Sunday, Yoga Sunday

Sunday I went to the 8:30 AM teacher-trainee yoga class. Basically, whoever shows up from our class gets a chance to teach and participate, and we usually go around in a circle and teach a few poses. It's fun, but early... luckily, my body's pretty happy about getting up at 6:30 lately (except for this morning), so I have a couple of hours to veg and drink my tea. There were only two of us there, but it was great.

Then I stayed for my teacher's 10:00 class. Since they've opened another studio in Burlington, their time has been split, so her classes at the Cambridge studio are usually pretty packed. It was a great class- very relaxing. The hubby came with me, and had some mat slippage issues. It's either time to start storing the mat towel with his yoga man, or time for me to sell his mat on Craigslist and get him a Jade mat.

Then I had a couple of hours to kill, so we came home, made lunch, and I scarfed it down and went back to the studio for teacher training. This week we started our section on Kundalini yoga, and I'm not gonna lie- I was hoping it was just going to be lecture. And I lucked out for about an hour; we learned about the chakras, through which the kundalini energy is supposed to rise, and we talked about different poses or series of poses to help align everything. Then we did about an hour of Kundalini. And let me tell you, Kundalini is not kidding around. I felt like the room was buzzing with energy by the time we finished.

Then I was finally done with yoga! But I had to stay and observe a class at 5:00. So I went next door to this awesome Asian cafe and got some iced coffee, then went and watched people do yoga in the hot studio for an hour and a half. Have I mentioned the heat wave? The studio is not air conditioned, so it was about 95, give or take, all day.

And after that, I had the greatest sleep ever.

Strengthening the Spirit (and the abs)

I decided that while my sort-of lackadaisical hatha practice was doing wonders for my spirit, it wasn't as awesome for my body. Plus, the studio is a sort-of wasteful ten-minute drive or twenty-five minute walk away, and it's just that distance where I feel like a scumbag for not going to more classes, but it seems SO far. Add to the mix that we've been encouraged to try out different studios in the area to more fully form our own style of teaching. So I decided to try a new member special at Samara Yoga, a studio about five minutes away in Davis Square. I love the walk down there- it's full of tree-lined streets and pretty houses. Plus, the classes at Samara are vinyasa flow classes, which I've been really missing since I left Michigan (vinyasa was my first introduction to yoga, and I think I'll always have a soft spot for the mind-clearing flowiness of it).

The first class started with so much ab work that my entire front half was cramping up by the time the teacher finally let us collapse to the ground. The next day (yesterday), I could feel my abs probably better than I've been able to in years. Today they just hurt! The class yesterday was a lunch-hour flow class, and the instructor played music all the way through. At my usual studio, the only music is usually just a never-ending om in the background... but this music was like Thom Yorke and Coldplay and all my favorites. She actually used Sigur Ros for savasana, and I was in heaven.

It made me think a lot about the use of music in yoga, and how it can strengthen or detract from a practice. When I first joined my studio in East Lansing, I found the use of pop music really distracting from my focus, but I guess I got more used to it as time went on. I remember one really fantastic class that we had right after MJ died- we were doing sun salutations to "Smooth Criminal" and it was awesome. I think it takes a special touch to make a playlist that inspires the students with every track, however... I'm not sure this is a touch that I possess yet, but the instructor yesterday definitely had it. She didn't have to adjust the music or look for a new track at all.

That having been said, my first instinct is to stick to "authentically" Indian music- Ravi Shankar, Jagjit Singh, and so forth... but the context in which I teach (with what I'm assuming will be young, American-born students for the most part) might beg music with which they're familiar once in a while. Music from outside their sphere might serve to increase the mysticism of the practice, but I wonder if it would also alienate the student when I want them to feel at home. I feel like the stakes are high: for me at least, the right music can elevate me onto a new plane where I feel more inspired and more clear-minded. The wrong music can distract me and actually physically disrupt my balance. Really. I've fallen out of balance poses before because of the music. I want the music to strengthen the spirit of the class, and maybe the abs too.

I'm sure that, like everything else, the answer will be in some sort of balance between the two. But it's still something I have to do some thinking about.

Doing Stuff

I think my problem is that I think too much and don't do enough.

I'm ready to change. Let's get this party started.

Yesterday I did headstands. I still have to use a door for now, but it's getting easier with practice (like most things, right?).

Being Present

As basic as it seems like it should be, it just doesn't make sense to me that we have to live in the present. I mean, we just came from the past- we were just there. And as far as the future goes... we seem to be hurtling toward that at the speed of... well, time. Not just individually, either- all together. Sometimes I look around in a crowded intersection and am amazed that all the people there are aging, skipping forward in time, at the exact same rate that I am. Weird.

In any case, I have a complicated relationship with the past and the future. As far as past goes, it's there and you did it and you can know it, but you can't change it. And future, you can change, but you can't know it until it becomes present and then past.

I realized (not so recently) that my musical practice consisted of the following three parts: 1) practicing taking place in the present. 2) mourning the past in which I didn't practice enough. 3) fearing the future in which I would not be successful because I hadn't practiced enough. The problem is, #2 and #3 were encroaching on the present so much that I could barely stay focused on my present, real-time practice. Not only did it erode my playing time-wise (why bother to practice for two hours when I'm never gonna make it in the future anyway?), but it eroded the quality (I'll never be able to play this right because I didn't practice enough in the past!).

So what's a flutist/yogini (flowgini?) to do?

