LOCK THE KNEE!

(A Little More About) How to "Make It" in Bikram Yoga

2012-01-27T13:49:00.000-08:00

Wow - I expected to get some reaction, but I am surprised and encouraged by how many people responded to my last post about "How to "Make It" as a Bikram Yoga Teacher." I got so many positive and thoughtful responses - on the blog, on Facebook, and in my inbox. I think people responded because this topic is so often swept under the rug. (There are hundreds of blogs about the teacher training experience, but not so many about the practical teaching experience.) I'm thrilled that my post was helpful to so many people, especially the new teachers!

I think I covered the most significant points in my first post, but other teachers have pointed out some more excellent points that are worth a mention. So without further ado, here is Part II.

Continuing Education

Yes, yes, yes, yes. I know you just shelled out $11k for teacher training, but did you really learn everything there? Don't answer that, it's not even a question. The best content at TT is in Bikram's posture lectures towards the end, and by that point you are totally sleep deprived and overloaded. So keep learning!

Keep your eye out for seminars and master classes in your area. (Or even seminars not in your area - road trip!) Most of those events cost $50 or less for teachers, and they are incredibly valuable. So far I've been to two seminars with Diane Ducharme, a master class with Lynn Whitlow, one advanced seminar (in 2009), advanced classes with Emmy (which are free), and master classes with every international champion since maybe 2008. These have all been immensely helpful for my teaching. And did I mention that they are also great networking opportunities? You can often get on the schedule at a studio for a week or two when a teacher goes out of town for vacation. (I taught for a week at the studio in Richmond after I met the owner at one of Diane's seminars.)

Read books about yoga that inspire you. I have a list of some of my favorite over on the right-hand side of this blog. Just don't go crazy and start overanalyzing everything - keep it simple!

Keep studying your dialogue. I said it before but I'll say it again. Most studios want dialogue. Don't think, "oh, I'll study it more once I have work." That's backwards. Learn the material, get your shit together, and the work will come to you! This is especially true for the newbies. You don't have to be perfect (because perfection doesn't exist), but don't get complacent, either. I know teachers who have been teaching for 5+ years and still look at the dialogue every day. Just keep trying the right way.

And yes, go back and visit teacher training if you have the ability. It can be illuminating. I've been back twice now. The first visit was overwhelming, but the second one was incredible.

Teaching Overseas

I haven't done this yet, but there are definitely opportunities overseas. (I guess I should specify that I am American and writing this from the USA perspective.) Australia seems to be going crazy for Bikram, and there are lots of opportunities down under for teachers under age 30 (due to a quirk of their immigration rules). Sounds like fun!

Studio Ownership

I left this out on purpose because you really have to get some experience as a teacher before you can be a good studio owner - you can't put the cart before the horse! I think HQ requires a minimum 6 months or 100 classes experience before opening a studio (or something like that - maybe somebody can correct me here). In my opinion, that's still an awfully short amount of time. I wouldn't have felt prepared to be responsible for a whole studio after only 6 months! But of course a lot of people go to training from areas where Bikram yoga doesn't exist yet, with the specific purpose of opening a studio in their home town/country, and that's fabulous.

Opening a studio will cost about $150,000 on average, so you have to spend a lot of money to make money. But a lot of studio owners do quite well for themselves after a couple years in business.

I might open a studio one day, but at the moment I'm not even remotely interested. Owning a studio will almost definitely cut into your teaching and practice time, plus it gives you a whole pile of extra responsibilities. I am very happy to operate as a full-time teacher with no extra worries - it lets me have more fun.

And Finally...

My friend Nikhil suggested that I should revisit the original question.

I wrote about the question that people are most inclined to ask: "Can you make a living by teaching Bikram yoga?"

But here's a better question, the one that is always in the air at the beginning of teacher training: "Do you want to change your life?"

It's a personal question. The answer is up to you. But if you are somebody who wants the life of a teacher, then I sincerely hope that this discussion will help you!

Comments are always welcome. I try to read and answer all of them.

How to "Make It" as a Bikram Yoga Teacher

2012-01-25T13:03:00.000-08:00

I've thought about this topic so many times that I was half convinced that I'd already blogged about it. But I checked my archives and I have not written this post yet. It is time!

I've gotten lots of emails and questions from aspiring Bikram yoga teachers, and everybody wants to know the same thing: "Can you make a living teaching Bikram yoga?"

My answer is YES, but with a few qualifications.

First - The Numbers

Here are the numbers. On average, at least in my experience, new teachers will make about $50/class. (In some cases you'll have to teach a class or two for free as an audition of sorts, but as a rule you should be paid for all public classes!) As a full time teacher, you would teach maybe 9-12 classes per week. Personally, I teach 10/week whenever possible. (If I teach less, I get bored. If I teach much more, I get burned out.) So do the math - you're gonna start at about $2,000/month.

If you're the sole breadwinner for a family of 4, that's probably not going to cut it.

If you're single and not carrying too much debt, this is totally feasible. You won't have enough money to drink expensive vodka at clubs every night and vacation in Croatia, but you'll have enough cash to go out for beer with friends and go hiking and stuff like that. It's comparable to the money I made as a grad student, less than the money I made as a waitress, and more than the money I made as a starving artist.

Also bear in mind that you will work lots of morning, evenings, and weekends, but you will still have some free time. I used to do some SAT tutoring in the afternoons during my "dead time," which was actually pretty profitable. You could also work from home, if you do any sort of freelance. Just count on 3 classes/day on average, because you'll be teaching 2 and taking 1. (Gotta keep practicing!) It is tiring at first, but you can adapt to it. My first week of teaching "full time," I spent 90% of my free time napping. But now in a normal week I can teach 10x and practice beginner class 6x, plus 1 or 2 advanced classes, and I have energy to spare.

After a year or two, you may start to earn more. I don't want to tell you guys how much I make now because that's kind of tacky - you can email me if you really need to know - but I'm making significantly more than $50/class and I get some great benefits, too.

Second - How to Get Classes

This seems to be the big topic on the new teacher's discussion boards - getting classes to teach!!

There are plenty of people who chose to return to their normal jobs after training and just teach a couple times a week, and that's totally cool. Especially if you have a great salary that you're not ready or able to sacrifice, this is a really logical thing to do. Your learning curve will be a bit slower if you can only teach a couple times a week, but be patient with yourself.

If you're trying to get classes at a local studio, the etiquette is pretty standard. Call or email, introduce yourself, take class with the owner, and make yourself available. Definitely take class - it's the best way to show the owner your work ethic and your personality. Studio owners aren't looking for you to touch the floor in your backbend or lock out standing bow, but they do want to see if you're a hard worker, if you have a good attitude, and if you understand the yoga - and that stuff will all be obvious in your personal practice. Smile. Owners want to hire people who are nice to be around and won't scare off the newbies. Keep saying your dialogue out loud. Teach class to the birds and the fishes if you have to, but keep it flowing.

Now here's the big topic: what if you want to teach full time and there just aren't classes available in your area?

No choice - you have to move!!

You guys, there are so many jobs out there! And no, they're not in New York City or southern California or Vancouver or Paris. They're in Ohio and Michigan and Albama and Montana. And there are so. Many. Jobs. There are studios that are virtually begging for teachers. One of my friends - a girl who is temporarily teaching with me in Rhode Island - posted to the traveling teacher's group last week: "I need somewhere to teach in the states. What studios are looking for a good dialogue driven teacher? Graduated Fall 2009." She found a job within a couple of days, and she's gotten calls and messages from like half a dozen other studios. She's been like, "Omigod, this is great, but I'm good now, everybody can stop messaging me!!" There are so many jobs.

What you've gotta realize, especially as a new teacher, is that it doesn't really matter where you teach as long as you teach as much as possible. Sure, it's tempting to go for the exotic location or just stick with the familiar location at home, but that's not gonna make you a better teacher. If you want to make a career of this - (and if you don't, that's fine, just do it part-time) - if you really wanna go for it, you just have to get up and go where the work is. The more you teach, the better you get. The better you get, the more opportunities you will have. The more experiences you have, the more locations will be available to you. But to get yourself started? Man, it does not matter where you go. Just go to an established dialogue studio in the middle of Bumf*ck, Nowhere and teach 10/week for a couple of months. Your teaching will grow by leaps and bounds.

Specific Example - What I Did

When I graduated from TT in June 2010, I was still living in southern California. My "home studio" could only give me maybe 4 classes a week, but I picked up tons of classes when other teachers got sick or went on summer vacation. I drove to the next-closest studio, an hour away, to pick up classes, and I taught a couple times in LA for free. I went up to Fresno for one week and taught 10 classes there, and that helped immensely. And then I got out of there - like a bat out of hell! - and went to Baltimore because there was a studio there that could give me full time work. I had never been to Baltimore. I only knew one person there: the studio owner.

I planned to stay there for about 3 months. It ended up working out so well that I stayed there for almost a year and a half. Good fit.

While I was living in Baltimore - as my blog readers know - I also did a fair bit of traveling and teaching. In total, I've taught at 16 different studios since I graduated. (And I haven't even taught overseas yet - this is all domestic, in the U.S.) This is helpful in several ways. First, teaching in new places challenges you to grow as a teacher. It's easy to get in a rut if you just stand in the same spot and teach the same group of people every day. Second, it lets you experience more contrast. It opens up your world! You get to see all the different ways that studios operate - the styles, the policies, the communities, the attitudes, everything. This does more than just improve your teaching - it also help you figure out what you're looking for. Then you can really make an educated decision about what you want - and when that perfect opportunity finally presents itself, you will recognize it!!

I'm in such a great place right now - really, blissfully great - and I'm sure that I would not have gotten here if I hadn't done all that exploration first.

Third - Money Can't Buy Me Love!

If I hadn't gone to teacher training, I would still be a Ph.D. student and my income would actually be less that what it is now.

If I hadn't got to teacher training and had stuck with engineering, I could probably have made a six figure salary sometime within the next 10 years.

If I had become an engineer, I would be rich and miserable - because my heart was not there. Sitting in a lab for hours on end never made me happy.

There is no substitute for doing work that you love.

I have enough cash to live comfortably and have fun. I cook, I spend time with my friends, I go on adventures, I laugh often, and I teach almost every day. No substitute.

I have never regretted my choice to become a full time yoga teacher. I have no regrets and no doubts. I don't really know what I'll want in 5 years or 10 years, but I know what I want now, and this is it. It's good stuff.

Questions?!

I'm not even proofreading this post. I want to publish it before I head out to take class, teach class, get dinner at PF Chang's, and see Beauty and the Beast in 3D with the other yoga teachers. :) If there's anything that you think I have left out or got wrong, let me know in the comments and I will post an addendum.

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UPDATE:

Two days later, after many lovely comments and suggestions, here is Part Two!

Try, Try Again!

2012-01-15T11:08:00.000-08:00

As the old saying goes: If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.

This weekend, I once again pulled on my leotard, put on some mascara, and got up on stage to do my 3-minute routine for the local yoga championship. And what do you know, I once again fell out of my favorite posture, the wonderful standing bow pulling pose.

And I really don't mind!

Last year, when this happened, it took me a couple of days to get over it, but this year I started laughing right away. Well, not right away - first I did the rest of my postures (without any problem) and got off the stage. Apparently this one posture just has stage fright. I can do it on a dime pretty much any time, any place. I can do it without warm-up, I can do it outside, I can do it for friends, I can even do it in a workshop with the international champions when everybody is watching me. But it pulls a vanishing act in competition - something about that big empty, quiet room just makes me loose my shit at precisely the wrong moment!

I got much closer this year, though. Last year I couldn't even get my leg up! This year I got my leg almost all the way up - I saw a video and it looked much better than it felt - but then I panicked and stopped kicking, so I fell out. If you lose the balance, you're not kicking hard enough! I am still pleased with my progress. By next year, I feel confident that I will be able to keep my nerve and do the posture in public!

I had a lot of fun preparing for the championships this year. I think I said in my last post, I took a very "come as you are" approach. My philosophy is that you have the whole year to work on your postures, so all you really need to do at the end is put together a routine and refine it a little bit.

I whined and moaned about competing up until about a week ago. Then I started running my routine and realized that it was in decent shape. I don't want to brag, but I did the routine flawlessly (meaning: my personal best) every time I showed it to somebody before the big day. So I decided to quit worrying about the postures and focus on the mental aspect instead. The whole thing is 100% mind over matter. It's actually very interesting to watch one of these events (although I didn't get to watch very much this year). Almost everybody who gets up to compete has amazing postures. So it really is a battle of nerves more than anything else. Who can keep their calm and do their practice under those stressful and intimidating conditions? That is the true yoga! It takes tremendous courage (or as Bikram would say, balls) to get up on stage at all.

Anyway, I prepared for this year's competition by meditating on my routine every day. I would just lay down for a while and visualize the whole thing. I included in this exercise: how do I want to breathe, what do I want to do with my body, and how do I want to feel while I do it. It was really fun! I've never really been "into" meditation before - I would usually either get distracted or fall asleep - but this week I just couldn't get enough of it. And even though I wasn't entirely successful on stage, I don't blame that on the technique. Next year I will prepare the same way, but I will start doing it sooner!

It's been nice to reconnect with all my friends in Baltimore this week. We're all going out one more time tonight for guacamole and margaritas, and then I'm heading back up to Providence tomorrow morning.

Also, my student Lauren competed for the first time this year and she won 3rd place! I am so proud. I had a feeling she was going to place - she nailed her routine and she totally deserved to win. Here is her frigging bow:

NOT ME NOT ME NOT ME

I know right?? I can't say I'm surprised that she did so well, since I am well aware of her talents, but I am very happy for her!

As always, even though I had to drag myself into it kicking and screaming, I'm thrilled that I went through this process. It's a different learning experience every time. You never get it wrong and you never get it done.*

Now I am relieved to return home, put all that crazy competition stuff behind me for a while, and focus on other things. These things will include: going out to dances and meet-ups, trying out the flying trapeze, more cooking and baking, less driving, more local exploring, and continuing to develop a super kick-ass yoga practice. Boo-yah.

Please no sympathy comments. I feel pretty good. :)

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*For those who recognize that sentence from somewhere: you bet I have drank that Kool-Aid!!

Pride and Prejudice, or How I Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Right Side

2012-01-07T09:44:00.000-08:00

In the spirit of progress and renewal - abandoning tired old habits and thought patterns, replacing them with better ones, moving forward into the new year - I am going to make a confession.

I have been guilty of one of the seven deadly sins. Fortunately I am not religious in any way, so I don't expect that this is going to result in an eternity of torment. But your body does respond to your thoughts and emotions - this is a fact - so I think I'd better come clean anyway.

Pride. Pride is my mistake.

I have always been proud of my standing bow posture. (See for example my icon.) Okay, you can see why I'm proud of it - it is, objectively, quite a good posture! (SEE - there it is again, pride.) But you know what? I'm only proud of the left side. I've got pictures of the left side up all over the place - from vacations, from championships, from classes, from teacher training. The earliest one was taken in 2007. The left side is the one I use for my blog picture and for my new profile on the Ocean State Bikram Yoga website. (Which: check it out! I'm official!) But not the right side. Never the right side. Not a single picture exists of that posture on the right side.

Why do I have this prejudice against the right side? You know what? I can't remember. I mean, the left side has always been easier. But in the beginning, it wasn't that big of a difference. Just a small preference, really. Both sides are pretty good. I can lock out on both sides. But sometime in 2007 I started favoring the left side, and I've kept it up ever since.

I've treated left-side-standing-bow like a favorite only child and I've treated right-side-standing-bow like an embarrassing second cousin. Left-side-standing-bow gets showered with gifts - really good ones like iPads - while right-side-standing-bow gets a brick for Christmas. It's like, if I were Petunia Dursley, the left side would be Dudley and the right side would be Harry Potter in the cupboard under the stairs. Poor thing.

So really, my mistakes are pride and prejudice. Aha! Now I have a title for this post!!

