Teacher Training Spring 2010

I'm actually kind of scared to post this.  Don't ask me why.  For the past couple days, I've been telling this to anyone who stands still long enough to listen!

But, yep.

You all guessed it.

I'm going!

I started figuring this out a few weeks ago, and lately a lot of things have come together fast.  This is definitely, beyond the shadow of a doubt, something that is meant to happen right now.  Just in the last few days, since AFTER I wrote that entry about pieces falling into place, a couple other big things have happened that proved I am on the right track.  I need to wait until a few things are finalized, but I have some cool stories that I'll be sharing eventually.

But I'm ready to say this much: Bikram Yoga Teacher Training Spring 2010, starting on April 18th in Vegas - or maybe starting on another date in another location - doesn't matter!  Wherever and whenever it is, I'm going to be there.  I'll be teaching classes by the beginning of the summer.

Where's the CAPS LOCK and exclamation!!!!1!!1!! marks, you ask?  Oh man, I've just used them all up.  I've gone all the way through excited and come out on the other side, and I think I need a nap.  They haven't invented a punctuation mark that comes close to conveying how I feel right now.  I don't have the vocabulary for it.  I am just SO happy right now.

Dialogue is playing on permanent loop through my head and I'm still 6 months out.  Whoa boy.  These 6 months are going to FLY past.  I just want to enjoy the anticipation!  Every morning when I wake up, I feel like I'm a kid at 6am on Christmas morning, in that moment when you still have to wait quietly because it's not QUITE time to open the presents yet...  It's a little bit like that.

More later...

A better mousetrap

Bikram always says that when you do this yoga, you do not have to chase money, money will chase you.  You don't have to chase the gods, the gods will chase you.  You don't have to chase the world, the world will chase you.

Umm... I think it's started working.

It's really cool.

This is a ridiculous analogy, but it kind of remind me of the game Mousetrap.  Did anyone else have that game as a kid?!  It's a game where you assemble this really complicated contraption with wheels, cranks, slides, springboards, buckets, all kinds of stuff.  I think there was a kicking boot involved in there somehow.  When the whole contraption is set up, you turn a crank that sends a little metal ball rolling  through all the different parts until it gets to the end and sets off the mousetrap, which catches the mouse.  (That's how you win the game.)  I hope that made sense to people who never played the game!  Will a picture help?

ANYWAY... I suddenly have the feeling that my life so far has been like the part of the game where you're just putting all these strange pieces together into a contraption that has no logical order or purpose.  And then a week or two ago, somebody started turning the crank, and now all hell has broken loose, but in a way that is predetermined and logical and perfect.

Sorry for being such a GIANT tease here.  I promise to tell the key parts of the story in a few weeks, but there are a couple things that I need to sort out first.  You can probably guess at one part of my plans, though.  (It's something that will make you guys really happy!)

In the meantime, I've got "No Such Thing" by John Mayer playing on repeat (and I was never a big John Mayer fan), and here are some lines from "Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver, one of my all-time favorite poems:

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Lock the Knee

We hear it almost every day.  It's spoken to million of students, in hundreds of studies, in every different language, in countries all over the globe.

But what's the big deal about "lock the knee"?

Number one, it's hard to do.  It's so hard to do, in fact, that everyone on earth is guaranteed to be unsuccessful when they start practicing it.  Standing head to knee is purely an exercise in locking the knee (the other parts are basically distractions), and it is the only "advanced" posture in the beginning series (other than savasana).  So it is first and foremost an exercise in patience and determination.  And self-control.  (Don't cheat.)  And concentration.  (Don't blink your eyes.)  And faith.  (It will happen if you keep trying the right way.)

That all sounds great.  But is that it?

There are so many interesting things that happen in standing head to knee, especially once it becomes accessible to your body.  I've found that the more physically capable I become in this posture, the more of a mental challenge it is.  That last stage, the part where you bring your head down onto your knee, really seems to give everyone a hard time, even if they have no difficulty getting their body into that same position when they're sitting on the ground.  I always have called it the "ultimate mind-fuck."  (Ahem.)  Because your mind goes crazy when you start advancing to a new stage (whether it's kicking out, elbows down, or head down). 

Lately I'm fascinated by that moment in the posture, because it tells you so much about yourself.  What I've often noticed - and I don't think that I'm alone in this - is that I experience a moment of absolute panic when I'm on the brink of success.  It reminds me of that famous quote: "Our deepest fear is not that inadequate.  Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure."  There's this sudden, uninvited rush of doubt - "oh no, I'm not going to be able to do this" - and as soon as that happens, it's all over.

