Monday, October 27, 2008

Bicycling, dog training, Extended Side Angle, and Building Post-Mastectomy Arm Strength

Last week a friend at work told me about his son.  His son is 7 years old, and an avid mountain biker.  My friend was telling me how much he's learned from this little 7 year-older, who has an intuitive sense about how to shift his weight and maneuver his bike through difficult trails.
 
I've thought about this over the past week.  I spend a good portion of every single day studying my body and muscles.  "Am I standing correctly?  Is my back relaxed and wide when I'm walking?  Am I breathing?  Is my neck tense?"  I seem to have lost my ability to handle my body "intuitively".  How is it that I need to relearn the very seemlingly basic forms of standing upright and walking?  In that same vein, how is it that my body doesn't intuitively understand what it needs in order for me to maintain good health?
 
Yesterday John and I had a gorgeous bike ride around our neighborhood.  The weather was warm, and the road was covered with leaves.  We laughed at a small poodle sitting in his yard.  The first time we passed her, she barked at us.  Second time we passed, she barked, but after we passed her.  Third time we passed, she didn't bat an eyelash.  How easy it is to train a dog :)
 
I bought a Rodney Yee DvD called "Power Yoga", and I've been doing the first 1/2 hour every morning.  Thankfully it's not as hard as I anticipated.  It's not easy either.  I like that you are thrown directly into the workout without long, tedious explanations.  I feel like that 1/2 hour is well-spent, doing one move after another.  It's a perfect complement to the "Moving Towards Balance: 8 weeks of Yoga with Rodney Yee" book.  The DvD starts off gradually with the Mountain, Standing Backbend, Forward Bend, Lunge, Downward Facing Dog, Upward Facing Dog, etc, and then works up to Warrior 2, and then Extended Side Angle, and then Triangle, and then sends you through different combinations of doing one after the other.  It's very nice.
 
I smiled last night as I was doing my nightly "Moving Towards Balance: 8 weeks of Yoga with Rodney Yee" lesson.  The Triangle and Extended Side Angle poses in the lesson are so easy now that I'm doing them with the DvD in the mornings.  I still find the Extended Side Angle to be one of the most challenging because of the arm limitations from my cancer surgery and my back pain.
 
Speaking of which....  one of the new things I've been adding lately is handstand.  I've been doing that twice a day for the past couple of weeks.  Just in the doorway for now, though, and only for 5-10 seconds at a time.  I have a long ways to go to build up my arm strength.  After breast cancer surgery I was told to never lift anything more than 5 pounds for the rest of my life or I would get lymphedema in my arm.  So, for the past 7 years, I've done nothing at all with my arm -- babying it obssessively.  Yoga is teaching me that I never had to do that.  The medical establishment still hasn't figured out how to heal people in the true sense of the word.  99% of the population will never study yoga or any of the holistic practices, so 99% of all breast cancer survivors will go the rest of their lives never picking up more than 5 pounds.