I have held this prejudice for going on 5 years now. I mean, why not? I'm just neglecting one half of my body - what could possibly go wrong??

Yeeeeeeah.

I pulled my hamstring last week. In standing bow. On the good side. I was holding the posture (for once), kicking and stretching, equal and simultaneous, 50-50, feeling like everything was good in the world. And then one spot on the bottom of my standing leg thigh went snap. It didn't hurt - it just felt like snapping a rubber band. I didn't even move. All that moved was my brain. My brain said, "ooooooh, shit."

This is not really a big problem - it's just a small pull, I'm being very gentle and taking good care of it (hand on the floor for standing separate leg stretching, no pulling, check), and it should be all healed up in a couple more weeks. Except - except! - I'm signed up for the Maryland regional championships next weekend. I'm competing next Saturday.

You see what this means, right?? I have to do the other side - the "bad side" - on stage in a leotard in front of everybody.

Everything is in divine order!

(It's so irritating when that happens. I get it, I get it, I get the fricking message.)

Incidentally or maybe not, I got some amazing body work done just before Christmas by this guy named Bruce, who is a legend in these parts. He does energy healing (which sounds crazy but I don't know what else to call it) and chiropractic adjustment. This was my first Bruce session and it blew my mind. He's amazing. He looked at my body for a few minutes, barely touched me, and then knew 1) exactly what my problem was and 2) what specific emotion had caused it. The root of the problem was 100% emotional (and no it wasn't pride, it was a different one, I'm not going to say what) and it was fucking up the whole right half of my body. When Bruce named the emotion, I was just like - yup, absolutely. He was spot on. And this was no fuzzy science, this was a very precise emotion. And then the crazier part was that he made it go away. Not 100% cleared, but like 90% better. And then he did lots of fun snapping and popping to put stuff back into place, and at the end my body felt incredible.

And then I pulled my hamstring. Too bad for me! It is all part of the process!!

I'm taking a very "come as you are" approach to this upcoming championship. I've been practicing for it in a sort of half-assed way after class, and I'm sort of hoping that things will magically come together. I'm so not in it to win it, and for me, that's probably better! I'm just gonna go down to Baltimore, see my friends, teach some classes, drag my butt up on stage for 3 minutes, do my seven postures including that beautiful long-neglected right-side standing bow, cheer on my fellow yogis, and then go out for a drink. At least two drinks. I hope I can convince Lauren to drive.

Out with the old, in with the new!

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On a related topic, the New York Times magazine published a somber article last week titled How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body. I read the whole thing. It's long and moderately interesting, but by the time I finished, I still wanted those 10 minutes of my life back.

There have been lots of good comments among the yogis on Facebook, all along the lines of: "Yes, you can get injured in any activity if you follow your ego and don't respect your own limits." Also: "Boy am I glad that we do Bikram!" (Surprisingly, for once, Bikram yoga is not mentioned once in the article, and all the postures that the article complains about are ones that are omitted from our series. Score.)

But the best response, by far, is this blog post by an Astanga yogi titled Reading Blogs Can Wreck Your Body. It is so damn good. You can skip reading the original article and just read this response - it will leave a better taste in your mouth. Check it out!

Turning of the Season

2011-12-31T17:04:00.000-08:00

"Here we come to a turning of the season
Witness to the arc towards the sun."
- The Decemberists

Happy New Year, all! I imagine that some of you have already crossed the line into 2012. I've still got a few more hours left to 2011. I'm heading out pretty soon to take the 10:30pm yoga class - finishing at midnight, of course! - but right now I'm happily relaxing at home with a cup of tea and some good music. (The lines that I put up at the top of this post are the first lines of one of my favorite albums this year.) Just enough time for a blog update!

Compared to 2010, this past year was significantly less dramatic. 2010 was all about change, change, change - finishing/quitting grad school, getting to teacher training, finishing teacher training, moving cross country (again), and starting my new life as a yoga teacher.

This year, I've just kept on that trajectory. If 2010 was a year for change, then 2011 was a year for expansion. It's been a full year of full-time yoga, and it's been fantastic. All together, I must have spent at least 2 months out of the year travelling - weeks of guest teaching in Kentucky, Virginia, Alabama, and Rhode Island, plus a really solid visit to teacher training in Los Angeles, plus the wonderful craziness of Bonnaroo Music Festival (which was definitely a highlight). In between trips, I have been firmly planted in Baltimore (up until recently), just teaching and teaching and doing my thing, trying to learn new things and get better at my craft. I made some wonderful friendships, all over the place but especially in Baltimore, that are sure to last for a very long time. A good year!

There have been some ups and downs, some personal frustrations, but overall it's really been fun.

I think Abraham is totally onto something: "The basis of your life is freedom; the purpose of your life is joy."

(Tangent: Heard of Abraham? Here's the best summary. It is woo-woo as all hell and I'm not sure if I believe half of it, but my god, most of the stuff that comes out of Esther Hick's mouth is just spot on. I get such a kick out of it.)

I know I haven't updated since my move to Rhode Island. If I had to summarize my feelings about my new job/location in two words, they would be: "fucking fantastic." It's great being close to home and close to Boston again. I've seen lots of my Massachusetts yoga family this month, and I hope to see even more Boston people next year! The West Roxbury advanced class Tuesday is back on my permanent schedule, which makes me so happy. (My schedule requests to my new boss Molly were as follows: I need Mondays off completely, Tuesday mornings off for advanced class, and Thursday nights off for swing dance class.) The studio has a permanent staff of four teacher right now (plus a rotating cast of visitors), and three of us are all around the same age and experience level, so we are getting along great. It's like having siblings - we do fun things together like going out to dinner, seeing movies at the mall, and baking a tray full of brownies in the shape of Santa hats for the annual Solstice party. Attendance at the studio has been booming this month, and we all anticipate that January will be even crazier - people around here just can't get enough of the yoga!

So onwards we go into 2012. And if I had to take a guess, I think this year will be more about home. After all the adventuring that I've done in this last year, I really like where I've landed at the end of all of it, and I'd like to stay here for a while. I'm making plans to do crazy things such as leasing my own apartment, one bedroom thank you very much, and buying furniture - my own TV set, my own couch! I know, craziness. I also have plans to make friendships outside of the yoga studio (see for example Thursday nights) and explore all the lovely restaurants that Providence has to offer. I also have a fantasy about rescuing a puppy, but we'll have to see about that one. I seem to have committed to some hang-gliding plans for the summer, so that should be exciting. And yes, I will keep this blog alive!

Best wishes to all for a fun and/or sweaty New Year's Eve and a very happy New Year!

Disperse and Come Back

2011-12-05T14:25:00.000-08:00

The last time I wrote, I was enjoying the scene and sights in Mobile, Alabama. Since then, I feel like I've spent every week unpacking and repacking my bags. I extended my stay in Mobile when another teacher fell sick and got back to Baltimore just in time for a weekend house-sitting gig. Once that finished, I had to immediately pack up all the things in my apartment to make space for my friend Lauren's return. (I had been subleasing from her while she was at teacher training.) Now Lauren and I are sharing her apartment temporarily, although I've only been here for half the time, because I went home to Massachusetts for Thanksgiving just a few days after she got back to Baltimore.

And the big news - might as well say it here at the beginning of the post - is that I'm only going to be in Baltimore for six more days. I'm teaching my last class here (for now) on Saturday morning, then I'm driving up to Philadelphia to spend the weekend with a friend from California, and then on Monday I am driving to my new home in Providence, Rhode Island! And yes, of course I will still be teaching yoga. I'll be at Ocean State Bikram Yoga in Pawtucket, just outside Providence. It's a beautiful new studio that just opened in last summer. I visited as a guest teacher last August and had a great time, and they've been saving a spot for me there ever since Labor Day.

This week is bittersweet. I feel sad about leaving all my great friends and students in Baltimore, but I'm absolutely thrilled to move back up to New England. I grew up in western Massachusetts, I went to college in Cambridge, and I got started on my yoga path in Boston. (Providence is only about an hour from Boston.) By the time I left Boston in 2008, I already knew that I was going to be a Bikram yoga teacher (eventually, in the future). So I have a lot of ties to that area, and it will be amazing to live up there again and be closer to both my families - my parents and my yoga family.

I was living in my first apartment in south Boston - okay, technically Dorchester - when I started thinking like a yoga teacher. I started thinking about the dialogue and the teaching and the students, and I started dreaming about the view from the other side of the podium. I had wonderful supportive teachers at the downtown Boston studio, especially Jill, Brad, and Tomo, and I also started venturing out to the West Roxbury studio where I met Diane, Teri, and so many of the other people who have become my friends and mentors. The teachers let me tag along with them to lunch every week, and I picked up some priceless information at the lunch table over pickles and pizza. I've visited that block on Centre Street almost every time I've gone back to Boston over the past three-and-a-half years, and it's always been a home to me. So yes, I'm happy about this move - I feel like after all these years of wandering and exploring and growing, I finally can go back and be home. At least for a while, until my feet get itchy again!

Meanwhile, the past couple of weeks have been amazing. The best part has been taking class with Lauren. I've probably mentioned her here before. (Let's be honest, I'll talk about her to anyone who stands still for more than a minute.) She was a beginning student of mine just one year ago. She came in with a Groupon and came just a couple times a week. Then I tricked her into signing up for the 60-day challenge, and the next thing I knew, she had turned into a serious, kick-ass yogi! She's lost over 100 pounds with the help of the yoga - it changed her life completely. In June, she decided to become a teacher, and I helped her study dialogue by the pool all summer. This fall, she rocked out teacher training. (Bikram loved her and her amazing backbend.) And on November 23rd, she taught her first class!

At teacher training, people always talk about how you "close the circle" when you teach your first class. Well let me tell you - there's a whole other circle that closes when you first take class from somebody who used to be your student! She's taught 6 classes now, I've taken 3 of them, and each one has been better than the last one. I don't think I've ever been so proud of somebody other than myself! This may be how parents feel. My first yoga baby....

I'm sharing Lauren's apartment right now, so we've been seeing each other constantly. This means I have been hearing all about her teacher training withdrawls! She misses her TT friends so much. I remember what that felt like. All day long I hear, "oh, Tereza commented on my Facebook photo".... "oh, I got a message from Mithu".... "oh, Yael taught 2 classes today".... It is heartbreaking!

But I keep trying to tell her (and she probably doesn't believe it yet, but eventually she'll find out on her own) - she hasn't really lost any of these people. They are still there, and she will see them again.

This is what we do, as Bikram teacher. This is how we are. At teacher training, you learn to live in this giant yoga bubble. You're always surrounded by other yogi, trainees and teachers, from all around the world. And after 9 weeks, you disperse. Everybody catches an airplane, and the group spreads out to all the corners of the world. And it's very sad, when that bubble pops. You feel like you'll never see those friends again.

And then... you see them again. All of our paths criss-cross across the globe. At one time or another, all those connections come back. When I went to Kentucky last summer, I ran into Mike from Malaysia, who now lives in New York. The last time I was in Boston, I saw Ben from Australia in a yoga class. Every time I got back to visit training, I reconnect with other people who I've known - half the staff of this last TT were from my training! Every time I go to a seminar or a master class, I see familiar faces. I have friends and teachers who I only get to see once a year, but I always know where to find them and I know that their doors are always open to me. My friend Teri's rule is, don't even ring the doorbell, just let yourself in. The last time I went to her house, I punched in the door code and harassed her cat until she came back from grocery shopping. It's a family.

This weekend, I went down to D.C. for a couple days of yoga with the international champions, Joseph and Yukari. This was the first time I've met Yukari, but I've known Joseph for years. The funny thing is, I can't remember how I met him. I've seen him at seminar and trainings, and I've seen him compete many times, and at some point I guess I introduced myself or someone introduced me. So now whenever I run into him, once or twice a year, we say "hey!!" and "how are you?!" and have a nice hug. Yoga family!

Lauren came down with me for the advanced class on Sunday, and she couldn't believe that Joseph and Yukari were here in D.C., because she had just met them a couple of weeks ago in LA. All day it was, "I can't believe you're here!" The class was at the Tenleytown studio, where neither of us had ever been, but of course we knew a couple of the teachers there. I knew the owner from a seminar, Lauren knew her son from a posture clinic, and I knew one of the other teachers (Yasmin) from our mutual friend Charlie Hubbard. I even ran into a student who reads my blog - Hilary Glassman, here is your shout-out!

Lauren and I had a couple of great classes - the champs absolutely killed us or maybe we just killed ourselves. They were so gracious and helpful, with lots of tips and encouragement for everybody. Lauren was amazed at how much attention they gave us, how generous they were with their time and energy.

And I just keep telling her - yes. This is how we are. This is our family. Your family, too, now - welcome to the family. Do you understand yet? Can you believe it? I know, it takes some time to sink it. It seems too good to be true. But this is who we are, and this is what we do. Share, teach, grow. We disperse for months and then come back together. You'll see your friends again - and the people who pissed you off, too, you'll probably see them again, and sometimes you'll even see them in a better light the second time around.

The next time I write, I'll probably have left Baltimore already. But Baltimore's been my home for the last year and a half, and now it will always be a home for me. I know which doors to knock on, and believe me, I'll be back. I just need to go back to New England now and have some time with another part of my family. I'm going to meet more students, more teachers, and let my family grow even bigger.

In yoga, you never lose - you only gain.

More later, from the other side of the move!

Our Expanding Universe

2011-11-14T21:52:00.000-08:00

This is a long one. Are you sitting comfortably??

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

On my drive back to the apartment after teaching yoga tonight, I heard a great interview on Fresh Air on NPR. Terry Gross was interviewing an astrophysicist named Saul Perlmutter who just last month was (jointly) awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. His team does research on supernovae and the expansion of the universe. (Kind of like my little sister. No really, she is a Ph.D. student in astrophysics.)

Anyway, this Perlmutter guy was doing some research on the rate of expansion of the universe. Everyone know that the universe is expanding, right? It has been expanding since the Big Bang. And according to logic and intuition, that expansion ought to be slowing down due to the effect of gravity - stuff attracts other stuff. Perlmutter's team set out to measure how quickly this expansion was slowing down, which seemed like a cool project. But once they got the data and crunched the numbers, they found the opposite of what they had expected. The expansion isn't slowing down - it's speeding up.

This is a cool result which certainly deserves the Nobel Prize, but the really funny part is how nobody can explain exactly why the universe is expanding at a faster and faster rate. There are lots of theories, all involving something called "dark energy" which basically - to my understanding - fills up the empty spaces in the universe and is multiplying. I think there must be a Doctor Who episode in there somewhere.

In my favorite part of the interview, Terry Gross asked Saul Perlmutter what the physics community would do if they ended up disproving some theory or law that had previously been validated. What if, for example, they found that part of Einstein's theory has been wrong and they had to go back and revisit it? Now, until this point in the interview, Perlmutter had come across as the type who doesn't really get out much - he spoke with the sort of halting, breathless speech pattern of either a non-native English speaker or a total geek. (Possibly he is both.) But when Terry asked him that question - what if something we "knew" was true turned out to be wrong? - he answered with the enthusiasm of a little kid:

"That would be our favorite thing!"

He went on to say how wonderful and exciting it would be for all the physicists if one of their theories were proven wrong, because then they could go back to the original problem "and get another crack at it."

What a fantastic worldview, right?

Now back to me (in case you are wondering where I am going with this). I was not listening to this broadcast while driving my little Toyota Corolla around a city in the northeast, as you'd expect. I was listening to NPR on the Mississippi Public Broadcast, in Mobile, Alabama, driving around after yoga class in a big Ford pick-up truck.

Let's talk about questioning assumptions and changing worldviews. Because I am a bleeding-heart liberal hippie, lifelong vegetarian, born and bred in Massachusetts, blue-state registered Democrat, city girl since age 17, and a goddamn professional yoga teacher, and I just discovered that Alabama is friggin' great!