So how do you get through that moment, to find the thing that's waiting for you on the other side?  How do you overcome such an overpowering instinct?  It's shockingly simple.  You fill your mind with one thought only, the one thought that will lead to success, because it drowns out everything else.

Lock the knee.

That's it.  And you have to know - not think, but know - that it will work.  That you are ready.  That everything is in place.  You take a look in the mirror and tell yourself, okay, Self!  This is it.  Just concentrate and meditate, keep fighting for it, and don't be scared when it works! 

We've heard it over and over and over: the secret to success in life is just to lock the damn knee.  And you know what's funny?  I think it's actually true.

"Boss" in the Media

I've been talking quite a bit about Bikram himself in the last couple days after introducing my friend Tanya to his class.  Suddenly our friends from yoga all want to know, "what is he LIKE?"  (They never asked me that... hmph!)

I always have trouble describing him because he loses so much in translation!  He says these things that make him sound like a total asshole on paper, but when you hear the same things in person, you're rolling on the floor laughing.  Tanya put it really well, actually: "It's definitely tough love, but you always feel the love part."  Yeah, he acts like a total lunatic, has a huge mouth, and makes some ill-advised business decisions.  But the thing that I was most struck by when I met him in person the first time was how affectionate he is!  All smiles and hugs and "sweetheart"s, all totally sincere.

Anyway, since I am in a Bikram-appreciation mood, here are two of my favorite interviews.

Bikram on 60 Minutes - I'm always surprised when people haven't seen this piece from 2005, because it was on the front page of the Bikram website for EVER.  I forget that not everyone is obsessive like me.  I've watched this over and over, and even though the interviewer grates a bit, Bikram totally manages to charm her and it cracks me up every time.  "Not THINK!  That's the only way it works."

This article from LA Yoga Magazine (also from 2005) is really fun too, cause the interviewer just quote him verbatim.  If you read it after watching the video, you will hear his voice SO clearly.  I love the bit where he talks about why he does this work; it resonates with me so much.  And the metaphor at the end, just classic.  "People are born as babies and they die as babies before they even know who they are.  How sad.  Every human being is a gold mine."

This guy needs some better media representation, and so does Bikram yoga in general, come to think of it.  Somebody should do something about that....

You're doing it WRONG!

"Right" and "wrong" are slippery ideas sometimes.  Some people will tell you very philosophically that they don't exist.  Those people will sound completely ridiculous to anyone who has ever studied math or science, where you are RIGHT if you say that 2 time 2 is 4 and WRONG if you say anything else.  On the other hand, if you study something like literature, art, or philosophy, things are more open to interpretation.

So where does yoga fall into this equation?

Aha!  Trick question!  "Yoga" is way too general.  It encompasses the entire way that you live your life.  And who's to say that there is a right or wrong way to spend your time on earth?  People have certainly tried... through law, through religion, through science... but let's not even go into that.

But what if we talk about just HATHA yoga?  Hatha yoga is just one of the eight limbs of yoga.  There are others like Karma yoga, which is your life's work, and Raja yoga, which is the study of meditation and contemplation.  Raja yoga and Hatha yoga get seriously blurred together in a lot of Western yoga classes, which I think leads to a lot of confusion.  It would save a whole lot of trouble if everyone could figure out which is which and not mix them up.  Hatha yoga is actually a distinct entity; the science of asana and pranayama, the physical practice that heals and strengthens your body to prepare you to embark on any other limb of your choosing.  (Bikram's yoga class is, of course, a purely hatha yoga class, which does a brilliant job of preparing you for the other forms.)

So can you do HATHA yoga wrong?  Abso-freaking-lutely!  Because it is result driven, in a way.  You need to practice the yoga in a way that results in a healtheir, stronger, and more flexible body and mind.  If you do this right, then eventually (according to theory) the body and mind come together so that you can "knock on the door to the spirit."  But if you don't do the postures the way they are perscribed, then they won't work, and you are wasting your time.

I was talking about this with my friend Tanya yesterday, while we drove down the 101 early in the morning to take Bikram's class in LA.  Tanya was telling me about a friend of hers who tried Bikram yoga class after doing a lot of other yoga classes.  This friend was totally offended when a teacher told her that she was doing a posture wrong and tried to correct her.  "But we do it this way in my OTHER yoga class!" she said.  "It can't be WRONG.  You can't do yoga WRONG."  Well... yeah, sweetie.  You can.  When you're in a class, you do need to follow the instructions, because they are all there for a reason.  If you do it wrong, you don't get any benefit.

