Hips and Lizards

Put your hands on your hips, and repeat after me. 
I am strong. I am beautiful. I am courageous.

I have recently fallen in love with yoga. This will not be the last time I tell a yoga tale in my Lenten journey because this practice is helping me bridge a chasm between my heart and my body. This is transformational territory.

I will not say that I am exercising, because I hate that word. I will instead choose to see this practice as a holy movement of Spirit that is connecting a part of my being that has been disconnected for far too long.

My body and I have issues. I am a 6' tall woman who grew up in a generation that didn't really have tall women. If I had a dollar for every time that someone asked me if I played basketball or volleyball, I would be a millionaire. Add to that, a dollar for every time some told me to 'stand up straight' or 'be proud of my height'... mega bucks. Besides the obvious, being tall brings with it unusual situations.

Take for instance a women's bathroom. As a tall woman, I can go into a public bathroom with short stalls and it feels like I am peeking over at you. Trust me, I am not.  At the grocery, I receive pleading looks of assistance from my smaller sisters. I also have been shot death darts when I have tried to help a seemingly struggling gentleman reach his desired breakfast cereal.

My growth rates caused permanent damage to my body. I could walk down the high school hallway and my knee caps would pop out. I had my first MRI on my back at 17, after my discs began compressing during a growth spurt.

So, to say that finding peace with my physical body has been a journey would be an understatement. Enter my 40's. I am in a season of parenting two beautiful, tall, strong females that need to see their mom and her lengthy frame as whole. I have some work to do.

I have walked into this practice of yoga with many insufficiencies. I have been forced to be the student, not the teacher. In almost every class I take, I have to modify for my long legs or feeble back. But I am freaking doing it.

Today, I stood in tree pose with a sure sense of balance and the ability to extend my arms to the heavens and hold my palms open. In case you didn't realize it, that was like 8' of me balancing on one leg - I KNOW!

I also folded my body into a hip stretch called lizard. It was not pretty. And just when I wanted to give up and not try it, I thought of my daddy. At that exact moment, he was having 4 holes drilled into his hips to extract bone marrow. I also flashed to my baby, who at 11 and 5'7" is facing her own growing woes and would give anything to stretch her hip without pain. Neither of them could do a lizard, so I did mine for them today.

Yes, I was stretching. Yes, I am getting stronger. But this is not exercise. This is soul shaping work that is helping me become the woman who can put her hands proudly on her hips and say, "I am enough!"