balance

on practice

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There was a time when I would spend two hours a week trying to defy gravity. I would put on tight, stretchy clothes and unroll a foam mat and attempt to switch off the endless churning of my brain and concentrate, instead, on the seemingly impossible task of keeping my hip bones in a straight line while lifting one foot a metre into the air. I would try to straighten my spine and tuck in my ribcage and connect my navel to my back and bring my heels together, forehead pushing against cupped fists, feet swaying five feet above them.

I did yoga for seven years. Then I went to a class one sticky summer’s morning, bought a pregnancy test on the way home, and didn’t go back.

I don’t think the pregnancy and the yoga were connected, but I do think this was a moment when I started to become both more and less bodily. My body was doing extraordinary things - growing eyelashes and arteries and fingernails and vernix; nudging my organs out of the way to accommodate a being that started the size of a poppy seed, then a lemon, then a watermelon - and, at the same time, I started to become a bystander to it. It was no longer just mine to own.