Flowing with the Go Read Online Free PDF Page B

train every day and others only once a week. For these reasons, the coach emphasized the importance of not comparing yourself to others or focusing on the next belt. He would remind us to come to class when we could, train hard, and do our best, and the rest would fall into place when the time was right.
    Yes, I believed this wholeheartedly, but not deeply. Each day I was able to train, I was simply thankful to have made it through another class—because my measure at the time was just to participate in the world again, to be consistent about something. I wasn’t thinking about rank or promotions because I only thought about life one day at a time—just moving forward for twenty-four hours. That was my status quo for a year and a half. If I thought too far ahead, I would fall apart.
    The anticipation of significant dates or holidays would trigger terrible anxiety. Carly’s birthday and the day she died are only one week apart in April. My anxiety would start to creep in around the middle of March. By the first week of April, I would have trouble sleeping, start eating poorly, and start drinking more, and I would become “the weeping woman.” A song by the Fray (Carly’s favorite band) would play, and I would cry. People sent cards and emails and texts, and each one was bittersweet. I was glad they remembered her and me, but each one was like a little dagger into my heart, just tormenting me with how much I missed her. For most of April, I felt like crap. I wouldn’t train much because physically I felt ghastly, and emotionally I wasn’t sure I could keep it together for an hour and a half. If I let my mind wander to my grief, I would start crying. And there’s no crying on the mat. That I might not be able to keep it together just made me more anxious.
    The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.
    â€” Thomas Paine
    It was probably close to my second year of Jiu-Jitsu, three years after Carly’s death, that I began to realize that I could shrug off some of the weight of the world that kept me yoked. I can recall a speech of sorts I gave at a fundraiser for The Carly Stowell Foundation. It went something like this:
    People who have known me for a while know that I am prone to curious etiquette. I have a Happy Birthday banner that hangs across a beam in our living room—everyday—for years. A few times I started to take it down, and then I’d begin to feel a little blue. I’d think, “It’s somebody’s birthday today, and won’t they be sad if they don’t have a banner?” And so the banner stayed there. I would also send thank you cards to my friends at Thanksgiving, usually enclosing a small rock or trinket that made me think of them. I would write a memory I shared with them inside the card and tell them how thankful I was to have them in my life. Well, I stopped doing that after Carly died. I quite simply did not feel thankful for any part of my life anymore. It felt like my grief was a heavy stone, and I was being crushed underneath it. It was hard to breathe or move under the weight of it. Yet it protected me.
    After a while, I was able to crawl out from under the stone. I could breathe more easily. Still, I felt like I had picked up the stone and put it in a backpack that I carried everywhere. Grief “had my back,” but not in a good way. I could move, but grief still weighed me down.
    And now, I finally feel like I can take that stone out of my backpack and leave it for a while. I can rejoin the world, lighter and for longer than before. And for this, I am thankful. Thank you for helping me move the stone. Thank you for carrying the backpack when I could not. I’ll be writing those thank you cards once again.
    â€œGreat love and great achievement involve great risk.”
    â€” A Dalai Lama wisdom
    I had made it through two Aprils with a gi on. And each one was a little easier. I still “fell off the