If you would like a soundtrack for this part of the post, here is a video of the band from St. Louis that I saw live at an Irish Social Club in midtown last night.

Now here are some things that have been awesome in Alabama!

- Went with studio owner Lucille, her husband Bill, and fellow teacher Devra to a first-Friday-of-the-month Art Walk in downtown Mobile. (Which by the way is pronounced Mo-BEEL, as in "automobile," not mobile as in "mobile phone.") Downtown Mobile is actually pretty cool, and the city has clearly put a lot of work into sprucing it up and making it an attractive place to visit. Lots of pretty lights and cool old building with intricate ironwork. Lots of local art and small bars. One really kick-ass chocolate shop, as well as a roasted peanut shop a little farther down the street, right across from the independent movie theatre which apparently serves beer - payment is on the "honor system." There was an art exhibit called "Paper Cuts" where everything was made out of hand-cut paper, and it pretty much blew my mind.

- We ate dinner that night at a restaurant called The Bike Shop. It used to be a bike shop, and in fact there are bikes hanging from the ceiling and I think you can still buy a bike there. Now they sell delicious Mexican food, and you can also order off the sushi menu from the Japanese place next door. Huge beer list, and I got lucky that they had my choice on tap. Delicious huevos rancheros.

- The scenery, of course, is beautiful. Big old houses, giant oaks and magnolias, and there are some great drives that go right along the Gulf of Mexico.

- Some of these radio stations are way better than the pretentious hipster one that I listen to in Baltimore. There are some good mix stations and MPB plays some awesome bluegrass and jazz on the weekends! And come on, we are just a stone's throw away from New Orleans.

- Great used book store - got three nearly-new books for $18. Some Sherlock Holmes, the first book in Song of Fire and Ice, and a non-fiction collection from the author of Fight Club.

- I don't eat (much) seafood, but I learned that the blue crabs that they get on this part of the gulf coast are the same ones that Baltimore is known for! They are only found in two places in the country - Baltimore, and here! Although 'round here I don't think they soak them in Old Bay seasoning.

- I had one of the best vegetarian sandwiches I've ever had in my life at the Mediterranean sandwich shop downtown. Grilled vegetable gyro with hummus and feta cheese, in fresh pita bread. For like 7 bucks. I could eat that every week. Also found another Mediterranean place that did a great Sunday buffet. Also ate at a Waffle House, just because.

- On Sunday afternoon I went to a Renaissance Faire, of all things! It was right near the Jersualem Cafe where I had lunch with Lucille and Devra, and one of the yoga students had mentioned it to me that morning. So I paid my $10 admission fee and spent the next few hours wandering around the fairgrounds being deeply entertained. Little kids whacking at knights with a stick, belly dancers, arts and crafts, lots of real swords, fried gator on a stick, an actual jousting tournament, homemade root beer, the best fire show I have ever seen, and also - for some reason - camel rides. Here is a sentence I just never expected to hear: "Why don't you want to go with Bubba and them on the camel?" Great mixture of accents - about 80% Southern accents, with the remaining 20% talking like they're in a Game of Thrones episode and shouting "Huzzah!!"

Have you run out of music yet? Here is another track.

Pokey LaFarge & The South City Three "La La Blues" from Filipe Bessa on Vimeo.

- The music you are listening to is by Pokey LaFarge and the South City Three. I saw them play on Sunday night at a neighborhood hangout spot called Callaghan's Irish Social Club. It really is a social club - it's the spot where everyone who lives in the neighborhood hangs out. They have live music at least once a week, and everyone knows everyone. I mean, I ended up hanging out with a woman named Lisa (friend of a friend), and she could pretty much say "hi" to everyone who walked by. It was a tiny place and super cool - wouldn't have been out of place in South Boston. Lots of friendly people, and I loved the music. I ended up chatting outside with Mr. Pokey LaFarge for 5 minutes during the band's break, and it turns out they had just come down from a tour in the northeast. Besides playing the Newport Folk Festival, they'd also played the Iron Horse in Northampton (about 10 minutes from the house where I grew up) and they'd played (wait wait don't tell me) Club Passim in Cambridge. We had a fun chat and I explained to Pokey about Smoots. (This is an MIT/Boston thing - look it up.) He is from St. Louis, but his band has been touring all over and they were loving the vibe in Mobile. I told him about the Bike Shop and the sandwich place.

- After the band finished, I ended up going along with Lisa and a few other women to a late-night place downtown. Two of these girls, Elizabeth and Tracy, were recently married - to each other! Tracy told me all about it at Callaghan's - they had a ceremony down here in Mobile, and she said that everyone was a little "curious" about what the wedding would be like, but they just did it "really traditional." They had to go up to NYC to get legally married, so that was their honeymoon. They love the south. "The only bad part is that it's pretty conservative, but everything else is great!" We all piled into Elizabeth's Prius and went out for drinks, dancing, more music, and pool. There was one guy at the bar who kept trying to grind with all the girls on the dance floor, and Elizabeth just went up and started dirty dancing all over the place with him (she was a great dancer), just totally winding him up, to the great amusement of all the spectators, which only got better when Tracy stormed through like "What the f**k?! My wife is dancing with an asshole!" and then went outside for a cigarette.

Oh yeah, and I have taught some yoga out here, too! The yoga studio - Bikram Hot Yoga Mobile - is absolutely gorgeous. It's a pretty new studio, so the classes are pretty small, but the people who do practice here are totally serious about it. They're really good. Lots of the students here have lived and practiced in other parts of the country, but the hot yoga concept is slowly catching on with the locals, too. Everyone is friendly and welcoming, and they are happy that I am enjoying their city!

I started off this post by talking about our expanding universe. And all this was just to say, my universe is continuing to expand. My universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. Exploring this city has been like a treasure hunt. I keep discovering these unexpected gems all over the place. This isn't even the full list. I'm still here for three more days.

I had plenty of vague assumptions and stereotypes about "The South", and most of them have been proven wrong. I mean, there is still plenty of conservatism and religion. There are some gigantic churches, and each day I drive past this sign that says:

JESUS DIED FOR YOU
WHAT HAVE YOU
DONE FOR HIM

which is just deliciously aggressive and Southern. But still, I'm driving through these tree-lined streets in the big old Ford, listening to bluegrass, on my way to the chiropractors office, and I'm having a great time. It's just like Sean Perlmutter, our physics Nobel Laureate, said on the radio. What if something you "knew" to be true were proven wrong? "That would be our favorite thing!" Because then you get to start from scratch and rediscover it all.

I am discovering Alabama for the first time and it is just my favorite thing.

See you Friday, Baltimore!

Life Is _______?

2011-11-06T16:55:00.000-08:00

There's a popular quote by Helen Keller that says "Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing." With apologies to Hellen Keller, I just have to say that life is a fucking blast! What a trip!

I just feel like sometimes I'm having way too much fun.

Examples:

- I got to visit teacher training, run around LA for a couple weeks, and teach class to 400+ people a couple weeks ago. That was very exciting and hasn't quite worn off.

- We are having a beautiful fall in Baltimore and I've just been driving around the back roads with the windows down admiring the colors and listening to an awesome mix CD that my friend Liam made for me when we were visiting training.

- I invented an awesome crockpot recipe for pumpkin curry and it came out great. Before everyone asks, the ingredients that I used are: one sugar pumpkin, 2 cans chickpeas, 1 can tomatoes, 1 onion, some garlic cloves, curry spices, and coconut milk. Basically just saute the onions and garlic in oil for 5 minutes, add the spices, then throw everything except the milk in the crockpot and leave it all day. Then add the milk. It is super delicious.

- One of my best friends came down from Philly and my sister came up from College Park, and we had an awesome evening last night. Went out for sushi, then discovered a Greek festival at the church up the street. Drank ouzo and danced to the live band with all the Greeks. Then went back home when we couldn't stand up anymore and watched the Princess Bride. This is my idea of a perfect weekend.

- Bought a plane ticket to go down to Mobile, Alabama on Tuesday to teach for a week. Just because they had a need, and just for fun. I've never been to Alabama and I am excited! I'll be teaching with my good friend Lucy, who I met ages ago through her wonderful blog. I've never bought a plane ticket on such short notice - only 6 days in advance - and it makes me feel very free and spontaneous.

- Taught a billion classes as usual. Lots of beginners, some of them even more hysterically funny than usual. Very enthusiastic, too - makes my day.

- In between teaching classes today, went out for brunch at favorite restaurant and wandered through the shops in my neighborhood. Had interesting chat with a couple of old guys in an antique store when I walked past and heard one of them say to the other: "Have you ever seen the Mahabharat?" Attempted to see Chef Gordon Ramsay, who is at a restaurant across the street shooting Kitchen Nightmares.

- SAW CHEF RAMSAY!! After teaching class! Stood on the corner with a bunch of neighborhood kids and tried to watch through the windows. Eventually he came out and we got to see him up close! He was super sweet with the kids. He went up to them all mock scary - "Don't you kids have homework to do?" He is fucking gorgeous in person. One of the little girls asked if she could take a picture with him, and he said "Yes, of course." Immediately after the picture was taken, the girl started SOBBING with happiness. It made my night! Hoping to see him again tomorrow and actually shake his hand! He is a very sweet man - his production assistant calls him a "cupcake."

All in all, just way too much fun.

One of the other teachers at my studio was telling me this week, "I'm just so happy every morning when I wake up and I'm pain free!" (She's been practicing for years, but lately she's had some real breakthrough and is now in the best shape of her life.) I told her, "Yeah, I know what you mean - I'm happy every morning when I wake up and I'm a yoga teacher!"

And I mean, it's not like everything is sunshine and roses, 24 hours a day. Sometimes I'm tired, sometimes I'm sore, sometimes I get frustrated or bored with certain things. Blah blah blah. But overall? I just feel like I have some good karma going on and anything can happen. Life is a fucking riot and I am just happy to be here for it.

Now I must finish my pumpkin curry, eat some pumpkin ice cream, watch another episode of True Blood, and set my alarm for 4:55am. That's the wake-up call for teaching the 6am yoga - UGH!! So early! But hell, I don't really mind. Even with the shitty early morning parts, I wouldn't trade this life for the world.

Teaching the Big Room

2011-10-23T18:41:00.000-07:00

As posted earlier today (here), Friday was a big day for me. I taught a class at teacher training for the first time! Excitement! And I know that everyone just has one question - How was it?

It was awesome.

Oh, you want more detail than that? Okay.

It was really awesome.

Sorry, sorry. I do have quite a lot to say, and I will get to it in just a second. But in all seriousness, teaching a big class like that - or teaching any class, for that matter - is an experience that defies description. There's nothing to compare it to. Have you ever stood up on an 8-foot tall stage in a chandelier-filled hotel ballroom, looking down on 398 sleep-deprived trainees, and told them, from the side you should look like a Japanese ham sandwich? You have?! Great, then you know exactly what it's like! Oh, wait - you said that you haven't? Well, then, I've got nothing. There's nothing in the world that's quite the same.

I will, however, give you a bit of a breakdown. I'm going to go behind the curtain a little bit - "breaking the fourth wall," as they say.

First, I must say that it was a huge honor and privilege to teach the class. To everyone who thanked me throughout the day on Friday and told me "great class," thank you all, each and every one of you. I wish I could hug you all, again.

Was I nervous? Oh hell yes. I got a phone call at 8:30pm on Thursday telling me that I was scheduled to teach at 8:30am on Friday, and I proceeded to quietly freak out for 12 hours straight. I don't even think I slept - I just lay in bed with my eyes closed and pretended to be super relaxed. (I stopped feeling nervous at approximately 8:34am, when the class actually got going.)

I was also excited and confident, because I had a plan. I decided to set low expectations and manageable goals. My first goal was "don't throw up and don't fall off." That was actually my mantra for the better part of Friday morning. Whenever another teacher asked me if I was nervous or excited, I told them, "I'm just going to try not to throw up or fall off the podium!"

I did not throw up or fall off the podium. Goal number one: achieved!!!

My next plan was "smile and say the dialogue," because those are the two things that I am good at. Know your strengths, right? This plan may appear simple and obvious, but I did actually put some thought into it.

(This is about to get slightly technical and teacher-y, but bear with me.)

See, in a normal class situation, I am teaching a class that is completely based on the dialogue. Most of the words that come out of my mouth are straight from the dialogue. But on top of that, I try to do a lot of individual corrections and explanations, which is where the real teaching comes in. I've spent the last year building up my ability to interact with the room and give corrections/instructions from within the structure of the dialogue.

For teacher training, I had a hunch (which turned out to be 100% correct) that I would not be able to see the room the way I normally do. In a class of 5 people, I can pretty much see everything. In a class of 20 people (normal size), I can scan every body in the room in every posture. In a class of 40 people (big), I don't see everyone all the time, but I know exactly where my "hot spots" are (the beginners, the newbies, the experienced students who need extra attention) and I can still keep a good handle on the room. In a class of 400?!? All of that shit is out the window! I have no idea how to keep an eye on 400 people at once, let alone assess how they are doing and who needs attention.

Hence, the plan - just smile and say the dialogue.

I played it totally textbook - might have been back in posture clinic! - and I think that was a good choice and a huge success. I got resoundingly positive feedback from all of the trainees, all along the lines of "it was so nice to meditate on the dialogue," "that really helped me study," and "thank you for the straight-up dialogue."

The trainees were also really happy to have somebody smile at them, since they've had a lot of people yelling at them. I can get tough if I need to, but man, they were freaking exhausted - end of week five, shit is hitting the fan in posture clinics, Bikram had them up late the night before - and they just needed somebody to be nice to them. Nice is my default setting. No problem. A lot of trainees later told me that they would have sat out, fallen asleep, or left the class if I hadn't been giving them positive energy. (Now to be fair, plenty of people still did sit out of postures, but what do you expect? In a class of 20, you might have 2 or 3 people sitting out of a posture. Scale that up to a class of 400. Adjust for sleep deprivation.) I pretty much just plowed along and kept the class moving, with various forms of encouragement (mostly in the less-than-creative form of "good! second set!")

Smile and say the dialogue. Goal number two: achieved!!!

So those were the goals. And once I got up on the podium, I managed to have a lot of fun. I spent all of pranayama telling myself to relax and breathe. That was the mantra in the back of my head the whole class - keep talking, relax, and breathe. I actually saw the room much more than I'd anticipated, although it was still a lot like being a brand new teacher. (All new teachers are blind.) I couldn't take in the whole room at once, but I did have a sense of its energy. I saw lots of individual bodies around me, I recognized trainees from the posture clinics, and I was able to call out some names. That was honestly more than I had expected to do - I was mentally prepared for total new-teacher blindness, which thankfully never happened. And I could see the group doing postures together, which was totally, totally different - visually different, I mean - from anything I've experience in my career. It was really cool and I'm dying to see it again.

There was one posture where I really wanted to teach, and that was cobra, for a lot of reasons. It's a widely misunderstood posture. I'd heard Bikram yelling at the trainees about it all week, and I'd heard other visiting teachers tweak it in slightly the wrong direction, so I knew that a lot of trainees still didn't get it. And they had just finished learning the dialogue for wind-removing pose, so they were about to spend their whole weekend studying cobra. So I thought - aha! This is a perfect opportunity to clarify something about cobra.

Here is the point that I made, in between the first and second sets of cobra. The dialogue says, "distribute the body weight all over the hand-palms, equally the same." This means that all of the body weight should stay in the palms of the hands - that's how you get your chest up so your elbows are at a 90 degree angle. Even if you're really flexible and strong, you still need to keep the weight on the palms of your hands - that's how you work your upper back and get your shoulders down. It's not "a little bit" or "10%" or "cheating" - these are common misconceptions - it's all of your body weight on your palms. I told them exactly this, and I think that some of them were awake and listening, because they did it better in the second set. And a couple of people mentioned it specifically after the class. It was the only posture that anyone - teacher or trainee - mentioned in their feedback.