We took Bikram's Saturday 10am, which was fun in a brutal and tortorous kind of way.  It was hot, though not as hot as the poor trainees had it in Vegas last week!  (Note to trainees: he is totally laughing at your suffering, though not in a mean way at all!)  But after that conversation, we both noticed that he does, pretty often, like to call out, "Hey Mr. Glasses!  You are doing 100% wrong!  What are you doing back there?"  "Wrong, wrong, wrong!"  It's so funny.  Because he's RIGHT.  And nothing gets someone's attention like telling them that they are doing a posture 100% wrong.  I've been on the receiving end of that before, and I can tell you, I have thought about that correction in every single class since that one, and used it every time!  Tanya got on the receiving end for not sitting down low enough in the second part of awkward, and it ended up making her day.  "Bikram himself called me a stubborn ass woman.  My day is a success."

I totally appreciate that he does this, because it's really sad when people spend years doing hatha yoga wrong and then wonder why it isn't working.  Then they think, "oh well, I guess yoga doesn't work for me."  No!!!!!!  Yoga works for everyone.  Just need to have the RIGHT information, and then everything becomes awesome.

Nothing to lose!

One of my all time favorite Bikram quotes is this one: "You have nothing to lose, because you never had anything to begin with." 

It's not a statement of defeat or regret.  Put another way, you could simply say that you already have everything that you're ever going to have, so all that you ever have to worry about is how to... (everyone together now....) use it!  You come into the world with nothing, and you leave it with nothing, but in between those two points, you have unlimited creative potential. 

Sometimes you might think you have truly lost something.  Things get lost all the time... you lose a watch, an umbrella, a phone number, a friendship, a parent, a lover... and it's sad, sometimes horribly and profoundly so.  But I don't like to believe that we ever really can lose those things.  You know this story: the missing earring turns up in the wash, a stranger calls to return the cell phone, the long lost friend just happens to step off the bus when you're turning a street corner, and all the lost pets find their way back home.  If not in this lifetime, then in another one.  Eventually.  In the future.

I've had a rocky couple of months, to be totally honest, and I was starting to feel afraid that some things were slipping away from me.  My focus, my clarity, my energy, even my yoga practice were all getting a bit shaky, a little bit lost.

But you know what?  Nothing got lost.  I just had to muddle around a bit, and then sure enough, everything was right where I left it.  And when I practiced again last night, for the first time since the weekend, I was so thrilled to be there, and I soaked up the practice like a dry sponge, all over again.  My postures were right where I left them, just waiting for me to do them.  My body was right there, so grateful to be taken through these now-familiar postures again.  My teacher's words were right there, the dialogue as familiar and comforting as a favorite song.  And my eyes were right there in the mirror looking back at me, focused, energized, and ready.  I stared myself down in the mirror and smiled.  Ok, self... let's do this.

I mean... if you have nothing to lose... then you can do anything, can't you?

There was one point in the last year when I was looking at a quote on the wall at the yoga studio: "What would you do if you knew you could not fail?"  I ended up talking about it with another student, and I told her that if I knew I could not fail, I would still do exactly what I was doing at that moment.  Because I did not feel that fear had not been a factor in any of the choices I'd made that had brought me to that point.  And I think that's a good goal, to live that way, to be able to give that answer to that question.  That's my goal right now: to know that I cannot fail, and then live accordingly.

We'll see how that goes....

Morning with EMMY

"... remember, you are not just a bag of skin containing muscles, blood, and bone.  You are a multidimensional being of energy and light." ~ Emmy, during final savasana

Two of my teachers and I made a little drive down the coast this morning and took class with Emmy Cleaves at Bikram Yoga Westlake.  The class was a special event.  It was on a donation basis ($25 minimum), and all the proceeds went to Wilderness Conservancy, a wonderful small foundation dedicated to the conservation of endangered and threatened species, which is run by Emmy's husband, Bob.  Bob spoke a bit about his work before class, and he struck me as a really sincere and cool guy who was doing this work out of concern and love.  What a great match for Emmy!  Now that I think about it, the class was a full house, with at least 50 packed into the room, mat-to-mat, so I guess some good funds must have been raised.

