First Cold

Well, it happened the week before Easter—Huck took his first cold home from day care.  And it only took 1 week at school to get this!  So, all the progress that we had made with sleep at night basically went down the drain and right before we were to go out of town for the upcoming holiday.  This particular week had also been a crazy busy one for me at work, which made it even more difficult when the lack of sleep at night returned.  I knew it was inevitable—I would blog about getting sleep and into a regular sleep pattern, then sure enough within that same week, we lost it again.  Oh well; Murphy’s Law I guess!  Needless to say, Easter weekend at my parent’s was quite rough because on top of little Huck not feeling the greatest because of his cold, I got the cold too; so no one was sleepingJ.  I’m not sure why I thought I was immune to whatever he had, but I definitely was not.  It was a nasty cold, and I am still trying to get rid of the congestion.  Huck also still has a stuffy nose, but seems to be on the mend. 

Now when I get a cold or have any sort of sinus congestion, I have found it is best to set my yoga practice aside until I am well; otherwise, it simply escalates all of the symptoms I am facing and seems to make the cold 10 times worse.  Setting my practice aside is not an easy thing for me to do both physically and mentally.  I find that at times when I have to do this, my life feels as though it is turned upside down.  I find it hard to focus, hard to relax, and MUCH harder to stay calm when trying to calm a fussy baby.  I used this past week to try to recover from feeling so rundown and listen to my body telling me that I needed rest.  This is a very difficult thing to do when I know how much my body and mind thrive on being physically active.  I have always been drawn toward movement to be my natural stress-relief, so not being able to practice magnified the tensions I was facing in my life this week.  Since I have limited time to workout these days, I generally prefer to just be able to practice at home or leave from our house to walk or run outside during the day or drive to the campground by our house to take Huck for a walk.  Although I did try to get out and do some physical activity when I could this week, the weather also caused havoc with this.  Which causes me to reflect on how all of this is tied together and realize that perhaps there was some greater force telling me to take it easy last week and cherish the sleep time that I was getting and the time for other things more pertinent in my life at that moment.  I did not hesitate to go to bed earlier when I could in hopes of trying to catch back up on some lost sleep, but even being well-rested does not compensate for the feeling I get from being physically active and the calmness it brings into my life.  

I do feel as though it was easier for me to accept that I needed to take time to rest and recover before rushing back into my practice or pushing hard through a workout and listen more carefully to my body than I would have in the past.  In the past I would have been more mentally violent towards myself because I was not having time or feeling up to working out, but that was not the case for some reason this past week.  I guess that could mean that I am making progress someplace within my yoga practice to be able to surrender and accept what is.  But at the same time it was equally frustrating to not be able to find the calm I often times can find when trying to soothe Huck because of my daily practice.   So, we’ll see how things go this week, and hopefully the cold my little monkey gave to me has not set me back too much.  I do, however, think the workout I did on Friday night at one of the local CrossFit gyms might give my body some resistance from the tension it pumped back into my muscles.  But, as my teacher always says “Let’s just see what happens!”