Today I took the train downtown and took a hip-hop yoga class at Back Bay Yoga. I didn't know the teacher and had no idea what to expect other than hopefully some good tunes. I love rap, so I figured the combo of the music and the BBY vibe would help me to really push myself.

I think the point I knew I was in trouble was when a woman with very cute and very short yoga shorts walked into the room, set up her mat right by the front, and popped right into a forearm balance. I've been very blessed with hips that open fairly easily and generally problem-free shoulders, but arm balances just aren't my strong suit. So far, anyway.

So the first song was "Ice Ice Baby" by Vanilla Ice, and I was like, fail. This class is gonna suck. And I laughed for the whole first song because that song is so terrible, but then she started playing Dre and Rhianna, and then the sequences started happening, and boy were there sequences. Left leg back in a lunge, pop forward into half-moon, reach back and grab your left foot, push your foot into your hand and open your shoulder, bring your foot forward into a standing pigeon without touching it down, bring your hands up to heart's center, twist toward the right and set your elbow into the arch of your foot, grab your foot and set it at tree pose, lift up, take reverse namaste and bend backward, exhale forward into a standing split, shoot your left leg back into lunge, take a vinyasa, repeat on the left side. And that was just a warmup.

The way the music was used seemed like a distraction for the most part. I could barely hear the teacher and had to watch the front rows for the next poses. But, the teacher had us do a simple surya namaskar flow for an entire song, and that was where I felt like the music was awesome.

The advanced poses were intense. There was an option to take crow four or five separate times, plus about four variations of crow. There were options to take headstands, handstands, and other arm balances. I was in standing split like ten times. This was a much more advanced practice than I am used to.

And I kind of loved it.

I dunno. I haven't taken a class that kicked my butt that much in a long time, and the challenge of it reminded me that I have a long way to go with my asana practice, and a lot more poses to explore. I think I'm gonna go back next week.

I feel like every time I write something in this blog, it needs to be some big life realization or lesson that I've learned or epiphany that I've had or light bulb that was burned out but magically re-lit itself. I'm re-reading my entries and getting tired of listening to myself. I'm not like that! Maybe it's just me, but I'm looking at this blog and seeing somebody who is obsessed with finding a lesson or meaning in everything when maybe she should just be focusing on the present. Not that this is this entry's big realization or lesson, but I'm gonna give it a shot for a few entries and see how I feel.

The weather today was gorgeous, really for the first time this spring. I love breaking out the flip-flops. I meant to go to a class at Prana after I babysat, but I got done in that annoying time where I was just five minutes too late for the 6:00 class, and an hour and a half early for the 7:30. So I came home and chopped up a bunch of greens and am in the process of making dinner. I put walnuts in my rice. Will let you know if it's gross.

Eating habits are in massive flux. I'll eat brown rice and greens and then chase it with Easter candy... not the best thing ever. I'm trying to cut out that last part, but I'm feeling like the only way to get it gone is to not buy the stuff. At all. So no more grocery shopping when I'm hungry.

And as far as big spiritual realizations... no huge ones, except that I'm still holding onto bad habits from the dead relationship (hey, that's pretty good. I feel like I'll call it that from now on), and I feel like I've got my fingers wrapped around them like they're life preservers. I'm worried that if I don't let them go (and letting go is one of the things I do least well... I'm great at holding on, and remembering, and making histories, and writing things down, and holding grudges, but I'm terrible at letting go) they're going to affect my current awesome life. Any pointers?

Crunchy Living

There's something about being in control of my eating that makes me feel in control of my whole life. I don't think it's an unhealthy thing, at least not in the way it seems to be working for me- but when I eat pizza and tons for cheese and beer and crap, I feel like everything is sort of spiraling out of control in a way. If I can't even control what my hand feeds to my face, how am I supposed to control the rest of my body? How am I supposed to look good, or sleep well, or manage my time with anything resembling responsibility?

So I was like, hello kale.

I'm on a serious health food kick lately, and for once, I'm doing it to be healthy and not to drop 16,000 lbs. Despite my periodical and insistent cravings for chocolate (which I've decided I can't do anything about, so I'm just going to eat nice chocolate in small quantities), I'm eating a lot of brown rice, healthy oils, and leafy greens. Broccoli has kind of always been one of my favorites, but I'm getting really into steamed kale too. And lots of garlic.

