yoga diary - day ten

This morning I was angry. I don't want to be doing yoga by myself in Ottawa. I don't want to be plodding ahead and being brave in the snow and ice by myself, trying to prove myself worthy of whatever it is I want and am not getting. I want to be in Austin, that's a fact.

Today yoga was about throwing myself at the practice and resenting it at the same time as digging into it to use up some of the angry energy that was sparking and volting through my body like contained lightning.

I started sweating almost immediately.

That surprised me because I've been doing this for nearly a month now and expect the sweat to come into it a little later every day, which has been the pattern so far and is, I think, the pattern with most strenuous exercise. Today, I was sweating five minutes into it - and it felt good.

The practice was hard but rewarding. I leaned into it. I felt myself tighten when I reached up in mountain pose, I pushed my heart out in cobra and for a second actually did feel like I was floating upward. I never believe yoga rhetoric, I listen respectfully and I follow the postures as closely as I can, I do the breathing as much as possible but I never believe I am going to feel the way the instructor says I should feel. Their descriptive phrases are almost always over my head.

My inner body is not "radiant" it does not "pause." I don't really feel the balance - I strain and struggle and wonder why my belly always seems to be in the way and if it will ever, ever allow me to do a real forward bend. I feel my arms start to tremble in downward dog and when I am asked to twist from a position of a low lunge? Well, sometimes I think that will simply never be possible.

Just the same, I was leaning into it today and thinking only about the physical cadence of breathing and moving, surging up and folding down. I think I was learning something about making an effort even when you really don't want to when my phone rang.

And rang and rang. I knew who it was and I wanted to answer but I ignored it. That made yoga even harder. I kept going.

I wanted to stop and check my phone but I kept going and pushing through my practice, waiting to let the world start until after I was finished with my routine. I made it and felt oddly calm and angry still, both at the same time. I guess resolute is the word I am looking for. (look at all the I's in those last two paragraphs, I'm really seated in myself right now, I guess)

So what am I learning here?

A few things. My anger stays inside me until I release it. Love does not reach me without my permission. The work doesn't end. I do this every day and every day it changes but it does not end, it's a wave that ebbs and flows, not a goal to arrive at.

Both physical fitness and mental clarity are hard, they are not made any easier by deciding to reach them by means of advanced practices in difficult situations.

Winter lasts forever.
(just like the moment we inhabit)

yoga diary - day nine

Woke up this morning a little early. I was taking my time getting out of bed when the phone started ringing. It was 7:00 am Ottawa time, 6:00 am according to every time-keeper I maintain. (I am staying on Central Time, don't ask) The Fed Ex guy wanted to know if my address was a mistake and then to inform me the TV would be arriving today.

Sounds like an average morning, right? Well, I have trouble with gifts. They make me feel abandoned. When I was a kid people gave gifts when they wanted to control me or didn't want to bother being with me. Over time I came to associate gifts and gestures of kindness with indifference and cruelty.

All of this means yoga this morning had a certain element of faking it until I make it. I don't want to be controlled by other people. I don't want to have these feelings about gifts. I don't want to get to a point where I resent my yoga practice but truth be told there is some of that mixed in every single time I go through the routine.

So I practiced half-consciously and it was entirely a physical workout. Harder than usual, in fact, because I went into it a little unwillingly.

Fact is, if I want to be comfortable doing anything else in the rest of my life, for the rest of my life, I am going to have to do at least this much yoga every single day for the rest of my life. It's not a New Year's resolution, it's a change of life. And if I am realistic, I have to admit, I am always going to wish I didn't have to do it. I went into this feeling like I was doing it to get to a goal but the goal is to be healthier - that means stepping it up is an option, actually it's probably going to be a necessity but stopping once I reach a plateau? That will never happen. Does it happen in life? I used to think so, now I'm not so sure.

