Some Non-Yoga Thoughts on Leaving Boston

So I'm moving in twenty days- one month in Connecticut, one month in France, and then heading west for a year. And I've been thinking a lot about Boston and what my year and a half here has been like, how I've adjusted to the city, how I haven't adjusted at all. Personally, my time here has been very, very confusing. Getting married and divorced within a year is nasty business, and I struggled for a long time with feelings of anger and guilt over being duped into moving to Boston in the first place. But I have to admit that the city itself, while confusing and seemingly contradictory at times, is definitely interesting.

Boston people are pushy. They know what they want, and you'd better damn well give it to them. This was especially apparent when I was working retail, and middle-aged Bostonites would come in expecting a personal shopper (and getting one, through pure pushiness). If you do something that's aggravating in traffic, like merging late (even though you've been signalling for five minutes), or stopping for a pedestrian (even though you're supposed to), you can expect to be yelled at and shown interesting variations of the middle part of the hand. Living in a really urban apartment has made me strikingly aware of how much Boston drivers honk their horns. Especially at four in the morning. I hated the pushiness initially. I like to think (or maybe pretend) that it's given me a little bit of an edge that I didn't have before, though. At least now I think I have the option of going all Boston on somebody if they need it. :-)

Boston people are really proud to be Boston people. On the upper crust, there's the serious and studious Harvard/MIT/BU/Tufts crowd that's mostly non-local but which seems at first to be the pulse of a city that basically shuts down at 9:00 PM and mostly doesn't party. But after living here for a while, you start to become aware that the Harvard crowd is just the skin of the city. All the blood and guts are made of the real natives, the ones that might drop "r"s and tell hilarious-but-slightly-racist jokes and really are Boston. No Yankees fans allowed. I've seen three people in two days with large, noticeable Red Sox tattoos.

Boston is a really, really green city. Every subsection of the population throws their cans into a recycling bin that gets picked up curbside once a week. People take the T to work to avoid driving their cars (not just because traffic in Boston moves at an average of 8 MPH, but also because it's better for the environment to use mass transit. And there's such a good system here). You can't walk two blocks without running into a yoga studio. The young, working, mostly-tattooed yuppie population can be seen after hours drinking herbal tea and carrying yoga mats. Nobody looks at you sideways if you mention that you're on an Ayurvedic diet or ask where you can get kombucha. This is a part of living here that I love.

There's also The Cambridge Mom. The Cambridge Mom has lofty ideals about how to raise her children... and actually follows through with them. The moms I have been fortunate enough to work with all are extremely well-educated (don't know one without at least one masters degree), most of them practice yoga, work and raise kids, and care deeply about their families and their community. One mom has quotes all over her kitchen from various philosophers, holy books, and writers that remind you, every time you take a glass out of the cabinet, to breathe deeply and enjoy every moment you've been given. One mom's kids run to the fridge to grab the jar of wheat germ to put on their yogurt for dessert. The kids are kids- but they often surprise me with grains of wisdom that seem very mature for their years. All of The Cambridge Moms seem to want to give their children this indomitable sense of hope- that life is good, and people are good, and you can make the world a better place right now! You don't even have to wait until you grow up. I love that about living here too.

Plus, after I moved here my sister followed, and I think Boston has been exactly the right place for her. She fits in well, she found work immediately, and now she's going back to school to be an NP. She also found her dude here. And that's a total positive.

So I might be back, after this year. And I wouldn't mind at all, because I feel like I know the ropes now. I can navigate the subway like a pro, I know which windy, poorly-maintained streets are one-way, and I'm fairly adept at avoiding the $50 street-sweeping parking tickets (god, these people love their parking tickets). I think I'd be much better at Boston a second time around. But for now, I'm a little relieved to have a year off to spend with my best friends, working and living in an environment that's a little more laid-back.

Yoga Slacker

I went a week, and then went more than a week, and then my life went temporarily insane and between babysitting and spending time with people I really didn't have time to hit a class sometimes. But I'm alive, and feeling pretty good. It's Friday. Sunday I'm going to take an overnight trip to Connecticut. I'll update more later, but things are going.

Day Six (Still A Failure)

Murgh.