I am thrilled about that. Because I really felt like I was out on a limb there, standing up on the big stage and saying, you don't understand this pose. It was the only time in that class when I deliberately took a risk - the rest of the time, I was absolutely playing it safe. Next time I teach one of those classes - oh please let there be a next time! - I want to take more risks like that.

Here is a testament to how nervous I was: after the second set of rabbit pose - that's 10 minutes from the end of class - I suddenly found myself thinking, "Oh thank god, I'm going to make it!!!" I haven't had that thought since my first week.

And here is a testament to how awesome it was: I was high as a kite for like 3 days. Especially walking around on Friday afternoon. Trainees, you guys made me feel like a celebrity. It was like Christmas, Chanukah, and my birthday all at the same time. That kind of fame is fleeting, for sure, but it was an awful lot of fun! Thank you all for being so kind to me.

In closing, this YouTube video sums up my feelings.

I feel happy of myself! Thumbs up, everybody! For rock and roll!

The Big Room

2011-10-23T11:38:00.000-07:00

See that little person way up on the podium?

Yeah, that's me. :)

This is my big news for the week/month/year: I taught a class at teacher training on Friday morning! It was awesome. I'm still pretty high from it. There are almost 400 trainees in this class, plus the room can accommodate a couple hundred visiting teachers, staff, and guests. These pictures don't even capture the scale of it. These teacher training rooms aren't just big, they are huge. The room is 13 rows deep, and about 3x as wide. That's why the podium is so tall. Huge. Yoga. Room.

I am going to write a nice long post about what it was like to teach the class, so check back later. I just wasted a whole bunch of time messing around with my blog layout to make the text area wider, which resulted in a bunch of other changes, so let me know if it looks okay.

Postcards from the Edge of the Bubble

2011-10-16T23:14:00.000-07:00

Alright folks.... this is just a quick dispatch from the yoga bubble in Los Angeles!

I'm right in the middle of my (hopefully!) annual visit to the Bikram Yoga Teacher Training. This is my second time visiting. I graduated Spring '10, went back to visit the Fall '10 training in San Diego, and now I am back exactly one year later to visit the Fall '11 training in Los Angeles. I got here last Wednesday afternoon - the middle of the 4th week, for those who are keeping track - and I will be here for all of week five. Woohoo!

Here's the tally so far:

Classes taken: 6. (I skipped the Thursday night class, but then took the Saturday make-up class because one of my friends from my training was teaching. Eddieeeeee!)

Classes with Emmy: 1, hurrah. "Don't just wave your leg around in the air. What are you doing?"

Classes with Bikram: None yet.

Bikram sightings: 1 brief. I did have the chance to say hi and give him a hug.

Anatomy lectures: Er.... some. Learned some good stuff but also took advantage of the "come and go" option. Ah, the luxury of being a visiting teacher.

Free chiropractic adjustments: 1, awesome. Lumbar spine goes pop. My right hip is now in its socket correctly for the first time in some while.

Bollywood movies: None. Again, the luxury of being a visiting teacher. The trainees had one late Bollywood night and they were pissed.

Visits to Traders Joe and/or Ralphs: Approximately 10. (Feels like.) Both are walking distance from hotel! Win!

Chocolate-covered peanut butter pretzels eaten: 1 bag.

Beaches visited: 2. Malibu Beach and Manhattan Beach. Great success, very windy. Still have sand in hair. Saw about 20 kite surfers - very cool.

Let's see. This post is not very profound. The profundity will come later, once I get back home and process everything. I do have to say that it is great to be here meeting all the trainees! A bunch of blog readers have come and introduced themselves to me ("Are you the Dancing J??") and that is super awesome. Keep doing that. Actually, if you're a trainee, quit reading this blog and go study triangle pose. This one could be a long week. Don't ask me, I don't know anything, I just have a hunch!

I will also say that one year, for me, makes a big difference. When I first revisited training in 2010 (blog post here), it was kinda rough. By "rough," I mean "totally weird and confusing" and "I had no idea what the fuck I was supposed to do." But the second time around feels much better. I've spent enough time teaching now - and not just teaching, but also giving feedback, getting feedback, and spending time with senior teachers - that I actually feel like I can offer something beyond a friendly face. I feel much more comfortable on the other side of the notebook. I actually led a posture clinic room on my second day here - a prospect which I found frankly terrifying - and it was fine. It was actually quite fun! Challenging, for sure, but fun. To my own surprise, I found that I had a good amount of helpful feedback to offer and I was able to give said feedback without blabbering like an idiot. (Lessons learned from the last time around: talk slowly, be clear and specific, don't scare the children.) We polished off balancing stick, did ALL of standing separate leg stretching, and finished up with 3 triangles! (It was an afternoon clinic.) The students are doing great and it feels good to be involved in their "process."

That's enough for now. I may be opting out from some of the sleep deprivation, but I suspect that I will still be working hard this week. More later... reflections and pictures will come next week!

P.S. For all the TT blog junkies, I refer to you Brian Keith's blog. It is fantastic! I met him this week and he is such a good guy. (Brian, I hope we will chat more this week if you're not dead on your feet!) And his sidebar has a complete index of all the Fall '11 blogs. Eat your hearts out.

"Really Into Suffering" - Or Not

2011-10-08T18:33:00.000-07:00

I spent last weekend camping and hiking out in Shenandoah National Park, in the mountains of Virginia. It was absolutely beautiful out there - crisp mountain air, wonderful hiking trails, hardly any crowds, leaves just starting to turn orange. I went with a friend and my sister and we had a great weekend.

We also had a cold weekend. It was much colder than we'd expected - we were prepared for it to be down into the 50's or 40's at night, but it clearly went down into the low 30's, because we woke up on Sunday morning and saw snow. When we made camp on Saturday night, it was cold, rainy, and windy. It took us ages to get our fire started, and the wind actually blew some rain up the side vents and into our tents, so that everything was covered with a thin layer of water. Long story short, it was the coldest sleeping experience ever. It would have been fine with a nice all-weather sleeping bag, but we only brought our mid-weight sleeping bags, and the sleeping bags got wet on the inside. Oh, and we pitched our tents on a slight hill. So my friend and I spent the night with our sleeping bags pressed up side-by-side, trying to keep warm and trying not to roll down the hill. It was totally worth it, but man was it cold!

A few days ago, I was in the yoga studio parking lot before class trying to organize my sleeping bag and tent (which had been hastily flung into the backseat of my car when we broke camp on Sunday morning). I got talking with one of my students, Hugh, who was also there early. Hugh is totally into camping, so he was interested to know where I had gone and how it was.

I told Hugh about our lovely cold-weather camping adventure, and he said, Hmm. It sounds great, but his kids probably would not like it. He has two young boys - ages 7 and 10, I think - and he wanted to take them somewhere over the weekend. But, he said, the boys were not fans of cold-weather camping because "they are not really into suffering."

I thought that was great - hilarious and to-the-point - and for some reason, it stuck in my head. I've been thinking about those words for the last few days, trying to unpack the implications. Little kids, we have decided, are not really into suffering. What about the rest of us? Are we really into suffering?

Well, yes. Kind of. I mean, we don't really like it when it's going on, but we sure love to brag about it as soon as it's finished! We come back home, out of the cold, and we just love to tell our friends how it was so cold. Back in Shenandoah, on Sunday, we hiked up to a summit called Mary's Rock and literally sat in clouds of snow. There were six other hikers up there at the same time - three 11-year-old boys and three middle-aged men. (All of them were awesome.) As we climbed back down, out of the wind and snow, one of the adults grinned at me and said, "This will really be something to tell them at the office on Monday!" Snow hiking! We get bad-ass wilderness points. We get bragging rights. Sweet!

In hot yoga class, people do this all the time, especially the new folks. They're proud of themselves for surviving - and rightly so! - and they run right out to tell their friends about it. I remember one lady who valiantly struggled through her first class. After the class, while recovering in the lobby, she asked me how hot the room had been and how many people had been in the class - she wanted to text her daughter to brag about what she'd just endured. Adorable.

Almost everybody does this, at least to some extent. It's not limited to newbies, either. Bikram junkies - you know who you are - we have all done this at some point. After the brutal class, there is the Facebook status update: "Forty people in class today, 70% humidity, only sat out once." Go, you! (Yes, of course I have done this. I probably wouldn't even sit down.) There's also the overachiever version: "Just did 10 classes in a row - without drinking any water!" And the teacher training version: "175 degrees in the yoga room, fingers and toes went numb after eagle pose, girl behind me puked, and half the class left the room including Bikram." Ohgod. Really? Are we really proud of this?

It sure is fun to glorify our suffering sometimes, and it's totally fine and normal - up to a point - but is this really a great idea?

Hugh's two little boys are "not really into suffering," and this seems like a more reasonable approach. Even Bikram says it, in his book: "You don't have to be a hero or a martyr." Just do the best you can, one class at a time.

Here's the other interesting part. The more we pay attention to our own suffering - you know, ohgod ohgod, I'm done, I'm dying, fuck all these turtles, stick a fork in me, I'm done - the more we actually suffer. I'm not against some creative internal cursing in class - that actually helps. But if you clutch onto your suffering too tightly, you can prolong it. If you lie on your mat chanting, it's too hot, it's too hot, it's too hot, you might not even notice it when the room cools down. You'll miss out on the relief. You can create a whole world of suffering for yourself inside your head. In the meantime, reality might be doing something completely different. The teacher may have taken pity and turned the thermostat down when you weren't looking. Anything can happen!

It's all about noticing what's actually happening. Don't get stuck inside your head.

Here's an example which I've just been dying to use. In the dialogue for fixed firm, near the beginning, there's a line about the knees and feet. "If your knees or feet hurt, you can open your knees." [Yes, dialogue nerds, I am fixing the typo.] One of the teachers at my studio has changed the line just ever so slightly. (Unintentional, I'm sure.) This teacher now says: "If you have any knee or foot pain, you can open your knees."

Now, this is so nit-picky that I feel bad about even bringing it up, but I see a big difference between those two lines. If you ask someone, "Do your knees hurt?" - that's the correct version - you are asking them to assess their present situation. The word "now" is implied. Do your knees hurt now? But if you ask someone, "Do you have any knee pain?" that is a totally different question. That isn't a question about now. That is a question about a person's history. That will make the person think about how her knees felt this morning, yesterday, last week, last month, last year. Any knee pain? Yeah, in February my knee really bothered me. Guess I'd better not do this posture. Whoops. Wrong question.

Your body is different every day. And if you're paying attention, you can see differences from day to day. Your past suffering doesn't matter, is not relevant. Do your knees hurt now? The answer can change, but only if you're asking the right question.

As Bikram likes to say: "Don't listen to your fucking brain!" (I love that.) Your brain may be totally into suffering. Your body might tell you a different story.

My teachers in New England pointed out something really cool to me last month - something that I had already witnessed, but hadn't completely noticed yet. As a teacher, I know that everyone comes into class with a different story. Some people aren't too concerned about their stories - they just get in there and do the class as well as they can. Some people are really concerned about their stories - they can't do the class without telling the teacher a laundry list of their (perfectly normal) aches and pains.

Which students do better in the class? Well, by now I'm sure you can guess. (If you think about it, it's obvious.) The ones who are constantly retelling their tales of woe will have a hard time. They tend to give up pretty early in the game. But the ones who are open-minded and give it a fair try will end up telling a totally different story. A new story. A story that starts with these words: "I used to." As in: "You know, I used to have so much back pain that I couldn't put on underwear, but now I am wearing underwear again!" That's a true story.

Absolutely wonderful.

The lesson, I think, is simple. Pay attention to your body, take care of yourself, but don't be attached to your suffering. Don't glorify it. Just let that story go. Before too long, you'll have a new story to tell.

"I used to...."

Without a Doubt

2011-09-25T17:13:00.000-07:00

I used to agonize over decisions. I'd rather see one clear course of action than two possibilities that both looked good. Never mind choosing between a rock and a hard place; I'd be stressed out if I had to choose between a water mattress and a feather bed. Two great internship opportunities? Two suitable apartments available on Craigslist? Two careers to choose between?! In that last example (which refers to grad school vs. yoga, by the way) it only took me two years to figure my shit out, and I worried about it the whole time.

Before I went to teacher training, I hadn't even decided what I would do with myself when I got my certificate. I knew that I wanted to teach full-time, but when, where, and how? Should I stay in Santa Barbara and try to make it work as a California yogi, driving up and down the coast to different studios, popping in to see Bikram on Saturday mornings, trying to convince other teachers in Santa Barbara that they really ought to have a look at that dialogue? Should I go overseas? Should I pull up roots and make a fresh start? What should I do?

And then one day, I woke up and realized that I knew the answer. Of course I was going to move. I was going to find a studio owner who I trusted and move to wherever she happened to live. Of course. There was never a question.

Three months later, Baltimore. Decide what to be, and go be it.

Since then, I haven't really had trouble making big decisions.

You know how, when you are trying to make a tough decision, people tell you that you should "sleep on it"? That's pretty great advice. When you sleep, your subconscious does its best thinking. With your conscious mind out of the way, your brain pulls apart strands of information, rewires the data, and makes new connections. If you ever take a look at the science of sleep and dreams, it's incredible how much activity your brain accomplishes when you are drooling onto your pillow. Your subconscious is smart as hell and it can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you if you give it a chance.

But when I'm trying to make a decision these days, I don't sleep on it. I practice on it.

This works.

Sometimes, the best way to find an answer just this: get in a hot room, listen to someone else's voice for 90 minutes, sweat your brains out, balance, stretch, and twist. Do this until you've completely forgotten the question. By the time you remember what your question was, you'll already know the answer.

In the yoga room, the right way is the hard way. In life, not always. I think that the "right way" is usually just the way that feels right. The right decision is the one that makes you feel peaceful and happy. When you can get your mind to settle down and step out of the way, it's simple to notice how you feel and figure out what that tells you.

It also helps to understand that there are no mistakes, not really. Even if there are two roads diverging in a wood, who can say that they won't come back to the same place? Maybe one of them is just the scenic route.

Or as it says in my beloved little Zen cookbook:

Everything is leading you, pushing you,

instructing you, bugging you to supreme,

perfect enlightenment. This means

there are no mistakes. You might do it

differently next time, but that's because

you did it this way this time.

I paraphrased from this in my yoga class this morning, because I really love it. It reminds me of that bit in How Yoga Works when the girl teacher says that, in order to do a yoga pose right, you first have to do it a thousand times slightly wrong (though not if your teacher has already corrected you). It's all part of - dare I say it? - the process. Doubt has nothing to do with it.

You already know what to do.

Planet Bikram

2011-09-14T09:49:00.000-07:00

Just in case you missed this...

I was reading the news online yesterday (at the crack of dawn while I was waiting for my 6am students to show up) and I saw an arresting article from the UK Telegraph.

It appears that astronomers have discovered a second planet that is in the right zone to support life. (The first was discovered in 2007.) It's in what they call the "Goldilocks zone" - not too hot and not too cold for the presence of liquid water, which is a prerequisite for life as we know it.

"But," the article says, "its hot sticky conditions mean it would be likely to feel like a steam bath and an uncomfortable place for humans." The temperatures range from 85 - 120F and the air is humid.

Holy crap.

WE'VE DISCOVERED PLANET BIKRAM.

Forget about the 747 taking off - we need to commandeer a space ship and go colonize ourselves a planet! Unfortunately it's 35 light years away, so it's gonna take us some time to get there, but at least yogis are patient. Right?

The planet is also more massive than Earth, so any life forms would probably be "shorter and squatter." Bikram is not a tall guy. Insert your own joke here.

Yay for Planet Bikram. I'm so delighted.

Full article is here.

Chance in a Million

2011-09-09T11:38:00.000-07:00

Here is a strange but true story.

