Wellness Realized
The idea of complete wellness comes to me as I stretch my hands forward on the yoga mat, fingertips reaching for the cupboards lining the lower half of the kitchen wall. I’ve decided to commit to this twenty-minute routine every day because I swear I can feel the S curve in my spine grow more pronounced as the years go by.
Now in Warrior pose, I decide to streamline my morning routine for maximum wellness. I know the benefits. Years of studying self-care and mood stabilization has caught up with me and in my mid-forties the time is NOW.
Here is the morning routine I lay out for myself as I hug my knees to my chest in (ahem) wind releasing pose:
Get up at 6am
Drink water
Drink coffee
Eat a banana
Do yoga (20 mins)
Take a walk (30 mins)
Make and eat breakfast: Oatmeal with almond butter, chia seeds, berries, soymilk, and maple syrup.
Take a shower (but only wash hair every other day)
Lotion
Dress in comfortable clothing
Review calendar
Write a blog post
Begin seeing clients
Notably, I leave out the many minutes a day I spend pacing around trying to find my glasses, water, laptop, cell phone, wallet, clean mask, or snack.
I leave out the fact that sometimes I need to sit in the hammock outside and sway and smell the sun bake into the earth or the chocolate cosmos my husband brought home, a huge grin on his face. Sometimes I need to wander the house and run my fingertips over the string of lights my eldest wrapped around the bannister to her room. The lights have long since stopped working but I have left them there as a reminder of her now that she has gone away to college. Sometimes I need to sit on our spare room mattress, legs dangling, and turn the pages of old photo albums filled with images of my children carefully slipped into plastic sleeves.
Often, I just need to make tea and stare out the window at nothing and notice my breath as it rises and falls. Check in with my body. Run cerebral, imagined hands over my head, neck, shoulders, torso. Honor this being who carried two babies, danced, hurt from the pain of scoliosis. This body that has sat with birthing women and grieving psychotherapy clients and reminded them over and over to breathe.
Not maximum wellness. Radical wellness. Accepting my whole being. Making room for laughter and earnestness and tears and losing things because sometimes I need to slow down.
On the mat, now in Savsana, our cat Mollie sniffs my hair, butts her head against my cheek and meows. She walks across my body and I giggle and gasp and then remember that I am supposed to be lying as still as possible. Supposed to be. Supposed to be is the underwriter to my imagined morning routine.
How do I take care of myself and preserve the time I know I need to do “nothing”? How do I quell my anxiety when I don’t have time to walk or do yoga and I want to eat a bagel instead of oatmeal and I need to cry because I miss my children when they were small and I could carry them from room to room?
Savasana ends and I clamber to a seated lotus, knees feeling less liquid than they used to. I have come to a conclusion.
Radical wellness is to approach each day with the intention of choosing what is best for me at the moment. Of changing my mind set to embrace the ideal morning routine as a menu of options for the day and not a rigid standard to hold myself accountable. Radical wellness honors all of me and what I need for maximum wellness each day. Maximum wellness might be the entire list. It might also be losing my glasses and running around in a towel and holding my imaginary baby against my chest as I swing in the hammock.
Who’s to say?
