A Very Important Lesson I Learned This Evening in Yoga

I suffer from chronic back-shoulder-and-neck cramps, originating in large part from my Internal Angst and Tension, and responsible in large part for my decision to practice yoga. Because I never know when my back, shoulder or neck muscles will Act Up, I find myself constantly checking them out by flexing and stretching and compressing and pinching them, just to make sure that they are still okay. This evening, I was in the midst of a perfectly enjoyable yoga session, happy to be back after a week-and-a-half-long hiatus, preparing for my second Sphinx pose, when the voice in my head suggested that I give my neck a good tweak…you know, just to make sure. So I listened. And tweaked. And was immediately rewarded with a sharp and glaring pain down the right side of my neck which disturbed my remaining yoga practice and continues to haunt me right up to this very moment, as I sit here typing in my shorts amidst a flurry of flaking dead skin resulting from my decision to bite the bullet and go SPF-less during my Last Beach Trip of the Summer.

The moral of the story is that maybe, sometimes, our biggest problems are the ones that we create ourselves. There is enough heartache and pain and misery in the world without the additional heartache and misery and pain we self-inflict. Maybe we owe it to ourselves, and our necks, to just concentrate on living and not worry so much on What Atrocities Might Befall Us, or The Terrible Thing That We Are Certain is Just Around the Corner. Because maybe if we expect bad things to happen to us, they’ll be so scared to disappoint us that they’ll go ahead and happen. Worse still, maybe we’ll make them happen, just to get it over with and face the inevitable.

So the next time we are happily minding our own business and aligning our chakras and otherwise going about our lives, and we hear that little voice that tells us we’d better screw things up before they get screwed up without us, let us all try a new tactic, which I like to call “Fuck Off, Little Voice.”