I spent the end of August and beginning of September guest-teaching at the lovely new Ocean State Bikram Yoga in Providence, Rhode Island. I taught plenty of classes, had a great visit with Diane up in Massachusetts, went to the Salisbury Reservation with Teri, went to the Horseneck Reservation by myself, and spent "hurricane day" watching three consecutive Harry Potter movies with a fellow yoga teacher. It was a great visit.

I drove back to Baltimore on Tuesday and it rained. The whole way. (In fact, several days later it is still raining and there's some sort of "flood watch.")

It sucked.

But! There was a bright spot in the middle of that shitty 9 hour drive.

As I was driving down the New Jersey Turnpike (in a light drizzle, rather than a torrential downpour), in the middle lane, minding my own business, the car in the left hand lane started swerving into the center as if he was going to cut me off. Thinking "this fucking idiot is trying to kill me," I beeped my horn several times to say "hey! I'm driving here, don't kill me." The car keeps swerving over and I keep beeping my horn. As the car pulls ahead to pass me, I look over to see the driver waving his hand in the air and grinning at me like a lunatic.

BALWAN?!?

It was somebody I knew. A friend of mine from Los Angeles who works at the Bikram Yoga Headquarters and helps out with the teacher trainings. His name is Balwan, and in addition to being an utter fucking lunatic, he is a good friend of mine.

Who - did I mention? - lives in LA, and therefore had NO business driving around the Jersey Turnpike in a car with Pennsylvania plates at 2pm on a Tuesday.

So anyway, Balwan passes me and pulls into the center lane. I switch lanes and drive past HIM to make sure my eyes haven't deceived me. Sure enough, I look over as I pass and there is Balwan. Waving and grinning. I grinned and waved back, and finished passing him. Then he came by and passed me again. (More waving.) We repeated this duet several times.

Then I reached for my cell phone and called his number. He picked up right away.

"What the fuck are you doing here?!"

"Juliana!! We should stop for a second!"

"I thought you were some asshole who was trying to kill me!"

"Yes! I had to get your attention!"

Sigh. "What are you doing here??"

"Oh! Ah - we should stop for a second!"

Okay, okay. I wanted to stop at one of the service stations, but those are few and far between, and Balwan (having come to New Jersey from India by way of Beverly Hills) does not really understand about toll roads. So we ended up exiting the turnpike, paying the toll, and driving to the nearest gas station we could find.

"Aaaaiiiieeeee!!!'

"Aaaahhhhhhh!!!"

We had a big hug in the rain and went into the gas station to talk for a second. I couldn't really stay, since I had to teach a class at 5:00, but neither could he, since he had a flight out of Philly at 4:30. (It was already like 2:00.)

Make long story short, Balwan was visiting a friend in Philadelphia for two days. While he was on the east coast, he decided to go up to teach at class at the Bikram studio in New Haven, Connecticut. Then he had to drive back down to catch his plane. So while I was driving from Rhode Island to Maryland, he was driving from Connecticut to Pennsylvania.

I asked him if he had recognized me by my car (which is the same one that I drove in California) or by my bumper sticker (which says Bikram Yoga for You/ 26 + 2).

"Bumper sticker? Oh! No - mm - when I am driving, I will look to the side to see who is in the cars, and I looked and saw that it was you!"

"...."

"I could not believe. I had to drive past several times to be sure."

"And then you tried to kill me."

"Yes! Mm - I had to get your attention!"

"I can't believe you saw me."

"I cannot believe either! You know, in India things like this would happen sometimes, but in United States, this never happened to me before."

Several traffic lights, one U-turn, and one tollbooth later, we were both back on the Turnpike and Balwan zipped past me at about 85 miles an hour so that he would catch his flight. (Who taught him driving, Bikram?) I can only assume that he made it, since this was the last that I heard of him. I will have to ask him when I see him at the training in October.

The life of a yogi....

Wealth Management (Having Doesn't Mean Anything)

2011-08-23T21:22:00.000-07:00

I spent a couple weeks this month house-sitting at a gorgeous house in a nice part of town. A house with an outdoor Jacuzzi, a well-stocked fridge, a turret that you can climb up into, and two cute (though high-maintenance) dogs. A house so great that I think of it in capital letters: The House. Woe is me, life is so hard. Seriously, I love my life.

Near the end of first week, one of the occupants of this house popped back in for a couple of days (to do some work), and we ended up having a series of intriguing conversations.

This guy - I'll call him "B" just in case he doesn't feel like appearing in a yoga blog - works as a wealth management consultant. I'm not sure that I've got the title correct, but I got the gist of what he does: he works with people who are super-wealthy (a very technical term referring to people with so much money that you use at least 8 digits to describe their wealth) and he helps them figure out how to manage these frankly ridiculous amounts of money. (This explains The House.) B is a sweet, thoughtful guy, and although his wife (a regular student of mine) has not yet persuaded him to make an appearance in the hot room, he is curious about the whole concept of yoga and Bikram yoga and What Do You Do To My Wife In There.

So B and I poured some wine and got to talking. He told me - in very general terms, of course, no confidentiality breached - about some of the clients who he's been working with. One client recently inherited an 8-figure sum of money. Wow, right? Well, B was visiting with this guy in the hospital after he had pretty significant, life-threatening heart problems. The client is only in his 50's, he's got more money than most people even dream of in their lifetimes, and he's lying in a hospital bed. And B is convinced that the money is what put the client in that hospital bed - the stress of it!

Now let's think about this, seriously. Beyond, "Oh, boohoo, cry me a river." What's really wrong with this picture?

B told me that some of his clients are well adjusted and handle their wealth beautifully - giving to charities, doing good works, raising happy families - but many are not. They are so overwhelmed by their financial wealth that it starts to overshadow everything else. He said that when he first meets with a client, he makes sure to ask them some simple questions: What are you doing to take care of yourself? (Are you eating properly? Are your kids happy? How are your grandkids? How's your stress?) Are you healthy and happy?

He says that these questions will stump the new clients every single time. They haven't thought about it. "Or maybe they just never expected me to ask them those questions."

Wealth management! What does it mean, really? What is wealth?

These are such great questions that are so easy to overlook.

Here's the yoga perspective. First, let's just suggest that "stress is the root cause of all diseases, even communicable ones." I believe that's from Bikram's guru, Bishnu Ghosh. Very old idea, definitely relevant to the questions.

Second - and I know you've heard this one before, but that won't stop me - "Having doesn't mean anything if you don't know how to use it." That's from Bikram. All Bikram teachers - and many Bikram students - have heard that line so many times that sometimes it almost loses its meaning, going all singsong like a nursery rhyme. Boss calls out, "Having doesn't mean anything if you don't know how to...?" and every teacher trainee still awake shouts out "Use it!" with varying degrees of enthusiasm, depending on how many hours she slept that night and how many times Bikram has already asked the same question that week. (Yes, of course this is primitive brainwashing. "I wash your brain! It is filthy!") End result: we can all repeat those words in our sleep.

And still, that statement is probably one of the truest things ever said. We have everything - food, clothing, shelter, water, possibly $15,000,000 - and still we're stressed and unhappy. In other parts of the world, the people have almost nothing, and many of them still manage to be happy. What are we missing? We have everything we need, but we don't know how to use it, so we still see problems everywhere. I told all of this to B, local neighborhood wealth manager, and he was nodding his head in absolute agreement. He'd never heard it before - all news to him! - and he thought it was spot on. From what he'd seen with all his clients, all these lost souls with incredible bank account balances, he had pretty much figured out the same thing.

What's the answer? If you want to learn to use everything you have, what should you do?

Well, that's easy: yoga.

I am a yoga teacher, what did you expect.

But seriously. It doesn't have to be yoga, but you have to do something to take care of yourself. That's first and foremost. If you're not taking good care of yourself, then you'll be no use to anyone else. Forget about self-sacrifice and just be good to yourself.

And don't make the mistake of thinking that your problems will all be solved if you can just get something else - some more money, a different job, a new relationship, a new apartment. Yes, some of those things are great. (I got a new job and it changed my life. I'm moving to a new apartment and I'm very happy about it.) But you can't keep waiting to be happy tomorrow, because then you'll always be waiting. Stop that. You have so much already, I guarantee it. Wherever you are, whoever you are, you have something. Most likely, you already have everything you'll ever need. You have your body. You have your mind. You have your spirit. Those three things will be with you for your entire life. That is your wealth.

Just figure out how to use it.

Didn't I tell you in the beginning that I love my life? I meant it. I really did. I have a job that doesn't feel like work. I have amazing friends, family, and teachers. I have a great spine. I have a messy apartment with some used furniture. I have some ice cream in the fridge (mostly gone). I have blue car (a Toyota Corolla named Callie), and in the trunk I have a hula hoop, a beach chair, a grassy towel, some road maps, cashews and Pedialyte (in case of emergency) and a kite. I have a sunburn from a weekend on a boat. I have a gig in Rhode Island at the end of this week and some new CD's for the drive. What more could I ask for? I have everything.

So do you.

90 Minutes off the Grid

2011-08-08T17:41:00.000-07:00

I read a great article from the Wall Street Journal this weekend about "The Heady Thrill of Having Nothing to Do." It was written by Scott Adams - the creator of Dilbert - and I'm very sorry that I can't link you to the full text, because apparently WSJ articles become "subscriber content" after a couple of days. But here's how the article began:

We've won the war on boredom! If you have a smartphone in your pocket, a game console in the living room, a Kindle in your backpack and an iPad in the kitchen, you never need to suffer a minute without stimulation. Yay!

But wait—we might be in dangerous territory. Experts say our brains need boredom so we can process thoughts and be creative. I think they're right. I've noticed that my best ideas always bubble up when the outside world fails in its primary job of frightening, wounding or entertaining me.

There's been plenty of other text - whole books! - written on the perils of modern overstimulation. It seems that our brains are being significantly rewired, if not completely turned into mush, by our relentless addictions to Facebook, text messaging, Twitter, and the like.

But Scott Adams puts a slightly different twist on the idea. He basically says - You know, it's too bad we never have to get bored anymore, because our brains do their best inventing when they are temporarily under-stimulated. Then he says - In a world where no one every gets bored and creativity dies, all the movies are going to be lifeless, derivative sequels, all the television is going to be unscripted nonsense, all the politics is going to consist of tedious, partisan bickering.... oh, wait. That sounds suspiciously familiar. Oh damn.

We've been raised to multi-task, and I am not sure this is so great after all. I find that I have to deliberately force myself to single-task. If I want to read a book, I first have to power down the laptop completely and go sit on the porch. If I'm even in the same room as my little MacBook, the actual book will end up on the losing side of the battle. And I love books! (I have been reading a lot this summer.) I always feel great after focusing all of my attention on one thing - and I like doing it! - but single-tasking takes a conscious act of will.

Now here's where yoga comes to the rescue! For at least 90 minutes of your day - assuming a 90 minute yoga class, of course - you are forced to turn off your fucking iPhone and pay attention to just one thing. Off the grid. No email, no updates, no texting, no nothing - just you, your body, and the teacher's voice.

You're still being stimulated, of course, but in a totally different way, because your attention has to stay in the room. As Bikram says, we are trying to "bring the mind back into the body," which is the hardest thing in the world to do, for even one second.

Maybe you don't achieve that perfect meditation. (Who does?) That's okay. You'll still get the benefits that you need, because at least you've removed yourself from all that outside chatter. It's a 90 minute mental vacation, in more ways than one. Maybe sometime during the second set of pranayama, after repeating the same inhale-exhale exercise fifteen times, your brain gets a little bit bored. Well, Mr. Adams is saying that this is also good. This is what your brain needs in order to be creative.

This surely helps to explain why so many great thinkers are famous for retreating from civilization. For Henry David Thoreau (the obvious example, sorry), even working at a pencil factory in Concord, MA in the 1840's was too much of a distraction. God knows what he would make of the internet! Thoreau brought the Bhagavad Gita with him out to Walden Pond, but you know, those long epics can get boring after a while. Maybe he got bored with Arjun and Krishna's eloquent but repetitive back-and-forth after a while (many yoga teacher trainees can relate to this feeling) and just sat around staring at the trees, and that's what gave him all his beautiful new ideas.

Of course, now it's 2011, and it's tough enough for us to switch off a laptop for more than a day, nevermind building a log cabin on a freaking pond in Massachusetts. But at least we can go to yoga and do the same exact sequence again, listening to the same exact words as last time, freed from the outside world for 90 minutes.

Haven't you ever had a really great idea in the middle of yoga class? One of those fantastic ideas that drops into your brain from out of the blue? Afterwards, you can't say what made you think of it. You didn't even have to go looking for it. It just came to you. That's because your brain was in a different state.

So please, let's just get all the policy makers, authors, CEOs, musicians, senators, script writers, television producers, teachers - and hell, even the comic book artists - and shove them in a hot room for 90 minutes! Then we'll see if we can't get some creative new ideas around here.

Open All the Doors

2011-07-25T12:56:00.000-07:00

"When you do yoga, all the doors is open, PLUS you create hundreds and hundreds of new doors and windows." - Bikram, teacher training, 5/27/10.

For more than a week, the city has been slumped under another "record breaking" heat wave, with heat index values in the triple digits. It was a humid one. I'd shower after the morning yoga class, get in my car to do errands, and immediately feel like I needed another shower. Instant sweat! Phew! I don't mind sweating when I'm in my cool little yoga outfit, but sweat-soaked dresses, shorts and t-shirts are another story. My friends and I have mostly spent our afternoons indoors, hiding in air conditioned basements and watching old movies on Netflix.

Today - it rains.

Not just a little bit of rain, but a full-on, glorious, noisy summer thunderstorm. I got back to my apartment just in time, and my roommate and I shut off the A.C. and opened all the doors and windows. Cool, fresh air - fantastic! We let the indoor cat run out onto the porch, since she wouldn't go far with the rain. When a big noise scared her in the street, she bolted from the front porch, through the house, and all the way out onto the back porch. (She is still out there happily, crouching under a chair and munching on green things.) It's cooled down so much that I tossed a light pashmina scarf on over my sundress, feeling slightly chilly from the breeze. The rain is still coming down - drip, drip, drip - the weeds are already growing at twice their normal rate, and lots of interesting crawly things are coming out of the ground.

And as we threw open all the doors and windows, I felt a little tickle at my memory, and I remembered Bikram, in the middle of another late night lecture at teacher training, saying something about yoga. Yoga opens all the doors and windows, and then makes new doors and windows.

I love that. When I think of those words, I can practically feel the breeze that swept me away from my old life and into something new and strange and wonderful.

I've got another one: Yoga is the rain after a heat wave. Yoga is the fresh breeze, and yoga - ironically! - is the cool air. Yoga is water in a dry ground.

You come to yoga dry and brittle, tired. Yoga wakes you up. Yoga opens up all those parts of your body that have been neglected and underused, and it brings the circulation and vitality back into them. You thought you were getting old? Emmy always said, "you are only old when your joints are no longer juicy." Yoga is the oil can - yoga makes your joints juicy. It opens up your spine so that the life force can get back in. Yoga makes you drip sweat out of every pore - did you even know there was that much water in your body? - just to let you know that you are alive and you are growing. Yoga comes like the rain and makes things change and grow - tomorrow, when we step outside, everything will be greener. Everything will look new.

The heat wave diminishes, and a new cycle starts.

Yoga is fresh air in your lungs. Yoga is relief.

Yoga is rain.

The Basic Needs of Human Survival

2011-07-17T19:01:00.000-07:00

For number 517 (approximately) on my list of "Reasons Why Teaching Yoga is the Best Job," I want to share some words from a musician.

Karl Paulnack, the director of the music division at Boston Conservatory, gives a speech to incoming music students about how music is a basic need of human survival:

"Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can’t with our minds.

"If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you’d take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you’re going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.”

Yoga teacher trainees, take note. This applies to us, too.