Today I am fed up with Ottawa so that's not helping. It's snowing (still, again) and outside all there is to see are crows, asphalt, white sky and snow. I suppose I should see the humor in my being born in the winter and yet not interested in winter sports. It has been that way all my life. I'm not a winter person. Having to saddle-up in coat, boots, scarf, sweater, heavy socks, mitts, hat and bag full of just-in-case supplies, pockets full of tissues for the never-ending runny nose and the awareness that no matter what I do my fingers, toes and nose are still going to get burned by the cold every time I want to go outside is not ok with me. Still, here I am, in Canada in the absolute dead of winter and so it shall be for the next few months.

Lesson for the day? Yoga can't fix everything. You still have to go through the painful parts.

Maybe it's good that the TV arrived today.

yoga diary - day eight

Last night I was up unexpectedly late. I don't have much of a problem sleeping, as a rule but the people with whom I am most deeply involved always seem to have, at best, a tortured relationship to sleep.

I don't understand insomnia. I know people suffer terribly and I try to be compassionate. The few times I've really had trouble sleeping it was an utterly miserable feeling. However, it must be said that my sleep problems, when they do arise, have invariably been self-inflicted and usually self-inflicted in the service of drama.

This results in There are times when I find other people's insomnia annoying and during those times, in the back of my head I admit, I sometimes find it difficult not to consider it attention seeking behavior. I am that way about physical processes. I believe your body will do what it needs to do when push really comes to shove and if you truly are sleep-starved, your body will knock you out where you sit, it won't wait for your permission to do it. (Actually, I've seen this happen on many occasions)

Anyway, it wasn't insomnia that tripped me up last night, rather it was the fact of someone else's insomniac habits catching up to them and their body ambushing them making them late and tipping the row of dominoes that made me late too.

The result of this was that I stayed up too late and then overslept. Physical things, it seems to me, are all math. Our bodies work to achieve a zero-sum game and we either notice and cooperate, making it easier to be more than just physical creatures, or we don't notice and refuse to cooperate, making us unwitting slaves to the physical process, slaves who are ironically irrational and convinced of our own sublimely unique and ineffable waves and patterns. I swing between these two extremes all the time. I assume everyone does. It's when I think I am the most special that I am really about as average and predictable as it is possible to be.

This morning I was late getting up. Yesterday left me with very little accomplished. The last thing I wanted to do was set myself back another hour to do yoga. The body may have a will to health but the mind is something else altogether.

Somehow I managed to override the desire not to get to my morning practice, tell myself that one hour spent in yoga buys me three hours of productivity in every other aspect of my life (which is true, always.) and got myself to the mat.

Parts of my practice were harder than I expected, parts were easier; the first half of it was practically unconscious. Starting out, I felt like it would take forever to finish. This despite the fact that I use a DVD and it always takes exactly the same amount of time.

I have modified one part of the routine, the lizard pose, which I find too demanding, always have. Now that I've modified it, it is one of the easiest poses in the series. I still dread it.

Observing all of this rolling around in my head something occurred to me; it is not only my practice that influences my life, my life, my thoughts, my resistance - those things influence my practice just as much as my practice influences those things.

When I do yoga daily and eat properly, or at least get five to seven servings of fruit and vegetables every day, my mind clears and I am better able to see the issues that need resolution in my life. I am a more efficient machine serving a mind and soul that are liberated to do their transcendent work.

Does that sound like the opposite of yesterday?

Isn't that interesting....

back to work.

yoga diary - day seven

That's right, skipped days five and six, not because I didn't do yoga but because, for whatever reason, I tend to slack off on weekends.

Anyway, who reads this? It's like hollering into a cave.

So I recently read an article in the New York Times about yoga, apparently there is a woman becoming quite famous on her approach to yoga, Tara Stiles has had the audacity to suggest that yoga might be more about becoming "Slim, Calm (and) Sexy" than anything else (Slim, Calm, Sexy is the title of her book.) She recommends 15 minutes a day.

