yoga

Barely Writing


After a blockbuster run on the keyboard, words trickled grudgingly this week. I managed two post for Care2, though one was nixed for not being “newsy” enough.  My assistant editor really liked it, however, which is a slight consolation.  The civil rights piece was a first for me, but I worry about writing stuff like that for this audience.  Many of them are a hair’s breadth step from being Fox Mulder and don’t need paranoia-feeding.  Oh, and I turned in a lame mommy thing to 50 Something which goes up next week, I think.

It was spring yoga cleanse at the studio. Yang-yin every morning. Yang in honor of the spring. In the fall and winter, yin rises. Coming off a training weekend, I had my doubts about energy levels, but I surprised myself, dug down and found quite a bit of strength and vigor.

Back to running too on the treadmill.  Intervals.  Pounded out 35 minutes without breathing heavy which is an encouraging commentary on my core fitness, but it made yoga a bit tricky.

I hadn’t thought about it before last weekend, but running undoes my yoga.

We were standing about after a practice teaching lab with Kat, the instructor, and discussing the various fitness routines – in addition to yoga – that we had and someone asked her what she did.

“Um, I do yoga,” she said, in a tone and with an expression that implied that the question itself hardly needed to be asked*.

“You don’t run or bike?” Puzzled looks all around.

“Well,” she said, “friends ask me to hike or bike and I usually don’t because those things ruin my yoga. They tighten my hamstrings and glute’s and quads. Too much could undo all my work.”

I ran this by my regular teacher, Jade, and she concurred.

“You’d need a good thirty minute post run stretch to counter the tightening, ” she said. “Also, you were a runner, so your body has learned to be tight and will want to go back to that more readily than it wants to loosen and lengthen.”

Yikes.

But I think I will keep on with intervals at the very least, just need to balance.  And I am so all about the balance.

*Kat is an uber-yogina. She told us the story of a guy she worked with in L.A. who told her she had a fierce “game face” when she practiced – ashtanga – which she hadn’t realized. Our faces are supposed to be relaxed, no tension.

“Yeah,” he told her “it’s like – fuck off, I’m doing yoga.”

I love that.  It should be on a t-shirt, integrated into a lotus design. Patanjali would not approve though.

Patanjali Says it All


Yoga training typically culminates on a late Sunday afternoon with the Sutras. We’ve hit chapter two, which is the meat of the mental practice – because yoga is all about reaching the interior whether it be the muscles and organs or the thoughts and emotions.

We spent a great deal of time on teaching beginners, so Patanjali got shorted. Thirty-five minutes is inadequate to the task of fleshing tapas.

Tapas?

Tapas is all about the pain and the letting it go. Emphasis on “letting it go”.

Patanjali insists that we are only anchored to the physical world through the pesky inconvenience of having bodies. Bodies that are not us.  The true “me” of me is not my body at all. Therefore, all experience happens to the body and what “I” should be doing is experiencing, acknowledging and then letting it go.

Everything. Good, bad, meh and bloody awful. Feel it. Know it. Wave goodbye.

“Nothing is permanent,” Cat, our instructor, pointed out.

True. It’s our attachment to the idea that good things should have no end and bad things are unfair (I’m overly simplifying) that leads us into the mud and mires us there.

I just listened.

Not because I have no thoughts or concrete experiences to share, but because I know that this is one of those deceptively simple ideas that become nightmarishly difficult when reality envelopes a person.

“Our reactions are choices,” another woman chimed in.

Essentially, we can shape our lives through letting go or just acknowledging that all experiences are finite.

And here the conversation veered into the anecdotal experiences that, I think, aren’t helpful.

A fellow student was in a serious accident and was told by her doctors that she would never regain the use of her arm. She told us that had she listened to the doctors, she would indeed have no function, but she chose to ignore them and rehabbed herself to the point where she is now able to use her arm – not 100% – but no one could tell by simply looking at her that she has difficulties.

I hate these analogies. They are exceptions and they lead others to believe that we are all destined to be exceptions when we aren’t.

We are the rule. Sometimes reality is what it is. No exceptions.

This doesn’t preclude trying to be an exception but it does mean that more often than not, one will have to accept that they are the rule and then – let it go.

“We can change our reality,” Cat said.

But we can’t. Reality is. Sometimes all we can choose is our reactions and how to live within the reality. There are some realities that can’t be let go. They can only be managed.

Managed isn’t the best term, I’ll admit, but there are experiences that stick even though we have let them go.

Will is dead. I have a dead first husband. Not much I can do with that. Very little to work with. Certainly can’t change it.

But I can acknowledge it and let it go, knowing that its effect on me is permanent and that “letting go” might have to be revisited periodically throughout my life.

Same holds true for my classmate. If she had not been able to regain the use of her arm, she would still have had to let the experience go and live within the parameters of her altered reality.

I don’t know if Patanjali addresses this later on, but letting go is a process and it can take years or a lifetime. The choice – I believe – is the attempt to let go in the first place or to cling and not bother.

All Over the Place


That 15 minutes of fame laps the stadium of one’s life rather quickly on the odd occasions it shows its face at all.

From thousands to hundreds to just my regulars in a matter of a few days.

Ah, well. As the sutras say, best not attach one’s self.

While I wasn’t gracing WordPress’s Freshly Pressed page, I was catting about my other haunts. The mom’s blog is rocking with new writers and I strive to fit in. School news was all about the sex and orientation.

I am immersed in yoga this weekend. Training.

Yesterday we talked about prenatal students. Enlightening and amusing.

First, I was right about the whole “bodies cannot come back after childbirth”. Like most things in life, people who make claims to something so obviously untrue have agendas ranging from misleading to delusional.

Second, if more mothers honestly spoke about motherhood, fewer women would rush into it.

A little less than half the class have been pregnant and given birth. Most of the students are Edie’s age, mid-ish to late twenties. While the moms shared the kind of things that still don’t come up on even the most tmi parts of the webosphere, all the child-free ladies grimaced and choked back a little bile.

I should not be amused by this because it is not yoga and because I don’t approve of those pregnancy in the trenches stories that some moms gleefully get off on telling, normally around newly PG women, but never PG’s will do in a pinch. The purpose of talking about the experience should be to enlighten not deliberately unnerve.

I always oblige those who query about the realities of pregnancy and birth, but only because I think a woman should go into it armed with factual info – just as preteens should be similarly armed as they bravely – and with foolish haste – step onto the hormone gridiron.

Back on Monday with a follow-up to Jillian Michaels (someone scraped my post and put it on a message board).

Namaste, y’all.