For Thanksgiving week, I was lucky to be able to work remotely in Taiwan so that I could spend time visiting family. However, I’m not as young as I used to be and jerking myself from one time zone to another extremely disparate one was a bit jarring for me.

I soldiered on. However, one night at my in-laws place, I slept on one of those contour pillows incorrectly (due to exhaustion, I passed on out it with the large contour digging into my shoulder blade. I woke up with such extreme pain in my neck and shoulder that I wasn’t able to move my head in any direction without tears coming out of my eyes (no joke.) My head felt like a bowling ball and tilting it in any direction made it weigh that much more. (Here’s an article talking about posture and how tilting your head puts nearly 60 pounds of pressure on your neck.)

Even though I brought my yoga mat abroad, I was unable to use it.

And then came the plane ride. Eleven excruciating hours with an immobile neck. Luckily my father-in-law provided me with some Toricam gel that I slathered on my neck that made things slightly more tolerable.

It took almost a week after I came back from my trip before I felt okay enough to do yoga.

And then I got a cold.

I am still suffering from the repercussions of the cold nearly a week later, which has progressed into a sinus infection. Somewhere between hourly sinus irrigation, pei pa koa, pseudoephedrine and copious amounts of rest, I’m slowly recovering.

What has this taught me? I think it was just a reminder to slow down. I had worn myself out to the point where I sleep in awkward positions and wear down my immune system.

It has been deeply frustrating not doing yoga, flipping around in aerial or even going for a simple walk (without being breathless.) Sunday was the first day I was able to take my dogs out for their usual stroll. Monday was a sorry attempt at yoga, but an attempt nonetheless… and I was happy. Happy to just be doing something even if it didn’t look that great. Happy and grateful that my body was able to recover and I could do some semblance of movement.

So this week I’ve been going along with the theme that sometimes we need to slow down and appreciate where we are. Don’t take for granted the things we are capable of doing until it’s gone (or temporarily absent.)

Photo is of Mount QiXing. No exotic yoga photo this post since I was relegated to no yoga on this trip.