I did end up continuing with 40 Days. Last week was all about Restoration, and our focus was on relaxing with what is, accepting your current situation, and removing the rocks in your life that hold you back from being who you want.

Relaxing

Through our practice, we learn that struggling against something makes the experience more difficult. Whether it’s a pose that you keep coming out of or a toxic relationship with your mother, constantly struggling against it won’t allow you through it. It’s like a Chinese finger trap.

Things I decided to relax with:

• My body does not look the way it once was, or how I’d like it to be. If I continue with the same behaviors, it’s only downhill from here.
• I’m not working toward achieving my goals in endurance athleticism, and if I continue this way my goals won’t be achieved.
• I don’t have a home that’ll be ‘repinned,’ but we’ll always have a “fun house.”
• My mom has opposing views on how to live, parent, grandparent and what is appropriate for young children. I can’t change her, I can only amend my expectations and my own behaviors.
• There are only so many active hours during the day, and sleeping less will only negatively affect following days.
• At the rate I have been going, I’ll never have a book published.

Removal

I’ve removed many rocks over the last year of practicing Baptiste Yoga. I restored long-time dormant relationships, connected with people on a deeper level, came to terms with being awful at working from home, committed myself to my family, accepted that some things, people and dreams are worth letting go of and that I’M ENOUGH. The latter, something that has been a driving factor my entire adult life: trying to prove my worth to others through outside achievements.

Getting out of the rat race and resisting the need for approval is a constant toil. I still have moments when, though I have enough on my plate, I feel the need to do more. I have times when I feel like I’m being lazy, even when I’m rushing from one thing to the next. I have times when I obsess over the steps I’ll take after the next thirteen, and others when my past preys on my mind: trying to figure out why I am who I am and if or why I’m at a disadvantage.

These are rocks I’ll keep chipping away at, but this time around I’m going after physical things that are holding me back. I’m heeding advice from the book I read at the beginning of 2015 and I’m ridding my home from top to bottom of excess, bit by bit and often.

Then I took it a step further

People always tell one another to drop the past. That it’ll make them a happier, more fulfilled person if they move on and focus on the future. It sounds like rainbows and butterflies, but I’m already so happy and fulfilled, and I decided years ago, after binge-reading memoirs, that I didn’t go through all that I did just to keep it to myself. I need to hold onto my memories, because what if, suddenly, I wake up and they’re gone? What if I lose them without telling my story?

On the final day of restoration week, I decided to remove all those rocks. I wrote a timeline, starting from things I don’t actually remember thoroughly going into what I did: childhood cancer, my dad moving out of state without a goodbye during my treatment, dealing with absentee parents as my mom attended med school, getting sent to live with my grandparents and various friends in middle school, hard, heavy and frequent drug use before I hit high school, rehab, dating violence and near-death experiences that stemmed from that, visiting my abuser in jail, teen pregnancy, teen marriage, domestic violence, alcoholism, sobriety, divorce, finding home as a single mother, finding true love, graduating college, beginning the workforce, my second marriage.

It’s just a framework, with few details, but it’s there. So it’s begun. I feel like I removed a boulder.