I’m sure you have heard the famous phrase “A family who does yoga together stays together.” You know, the famous phrase by the famous yogi whatshisname. Not ringing a bell? Okay, perhaps the phrase isn’t famous or even catchy, but its our new Riley motto.
After the holidays, both Dave and I felt sluggish and generally old and doughy. I vowed to eat less sugar, a vow I’m not keeping at the moment. Dave vowed to get his health back and find new ways to relax, a vow that involves a lot of upward facing dogs. I own three beginner yoga DVDs and I have owned these for 5 years. Why haven’t I moved on to intermediate or advanced purchases? I don’t know. Lazy or cheap or both. I scrounged through our DVD collection and pulled out Body Wisdom Yoga for Beginners by Barbara Benagh, my favorite of my seldom used better me DVD items. I thought Dave would laugh at the earthy crunchy voice overs and cuts to waves splashing, but he didn’t make a snarky peep. We did the gentle unwind for about 30 minutes and Dave struggled through most of the bends and twists, suddenly aware of yoga’s difficulty. But he loved it so much, we are planning to incorporate evening yoga into our schedule a few times a week.
I’ll admit, I didn’t see this happening. When I would do yoga in Virginia, Dave always made a lot of uncouth jokes. Parenthood has acted as a health do over impetus or, perhaps, parenthood has made the de-stressing power of yoga essential to our physical sanity (physical sanity is a thing, right?).
Lest you think we have turned over a new leaf, our yoga is purely yuppie. In fact, one of my items on today’s to-do list is buy a yoga mat for Dave at Target. For us, yoga isn’t likely to be about some inward spiritual journey and that’s fine. We’ll see how long this lasts, but I’m optimistic about health changes we can make together. Unfortunately for Dave, my desire to sugar detox has been confusing. I asked him to support me in my decision, in other words, to remind me of my sugar addiction in my moments of weakness. Predictably, whenever Dave tries to do this, I get mad and eat the cookie anyway. Meanwhile, Dave wanted to do a strange detox liquid type diet for a couple weeks and I told him I wouldn’t support that decision. Based on the science, detoxes don’t actually do anything, but more importantly I didn’t want him to mess with family dinner time. We compromised and now take our probiotics together in the morning. Our OCD dorkiness knows no bounds.
Our solution of joint incremental changes has been great, even if the other two members of our family still don’t participate. Amelia is not included in this family yoga time because she is already asleep by 8pm and because a 9 month old is so flexible she could join the Cirque Du Soliel. We tried to include Kaiya, but she told us downward facing dog was part of her DNA. Would we purchase a DVD teaching us how to do standing human pose? I think not.
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