Words fail me when it comes to describing Emmy.*  I just adore her.  My friends and I were talking about her on the way home, and we found it so difficult to capture what is great about her and her teaching.  She just has the "secret Emmy mojo" - often imitated, never duplicated!  Here's one thing we figured out: nothing steals her peace!  She walks through the rows in her black leotard and diamond earrings, with her hair up in a french twist, and she is always graceful, calm and elegant, even as the heat rises and the student start, well, dying.  (I worked my butt off today for sure, and I can feel it already!)  We love the way she talks, and the things she says.  She does not teach by the dialogue, but she gives these absolutely clear and insightful physiological instructions that let you understand the postures all over again.  She is definitely the yin to Bikram's yang.  Where Bikram says, "Lock your damn knee, assholes!", Emmy says, "Now this is the 'lock the knee, baby' part of the class."  We also love that she doesn't say "change"; she just says, "okay, that's enough."  When I "grow up," Emmy is one of the people I would like to be!

The studio provided orange juice and fruit after class, which was MUCH appreciated by me.  It took me a while to feel recovered after that class!  Emmy and Bob hung around for a bit, so I got the chance to chat with her a little bit.  I (finally!) asked her about my backbends - told her that I know that I have a deep backbend that comes very much from the lower back, and asked her what I should be doing to distribute it more.  She basically just said to experiment with how far I go back and see if I can find the lift in the chest.  This is what I have been trying to do, so YAY! for being on the right track.  She also mentioned that of all the Indian students who come and take class, none of them do backbends from just the lower back. They all either stay up higher and bend their upper backs, or go ALL the way down and touch the floor.  (Literally.)  She said it was "very demoralizing" for everyone to see the Indian boys touching the floor in their backbends, which was awfully funny.  (It's funny when it's true!)  I also mentioned that I wish I could get down to LA more, since it's been a while now, and she was quite sweet, saying yes, come back down to advanced class, "just dip your toe back in..."

Finally, the shout-out portion of today's blog!  I got my Mei grey tank top in the mail yesterday afternoon (thanks McKinley!!) so of course I wore it this morning and used it as an excuse to finally grab a picture with Emmy before class.  I showed it to her and told her it was made as a fundraiser for one of my friends who's at training in Vegas, and she thought it was great!  We had just one suggestion for the design: Emmy thought the girl kinda had "thunder thighs," and we realized it was because the picture hits right over my boobs and gets stretched out sideways.  HAHA!  Our suggestion is to ask people if they have big boobs and then adjust the design accordingly.... (Just kidding, McK, don't be embarrassed!)  But seriously, everyone loves this shirt, and I got a great picture with it, too!

* Edited to add:  I am so used to hanging out with Bikram teachers that I forget that not everyone in the world knows who Emmy is.  So just in case some of you are wondering who the heck I am talking about, Emmy is Bikram's most senior teacher and school principal.  She's in her mid 80's now and still rocks the advanced series - proof that yogis can just get better and better with age.  There's a nice profile piece on her that was written a few years back, which you can find here.  (Did I post this link earlier this summer??  I'm getting some serious deja vu... I guess some of us age less gracefully than others...)

Yoga marathons/ Fun with technology!

I have to say, I spent a couple of hours online this evening that turned out to be one of the MOST entertaining times I have ever had on the internet.

Some of you guys may be familiar with Mary Jarvis (a senior Bikram teacher) and her studio, Global Yoga in San Francisco.  I've never studied with Mary yet, but I have a lot of teacher friends who have trained with her and speak very highly of her, so her class is definitely on my wish-list of things to do!  (I'm hoping to catch her in December when Mei and I go on our California yoga road trip.)  Anyway, one of the things that her studio is known for (besides training yoga champions) is doing the occasional yoga marathon.  And that's "marathon" as in 7 or 8 classes in ONE day.  (Holy cow.  Just when you thought that 7 or 8 classes in a WEEK was a lot...)

Today, one of Mary's students, Charlene, did a "Global Yoga Marathon" of 8 consecutive classes today to raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.  I thought this was pretty damn impressive, and donated 10 bucks to her cause (even though I've never met her)!  Her fundraising page is right here, in case you want to do the same.  But anyway, they took things a step further today with a new twist: all 8 classes were online in a live webcast!

I tuned in from my desk at my office for the last couple of classes, at 4:30 and 6:30pm.  Charlene was still going strong after the first five classes, along with a visiting teacher who had joined her in her marathon.  Pretty cool!  It made me wonder if I could do that, too.  Scratch that - I'm pretty sure I COULD do it if I made up my mind, and maybe one of these days I will give it a go, just for fun.