It took about three days of this before I started to feel less like a sickie on the road to recovery from strep throat and more like Superwoman. Or, as I'm going to say in France this summer (presumably when people ask me what prompted me to visit), je voudrais m'eloigner des Cheez-its. I would like to distance myself from Cheez-its. Heck oui.

It's Okay. I'm Back. :-)

I know it's been a long hiatus, and I thought it was going to be permanent for a while. But, like Slim Shady, I'm back again.

I was going to say that I've been dealing with some struggles when it comes to yoga and its place in my life, but that's misleading. And anyway, more recently I've been doing a lot of thinking about my place in yoga. It's a tricky series of thoughts, but I'll try to get it out in a way that is at least partially comprehensible.

Without going into details, a monstrously hurtful thing ended in November. And I have a tendency to want to, in situations like this, throw out the baby with the bathwater- so when a relationship ends, I want to throw out everything that came from the relationship, or was a byproduct of it, or that I associate with it in any way, or even that happened around the same time. And so I looked at yoga in my life, for a little bit, and really scrutinized it. Is this really me, or did I just get into it to make others happy? When I started teacher training, was I finding myself or obscuring myself? Are the yogic beliefs my beliefs, or did I lose my beliefs somewhere back along the path? Do I need to do some serious re-tracing to pick them back up?

But I kept practicing and teaching through the whole thing, because I figured, what the heck. I'll just back off the mental thing for a bit and see what happens. And then somewhere between learning how to touch people in a healing way in a workshop at Back Bay Yoga and practicing on my bedroom floor, I had this realization.

This practice and lifestyle isn't a cover-up of me. It's actually helping me to uncover me.

I'm nobody to be talking about yoga. My practice isn't the most perfect or steady. I have random and sporadic issues with my right hip flexor and I have a tendency to collapse into and injure my lower back (my lower back is an allegory for a lot of things in life: it seems to be very flexible, but really it's just weak). Money is tight right now and I don't go to as many classes as I'd like to. I sometimes eat junk food. I beat myself up about everything (and violate ahimsa [non-violence] in the process).

But.

I'm happy. I'm deeply fulfilled. I'm less prone to attack myself than I've ever been in my life (although I have good days and bad days). I'm playing my flute with an intention that hasn't been present in years. I'm listening to my body in a new way. And there's still that little voice in my head that whispers "your headstands suck. And you need to lose ten pounds." But I figure, I'll just keep reminding that voice that practicing yoga has never been about the asana practice for me. It's been about learning to love myself and the people around me more fully, and about opening myself up to what the universe has to offer me. And that even if I'm never, ever perfect, I can't keep up my life-long pattern of directing violence and hatred against myself for every mistake.

So. Yoga and I are friends, and I think this is going to be one of those beneficial friendships that last a whole, long, imperfect, mistake-ridden, beautiful lifetime, for better or worse.

Thanksgiving

Because I'm human and there are many things in life to be thankful for:

I'm so happy to have friends who love me even when I'm totally buried in my own pain.

I'm lucky to have a place to go where I can be myself.

I'm very fortunate to have this opportunity to find myself and figure out what I want.

I'm deeply grateful to be alive and healthy.

I'm thankful for my time at Michigan State, and for the amazing and lasting friendships that resulted.

I'm thankful for my family, who told me today to not listen to anyone but myself about this, including them.

I have enough financial stability to live for a while.

I can go anywhere and do anything.

I'm actually thankful for the last year.

I'm thankful for what I know about myself from this experience. No matter what, it will be useful in the future.

I'm thankful for yoga, and thankful for how yoga and meditation have helped me in dealing with the absence of music in my life.

I'm also grateful for how yoga has helped me realize how necessary it is to me to have music.

I'm thankful for wine and organic cotton.

I'm thankful for the earth under my feet.

I'm thankful for this song.

I'm thankful for the person that I am.

I'm thankful for the person that I am.

I'm thankful for the person that I am.

Yoga

Yesterday we graduated. We all wore white (it's a Kundalini thing) and had a small puja (fire ceremony) along with a pretty spectacular gong meditation. While our teacher was giving us our bindis, she said "you are now teachers of yoga... you are now in union with the universe."

