Respect

Before starting grad school, Ian and I used to take yoga classes on a regular basis. We were getting pretty strong for a while there, even doing partner yoga, in which you sort of use your spouse's body weight for resistance. But then I started splitting my time, I wasn't home on a regular basis, and to be honest, I got lazy. Now that I've got my degree and a whole mess of free time, though, we decided it would be best to get back to our yoga-ing. So we signed up for Yoga Fit Flex & Flow through Yogatopia, with our favorite instructor.

I'd forgotten how many muscles yoga actually works and stretches. After our first class back, even my toes were sore. Though, to be fair, Tuesday nights are also cheap beer nights at Dupus Boomer's, where Ian and I are working our way through a list of 44 beers that they have on tap, and after yoga we took the bus over there and had two beers each. Bad, bad decision. Apparently the blood was still moving pretty quickly through us, so we ended up getting much drunker than expected, and then were miserable the whole next day. Of course, it wasn't as bad for me as it was for Ian because I'm unemployed right now and I didn't have to sit through eight hours of work, meetings, or anything like that.

Anywho--last night, before yoga, I was grumpy. It was a really sour mood. I'd managed to stave off some of the negative feelings that came from the six (count 'em--six!) rejection letters I got over this weekend because I also got an acceptance from Necessary Fiction (I'll let you know when my story is up on their website) and a notice that I'll be getting my copy of the journal Aethlon in the mail soon, in which appears my poem, "Curling." But then I checked the WSU jobs website, where I've been monitoring my application for an assistant job for about a month, and the damn position was filled. That led to a little ranting and raving. I mean, it's one thing to be rejected in a field where you know you're still growing and the competition is fierce and tastes vary dramatically, blah blah blah. It's another to be completely brushed off by a job for which you're insanely overqualified, which you would barely need to be trained for. Granted, I know that the overqualification might have disqualified me (I have as much education as many of the department's professors), but it still hurts. Especially because it means I might not get a job this year. In my little college town, jobs are sparse, and most of them ask for a two-year commitment; I'm only here eight more months. The eight months thing is cause for celebration, but the unemployment tempers it, huh?

So. There I was, straight off of a hissy fit, rolling up my yoga mat and heading to class. I kept hoping that yoga would have that magical effect where you spend the whole time so focused on balancing and the burn in your muscles that you couldn't think about anything else if you wanted to. I sat down quietly on my mat and waited for class to begin, trying to stay upbeat. The instructor had some poppy music playing, which I assumed she would change to the echoey yoga stuff she usually plays, but as we started to find our breathing, she didn't. Instead, while the instructor gave her usual speech, my breathing started to match some nineties song with encouraging lyrics. She made extra emphasis last night on respect, for ourselves and our bodies, and being compassionate with ourselves. She always tells us to throw judgment out the door, along with comparison and expectations. But being compassionate with ourselves--that just sounded like a good idea. And then when she played Aretha Franklin's "Respect" during our first flow, I couldn't help smiling.