It was so interesting to watch an actual class going on.  I've really never seen that before!  It's not like you can look around and check out other people while you're doing your own practice.  (Well, occasionally I peek, like if there's a cute boy behind me, but that's not the same as watching a class from the comfort of your room-temperature desk!)  It's fascinating to see how the different bodies function and respond, and I could watch it all day.

There was a live chat going on alongside the feed (which I logged onto as thedancingj, of course), and that was infinitely entertaining during the 4:30 class, because the teacher kept going over to a monitor somewhere in the room and reading the live chat comments to the class!  So all of us in the chat room were basically cheering/heckling the class and its teacher, and seeing the responses in real time.  One of the yogis in the chat room was a global yoga student who knew a lot of the people in the room, so he'd be like, "hey, Natalie (or someone) looks great!" and I'd be like "which one is Natalie?" and then suddenly the teacher would be like, "Natalie, they're talking about you, give them a wave!"  It was totally surreal to be sitting at a computer, sending in comments to a guy who was in the MIDDLE of teaching a class, and watching him respond!  I don't even remember what I wrote, but a couple of times he told his class, "the dancing J says thus-and-so..."  Then he decided that we were creeping him out.  It creeped me out a little, too!  Am I a human, or a virtual reality robot??  Started to feel like a cyborg!

And then (as if there weren't enough modes of communication going on already), I dropped Mary a note on facebook to say how much I was digging the webcam.  She wrote me write back and said she'd tell Chadd (the teacher) that I was one of the people in the chat.  I told her, "well, I don't think he knows who I am, but you could show him my facebook page or something... !"

After the 4:30 class ended, the students started coming in for the 6:30, and Chadd was setting up over by the camera.  He looked in the camera's general direction and said, "Hey Dancing J, Mary showed me your pictures!  Very lovely!"  I typed back, "Wow, thank you very much!!"  It made me feel less like a cyborg.

Then Mary taught the 6:30 class, so I got to listen to her teaching!  It was pretty interesting, especially since I was listening but not doing.  There is a world of difference between listening to someone's words while they move your body versus listening to someone's words while you sit on your butt!  Hah!  But she said a lot of great things that I really appreciated.  Some were technical things, like for example: "whatever you do, DO NOT lift your hands off the floor in cobra!" and some were life-related, like: "I am begging you, stop getting on the scale every day, those numbers don't matter."  I absolutely agreed with both of those statements!  She doesn't teach the regular dialogue, but her technical knowledge was rock solid.  Plenty of other interesting ideas and catchy phrases, like "prana, not protein!!"  I wish I could remember more of the things that she said... my tape-recorder memory is operating a little bit below par today, I guess, and anyway nothing is a substitute for a live class!

Speaking of which, better get my butt to bed so I can DO a class in the morning!  I know I've been kinda quiet lately, mainly because October and November of this year are the times when I get my butt kicked by school, but stay tuned.  I'm still out here.  :)


|  \
|   \
|--\O___
|
L         It's a virtual standing bow!  

Scenes from parallel lives

I think that you are always going to be in the right place at the right time.

But you can never know where you would have ended up if you had taken a different fork in the road, and it's always kind of interesting to think about.  What would have been gained, what would have been lost, and what was inevitably going to happen no matter what choices you made?  Here are some things that I might have done, but didn't...

September, 2007

My friend Jackie is going to teacher training in Hawaii.  She tells me I need to come with her.  Instead of staying home, saving money, and applying to grad schools, I say "what the hell," and sign up.  I've only just recently returned to Bikram yoga after quitting ballet, but my studio owners love me and think I have potential.  They give me a 2 week crash course in dialogue before putting me on the plane.  It's awesome.  I come home after training, go back part-time to the restaurant job that I hate, teach full time in downtown Boston for a while.  Two years later - who knows??

(Instead I stayed in Boston, did my first 30 day challenge, did my first yoga competition, got to know my teachers, got to know the other students, and found a new community right where I was.)

March, 2008

After getting into grad school in January, I decide to seize the opportunity and go to teacher training before starting school again.  I can do it ALL.  I spend all of my savings and buy a plane ticket to Acapulco.  It's awesome.  Just a couple months after graduating, I leave my support system and move cross-country, flat broke, to start grad school.  I get to my new yoga studio as a brand new baby Bikram teacher and no one helps me with dialogue.  I'm a new grad student, a new yoga teacher, and a new Californian all at once.  It's a bit much.