Yesterday I had a very... uh... negative bodily response to the idea of going to yoga. I was tired, my joints hurt, and I was feeling a little bit on the down-side. Maybe more than a little bit. So instead of going to yoga, I took a nap and felt a little bit better afterward. I felt like I was having a reaction against this idea of continuity. Some part of me really hates routine, especially self-induced routine, because it feels a little like an addiction process. I must have been really addicted to something in a previous life, because I shy away from anything that feels like addiction, even habit. Even habits I like. I can't even commit to one brand of deodorant for too long.

But I'm not going to be beaten by freaking going to yoga once a day and blogging about it, so today was back in the saddle. I taught a class this morning and think I may have accidentally killed my regulars trying out all the new poses I learned this week, and then I took just a basic vinyasa class at the studio down the block this evening. I was still triggered from feeling like a Yoga Failure, I think, and I tried to go into it with the best attitude that I could, but to be honest, it's just not my week. I feel bloated and I'm eating a lot of chocolate, I don't feel lithe at all, and these issues with arm balances are really starting to bother me. Plus, it looks like I'm starting to have issues with my balance in general. So I'm trying, but it was weird.

But there was one minor victory- I made it successfully into a new bind that I've never been able to get before. It looked like this:

So tomorrow is back to business. I'm teaching four times this week, and hopefully taking at least one class every day. Although I don't want to jinx it with my expectations.

Day Five (In which I feel like a yoga failure)

Wowee, today's class was a difficult one. It was another Anusara-inspired class where the teacher took us through a series of poses that might or might not be advanced by Anusara standards, but definitely were by Hatha standards. But regardless, I made two discoveries about my body- one is good, and one is not so good.

1. The instructor was having us pull our shoulders out and pulling our abs in, then taking almost a cow-like back and pulling our shoulderblades together behind us. I have never in my life felt my shoulderblades grinding together, but I did today. The front of my chest felt open, my heart area felt open, and I had so much less pain in backbends than I usually do (and I assume that it had to do equally with being able to bend in my upper back, and also tucking my tailbone and engaging my core to prevent my lower back from bending too much.

2. It became apparent during the class that I have really, really tight quads. This explains soooo much (like why my butt doesn't hit my heels in child's pose. I assumed I had really tight knees, but I never had any knee pain). The classes I usually take, and the classes I teach, have a lot of poses that engage the quads, but very few that stretch them out. Even pigeon on the floor- usually I am not asked to (and don't ask my students to) bend the extended leg. So, quads. One area I really need to work with.

I still found myself today working with some major fear. I have no problem getting into a headstand against the wall, but handstand was completely different. I had to ask someone in the class to assist me just getting up. And it's not like I couldn't- I have the core strength for it now. I'm just too freaked out by the prospect of falling. So I'm considering the possibility that I'm going to need to start practicing twice a day: once in a class, and once on my own.

Day Four

I went to a one-hour class today. It was a lunchtime Vinyasa flow, and boy was I achey and sore from the classes yesterday. Opening up my shoulders to bind things and fold forward hurt like hell. And I came face-to-face with my biggest yoga foe at the moment: arm balances.

Arm balances. I suck at them. Crow pose? It seems like every yogini on the planet can do crow pose. Except for me. And originally I was like, well, maybe I just don't have the wrist strength yet. Or the ab strength. Or the upper arm strength. But lately I've realized that I do have that strength. I'm just terrified of falling on my face. And this is what kept me from playing soccer and what kept me from enjoying tetherball and other mundane things. But seriously. Why can't I do a freaking arm balance?

So I guess the only thing to do is work on it.

But, BUT. There was a girl in the class today who was probably ten years old. And when the teacher demonstrated the arm balance, she said "wowwwwwwww." And everyone in the class was thinking it, but she was the only one brave enough to say it, and it was awesome. I wish there was a ten-year-old in every yoga class.

Day Three (Yesterday)

Yesterday I hit not one, but two hour-and-a-half classes. The first one was an Anusara-inspired flow at the studio right down the block. I guess I've been steering away from Anusara classes because I find them a little bit cultey, and although I won't be becoming a devotee any time soon, I did love the class. Afterward I felt well-rested, well-stretched, and kind of radiant. It was cool. Maybe because of the first class, I was really paying attention to how I felt in the second class, which was at my old studio. During the meditation, I felt like I wanted to jump out of my skin. But then, during the class, I conquered a major obstacle for me: the splits. I came farther into Hanumanasana than I've ever even gotten close to before- I just had a bolster holding my hip about two inches off the floor. For me, who spent most of middle school not even being able to touch my toes, this is huge. Me: 1, Fear: 0.