I'm gonna try this week to live like I sight-read- one note at a time, with my eyes looking only one or two notes ahead. If I think about what I can do that's productive and positive in this minute (and the next five minutes, say)... that's something that I can handle! In every minute, I have to embrace the present, let go of the future, and forgive myself (and sometimes others) for the past. That's a lot, but I tried it in class today, and it worked!

... then I came home and stuffed my face with ice cream.

And now I'm forgiving myself for the past and moving on. :-)

Inversions

I'm a worryer. I worry about everything, especially death. Especially health issues... I'm terrified of cancer (it's silent and hidden). I worry about car accidents. I worry about the issues that I've been having with my back (even though I knew my terrible posture would catch up to me someday). I worry about these things happening to me or to the hubby. I worry that we'll end before we're supposed to, not because we had a silly fight like last time, but because we get smashed on the highway, because cells decide to multiply out of control, because of a random event. And I worry most when I'm happy, which is most of the time lately. Last week it was starting to get out of control, to the point where I was seriously thinking about going to see a counselor (and I still might, because it seems like a good idea).

On Sunday in teacher training, we did inversions. So basically, we did headstands, handstands, and shoulder stands for almost three hours. We'd try something, then rest (headstands are hard on the neck, shoulders, and almost everything else!). The feeling after all of that inversion, though, was amazing. We were all so mellow that we were struggling to have conversations! When I got home, I realized that I felt really strange... after trying to figure out why for about ten minutes, I realized that it was because I hadn't worried about anything in hours! So I think this week, every time I start to worry about something that I can't control right now, I'll go into an inversion.

Patanjali

This weekend was tough. In teacher training, we were discussing the yoga Sutras of Patanjali, which were probably written three or four thousand years ago. We used the version with commentary by Swami Satchidananda; commentary is very important, because the sutras are extremely short. The purpose of the sutras is basically to explain what yoga is, and how to use it to attain samadhi (or liberation from the current human state without having to be reborn a zillion times).

So much of the first book made so much sense to me, but was still really troubling. Patanjali says that nothing that we can see, hear, smell, touch, or taste is real, and his rule of thumb is that if it changes, it's an illusion. This seems to be exactly what Descartes was going for in his First Meditation, except Patanjali takes it further. Everything changes except the inner self. And he says there's a self so far in there that it doesn't change- rather, the purpose of life is the building up of this inner self, and the bliss of samadhi is when that self gets to join with all the other inner selves who have achieved samadhi, and that joining is god. Phew. The first book also says that things in life that seem at first pleasurable often are actually painful. Well, yeah. You love someone, you get married, and eventually it will be painful for one partner to lose the other partner, and that's best case scenario. When people are too attached, he says, even when things are going well you're scared that they won't be tomorrow. How do you deal with this pain and at the same time get close to your true self? Non-attachment.

So, non-attachment to stuff I can understand. When my bike got stolen last summer I realized how attached I'd become to it, and it hurt when it was taken away. Stuff just isn't worth being attached to because it's all temporary. But Patanjali says to avoid attaching to people as well, both to avoid pain and to avoid clinging to this life. This, I'm having problems with.

One of the other teacher trainees (who is a beautiful, very enlightened woman) said that she thinks of it like this: if she would experience a crushing amount of grief on the loss of a person in her life, then maybe she is stifling the growth and life of that person. So, holding them too close. Smothering them with her attachment.

Our guru was careful to point out that non-attachment doesn't mean indifference. I'm struggling to find the meaning of it for myself, though. I'm not sure if this is an attitude I want to adopt or even want to think about too much, but I feel like it's something that I need to consider, especially given how scared I've been over the last year that something would happen to the hubby.

Product Reveal

I think the first time I thought about what I was putting ON my body, instead of IN, was when Katie was talking about natural makeup. Even though every woman knows that her skin soaks up the lotion she puts on, it hadn't occurred to me before to question what was in the lotion I was rubbing all over my body's largest organ once or twice a day. Lately, partly because of the yoga and partly because I'm trying to become more conscious of my impact on the world, I've really started to think about what Katie was saying about using natural products.

In teacher training last weekend, we talked about habits and routines, and the literature that we were reading mentioned skin care, that you should rub oil into your skin every night before you go to bed. One of the other trainees said that she uses almond oil on her face, and that you can see the difference the next morning. So on the way home, I bought a jar of organic coconut oil, and started using it as lotion.

Coconut oil is a good oil for cooking; supposedly because it's solid at room temperature, it has a high flash point and is slow to develop cancer-causing free radicals (same as ghee). It's also easier for the body to metabolize than olive oil, according to our teacher. It's not particularly good for my dosha, so I figured I'd try it out as a moisturizer and see what happened. Even though it's solid at room temperature, it's liquid at body temperature, so the easiest way to get in on skin is to scrape a hunk out with the back of your fingernail and just rub it into your palms; it'll turn into a nice-feeling oil, not too thin and definitely not like rubbing shortening into your legs. It's unscented, which surprised me. It's good, though, in that if you dislike coconut or don't want to smell like a tanning salon all the time, you don't have to!

It's been awesome. I don't know whether it's real or psychosomatic, but I feel... less toxic, maybe? I feel good about what I put on my body before I go to bed. And the morning after I first used it, my whole body felt like a baby's butt. In a good way. This is also the best oil we've ever used for back rubs, because it seems to have a saturation point where you don't need to keep reapplying.

So now I have to ask, if this unscented, hypoallergenic, organic, natural moisturizer works so well, why have I been rubbing chemicals into my skin for the last twenty-five years?