Doubt

 

These sutras hit home immediately; doubt and the inability to rest are abundantly apparent in my everyday life. As my GRE quickly approaches, I find myself filled with doubt. What if I don’t get a high enough score? What if I get hung up on one problem, get anxious and become too distracted to do well on the rest of the exam? It’s very frustrating and feels like I am waging a mental war with myself. The program wants a 300 on the GRE, a score that is exactly 50%. I have taken dozens of diagnostic tests in varying degrees of difficulty and have been predicted to make a 320 out of 340, with a small margin of error to account for variance in test questions that actually show up on the exam. My brain knows that I have the capability to do well and I think I know that I will succeed, but there’s this ever-present doubt that just eats away at me…

 

Making time during the day for yoga practice has become near impossible, so I have started practicing just before I try to sleep. I am unsure if the change in timing has impacted me. My quality of sleep has been very sporadic lately and there are no discernable variables that account for whether or not I sleep well. Perhaps practicing at night has helped me fall asleep faster, but I still wake up regularly throughout the night. However, I guess a lot of waking up can be explained by my sore back, detailed in the next paragraph.

 

I was practicing headstands at my house this weekend and my left side just sort of gave out. My left shoulder/side collapsed, causing me to fall over, and I landed on one of my rain boots that I had forgotten to move far enough away. I ended up with a small bruise on my leg, but more worryingly, my left shoulder blade/back have been feeling horrible since I fell over. I cannot walk, sit, lay down or even breathe without feeling pain in my back. I don’t think it’s a rib injury – that doesn’t really make sense when it was my shoulder/arm that gave out and caused me to fall – and I think it will go away relatively soon as it feels more like a muscle injury. Advil has helped mitigate the pain, but even at high doses, just breathing causes me to grimace at the pain. The whole thing is strange; my old injury is my right shoulder, so if anything, I would have expected that side to give out, but it was the other one. I’m already scheduled for a check-up over Thanksgiving Break, so if the pain is still occurring that far in the future, I can ask the doctor about it then.