May Day! May Day!
Today is a potent day to mark in the cycle of your life called Beltane or Midsummer. It is a cross quarter holiday mostly celebrated in Europe, UK, and Ireland and traditionally is marked with the lifting of a decorated May Poll, libations, and good food in community. We celebrate the halfway point between Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice by lighting bonfires and partaking in honoring the fertility of the Earth and the fertility of life.
At this cross quarter season of life, I wanted to share why I have been so quiet these past few months. My personal chart astrology has me shedding and letting go, has me not being able to find the words, and at the same time, passionately wanting to share my story. as maybe others have been through the same challenges. I would be remiss to not to share. The start of 2025 has not been kind to me, but it has been incredibly transformational. With the state of the world, I have felt a need to be more introverted. I see the injustice, the struggles, and the ripping apart of all that we thought was safe and secure. I consider myself to live outside the “norm” of the general US societal cultural ideology, which in turn makes me feel unsafe now, not just as a woman, but also that I have a child that is queer and non-binary. It makes my heart ache deeply, not knowing what to do to help. I work in the government too and have experienced layoffs and struggles all around with programs that help our communities, our schools, our livelihoods. I am in utter and complete shock most days and when that happens alongside what I have been going through physically, I only have energy for myself and my family.
Life has been a lot and I have been dealing with some big health issues that pulled back. I took a really big break from posting and writing my newsletter. Also, I needed to step away from teaching in person yoga classes for the time being to focus on my health and self care.
In December 2024 I was experiencing left shoulder pain and ignored it, however after 108 sun salutations for Winter Solstice it really started to flare up. It was painful to teach or even take yoga classes. I took a lot of ibuprofen (sorry kidneys). Come the end of January I2025, I couldn’t even use my left arm anymore and I was in an incredible amount of pain. It was so excruciatingly painful, worse than having two c-sections and three other surgeries from my past. I had never experienced anything like it! I went to the urgent care, who gave me muscle relaxants and sent me home. A few very painful days later, my doctor ordered x-rays and we had our answer.
Calcific Tendonitis. The xray attached to the post is my actual shoulder and if you look very closely, you can see the calcium deposits growing in my tendons. Why is this so painful? Because bones should not grow there and especially between two joints. The doctor said no one knows the exact reason bone spurs grow in weird places, but it was probably a combination of over taxing the shoulder with repetitive movements and then not resting it added onto my perimenopause change in hormones. The body is just trying to heal it, but overdoing it by growths happening in odd places. Apparently this type of tendonitis happens a lot with people that do repetitive movements, think manual labor, pro athletes, yoga teachers, and also women in perimenopause due to hormonal changes. He gave me a prescription for PT, told me to follow up with him in a few months, and sent me on my way.
This same week, I had my yearly physical with him and was declared diabetic. Devastating to say the least, like I needed one more thing to worry about. My A1C went from 5.7 to 6.5. A pretty big jump, but not uncommon due to my family history of diabetes, me going through perimenopause, and the extremely high stress of 2024 and entering 2025. The diagnosis is not so bad that I have to take medicine (yet), but rather manage it with diet and exercise. Which I find doable, I just had to make some minor shifts in my life and realized my body was screaming for me to do so. It was a distress signal, the Universe decided to slow me down.
When I started PT at the end of February I could not move my left arm. Teaching vinyasa yoga was a nightmare, I couldn’t lift my arm up, to the side, or in front of me. I couldn’t even do basic poses like child’s pose or goddess arms. It was devastating to me, I loaded up on ibuprofen just to get through class. PT helped me release the tension I was holding onto around the calcium deposits, to release the rotator cuff muscles and neck. I had deep massage in PT, trigger point myofascial release, and then soft movement. The doctor and PT advised me “never stop moving” otherwise the frozen shoulder would come back. When I went on a family vacation in March, I didn’t do any PT exercises and it came back with a vengeance. I took like 3 steps back. I started back up with PT twice a week and I had to make the sad and dreaded decision to stop teaching yoga in person.
Letting go of my classes in person is when the real yoga kicked in off the mat. I had to find santosha with my situation. Santosha is the acceptance or contentment with the situations in life that we can not control (my diagnosis of calcific tendonititis and diabetes at the same time). It is also the acknowledgement of the next right actions I can do to take control of the situation (PT, rest, stop teaching, change up the diet, add in more exercise not just yoga). It was a measure in my patience and in my attachment to “what is” in order to let go and surrender to the moment. Chronic prolific physical pain is a major game changer in someone’s life. I could either go down the path of self pity, ego attachment, and depression, OR, I can take it day by day to build little improvements and heal, get better.
Since the end of March, I have built strength in my shoulder by adding in weight training in addition to my PT, but I plateaued. The pain was getting worse with just micro movements, I didn’t know what to do. I looked up ways to deal with it, I researched non-surgical ways to help the calcium deposit reabsorb back into my body. That is the funny thing, the only way it can heal is if it reabsorbs naturally or is removed surgically (which can actually make it grow back). There are ways to help it naturally and my PT agreed to try ultra-sound therapy. I have been getting this treatment for 4 weeks now and slowly but surely my range of motion is coming back, my numbers are improving, and the pain is slowly improving. With continuous strength training, I have helped my mobility not only in my body, but also my mind. I may have been flexible as a yoga teacher, but switching up my activity and exercise has helped immensely.
Going beyond my everyday routine of numerous yoga classes and walking 4-5 miles a day with new exercises and weight training has help by diabetes as well. It was again, another plateau I was working to move away from over the years. My body just was too used to the same old, same old and needed a challenge. I am grateful for this challenge, this pain. Instead of sitting in victimization, why is this happening to me? I am able to utilize all of that yogic training and ask myself “how can I learn from this?”. I am having fun with the extra time I have created for myself to go to the gym, to take cycling classes again, to dance with my kids, and add in cardio intervals. Carving out this self care time for me has been instrumental to managing the diagnosis of diabetes, my stress, and also deal with the chronic pain of calcific tendonitis. It can take upwards of 12 months to heal from CT, if that even works, but I am staying positive and have already seen amazing results. I have also lowered my fasting blood sugar by 30 points and my A1C by 0.4.
Not every day is good, but there is certainly something good in every day.