Yoga means "to yoke." So it means to tie two things together, to bind one thing to another thing. Ideally, this would be a person in union with the universe, or the eternal, or the reality, or god, or God, or whatever the person desires to be in union with (yoga's not picky, in my admittedly limited experience). Our human minds, connected to the infinite god. So nice (and optimistic) of our teacher to say, but so not true.

Yesterday while we did 108 sun salutations at 6:30 in the morning, I was trying to think "okay sun. You've done a really great job of coming up every day for my whole life. This is the least I can do for you." What I was really thinking, though, was "oooo boy, my triceps are going to KILL tomorrow."

It's not that I haven't been there before. I have been in that place of communion, and I'm fortunate enough to say that I've experienced some pretty great moments lately... not samadhi, but not bad either. But I obviously have a long way to go. I have a very, very erratic mind to calm, and I have big decisions to make about my life, and I have a life to live. That means that I will always struggle to maintain the balance, and that there will always be something that I haven't done that I need to do. It's not me to live a monastic life, so I'll be balancing these things until I give up my body, and that means continual work on my windy (vata) mind, on my sluggish (kapha) body, and my (pitta doesn't translate well) temper. I'll always be working on yoga.

It made me think about other ceremonial "markers" in my life... college and grad school graduations, for instance. They always seemed like a smoke screen to me. Like a silly trick to play for your family... "X is now educated! X can be sent into the world now to do things that are hopefully good." Marriage too, seems to me to be a misleading ceremony. Like your relationship hasn't really started yet, or like it will substantially change for the better. As if the learning and growth is over. As if the work has stopped. As if yoga has been achieved.

Maybe we need that, as people... maybe we need to stop in time and appreciate how far we've come just for an hour or so. But it seems so dangerous and misleading. I know my education hasn't stopped, and I definitely haven't "finished" yoga.

In any case, I can teach in a studio now, and am looking forward to continuing to teach the little brood I have already. Here's to a lifetime of yoga.

So.

So I'm awake in the middle of the night and I need to do something to calm my mind down, and there's something about meditation and pranayama that are just not cutting it right now (like... I'm not good enough at them yet!). So here I am. And I think "I should post something that's not heavy," but it's the middle of the night. It's all heavy right now.

The reason I'm awake is that I'm tachycardic. This happened once a couple of weeks ago, also on a Sunday night when I'd had a particularly miserable week the week before with the kiddos that I watch. I'm nervous about going back to work tomorrow (and I have them for the whole day), so the nerves bypass my conscious brain and go straight to my heart rate. Meditation is just making me worry more (note to self: practice meditation), so I'm doing an outside thing to calm my mind and maybe work out some of the heebie-jeebies about tomorrow.

This week in teacher training, we read the Bhagavad Gita, which is the most fabulous little book. It's a dialogue between Krishna, a chariot driver, and Arjuna, a prince. In the beginning, Arjuna is about to go into battle against some evil usurpers of the throne. He asks Krishna to drive the chariot in between the two armies so he can see what he's up against and looks his whole family smack in the face. His cousins, his uncles, his teachers... they're all there, ready to fight against him. So Arjuna does what any prince would do.

He has a total panic attack. (Sounds familiar.)

So Arjuna starts hyperventilating into a paper bag and saying things like "it'd be better for me to die than all these guys... even if I won, life wouldn't be worth living without my family." He throws down his bow, sits down in the chariot, and starts crying. His chariot driver, Krishna, looks at him and is like "really? Really?" and Arjuna says "what? YOU tell me what to do. I'm your student. Instruct me and I'll do whatever you say." In a surprise twist, Krishna the charioteer is god. So Krishna explains that he has to fight, because choosing not to fight is choosing evil. He's not condoning violence... the whole thing is an allegory for the fight that we have inside ourselves every day. In that fight, it's hard to kill a part of ourselves, but choosing not to fight the bad parts of ourselves is letting them win.

The part that really sticks out to me is when Krishna tells Arjuna not to be attached to the results. "Don't worry about if you win. Just fight." It brought up a lot of memories for me of times when I was much less attached to the results of what I did, mostly musically. When I wasn't so worried about getting a job, or whether getting a graduate degree in flute performance was worth it, I practiced better. I was less worried. I was happier. I tell myself that I'm just being practical, but the worrying and the wondering doesn't do anything but undermine my own fight, just like Arjuna's wondering would have undermined him if he hadn't lucked out and had Krishna for a taxi driver.

So here's to detaching from the results, and to detaching from tomorrow.