Every day, students walk into the hot room, some of them for the first time. Some of them will need saving - from broken hearts, from turbulent minds, from aching souls. And it's not like the E.R., where the wounds are obvious - you might never even know which people need saving. But sometimes, you might save them anyway. It depends - partly - on how well you do your craft. So practice with attention, with care, and with love.

~~~~~

Note: I read Paulnack's speech at this photo blog, written by a very talented young lady who is recording her time as a Swedish exchange student - worth a look!

Soon in Your Lifetime

2011-07-10T19:58:00.000-07:00

I am visiting a studio in Virginia this week as a guest teacher, and it is really a joy to be here. The teachers and students have been so welcoming. I'm staying with a friend from my teacher training, and we've been staying up well past her bedtime looking through our yearbooks and reminiscing. (When will that get old?)

When I did the "traveling teacher" thing in Lexington last month, I felt that it took me a few days to really get my footing on the podium. It was tricky to learn all the different names, manage the different room, figure out the different atmosphere. For just those first couple classes, I felt like I was starting from scratch!

I'm not sure what's different this time - it's probably just practice - but I felt comfortable teaching here from the very first class. Is comfortable the right word? Teaching is never truly easy, just like the practice is never easy - it's a mental tightrope, a challenge every time. But I felt really good - calm, relaxed, breathing normal, everything under my control. I was able to learn almost every single name within the first 20 minutes. I had some rapport - when I cracked little jokes, people actually smiled and laughed. (It definitely helped that my friend was in the class!) I guess I hit the ground running. This never happened before!

I sure hope I'm not jinxing myself for tomorrow's classes...

There's a great expression that I heard somewhere (and I am probably butchering it here) that goes like this: "It is the teacher's job to hold up a higher vision for the students until they are strong enough to hold it for themselves." And I feel that way now, a little bit. Since all the other teachers here are kind enough to hold up this high vision of me - "Here she is, our special guest teacher!" - I feel myself stepping up a little bit more. Stepping forward. Okay, sure. Here I am, and here is what I do. Here is what I have to offer. If you want it, please take it.

The whole point of teaching is that it's a gift, or a prayer, that you give to someone else. There's nothing to actually hold on to. And it seems like ego, to ever think of myself as a "good teacher," but it's not about me. The further I go, the more I want to keep going and learn more. I'm barely even scratching the surface.

When I was practicing advanced series with some of the teachers this weekend, a little piece of a song drifted into my head, sometime from a tape that I listened to when I was a kid. And that's the real purpose of this post, typing away half-formed thoughts on a late Sunday night - I just wanted to send these words out into the ether, for you to read over your coffee in the morning.

Soon in your lifetime, something will happen
All at once for a moment, it will flash into view
And from that moment on,
It's all up to you.

Ketchup!

2011-07-06T13:28:00.000-07:00

Summertime, and the living is easy! Humid days. Iced tea. Warm nights. Afternoons on the porch. Dialogue at the pool. (One of my students is going to the next TT, hooray!) Fireflies. Outdoor music. And summer reading! Oh, how I love summer reading.

I've just finished the newest (?) Malcolm Gladwell, What the Dog Saw. It's a nice thick book of his various works from The New Yorker, and it's been keeping me happily occupied. Yes, XKCD, I am living the dream. In case you're not familiar with him, Malcolm Gladwell has written a string of non-fiction best-sellers (The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers) that all try to make you see the world in a different way. Blink, for example, is about the split second-decisions that happen behind the closed door of your unconsciousness, and it's fascinating. As examples, Gladwell talks about how art dealers instinctively identify frauds, why tall-dark-and-handsome types earn higher salaries, how hospitals should really diagnose heart attacks, and what makes the best car salesman in New Jersey so successful. It's an awesome book, the kind of book that has me telling me friends, "Oh, I'd lend it to you, but I've already loaned it to somebody else."

Anyway, What the Dog Saw is a loosely strung together collection of essays on various topics - hair dye, football, the Challenger disaster, etc. One of these essays is about ketchup. It's called "The Ketchup Conundrum."

Here's the question: "Why are there dozens of varieties of mustard but only one variety of ketchup?"

Never thought about it, did you?!?

For a long time, there was only one type of mustard: French's yellow mustard. Then, about thirty years ago, Grey Poupon launched a really successful marketing campaign to become a household name, and that spawned the whole mustard section that we have in the supermarket today. Meanwhile, we still just have Heinz ketchup, plus a few specialty varieties that never hugely took off. (Apart from Muir Glen at Whole Foods and some supermarket generics, there's not much out there.)

What works for mustard should work for ketchup, right? They're both just condiments! So eight years ago, a guy name Jim Wigon from Massachusetts decided to do for ketchup what Grey Poupon did for mustard. He started a business called World's Best Ketchup, using all sorts of premium ingredients that you can't get in Heinz. Build a better ketchup! This guy Wigon poured his heart and soul into the project, all kinds of research and taste testing, but it never took off. Why not?

Because the flavor of ketchup, as it turns out, is universal. The human palate recognizes five fundamental tastes: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. When the Heinz company developed their ketchup, they ended up hitting every single one of these notes, in a balanced composition. Heinz ketchup is one of the only products on the shelf that pushes every single sensory button.

So how can World's Best compete with this? Jim Wigon made World's Best using different sweeteners and more tomato, but in doing so he changed the balance. The ketchup experts - and shoppers of the world - said that it simply wasn't ketchup anymore. A quote:

World's Best Dill ketchup on fried catfish, for instance, is a marvelous thing. But it also meant that [Wigon's] ketchup wasn't as sensorily complete as Heinz, and he was paying a heavy price in amplitude. "Our conclusion was mainly this," Bhuchholz (a ketchup taster) said. "We felt that World's Best seemed to be more like a sauce." She was trying to be helpful.

Ouch! So much for building a better ketchup.

What the heck does this have to do with Bikram yoga? Oh, I bet you can guess by now!

Bikram yoga is ketchup. By a combination of cleverness and luck, Bikram put together a class that hits every single note in the human body, in just the right balance.

When I first started Bikram, I had done plenty of other exercise and yoga in my life, but I remember walking out of class thinking, "I think I just used every part of my body, and half of those were parts I didn't even know I had. What happened in there?!" Because unlike everything else - unlike dance, Pilates, running, sports, hiking, or even other types of yoga - Bikram's class hits every note. You've heard the spiel before - you're using every part of your body, every system, every muscle, joint, organ, and major gland. Inside out, bones to the skin, fingertips to the toes, blah-de blah blah blah. We say it all the time, but man oh man, we say it because it is true!

Just think of it. In 90 minutes, you stretch and strengthen lots of different muscles. That part is easy to see. But there's also tons of stuff happening inside your body, and it's easy to forget about the things you can't see. You're working your cardiovascular system (heart), your respiratory system (lungs), your digestive system, your immune system, and the rest of your endocrine system. You're working on strength and flexibility, plus balance. And you're working all the mental aspects as well - your determination, concentration, self-control, patience, and faith. All of this in perfect balance.

That is Bikram yoga. There can be only one. Bikram yoga is ketchup.

And if you change anything? Take things away, add other things in, try to build a better hot yoga? Well, my conclusion is mainly this: although it might be delicious in its own way, that seems to be more like a sauce.

Six Months of Joy

2011-06-27T18:44:00.000-07:00

Hello my lovely and patient (?) readers!

I have some catching up to do here! Let's see - when last I wrote, I was teaching in Kentucky, getting ready to head out to Tennessee for Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival. So tonight, I will tell you a little bit about my adventure at Bonnaroo!

Bonnaroo was awesome. I totally loved it and I will probably go again next year. For those of you who aren't familiar with this festival, let me briefly explain. Bonnaroo is a 4-day music festival on some farmland in the middle of Tennessee. And for those 4 days, Bonnaroo is essentially its own city, kind of like at Burning Man - this year, there were 90,000 people at Bonnaroo, and most of these people are camping out next to their cars. (The cars are nicely laid out in grids in camps with names like Camp Chewbacca, Camp Stewie Griffin, and Camp Marsellus Wallace. We got a corner spot in Camp Ed Rooney, which was a prime location, only 10 minutes from the stages.) It is hot and very dusty during the day, and gorgeous at night. We never set an alarm clock while we were there - all the acts start in the afternoon, but also, you automatically wake up at 8am when you start sweating in your sleeping bag. As a Bikram yoga teacher and a fairly-frequent camper, I felt that I was very well prepared for this environment! I wore a hat, a bandana, and SPF 50, my friend and I carried around CamelPaks and gallon jugs of water all weekend, and we both felt great.

The city of Bonnaroo is a fun and happening place, even before you take the music into account. There was a surprising amount of delicious and reasonably-priced food - some of the smoothie stands were excellent, and I had the best iced chai tea that I've ever had in my life. The girl at the chai stand gave me the ingredients but not the proportions, so I will spend the rest of my summer in my kitchen on a quest to recreate the perfect chai. Some booths were just blatantly selling stoner food - hot waffle ice cream sandwich with hot fudge, anyone?! The shopping was great - I bought quite a few sundresses, a new backpack with an Om sign on it, and some feather earrings. There were also rides - a water slide, a Ferris wheel, and a giant slip-and-slide - and lots of hula hoops.

So my friend Slappy and I basically spent the first day wandering around ooh-ing and aah-ing over all this fun stuff before remembering that there was also supposed to be some music involved. And a LOT of it! With 2 main stages, 3 music tents, a comedy tent, and a cinema tent, the big challenge at Bonnaroo is getting to see all the acts you want to see! There were some amazing acts that we missed seeing, either because they conflicted with another group that we wanted to see or because we couldn't make it in.

Here is most of what I did see, in order. (I am consulting my schedule for this.) Thursday: Futurebirds, Karen Elson, Beats Antique. Friday: Bela Fleck and the (Original!) Flecktones, Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, The Decemberists, My Morning Jacket, Arcade Fire. Saturday: Old Crow Medicine Show, Alison Krauss and Union Station with Jerry Douglas, Mumford and Sons, The Black Keys, Buffalo Springfield, Eminem, String Cheese Incident, Girl Talk. Sunday: Mavis Staples, Amos Lee, Iron and Wine, Ben Sollee, White Buffalo, Robert Plant and the Band of Joy, The Strokes, and Widespread Panic.

Pretty good!!

That's a wide variety of musical styles (which is the cool thing about going to a huge festival like this) - along with the jam bands (which are a Bonnaroo staple), we had rap, soul, dance, bluegrass, and rock and roll. It was very cool and I'm discovering my latent love for bluegrass music. (The Telluride Bluegrass festival is seriously tempting me for next year, if only Colorado weren't twice as far as Tennessee...)

There were a lot of great acts, but there are two that really stand out for me.

First standout: Mumford and Sons. My god, but those men can play. That was hands-down one of the best live performances I've ever seen. Watching those men jam out, it is impossible to imagine anyone enjoying himself more than that. They are pure energy and joy, and if you ever get the chance to see them, GO!!

Mumford had a 6:15pm spot on the second-largest stage, and Slappy and I essentially camped out at that stage for the entire afternoon in order to get a decent viewing spot. And we did - we were close up enough that we could actually see the faces of the guys on stage!

All told, there were about 50,000 of us jammed onto that dusty little field, standing room only, jostling around each other with our backpacks and water jugs, trying not to end up standing in a ditch or behind someone really tall. We stood around like that for a while, waiting for the band to come on, and I was very proud of myself when I started up a half-decent Eagles sing-along. ("Well I'm a-running down the road trying to loosen my load, I've got seven women on my mind....") And then the band came on. And we sang.

Here's the gorgeous thing about being a fan among other fans. Listening to music is normally a semi-private experience. You listen to an album in your car, in your kitchen, during dinner, on your iPod, on the subway, in your bedroom. If you love the album, then you listen to it over and over again, until you know every word. And that's a very personal thing, right? When you love a song or a band so much that you play it on your iPod all day, until you know the music inside-out...

Until one day, you go out into a sea of people, in the middle of nowhere. And the band starts playing, and everyone else knows the words, too. Everyone in this space has been listening to these songs over and over, in the car, on the subway, in their bedroom. So the private experience becomes a shared experience, and you realize - how can you miss it? - that all these strangers share the same emotions. You know, beyond doubt, that our hearts all keep the same beat. A sea of strangers, thousands of people, stand together, soclose, nearly touching, in a dusty field, at sunset, moving to the music, and singing out: "Love, it will not betray, dismay or enslave you, it will set! You! Free!"

It's just the same in yoga sometimes, isn't it? You come together with these strangers, and you sweat together, you breathe together, your hearts pound together. And you end up kind of loving and respecting each other, even if you never know each other's names, because you recognize that common bond. You're having this intense, private experience (that's called life), but everyone else is having the same experience with you, side-by-side.

Not to mention the other yoga-to-music analogy - you can walk up to a fellow yogi and say "eventually, in the future..." and they will fill in the blank. I know that you guys know the lyrics.

So that was one memorable experience.

Here's the other one.

Saturday night is basically big, loud, chaos. We saw Eminem on the big stage at midnight, who was okay. (He spent an awful lot of time sort of talking about himself and shouting, when we mostly just wanted to hear "Loose Yourself." Which he got around to, eventually, and which was a lot of fun.) Then I ran around and went to the jam bands and dance parties until the wee hours of the morning. There was a big blow-up dinosaur at one, and lots of balloons and confetti at the other - fun!! Then I went to bed at about 4:30am - so early, by festival standards! - because I wanted to go hear Mavis Staples on Sunday morning. I had heard her once before on the radio and I liked her.

Mavis Staples played at 1:00 on Sunday afternoon, on the main stage. The last act to play on that stage had been Eminem, and that field had been trashed, but it all got cleaned up overnight, just in time for some gospel music. There were not too many people there - most people were still sleeping off Saturday night! - so the field was nice and open, great for spreading out the picnic blanket (i.e. sheet), lounging in the grass, and listening to some happier music.

It was a beautiful day.

Mavis Staples. Look her up. Her family has been making music for 61 years, and they - The Staples Singers - were basically the musical voice of the civil rights movement. (Mavis's father was friends with Martin Luther King, Jr.)

Now, according to Wikipedia, Mavis Staples is 71, which I find hard to believe, because she looks about 50 and has the energy of a 25-year-old. She reminds me of a yogi - ageless! And she has a presence. That's the only word I can think of for what she has, and really doesn't even begin to cover it. When she sings, you feel her, right down to the soul. Oh my gosh, that's why they call it soul music. You can feel her soul, and she is talking to you.

She sang some amazing songs. She sang "Wade in the Water," which led Slappy and myself to dance around like fools doing our best white girl impression of Alvin Ailey. She sang a gorgeous song from her new album, "You Are Not Alone," and she sang very old songs like "For What It's Worth" ("stop, children, what's that sound?") and "I'll Take You There." Did I mention that this woman has presence? When she was singing, "I'll Take You There," she called out, "Our family has been taking you there for 61 years, and we ain't tired yet!"

In that moment, I thought of Bikram. Two completely different individuals - Mavis Staples and Bikram Choudhury - but both of them getting up in front of a crowd, tirelessly, for decades, repeating the same words, to lead people to a better life. And I thought of myself and all the other yoga teachers, because what is it that we're trying to do? We'll take you there. We want to take you to a better life, a better way of living.

On top of being a singer, Mavis Staples speaks with magnetism of an old-school Southern preacher and the affection of a mother. When she speaks, your ears perk up and you listen. So I remember, very specifically, something that she said in the middle of her performance. She said, "I just want you to walk away from this performance.... feeling joyful... for at least... six months."

Six months of joy. Gorgeous. What a brilliant goal. What a fantastic power.

Just take me by the hand.
Let me, let me, let me lead the way....

~~~~~~

Next up: How Bikram Yoga is like ketchup! I know you are dying to find out....

More Cities, More Yoga!

2011-05-31T19:56:00.000-07:00

This is just a quick-ish kind of an update, since I am Very Busy and Important. (Name that book/movie.)