Ms. Stiles is getting significant flack from everyone else in the yoga world for exposing her dirty little secret - that she's not in it for enlightenment but rather she wants to stay fit, be relaxed and have a decent sex life indefinitely.

Surprise surprise, the book's a bestseller.

Well, me too.

When I am dripping sweat, trying desperately to stretch into lizard pose or lowering myself slowly from plank pose into position for cobra, I am not thinking of enlightenment. I am thinking about how my feet won't swell when I've been trapped at my desk for four hours and how I won't get out of breath climbing the stairs and yes, how much hotter I'll look in my black wrap around dress.

Today I got dressed in some of the old clothes that were too new to toss before I left for Austin last year because they were too tight to wear regularly in my old body. Now my new body isn't what I want it to be either but these clothes aren't tight anymore, they remind me that as little progress as I think I've made, I have made progress and that progress is not toward enlightenment, it's toward being flexible, even lithe, slender - maybe, and sexy the next time I step off the airplane in Austin. That's a fact.

I've done 21 days in a row and every one has been hard in its own way, I'll keep going anyway because I've decided that's what I need to do but if I for one minute thought that nothing dramatic would change in my appearance for all this effort? I wouldn't do it. And neither would most of the smiling yoginis sitting in their half lotus at the yoga studio two hours before they go out to try the newest thing in haute cuisine or buy a new dress without worrying about the steady decline of their physical state.

The body is part of it, sexuality is part of it, why are we all so interested in people thinking we aren't into these things? Like they come effortlessly? They don't. I did my yoga today. I didn't want to, the living room was cold and it wasn't fun but what got me onto the mat was the fact that I will improve for doing it - I will become slim, calm and sexy and I want that. Hell, don't you?

yoga diary - day four

This is actually day 18 of my daily practice, I think. It's day four of writing a little about it.

Today was hard. Started sweating and not feeling great right off the bat - even had some aching in my muscles. I was very resistant. It didn't help that my alarm went off insistently halfway through.

Woke up too early and decided to take advantage of it to get my yoga done earlier and to synch up my sun salutation with the sunrise.

It was an interrupted practice, a difficult, sweaty, sometimes annoying practice and it took a lot of resolve to stick to it. I guess what this shows me is that some days it doesn't get easier, some days it's not about being in the moment and getting blissful from the practice of yoga. On days like today, it's about going through it, dealing with interruptions, finding it difficult and eventually sticking with it anyway for the pleasure of putting the X on the calendar and knowing I am that much closer to the goal.

Also - having put a hard day's practice behind me, I can hope tomorrow's yoga session is different from today which is almost assuredly will be since every day is different, even if we're trying to make it the same.

yoga diary - day three

Today my practice felt difficult. It seemed long at the beginning, hard in the middle and cluttered, busy. I got through it and I'm glad but it put me into this domestic frame of mind where I felt I had a thousand chores to do and not nearly enough time to do them.

To address this urgent and uncomfortable feeling, I gave myself the morning for chores. As I was cleaning the bathroom I couldn't help but think of my Grandmother and at the same time, notice I am still removing the final traces of my tenant's habits.

I like my bathroom to be clean, spotless by most people's standards. I don't think I'm overly careful about the floor but you would probably be safer eating your lunch in my bathroom than you would at most public tables - actually, I'm sure of that. You'd probably be safer eating lunch in my bathroom than most people's kitchens and that includes, sometimes, my own.

As I scrub and rinse the white porcelain basins I think of my Grandmother doing the very same thing. I think of the spiral of water as it spins down the drain, sometimes pushed along by my hand, how it reflects the spiral of the galaxy, the whirlpool in the river, the pattern of seeds on a sunflower or a dandelion. I remember my Grandmother's hard work and today I thought about what she would have used to clean with.

She would have had vinegar and baking soda and not much else.

Now I know that is very fashionable right now but I use scouring powder (which she did have at the end of her life) and sometimes I use bleach - which she also had and loved.

