Body High 18: The day’s first inversion
No Dodgers-Yankees talk yet. I intend to be the last word, not the conversation starter
Hey Sojourners. In case you missed it, author RK Byers is the Sojourn podcast’s newest. Last week the Atlanta-based Threadren member put out a funny, wittily-edited Ghetto Celebrity TikTok review.
I laughed aloud at the early SNL bit. It’s a painfully funny truth.
As was the case in Echo Park, I dwell in a house up on a hill. Unlike Echo Park, there’s unlimited weed in this crib. Every day I exercise the discipline necessary to do my day-job sober, get these posts out—sans typos— and keep moving forward my Main Thang project, the storytelling flower I want to bloom in 2025.
I am working in a new form.
This hill in the new ’hood provides my other primary test of discipline. A couple of times a week I do the upward winding quarter mile at the end of a three-mile or so walk. That’s the foundational Body High workout of this moment. These days I am so gentle on myself that spring’s harsh 24-Hour Fitness exercise sessions seem like they happened to another person.
Painful recovery was a state that I had become accustomed to. There would only be short windows between workouts when my muscles didn’t ache. My tolerance for hurt grew silently. Now, I don’t lift weights and even those low-resistance workouts are an Echo Park relic. They feel like a fad gone too fast.
Now there’s the day-gig running around with children, and that hill.
My day’s first inversion usually comes just before dawn, right after the day’s first bowl. Together they make for reset perfection. On the bedroom yoga mat I do downward dog after consuming a little weed and shake off parts of the previous day that are not necessary.
Today I have the excellent 2017 sci-fi thriller Annihilation playing on my laptop as I get onto all fours. I balance my body weight evenly across my hands and fingers, then my hips lift me into down dog: the day’s first inversion. Heels pump up and down on the mat, alternating. Their stretch along my calves and hamstrings fall just short of sexual in how it satisfies.
From downward dog I move into plank pose, pulling high my abdomen muscles to get into that flat-back, push-up-ready position. To pull back up into down dog, the same belly muscles guide the way. And, returning to plank pose, I work on neck and shoulder alignment.
The two will become conspiring Enemies of the Body if left to their own tendencies, bound to foment much discomfort.
Mind-blowing Groce Out Specials!
I hold the plank pose for a couple of minutes, intermittently, while flowing in and out of down dog. That’s when the ideas begin to flow. Here is where my life gets sorted, holding a push-up halfway. Tasks are prioritized, inspirations find easy evaluation. After lifting my left leg for a three-legged dog, I turn my hips open. The balance in my hands has to remain even as the left foot turns outward.
What happens next will take my middle-aged hips, groin, and lower back as close to Nirvana as they’re going to get.
That left leg swings back up straight and behind me. Then I pull it underneath my torso and bend the knee flat, twisted almost parallel to my balanced hands. My head rests on the clasped hands in front of now-prone self and I roll my outstretched body slightly to the left and to the right. My core loves this and tells me so, directly.
Sometimes I moan softly.
Next comes the other leg. At some point I will again hold plank position halfway to the floor.
The work has grown very specific. When I’m dialed in I can feel, seemingly on a cellular level, my oblique muscles turn on and get to work. In 2014 I was 225 pounds or so and just trying to hold these poses at all. Minutes of maintaining plank was not a viable option; I was only starting this physical makeover.
Never mind structuring my day, I was just trying to make my body behave.
An awesome appeal for support
Last night the host of Sleep with Me, a podcast that works just about every time, made an awesome appeal for financial support. I totally bought what he was saying and actually wanted to pay for the show. Instead, I thought: Why can’t I do that? Why can’t I sell the idea of spending more money on my Substack?
It’s tough. I think you need a sense of indispensability to ask for money that way, and this shit don’t always work like Sleep with Me.
Tonight I won’t be doing the hill. On Sunday evening I walked it, after a four-mile errand and listening to the Dodgers win. The sorta ached in the end, but that ache is just part of my West Coast sojourn. The mind is fine. My body and spirit are making great progress in catching up.