Happy Hump Day

New posts drop daily. A year's worth of content to enjoy upon joining. See you inside

Art HERE
Uncensored Art HERE
Pelvic control workout nude uncensored HERE
Uncensored Dance HERE
Uncensored workout HERE
Pelvis control from under workout HERE

People often see what my body can do now and assume I must have always been flexible. I wasn't. For most of my life, I was actually one of those people who said, “I'm just not flexible,” as though flexibility was something decided for us at birth. Some people got it, I didn't, end of story.

I was 29 when that story started to change. I'd had my daughter, and suddenly going out for long runs whenever I wanted wasn't really possible anymore. I needed something I could do at home, around a completely different life. I found yoga, and if I'm being truthful, my motivations at the beginning weren't particularly spiritual. I wanted to do the splits and I wanted to handstand. I'd dreamed about doing the splits for years, and discovering that flexibility could actually be trained made me wonder why I'd spent so long assuming my body simply couldn't do it.

So I started practising. Yoga in the morning, stretching every day, slowly learning what happened when I stopped fighting my body and actually gave it time to adapt. There wasn't one magical stretch that suddenly changed everything. It was repetition, patience, learning when to relax and when to use strength, breathing through discomfort without forcing it, and returning to the same movements often enough that ranges which once felt completely foreign gradually became familiar. About a year later, I had my splits.

But somewhere along the way, the reason I was doing yoga changed completely.

I had started because I wanted physical skills. What I hadn't expected was to need yoga for something much deeper. During a period of deep depression, it became a lifeline for me. I began to understand that the breath wasn't just something a yoga teacher reminded you to do while you were trying to get your leg somewhere ridiculous. Breath really is life in the most literal sense, and learning to stay with it while I moved gave me somewhere to come back to when my own mind felt like a very difficult place to live. The handstands and splits mattered, but yoga ended up giving me something I hadn't known I was looking for.

Over the years, one impossible thing became another. Deeper flexibility, backbends, balances, handstands and movements I once would have looked at and immediately thought, my body can't do that. Some came quickly, others took years, and some still come and go.

That last part is something I think we don't show enough. I still train my flexibility. I can lose poses. I get stiffer. Life interrupts training. Bodies change. There are periods when I'm nowhere near my most advanced flexibility or strongest skills, and I don't magically maintain everything I've spent years building just because I once achieved it. But there is a huge difference now: I no longer interpret losing something as proof that I was never capable of it. I know how to work with my body and build it again.

So when you see me fold deeply, put my legs somewhere slightly absurd or move into a position that now looks natural on my body, you're seeing years of practice, not the body I started with.

And perhaps that's the part of this story I love most. At 29, I thought “I'm not flexible” was a fact about me. It turned out to be a description of where I was at that moment.

I wonder how many things we permanently decide about ourselves simply because we haven't learned how to do them yet.

See you inside the cooler months is a great time to start and see where it takes you when you can get back outside again and enjoy that summer sunshine.