Hey, my pals ~
Newsflash: I’m not a sporty girl.
That phrase crossed my mind as I read an email invitation to yoga a while ago. Nope. Delete.
I’m realizing as I write this that I have a specific definition and belief set in my head about sport and fitness. And what that is and what I am are not in the same universe.
But you know, sometimes the beliefs we hold
can limit our lived experience.
My belief that “I’m not sporty” plays out like I don’t accept invitations that involve moving my body, testing it, stretching it, or even – more poignantly – growing or nourishing it. I wear that “not sporty” belief like a shield, protecting myself from any challenge that involves physicality.
Not sporty. Not. Sporty.
I ask myself, “When did that belief show up?” The answer rises immediately.
Almost ten years ago, when I experienced a full body health crisis, movement stopped. Activity ceased. My world shrunk to a mini-orbit of work and home, home and work. A lot of sitting. And fear. And a descent into stuckness.
For the record, let me say: Stuckness isn’t the same as Stillness.
Stillness is a desirable oasis…a state of calm and resilience, a refreshing space of allowing. Stuckness, on the other hand, is a constriction of life force, a contraction into smallness that seeks safety over suffering.
I do not fault myself for stopping or retreating when I became ill. Indeed, it was necessary to cease the striving, grasping way of life I had unwittingly created and which eventually crippled me, mind, body, and spirit.
I needed that time-out.
Still, I did eventually recover, yet I did not return to any semblance of movement or, for heaven’s sake, sport.
“I don’t move like that. I’m not sporty.” That’s what I continued to tell myself.
But beware when we start believing our own thoughts!
Because, even after I regained my health, I held on to that identity of “Not Sporty Nancy.” Before my illness, I craved walking – even jogging – on a fresh spring morning or biking on a riverside path. After my illness, I separated from that part of myself. I had, metaphorically speaking, left home.
And that leave-taking had created a depth of grief that I only recently recognized I was carrying.
Remember that yoga invitation I mentioned at the top of this story? Well, it arrived in my inbox daily for a month. And I deleted it, daily. Until the last day of March when the “offer” was ending and I felt a soul-nudge to respond. Two weeks ago, I heeded that nudge and returned to the studio that had become my lifeline for restorative yoga during my healing season.
Upon re-entering the space, I felt tears spring to my eyes. I became overcome by a wave of grief and relief akin to having lost and then found again an old friend. I had come “home” – not only to the yoga studio – but also to a part of myself that I had abandoned.
A part of me knew that old story was limiting my life.
And my soul nudged me back home.
I may not be “sporty” in the Olympic sense, but I’m allowing myself to stretch and move my body beyond what I had been telling myself was possible. When we release expired beliefs, or rewrite old stories, we remember our truth, and re-member our very Being.
And that old friend I had lost and then found? It was me.
With love and homecoming,
Nancy
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