones, it is this amazing sense of weightlessness. You come up grinning from ear to ear! Its the exact same feeling that you get from hitting a good golf shot ~ so pure, so effortless, so easy......so amazing that its so damn hard to do when its really such a simple action! (Except, of course, it isn't....there are a million tiny things that have to go just right.) Anyway. From there we move into some sort of twisting headstand ~ where we move up into a headstand, twist, put our twisted knees over our outside elbow, and lift our head up.

You look sortov like this having come down from your handstand, twisted, except, again, no yurt.

 I collapse at about that point. Ideally one would lower the head back down, extend the legs back up, twist to the other side, lower the legs over the OTHER elbow, lift the head again, extend back up into headstand, and gracefully come out of the posture. Someday.

We then go into a crow, lower our head, push up into a headstand keeping the toes together, lower back into knees over armpits, and bring the head back up into crow.

Thats this, except I'm about eleventy inches shorter than this person. My crow is more like a, I don't know, some kind of squat flightless bird compared to this woman.

 From there a side balance where we put our entire body onto our forearms on either the right or left side, kicking the legs out to the opposite side. Then, we put our right leg over our left, place our elbows down on the mat, and come up onto our elbows, kicking our top leg straight out behind us and the bottom leg out to the side, with our entire body up on our two arms. Its wild. We then repeat that to the other side. Did I mention that we are doing all of these things many times? Trying, failing, trying again? It requires 100% complete mental concentration ~ there is NOTHING outside of that room for 75 blissful minutes ~ no kindergarten thousandpapers, no millionpreschool specialdaythingstoremember, no holyshitsocceruniform is dirty again, no nothing. Just trying to stay upside down. Or sideways. Or twisted. Or however you want to be. It is physically exhausting in the most wonderful of ways.

We then work backwards, doing one of each posture, winding down to shavasana. I actually got teary tonight in shavasana ~ something about the music......I was just overcome with gratitude. I've been thinking a lot about this whole life thing ~ how we really only get one (everyone knows this, I know. SOrry, so not groundbreaking stuff here in my journal. I'm pretty dense). This is the show. I feel like I've being so bent on surviving the past 2 years ~ between breaking my hip and Nate's school....well.....I have not treated time as though it was precious. I have not treated my life as though it was precious. And I could spend a lot of time beating myself up about that, which usually just leads to more self defeating behavior for me....or I could just forgive myself, know that I did my very flawed best with what I had available to me at the time.....and vow to do better.

I'm doing better. Today was precious. Today I spent time with my babies and my best friend, in the sunshine. Today I got to dance. I got to do yoga. I got to buy mums (all I can hear is my British instructors voice....I did not buy mothers. I bought fall plants). And when I messed up (I wasn't paying attention to how long Julia had been in the shower, and realized in a panic that it was time to get Luke's bus, and I yelled at her to hurry up, and she got upset......and it was my fault for losing track of time while I was in the kitchen) I got to apologize to her tonight with tears in my eyes, and explain to her what guilt was, and why I had it, and vow to do better tomorrow.

So, this class. Its really hard. And it makes you laugh, because there are some things that you just can't even come CLOSE to doing. There is this one posture I didn't even mention that involves the hips, where you interlock your ankles over your shoulder and raise yourself up onto your wrists and sortov, like, dangle there. You may as well asked myself and the other runner in the room to grow wings and fly. My body simply can't do that. And thats cool. And its okay to laugh at my ridiculous, challenged, half metal hips. And when I held a handstand free of the wall tonight for a minute, I felt a flush of pure victory. And the whole group is amazing, all of us working together and rooting one another on. Its nice to have small victories in life. And its nice to know that there are things that, today, you CANNOT DO. And that it's okay to not succeed at everything you try. That you can fall down in a handstand....even if you fell down for, say, two years......because you can still kick yourself right back up there, damnit.