I'm doing a little bit of a "traveling teacher" thing right now - I took off a couple weeks from my regular studio in Baltimore in order to go gallivanting around the country. Okay, I really only gallivanted as far as Kentucky, but it was a satisfyingly long drive through the hills of West Virginia. (I think that every single bug in West Virginia is now plastered on the front end of my car.) It always feels good to be out on the open road, just me and my car!

I'm teaching at the studio in Lexington KY right now, and it's pretty awesome. I've taught 4 classes here since Sunday, and they've all been pretty action packed. First of all, I taught the Sunday and Monday morning classes of Memorial Day weekend, which is a big holiday weekend. And second of all, the studio just did a Groupon deal last week, so there is a flood of new people coming in. So it's been hot and humid and crowded and exciting. I taught the two evening classes tonight and had ten new students in each class - I barely learned half of their names! They all stuck it out through the class and did great - it was really fun. Slightly tricky, but fun.

The travel is good for me because quite honestly, the first day at a new studio is always way out of my comfort zone. And I hadn't taught anywhere apart from my "home studio" since December, so I was definitely due to shake things up a bit. I had some butterflies in my stomach before I taught my first class here on Sunday morning, and it's been months since I got nervous about teaching a class. I wonder if this gets easier with practice? I've got some more travels coming up this summer, so I guess I'll find out.

I also had a good feedback session with Jodi, the studio owner, after my class on Sunday. First of all, she busted me on a little phrase that I'd left out of my dialogue, so she gets props for that. I don't get corrected on my dialogue very often. We also had a good chat about the classroom interactions, and as I was talking to her, I put my finger on something: teaching the first class at a new studio is like going on a blind first date. It's kind of awkward and kind of nerve-wracking, because you (the teacher) don't know them (the students) and they don't know you. I'm used to having an easy rapport with most of my classes, but that's because I know all of my students! I know when they started, how much they practice, how they're doing, how their dogs are doing, etc etc etc. That makes it all easy and great. But when you're in front of a room of total strangers, it's such a different feeling! It's harder to read the room, and it's harder for them to read you, too. First class in a new place, I crack a little joke and it's like....... *crickets*...... ooh, tough room.

But happily, that phase doesn't last too long. And already, after only four classes, I'm much more comfortable with the whole set-up. I'm getting to know the regulars (and the repeat newbies), and I'm learning how to assess the room much more quickly. I'm getting used to looking around the room during the first couple of postures and figuring out, okay, here are the rock star regulars, here are the newbies, here are the ones working through injuries, here are the total weirdos.... check, check, check.

I really am loving it here in Lexington and I will have to post about it at greater length later, with pictures. For now, I will just say that two out of my three evenings have been spent at lazy backyard barbeques, and all the yoga teachers spent Monday afternoon biking around Lexington with a huge group of people. I could get used to this. (But don't worry Baltimore, I'll be back.)

There are so many great yoga studios and so many places that I want to go. It's always tempting to just chuck everything into my car and hit the road for a while to go everywhere - but where would that really get me? The students that I love the most are the ones who I spend months with. I guess it's important to have a home base. It's exciting to go to new places, but it's sad to leave them. Very Mary Poppins. ("And what would happen to me, may I asked, if I loved all the children I said goodbye to?") I was talking about this with Mike from my teacher training, who has been in Lex for the last couple of weeks. He's been to lots of different studios and he says that he is always really sad when he leaves. I told him, "Yes, but your family is only getting bigger." Every new place becomes a new home.

Apparently this is my idea of a quick update. Watch out for the long one!!

Also, my next stop is Bonnarroo! Anyone else going?!

"Groundhog Day" Revisited

2011-05-17T21:21:00.000-07:00

I just want to point something out.

Most of you probably know the movie called "Groundhog Day." It's an early '90's comedy flick starring Bill Murray as a weatherman who gets stuck repeating the same day over and over and over again. It's one of those movies that frequently gets shown on cable TV over the weekend when there's nothing new to be shown. I re-watched it earlier this year and was surprised at how funny and satisfying it actually was!

When we find ourselves repeating the same task over and over again - whether it's the same yoga class, the same job, the same chores, or the same studies - we tend to exclaim, "Ugh! It's just like Groundhog Day!" I remember when I was halfway through teacher training and all the days started to blur together, my roommate and I agreed that there was definitely a Groundhog Day effect going on - it felt like we woke up into the same circumstances every day and we were doomed to repeat the same day indefinitely.

But here's the thing, the blindingly obvious truth of the matter, the part that we always forget: Bill Murray had a completely different experience every day!

Yes, it was still February 2nd every time he woke up. But the day never went the same way twice.

And more than that - as the repetition continued, Bill Murray learned to live the day better. After a few attempts, he remembered to avoid the puddle outside his front door. He figured out how to get rid of the annoying acquaintance who would always accost him. On a some occasions, he tried to throw the towel in by acting as outrageously as possible, getting himself arrested or driving his car off a cliff. But then he really started to learn. He found out when the little boy was about to fall out of a tree, and he learned how to get to the right place at the right time. He knew what time he had to get to the restaurant in order to save the old man from choking. He learned to play the piano, one lesson at a time, hundreds of lessons, all on February 2nd, until he was able to amaze everyone with his prodigy - "I've never played before today!" He even - naturally, because this is Hollywood - figured out how to get the girl. He got better and better and better, until he finally got the day right - and that, of course, finally released him from the loop.

But that's what Groundhog Day means. It's not just doing the same shit over and over again. (What's that saying about insanity? "Insanity consists of doing the same thing over and over and expecting to get different results.") Groundhog Day means that you wake up to the same circumstances every day and take the chance to tackle them differently, to live the day better. Groundhog Day is an opportunity. Groundhog Day is infinite possibility. Groundhog Day is a chance to try lots of different things, and sometimes you'll succeed, and sometimes you'll fuck it up, but you still keep going back and trying again.

And if you're clever and persistent, if you just keep trying new things, then maybe - just maybe - one day, you can live that perfect day.

Driving Lessons

2011-05-10T18:13:00.000-07:00

When I had just turned sixteen, my dad drove me down the street from our house, maybe a one mile distance, to the corner of Spring St. and Pine St., where there was a mostly empty parking lot. Then we both got out of the car, he handed me the keys, and I got into the driver's seat of the car for the first time.

I remember the surprise I felt when I pressed the gas pedal and the car started to move! I drove the length of maybe 5 parking spaces and shouted "Whoa!!" and my dad said "Brakes!" and I braked. We cracked up for a minute, and then my dad took advantage of the teaching moment. He made an excellent point which I will always remember. He said, "Next time, when you feel like saying 'whoa', what you should do instead of saying 'whoa' is use the brakes."

This was my first driving lesson: gas pedal and brakes.

(Later in the day, I drove on the actual road out in Haydenville, a teeny Massachusetts town with a population of barely a thousand, and I got pulled over by the one cop in Haydenville for "erratic driving." I told her somewhat tearfully that it was "my first time," while my dad helpfully pulled out the license and registration, and she kept a mostly straight face when she told me to "keep practicing.")

In yoga, I think, we need to learn the same lessons. I don't mean the bit about erratic driving (although if you flail about too much at certain studios, you might get in trouble with the yoga cops). I mean the lesson about the gas pedal and the brakes. In every posture, in every moment of the class, you can chose to hit the gas and expend more effort or you can chose to hit the brakes and do less. Your job - and it really is your job, ultimately - is to figure out which of these two things to do and how to do it.

It's easy to see the two big mistakes that students can make. Some students come in and drive with the gas pedal to the floor for the whole class. You know these people - the ones who come in and turn really red and breathe like they're playing rugby for the whole class. (Bless them. We've got a guy like this who is improving by leaps and bounds and I love him to pieces, in a purely professional way.) This is the yoga equivalent of the guy who weaves in and out of traffic, tailgates all the time, and tries to go as fast a possible - and yet you still notice that he gets stopped at the same red light as you do. For all his extra effort and gas, he doesn't really gain anything.

Then you have the students who are riding their brakes, or maybe they just can't find the gas pedal. These are the ones who somehow flop through the whole class without contracting a single muscle. This is the yoga equivalent of the old lady who drives at 45 miles per hour in the right lane on the freeway. Totally oblivious. Relatively safe, but there's not much actually happening.

Those are the most general and obvious cases, but the differences can be much more subtle. In my last post, when I was talking about doing "less", I used the example of pranayama breathing. For someone who is nice and healthy, there is no problem with pushing the head way back (as long as the spine is straight) - it's a fine time to use the gas pedal. But for someone with neck pain, the exercise should be done to tolerance, so that it is uncomfortable but not horribly painful. The person with neck pain might have to step on her brakes.

Even for just you, from day to day, you have to make judgments about how to drive your body. For me, when I am feeling really great, I can go through the class giving 110% and feel great at the end. (That's an efficient 110% - no heavy rugby breathing.) But this week, I tweaked my back a little bit, something way down by the sacrum. Don't know what I did, but it really kinda hurt. So I pulled my practice back to like 70%. I took out the sit-ups (which annoyed me for about 10 minutes), went slow in the warm-up, and did good spine strengthening series and camel pose but really wimpy forward stretching. And after three days - which is nothing, really - I'm nearly as good as new. That's because I knew that I had to lay off the gas pedal and just coast for a bit. If I had tried to power through the class, I suspect that I'd have been hurting for much longer.

I love when I can coast my car along the freeway - no brakes, just a little gas as needed - because it is the most efficient way to drive. (I mean, gas looks like it'll be up at $4 a gallon for the whole summer - it's expensive to be an inefficient driver, even if I am using my miles as tax deductions!) And really, when you get the hang of this yoga stuff, that's what a really good practice feels like: it is absolutely efficient. No effort is wasted - none of that nonsense where you floor the gas pedal for one block, then slam the brakes all of a sudden when you come upon a stop sign. No, you put the effort exactly where you need it, no more and no less. In the beginning parts of standing head to knee, the effort goes into the legs and the stomach, and hardly anywhere else - face relaxed, breathing relaxed. That's why your teachers can do standing head to knee and have a chat with you at the same time, if they want to. (Isn't that annoying?) It's all about efficiency. Fuel economy.

Just remember. The first lesson of driving a car: here is the gas pedal and here are the brakes. And unless you learn how to use both of them properly, you'll have trouble getting very far.

Even in Haydenville.

Sometimes "Less" is More

2011-05-05T20:39:00.000-07:00

I spent this past weekend in the most glorious yoga bubble. My studio just hosted a student seminar (Saturday) and teacher seminar (Sunday) with my mentor Diane. It was a weekend of non-stop yoga awesomeness. Almost impossible to describe. I can still feel the bubble, actually - it hasn't popped, it just expanded when everyone left our studio and went back to their homes, their states, or their travels.

The students are still buzzing about how awesome the seminar was and how much they learned. Everyone learned something different - "I learned that I can balance if I really concentrate," "I learned that it's better to stay with the class," "Class goes by so quickly now," "I learned that my triangle is actually pretty good!" And we teachers have all sorts of great new information to share with the entire studio. I gave one girl some new advice on a shoulder problem she's been having, and on the way out, her mom said to me, "I think you just gave us more than we've gotten from 8 doctors." Information is so powerful!

As a precocious but new teacher, I cannot imagine a better learning exercise than this, which is what has happened for me:

1. Go find a supportive studio to teach at.
2. Teach there full time for 8 months, teaching approximately one third of the weekly scheduled classes, so that you really get to know all the students.
3. Teach by the dialogue, nice and clean, to the best of your ability, including personal corrections.
4. Get your studio owner to book a senior teacher for a seminar. (This part takes some advance planning, since senior teachers tend to have full schedules. We got lucky - Diane had a cancellation and we jumped the line.)
5. Get all your awesome regular students to sign up for this seminar.
6. Put all of your students in room with expert teacher.
7. Sit back.
8. Watch. And. Learn.

Wow, seriously wow. What a terrific education. It's like I've been building the foundation for a house, brick by brick, and then someone came along and said, "Hey, great foundation, this is going to work perfectly... and now here's how you build the house!" A bit artless, but that's the best metaphor I can think of right now, and I'm not going to wait for a better one to come to me.

I'm a little bit lost for words. It's hard for me to convey what a joyful experience this weekend has been. Language always has this problem - at its best, it is still just a finger pointing at the moon, never the moon itself. Strong emotions can't be captured. But if I had to chose a few words? Grace. Stillness. Energy. Compassion.

Love, of course.

And I feel confident, not in a reckless way, but in a steady and quiet way. Because I can see the path laid out before me now, and I know what I need to do next.

Here's what I learned (and this lesson is going to guide me for many months now): it is so easy for students to do too much. In Diane's estimate, about 3 out of 10 students need to use their strength more, and the remaining 7 out of 10 are being over-aggressive in their practice. I didn't truly understand this until I saw how Diane worked with my students. In so many cases, they were pushing a little bit too far into pain, trying to do something that the body wasn't quite ready for, and they needed to be pulled back a little bit.

Need an example? Pranayama breathing. Lots of people at the seminar with neck pain, way more people than I thought. (Because you know, students don't always tell us these things. Some of them tell us way more than we need to know, and the rest don't say anything at all!) I've just been teaching pranayama by the dialogue, which includes (on the exhale) "look back until you see the wall behind you," "spine straight, no backward bending," and "push your head back until your neck hurts a little bit." But - as it turns out - lots of people with neck pain are pushing the head back more than they really ought to. Yes, you should try to see the wall behind you, but "spine straight" is more important, and "hurts a little bit" (which means discomfort but not really pain) is most important. Clear as mud, right? So for a lot of people, the correction was to "do less." Do less, do less, do less. Only to tolerance, not to pain.

That's just one example, of course. (And I hope it's clear and correct - I'm just giving my interpretation here. Diane, feel free to butt in if you ever read this!) There were plenty more examples like this throughout the day.

At this point in my teaching journey, there are certain things that I know how to do. Number One, provide correct information. Check. Number Two, provide encouragement and coax students to do more. Check. But now I have a Number Three: get students to pull back when they are doing too much. Oh!!

I've done "number three" to a small extent, but I've never made it my main focus before. Now it is coming right to the front of my consciousness, and it raises so many questions - how do I identify when someone is pushing too much for their body, which postures and clues do I need to look out for, and how do I address this issue smoothly, within the class?

And of course, it is still important to encourage the class and to push the students who need a push, so I really need to figure how to push and pull, equal and simultaneous, 50-50, all within the structure of the class and dialogue.

Ooooh, this is so exciting! And it feels so right. This is just another puzzle piece falling into place - click - helping me become a better and more mature teacher.

Last winter, when I was staying over at Diane's house in the middle of a snowstorm, I picked up a book from a shelf and flipped through to a random page. I don't even remember what the book was, but I remember what I read (and I may have mentioned this before). There was a passage in the middle of the book that said: As you do less, you can accomplish more. Eventually, you reach a state where you do nothing and achieve everything.

Well, I haven't gotten to that state yet - when that happens, I suppose I will levitate and disappear in a ball of light and never type on my little old MacBook again. But "do less, accomplish more." Yeah, I get that. I think I can learn how to teach that.

Four Words

2011-04-23T15:37:00.000-07:00

You know what? Forget about everything I've said. For feedback, for validation, for confirmation, for a reason to teach, there are only four words I need to hear:

"It's changing my life."

Today, from a student who's been coming every day for just one week!

A breath of fresh air, every time. Absolutely amazing. I am humbled and empowered in the same moment.

Continual Becoming

2011-04-20T19:14:00.000-07:00

After teacher training and posture clinics are over, how does a Bikram yoga teacher improve? Practice, practice, practice - and feedback. When you have another teacher take your class, and afterwards she tells you what you did well and what you can improve, that's called feedback. When it's done well, it's really lovely, a good collaborative process.

