Edward’s Diary Entry 133: When the body aches you know you’re alive

One of the benefits of doing physical yoga exercises is that you have a heightened awareness of being alive. Moving around and breathing sometimes actually…hurts…, so you get the big message that you’re really alive. No way you can miss out on that!

Not that I believe yoga is limited to twisting and turning only. But I have been practising it of late due to lack of education – education in the fullest sense, I mean. Because I should have been taught yoga as a child, teenager and youth instead of just going to school, fooling around in a gym or playing with a ball. I would have been healthier and more flexible, and who knows what else? So in my latter years, when touching the toes has become a problem (with long legs it’s always been tough anyway!), I force myself to undergo the sweaty business of adopting 26 postures in a heated room every morning, exerting myself fully, and sinking into total Savasana relax, on and off, off and on.

After various months, the work has just started. As soon as I can balance on one foot, there’s another part to the posture, and I go for that. When I can just touch my knee with my nose, there is a lot more to stretch, and I try to do that as well, concentrating on my breathing. Just after getting the legs firm enough to support me, now it’s the arms and chest that have to be opened up more. The work never stops.

And every day, after a cooling shower, I float around like a leaf in the breeze as I walk home, completely calm and quite contented. But my body soon tells me all about those little aches and pains. I have stretched a little more today, and the spine twist has now opened up my hip sockets a tiny bit further. Bit by bit, a muscle extends, a ligament expands and the bones stay in place a little looser than before. Maybe I am taller now than 6 months ago. Just a little more space between the vertebrae, a little more flexibility from sacrum up to atlas.

These little aches are really just reminders that I am doing a good job. Before I can even think about doing real hatha yoga and benefiting from alignment with the sun and the moon, I have to get this ageing body into an acceptable kind of physical fitness. Things that were impossible that 21st of June last year when I officially began my Bikram Yoga “trial” are now quite feasible. The Balancing Stick is now a reality, almost, whereas it was totally useless trying to do it when I first started.

So I mentally review the aches and pains and accept their reality. I could just pretend to stretch and maintain the status quo. But no, every time I master one thing, I have to go on to the next. And every day the slight aches tell me, you’re alive Edward, so enjoy it. There’s no use searching for pleasure without a little pain, is there? Cats do it, dogs do it, even educated frogs do it. So let's all be natural and stretch...