People seem to think there was never any reason to move from baking soda to bleach to whatever is in the scrubbing bubbles can and that annoys me more and more.

Chemical cleansers were part of the first wave of feminism geared to the lower classes. If your Grandmother cleaned her own house, chances are she moved from spending hours scrubbing with all her might using vinegar and baking soda and yes, a brush and boiling water to using a soft cloth, hot water and scouring powder. The change cut her time and effort down by at least a half and maybe quite a lot more.

Organic does not mean magical. If you choose to use organic products you need to remember your Grandmother. Chances are excellent that she tailored her formulas and her methods to her specific place and time and also to her family and their patterns of use. She spent hours on this - you cannot get the same results by sloshing half a cup of vinegar into the sink and splodging it around. Organic cleaning is an advanced method as much as anything else and it will (and should) eat your time. It ate your Grandmother's I promise you that.

Many of us are old enough to have Mothers who are grandmothers now and even older. I noticed pretty early on in the return to organics and environmental responsibility that my Mother's response was to clean less often and conserve more water and more of other resources.

This was not done out of laziness. My Mother's response typifies the kind of response that is deeply feminine. When we recognize a solution as being too flawed to ultimately be workable we work around it. In the case of my mother, it's a kind of domestic cap and trade.

I've found I do it myself. I use cleaning products that are not organic in order to buy myself the extra hours but I don't flush the toilet after around 11 until morning and I look at other conservation measures. I don't buy plastic wrap -limit plastic products period. I live somewhere walkable and walk to do most of my errands. This didn't start out by choice but it has become my preferred method of combining exercise, conservation, frugality and eco-kindness. Anything that gives you four distinct benefits for one effort is worth it. As far as statistics are concerned, I am in the 13 per cent that eats right and gets more than enough exercise on a regular basis. This is not because I am good or smart or disciplined, it's because I built it into my life such that I really don't have any other choice.

I think we tend to expand to fit the space we're given. This applies to luxuries too. I think we eat too much because we're offered too much, we hire housekeepers and maintain distance from the detritus of our daily, (intimate) lives, because we can. People offer to take over our unpleasantness for money. Whenever someone offers to buy your discomfort - be wary. It's probably not a good idea.

We sit on the couch cause the couch is there.

For some of us it requires drastic measures to change that - it didn't for our Grandmothers because they grew into their habits over time. When an older woman is reluctant to make a change, I think it is possible that as often as not it's because the way she does things as they are has hidden benefits and the loss of those benefits would mean losses in other areas of her life.

The woman who has figured out how to use organic cleansers and doesn't want to change? Well, leave her alone. Also leave alone the woman who uses bleach and bounce and all the rest of it because I will bet you anything she's making up for it somewhere else in her life and probably doing a pretty good job of it too.

Feminism is whatever benefits women, the same is true of environmental consciousness. Just because it doesn't fit your view of it, doesn't mean it isn't valid.

yoga diary day two

It's been sixteen consecutive days I've been doing yoga in the morning.

Things seem to be going better - change is stirring/ My posture is improved. I can't, literally can not eat as much junk as I used to. And I am (maybe foolishly) trusting myself to proceed at my own pace. Which is slower than most people, I admit.

Today, I have two things to work on - the search for work and my art proposal. They'll take the whole day.

That's ok with me. Time is passing. This is just a note to mark a place. It is a place to say there are shifts occurring and nobody is more surprised about that than me.

If you've ever felt the urge to do yoga? Listen to it. You can use a DVD to start, you don't have to be a member of the beautiful yoga people, Lord knows I'm not.

I have a DVD from a studio in NYC and one from California, I think and I am going through a beginner's daily flow practice every single day. I'm finding it just as beneficial as my studio membership in Austin, maybe more so. I practice before breakfast, I spend an hour at it and I can tell I have a long way to go but even in 16 days, I think I've come further than I expected.

Back to breakfast and work.