(Instead I finished paying my dues in the service industry.  I came home from work at midnight every night and read Jen's daily TT blog update while eating EasyMac for dinner.  I saved up enough money to buy a car, take a cross-country road trip, furnish a new apartment, and eventually go to advanced seminar.  I met my yoga mentor and spent time with her every week for 6 months.  I learned SO much of what I know now from that time period.)

September, 2008

I've deferred grad school for a year so I can go to the Acapulco training.  I am so ready.  Four other girls from my studio whose names all start with J are at the training.  I am the 5th J.  It's awesome.  I come back and teach 15 classes a week at all studios around Boston.  I get great mentoring and feedback from all the studio owners, and start to get the hang of this teaching thing.  I realize that this is an exhausting way to make a living, and I'm a little bit relieved to start school the next fall and do something besides yoga.  I don't get to research LEDs like I wanted to because the research group is full and there's less funding in 2009 than there was in 2008.

(Instead, I had the best week of my life when I drove from Boston to LA with my best friend.  I had a shitty fall and was homesick all the time.  I got exactly the research job that I wanted, but it wasn't that thrilling.  I got to meet Bikram and Emmy in LA.  I competed at championships in LA and met a whole new group of cool yoga people.  I learned how to be a Bikram yogi outside of my safe little bubble.)

(If there is one that I regret missing, it's this one.)

April, 2009

I drop out of grad school after the first 6 months, pack up the car, take out a huge credit card loan, and go to teacher training in Palm Springs.  My family is horrified.  Except for my two closest friends, I never speak to anyone from UC Santa Barbara again.  I'm roommates with one of my friends from New England.  It's awesome.  After training, I keep on driving east until I get back to Boston.  I have job offers from at least 5 different studios in Massachusetts.  One of the studio owners lets me stay at her house.  I get to teach for my mentor.  I get to teach as many classes as I can handle, and then some.  I love what I'm doing, but it's a little hard to justify sometimes.  I never go back to engineering.

(Instead, I decided to wait things out with academia a little longer.  I got a new research supervisor and things turned the corner a bit.  I started to enjoy my new home.  I started writing.  I went from Zen-like acceptance to total impatience and back again.  But I didn't renew my housing lease, either.)

October, 2009

I decide that a year of grad school is enough.  I follow through on the plans that I made during the first weekend of February.  I pack my car and drive to Vegas.  I have to say goodbye to a lot of people.  I still can't decide whether to teach in Cali for a while or hightail it back to New England.  I don't know if I'm done here yet.  I stay with Michelle before training and I'm in posture clinics with Mei.  I check into the Las Vegas Hilton today.  It's awesome.  I don't know what happens next.

(Instead, I end up finding a beautiful new house and putting down a couple more roots.  My sister moves out to the west coast and stays with me for the year.  I go out dancing on Fridays, I meet new people, I have friends over for dinner every Monday.  I get a great new research topic, which I have yet to follow through on, but I want to, really.  I bring new teachers into the yoga studio.  I keep studying, communicating, learning, figuring out my way.  I have a good life, but it's not quite complete yet.  I don't know what happens next.)

You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometimes
You just might find
You get what you need...

(Sometimes the old themes are best....)

That's just how we roll...

I have made an observation.

Whenever I go out with friends who do Bikram yoga, there is an extremely high probability that at LEAST one person will end up demonstrating standing head to knee in jeans outside a bar before the night is out.

Last night that person was me.  I was designated driver, so I was not drunk, and I was trying to make a very important technical point!!!

I was out last night with my roommate and a couple of new girl friends who I've met through yoga.  One of the girls had just finished her first 30-day challenge, and she seriously powered through it - she missed 5 or 6 days in the middle because she got sick, and ended up doing 4 doubles in 5 days in the last week.  Teacher-training style!!  Clearly, I had to buy this girl a Guinness.  We went to this really chill lounge on the outskirts of town that played Beatles music and gave you fresh popped popcorn with your beer.  Played 4 rounds of pool, told stories, talked yoga, all wonderful.  For some reason, once we stepped out of the bar (with the intention of going home), we REALLY got into the shop talk and couldn't shut ourselves up until we realized it was 1am on a weeknight.

The funniest moment was when one friend was trying to describe the problem she has in toe stand, and ended up just doing the posture on the curb in her jeans.  This feat impressed the HECK out of a group of 4 tipsy girls who were passing by.  They were pretty effusive with their compliments!  "Some kinda crazy gymnastics shit!!"  "In jeans!!"

Yep.  Yoga dorks.  Sometimes the yoga, it just... happens.  That's just how we roll....