Thinking about the fear thing has been making me think about all the things that go with fear, like hate and judgment. I had a few friends who identify as Christian post some things on Facebook that I felt projected intense hatred and belittlement toward people who practice Islam, in the wake of Bin Laden being killed. Last night after I got home (from my almost-total Hanumanasana! Score!!) I felt emotionally dragged back to high school, where this kind of debate was commonplace in the mostly-Christian group I was a part of. I always felt ignored, slighted, or put down for my beliefs and views, even when they weren't that different. One of my best friends in high school told me that when I practiced yoga, I was worshiping Satan. I was told by various Christian sects that I wasn't baptized early enough (I was seven), I was baptized too early for it to "count," I wasn't really baptized at all since I hadn't had a full-immersion baptism, that I couldn't take communion (by Catholics), that I wasn't really Christian because I was too close to Catholic (by Baptists), that I wasn't spending enough time in church, that I was spending too much time in the wrong kind of church. These messages were really confusing for a kid, and I hope they have made me very conscious of the judgment that I pass on the beliefs of others.

But I didn't do a good job last night. The post that triggered me so much started with a lamentation that six million Jewish people were killed in the Holocaust, only to be replaced with twenty million Muslim people in Spain, who had presumably brought with them poverty and sloth and idleness. Then there was a list of Jewish people who had won the Nobel prize, and a much shorter list of Islamic people who had won the same prize. This was supposed to be shocking because there is a much larger Muslim population in the world than Jewish population. Then there was a quiz, where the answer to a lot of violent "who done it" were Muslim men.

There are obvious numbers to refute these facts, and I'm not going to post them here because I've been thinking about them all day and I think that my thinking about it any more is not going to do anybody any good. Suffice to say, something similar to this could easily be posted about any major religious group, and a part of me wanted to produce an almost identical post targeting Christianity, just to prove a point. We are all individuals within a belief system, and we can't hold others within that system culpable for the actions of a few, no more than we could hold an entire race or gender culpable for the actions of a few. I'm not saying that I agree with everything in the Muslim faith. I definitely don't. But I don't really hold 100% to any major world religion, and I have similar issues with them all. Many of them, including Islam and Christianity, appear to condone violent acts if you read the texts that way.

So I guess what I'm saying is that I, within and concerning myself only, want to feel compassion for both people practicing Islam, and people practicing Christianity. I don't want to get into a place where I feel so trapped and exasperated and am trying desperately to make an argument that I know won't be heard, and I definitely don't want to be judgmental or appear violent myself because I'm trying to prove a point. I don't want to be a giant oxymoron, yelling and stabbing at people in the name of peace. All I can really control is myself, anyway, and I feel like that's all I should want to control.

But I don't have all the answers. And I know I won't- so I think maybe for right now instead of pretending that I do have answers, I should just listen to what's going on around me and think about it as peacefully as I can. Maybe all this yoga can help with that.

Day Two

Today instead of going to the new studio, I went to my friend's class this morning. It was yoga stretch, and it did. My hamstrings need some rest and probably ibuprofin this evening. After the class we went to Whole Foods and got stuff for a picnic and took it out to Walden Pond in Concord. This is where Thoreau lived, and (more importantly) where Louisa May Alcott grew up. The weather was beautiful, the sun was shining, and I soaked up a month's worth of vitamin D while we ate on the beach.

My skin really hates the sun, and this evening feels slightly angry and sore even though I was covered everywhere with sunscreen. It's like my little skinules, underneath the protective blanket of sunscreen, are like "WE KNOW WHAT YOU DID!!!" And boy did I. We walked around the whole pond and it looked and smelled and felt fantastic. Spring was popping out of everywhere. My collarbone and hairline are definitely pinker than usual.

I'm wondering if this yoga journey is going to hinder my transition into moving to Rochester, or help it along. I can't wait, and I can feel myself moving toward The Move faster than it's actually coming toward me, so it's nice to have the groundedness of a little bit of routine to help stabilize things.