The Yogi Has Found Her Rage

A Reiki Practitioner told me yesterday that I needed to access my rage and let it out.

As a yoga teacher and daily meditator, I didn’t know I had rage stuck inside of me.

My life’s work for the past 16 years has been finding equanimity and peace within.

She sensed grief in me.

I knew exactly what she was talking about.

The passing of my parents in July 2020 and July 2021 damn near broke me.

However, I followed her advice and signed up for a HIIT Boxing class the next day.

“Yes, let’s access the rage and let it out,” I thought.

I woke up today heavy with grief.

I figured it was because I had started the deep work of processing my parents’ passing.

I arrive at the studio for my boxing orientation and I have no idea to whom I am reporting.

The man at the desk eyes me up and down, looks at my legs, and asks if I’m a runner.

“Yes….where am I supposed to go?” I answered.

He said my coach was training someone and I needed to wait.

I could feel a bit of rage rising in me because he had looked me up and down — would he have done that to a man walking into the studio?

I thought, “Ok, God, thanks for that because now I have something to work with here.”

The class began and I’m having a great time.

Running outside, shadow boxing drills, partnered work — it’s all great.

“Rage! Find the rage! Let it out!,” I’m thinking with each jab/cross combination.

I didn’t know if I had accessed my rage during the hour-long class but I was drenched with sweat.

Then the final move: Hollow holds.

Here’s where we all lay on the turf with our shoulder blades curled up and legs hovering one inch over the ground.

It feels like Hell is melon balling me from the outside in.

Coach keeps shouting, “C’mon! Keep your legs up! Legs straight! If you lower your legs, you are admitting defeat!”

My heart SCREAMED, “You haven’t had a C-Section!! You haven’t had your core ripped apart! You haven’t had your lower abs atrophy from scar tissue! YOU CAN’T TELL ME WHAT MY BODY IS EXPERIENCING!!”

There it was: I had found my rage.

A man telling me what my body can and cannot do with zero knowledge of my life.

The rage that I had to have a C-Section when I did everything in Western and Eastern medicine to get my sweet breech baby to flip her head down.

The rage when people roll their eyes at my decision to get a tattoo of a drawing my daughter did of her cherished purple elephant placed exactly where she sat breech so I can turn my pain into her beauty.

Then a level of grief I hadn’t accessed for close to 10 years: I never got to experience the natural childbirth I had prepared for.

I had dreamed my entire adult life of experiencing the groans and screams of birthing my child.

Instead, I had an epidural placed by a med student who went too far into my spine and hurt me.

I had the steel table and the draped curtain distancing me from seeing the one bloody mess I wanted to witness fully: my daughter coming into this world.

I had months of physical pain in my lower abdomen as my muscles worked to come back together after having been cut apart.

The daily self-aggressions at the playground with other new moms as they share their birthing stories and all I can say is, “I had a C-Section” while lashing myself as a failure in some way.

Then their lectures on how Western medicine forces women to have C-Sections when women have been birthing breech babies for centuries.

I wanted to say to them, “Would you risk losing your child in a breech delivery? Would you risk dying from a complication?”

Or, even more at my heart:

“You have no idea what my experience has been so don’t judge my choices.”

My rage is summed up in one core value:

Don’t assume or judge anything about me or anyone else.

We have no idea what other people have gone through.

We have no idea how much courage it may have taken them to leave the house that day.

Instead, let’s hold compassion and kindness for each other.

Understand that everyone is doing their best with what they have.

For me today, it was keeping my knees bent with my legs six inches off the floor in a Hollow Hold.

I was damn proud of myself for getting in the ring and coming to terms with my shadow self.

And I left my aching voice drenched in a pool of sweat on the floor.

I’m getting clear. I’m feeling light.

My rage can now dissolve into grief and pass through me like a turbulent weather system.

It’s my job to get out of its way and let it happen.