Back to the Beginning

So I move to Rochester and what do I do for a living? Guess. For those who know me, it's the most ridiculous, out-there thing ever.

I'm teaching preschool.

What.

And then sometimes I come home and throw tantrums, just like the kids. :)

Give Up

I bought a yoga mat in France. It was the only one I could find at a big sports store, and it came with two foam blocks. I took it outside for two days in a row and did fifty-six sun salutations (it's hard!) and stared at the horses and the mountains and got sun on my back and shoulders. And then I just kind of stopped.

I mean, we got busy. We had the recital, then E and I went to Cannes for a couple of days, then there were family things and I just didn't have time. After we were in Cannes, we were only back in Mons for a couple of days before we left, and E got really sick so I was with him most of the time. Then we came back to the US, spent some time in NYC with his cousins, and moved here. And we went to one class, but it wasn't enough to even make me sore the next day (and believe me, I'm so out of shape that standing up and sitting down could make me sore).

And it's funny, because I'm only talking about the physical side of yoga, but all the mental stuff went to crap too in a big financial freak-out that I had when we sat down and I realized how much I need to keep me going, just based on my bills. I haven't felt quite right mentally since then.

What is right? This living situation. I love it. I love the apartment, and between the two of us we don't really need any more furniture (except a kitchen table). I love the time we've been spending together and with other friends. I love that I have a job, that we have a recording studio in our apartment (with a piano!). I hate that our horn-playing neighbor plays Mahler excerpts at 10:00 PM, but I sort of love that at least we have a musician neighbor. But if she does it one more time, I'm going to start practicing Stars and Stripes Forever on piccolo right into her window.

So pretty much what's missing is exercise in general, yoga in specific. But it's definitely been an interesting study in how much the physical affects the mental.

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.