My favorite poet, Billy Collins, just published a new collection called Horoscopes for the Dead. It's fantastic and you should read it. One of the poems is entitled "Hell" and starts with the lines "I have a feeling that it is much worse/ than shopping for a mattress at a mall." Oh Billy Collins, this is why you are my favorite. There's another poem called "Feedback" which I adore. It's very short, so I will present it to you here:

Feedback (by Billy Collins)

The woman who wrote from Phoenix
after my reading there

to tell me they were all still talking about it

just wrote again
to tell me that they had stopped.

I love this poem more than I can explain. It's so sparse, it's practically haiku, but it tells a whole story, and that story is wry, self-deprecating, and hilarious. And in a way, it says it all. Sometimes people pay attention to you, sometimes they forget. Sometimes you're the pigeon, sometimes you're the statue. And some people - some of whom apparently reside in Phoenix - are refreshingly honest and can tell you "yep, that's working" and "nope, that's not working" in the exact same tone. How lovely!

I mostly do my own feedback these days - all those little tweaks and adjustments - so I have to be really honest with myself about what is or isn't working.

I've been pondering the concept of "perfection." Years ago - probably in 2008 - I heard this question for the first time: "Do you want to be perfect or do you want to be great?" (That's what Diane says.) And I absolutely did not get it. I was like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay - but I do want to be perfect!" I'd always classified myself as a perfectionist and I had no idea how to change that. I've been tossing that question around my brain for the last three years, and if I'm honest, it probably started to make sense sometimes last summer, after I started teaching.

Here's one thing about perfect: you have no place to go. You can't get any feedback. You're dead in the water, no place to swim.

Saint Augustine says: "If thou shouldst say, 'It is enough, I have reached perfection,' all is lost. For it is the function of perfection to make one know one's imperfection." (Yes, I'm quoting a saint - he is in my little Zen quote book!)

Here's another one (found in the same book) from George Bernard Shaw: "I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one's business on earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind." That one's a little bit more gory (which entertains me), but that last bit is really nice - "continual becoming" is nice.

I had a brilliant conversation with one of my students last week. Actually, she conversed and I listened. (That's just one of the things that was brilliant about it.) She's been coming to the yoga for just about two months and she is absolutely transformed. I mean it, completely different person - body changed, personality changed, attitude changed, everything changed. It blows me away. Anyway, she said some great things. She said - I've realized that I don't have to prepare to practice, I just have to come in and practice. She said - I am just keeping myself open to feedback, just listen, adjust, and change. (I am paraphrasing here, but I'm not making up a single word.) She said - if you think you're "perfect," if you're always "doing it right," then you can't learn, but if you're just "practicing," then you can keep adjusting and taking in new information.

Yes. Gorgeous. Couldn't have put it better myself.

Spring is in the Air!

2011-04-06T10:41:00.000-07:00

Hello again blog!

Hmm... I thought about going on an official "blog hiatus" since I keep on not-writing, but maybe I don't need to. Spring is in the air, so lots of fresh thoughts are coming in. I've had a lot of things going on over the last few weeks, but they haven't been the sort of things that belong in public.

Still, I refuse to be the type of blog writer who starts every post with "Sorry I haven't blogged in so long!" So I have decided: henceforth, I am not going to pretend to have any sort of regular posting schedule. I will just be posting when I feel like it, and it will be good!

Moving on.

You know what's a really refreshing activity? Throwing open the windows, getting something good to eat, sitting out on the porch, and reviewing the dialogue. Hah!

I am dead serious about this. Even though it's been almost a year since I went to teacher training (what?!?) and I know most of the dialogue like the back of my hand, there are still little bits and pieces in there for me to discover. Easter eggs. The 2nd set of stretching is a great Easter egg. I'd thought that I was saying it, but I was really only saying about half of it. I guess I only half-learned it the first time around. So lazy! I mean, ok, I give myself a lot of credit for having learned any of it, but there were still pieces that I was missing. I've added a couple of missing pieces back in already, and I am going to nail it down verbatim this week.

New dialogue - it keeps your class fresh!

(Why must people insist on inventing their own words just to make their class fresh? Why not just learn more of the dialogue? There's plenty of it! Hmmm.)

I went to a seminar with Diane at Bikram Yoga in the City (Chicago) a few weeks ago, and that was absolutely terrific. I saw lots of friends from my teacher training, along with some other old friends and some new ones. Here's a cute picture of some Spring '10 folks out to brunch on Sunday morning:

Littermates (born at the same time): Chris, me, Catherine, Carrie, Meg

I've been to plenty posture clinics and seminars as a student before, but this was the first time I've been to one as a teacher. It was a completely new experience. As a student, I would watch the corrections at posture clinics and think, "Ah, this is really interesting." But as a teacher, I watch the corrections and think, "Oh!! That's what I need to do for Bob, and that one for Jane, and this will help Sue, and I really need to get John to do this..." Then I go home and get to apply everything right away.

After teaching for a while, you start to recognize patterns. I remember at training, Bikram would do these great demonstrations where he showed us how new students would look in the postures. We all laughed, because they were great demonstrations, but we were just taking Bikram's word for it. But now, someone like Diane can come in and say, "Well, in pranayama a lot of your new students will have their head like this," and my reaction is, "Omigod that's true! That is exactly what they do!" Very enlightening.

I came home from the seminar with a pretty good checklist of "things for my students to work on," and I must say, it's only been a few weeks and they have totally improved in those areas. It makes me proud. It's so satisfying to look around a room and see everyone trying the right way!

Also, speaking of seminars, I am throwing anonymity to the wind in order to post this: Bikram Yoga Hampden Special Events. I currently teach at this studio, and we are hosting Diane for a seminar at the end of the month! Public seminar on Saturday, teachers only seminar on Sunday. I am thrilled. It will be so much fun to have tons of teachers converge on my own studio, and I am excited to show off all my students to Diane. It's a bit vain, but what can I say? I'm proud of them! They are so good!

If you ever have a chance to go to a posture clinic or seminar - with anyone! - you should really jump at the chance. There's nothing better than getting new information and perspective - it breathes fresh air into your practice (and your teaching).

Now I'm off to organize tax papers and work on my 2nd set dialogue. (Now that I've mentioned it to the world, I guess I really have to do it! My students who read this blog will be listening to see if I say anything new! Dang it all....)

Read This! ("Mirror")

2011-03-12T17:09:00.000-08:00

This may be old news for some of you (it's been posted and reposted by 28 of my Facebook friends today, and counting) but I just want to draw your attention to an article that appeared in the New York Times yesterday.

Bikram Yoga gets a lot of weird press - "bad boy of yoga," "teacher training sex cult," "Bikram vs. Charlie Sheen," etc etc. Some of it is entertaining, some of it is offensive, and some is just plain silly. It is rare to come across an article in the mainstream media that says something poignant and true about our yoga. Paige Williams' story in Oprah magazine last year was one exception.

Here is another one: Mirror

This article makes me want to punch the air and shout, Yes! This is what we do.

All my fellow teachers and yogis would agree with me, except that I think they're all too busy looking for the Kleenex box. Just a moment, I think I have something in my eye....

The video is worth watching, too....

Forget about "Style"

2011-03-10T12:57:00.000-08:00

"And it started to make sense... No fear. No distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide." - Fight Club

This week, I've been reading a book called On Writing Well by William Zinsser. It's exactly what it says on the tin: a book about writing non-fiction. I found it on a bookshelf in my living room. One of my roommate must have bought it at some point, or maybe a past roommate left it behind. (My house is like that.) Yes, I was trying to read the yoga anatomy book (and I'm still working on it), but this other book pulled me in.

I particularly like the sections where Zinsser talks about "style." He says that most people who think they are writing with "style" are just doing messy writing, trying to dress up their sentences to make them sound good. "Trying to add style," he says, "is like adding a toupee. At first glance the formerly bald man looks young and even handsome. But at second glance - and with a toupee there's always a second glance - he doesn't look quite right... he doesn't look like himself." What's the alternative? Say something substantial! Instead of taking a tired old idea and trying to dress it up, say something unique. Your personality comes through in your ideas, not in your grammatical contortions.

Yoga teachers can tie themselves up into knots in similar ways. (Please excuse the pun, I inherited my sense of humor from my dad.) I've watched plenty of yoga teachers go through all kinds of verbal acrobatics in an effort to give instructions in a more personalized way. This comes from the same thought process - the thought that you need to "add style" in order to express your personality. Then you start to hear all sorts of crazy stuff that doesn't quite make sense, like "imagine you're painting a rainbow" or "motivate your core," along with filler phrases like "next we're gonna," "and then now," or one of my favorites: "you're gonna wanna try to." Hey, we've all been guilty of this at some time. But it doesn't improve the class. Just like in writing, you have to strip your class right down to the basics (*cough*dialogue*cough*) before you can build up again.

A couple weeks ago, one of the teachers at my studio asked me to give her feedback on her class. (It was the studio owner, actually - how cool is that? I have a great boss.) I practice in the back of the room and wrote down comments (all dialogue stuff) throughout the class. This turned out to be a great exercise in multitasking. I have a new appreciation for the teachers and studio owners who are responsible for giving feedback on a regular basis! Anyway, it was really fun to take notes and figure out which bits could be improved. It reminded me of proofreading a paper written by a friend. (I do love the art of proofreading.) Just like in editing, my task was to go through the words and identify which ones were necessary, which ones were doing their job, and which ones were having their meaning twisted around. Of course, doing it in real-time is a bit trickier, but that just added to the fun!

When I'm teaching the class, I have to edit myself for clarity as I go. I usually have the words right, and if I speak quickly I can get out nearly the entire dialogue, but then the words can get lost. That is not the goal! (I once read a Yelp review about Bikram yoga that said "The instructor leads by dialogue, which means that they talk very fast like an auctioneer throughout the class," and I wanted to bang my head against the wall.) In my best classes, I am absolutely deliberate - I control the tempo, sometimes faster and sometimes slower, and I hear every word as it comes out of my lips. Oh yeah, and I make it sound totally natural. Or so I'm told. I try.

Another Bikram teacher once described my class as "really personalized." She meant it as a compliment, but it struck a little bit of horror into my heart. Does that mean I'm off the dialogue?! But here's the thing: I'm not off the dialogue. I've checked. So that means that, without embellishing the language, my personality is still coming through. I can only guess that it's because I have something to say. Substance wins over style. For once, I have to flip a Bikramism upside-down: "It's not how you say it, it's what you say!"

Style is useless on the yoga mat, too. Everyone has a style in the yoga room, some more than others. Some people fix their clothing or their hair, some people look around curiously, some people more ahead or lag behind, some people are being dramatic. But the only "style" that really helps is simplicity. Stillness. The total absence of stylization. My best, most transcendent classes have been the ones where all the distractions disappeared, where I didn't even twitch a finger if it wasn't in the instructions.

The goal in all of these pursuits - in writing, in teaching, in practicing - is to strip away everything that does not matter. All that murkiness just cover up what's real, like dirt on a mirror. Like ripples in a pond. The first yoga sutra roughly translates as "Cease the fluctuations of the mind-stuff." Let everything which does not matter truly slide. Forget about being a certain way, and just be.

That's yoga.

Catching Up...

2011-03-03T15:01:00.000-08:00

Whoops... I had all these great blogging plans, and then this week seriously got away from me. Had some rather urgent family business come up, the kind that involves long drives across state lines in the middle of the night. To make a long story short, my 92-year-old grandfather is now recovering after a successful surgery, so everything seems to have turned out okay. (Knock on wood.)

But back to this little blog - I'm finally caught up on everything (rent is paid, schedule is back to normal, washing machine is running, house is clean, chili is cooking in the crock pot) and I have been itching to write for days now.

First order of business: Chicago! Assuming that no more emergencies arise in the next few weeks, I am going to Chicago for the weekend of March 19th. I'm not mentioning this because I think you ought to stalk me. (Don't be silly.) I mention this because I am going to a yoga seminar with the one-and-only Diane Ducharme, and if you're in the neighborhood, you really should show up. Her seminars are awesome, trust me. More info is online at Bikram Yoga in the City. (And no, I'm not likely to be teaching while I'm there - this is just a quick trip and I am going purely as a student. Exciting for me!!)

Second order of business: Blog comments! I received some really insightful comments on my last blog post, the one about requiring "proof" for the benefits of a yoga practice. Basically, my readers have been keeping things interesting even in my absence. So if you haven't been reading comments, go and check them out! It's never too late to join in the conversation. It's been giving me a lot of ideas, including a gem of an idea for a new kind of Bikram yoga website. After an initial spurt of manic excitement, I am thinking carefully about a couple of different projects, and I may bounce some ideas off all of you later....

And finally, my personal 30 day reading challenge is looking more like a ?? day challenge, but it is still on! Yesterday I finished chapter 2, and now I am on page 139 (out of 594)! Progress! I am still shooting for 20 pages a day from here on, but not every single day. (For example, when I take my trip to Chicago later this month, I'm not going to sacrifice time from my yoga weekend extravaganza to plow through a big heavy book!) So now I give you:

?? Day Reading Challenge: Day 10

I've finished the first two chapters! Hurrah for me!

The first chapter is about "Movement and Posture." It goes through a lot of technical anatomy terms, which would have been tedious reading if I didn't already have a solid foundation from the anatomy course at teacher training. That was a seriously good course; Dr. Preddy knows his stuff! There was some new-for-me material, though. I finally understand the difference between concentric shortening and eccentric lengthening, though I'm not sure whether this will help me much in my day-to-day life. It helps me understand anatomy textbooks, though. (CliffNotes summary: Concentric = going UP the stairs. Eccentric = going DOWN the stairs.) The most interesting bit for me was probably the section on reflexes. If you want to understand why you can stretch your muscles with a slow, steady pull, but NOT with bouncing and jerking, this is the section for you.

As far as the concepts about stretching, posture, and gravity are concerned, I found all of the conclusions pretty familiar and intuitive. That's because I've read this kind of thing before and I have a lot of experience working with my body. But the text gives enough detailed and rigorous information to satisfy the most curious questioner, and it's cool to understand the hidden mechanics behind familiar processes.

The author also has a tendency to editorialize, which is one of my favorite parts. I feel like I'm reading Nabokov sometimes. (Pale Fire, anyone?) I really liked a section on page 29-30, where the author's [technical notes] go on for a full page and get gradually more and more tangential. His last note is pretty far from the main point of the passage, but it's a really great point:

"If your complaint is that you can't understand a particular concept and do not feel competent to criticize it, don't assume that the problem is your own lack of intelligence or scientific background. More than likely, the idea wasn't presented in a straightforward manner, and it usually happens that this masks one or more fatals flaws in the putative reasoning. One dependable test of a concept is whether you can convincingly explain it, along with the mechanics of how it operates, to a third party. If you find yourself getting your explanation garbled, or if your listener does not comprehend your argument or is unpersuaded, please examine and research the idea more critically."

Okay, so he did use the word "putative," which I had to look up (putative, adj, commonly accepted or supposed), but overall this is a fantastically clear point which I support 100%. The "third party test" is a great test for any idea, whether it's a scientific point or a business plan. (The business plan test says that that if you can't explain the purpose of your business to a third party in one sentence, you don't really have a plan.)

Returning to our immediate concerns: like in any good yoga anatomy book, chapter one is about posture and chapter two is about "Breathing." This was a pretty cool chapter. It includes a lot of suggestions for self-experimentation, and I was too lazy to get up and do any of the experiments because I was too busy lounging. If I every get motivated, I will probably go back through this chapter and try some of these breathing experiments, instead of just conceptualizing and looking at the pictures.

The chapter does a good job explaining about the different lung volumes and capacities. I still have to double-check the terminology as I read, but the main take-away point is that you never breathe your total lung capacity in and out (some air stays in your lungs so they don't collapse), and you rarely breathe your full vital capacity. In normal breathing, your lungs are never completely full or completely empty, which is totally normal and fine, but it means that there is a lot of room for manipulation when you start doing yogic breathing exercises.

There's also a ton of stuff about the different anatomical ways of breathing: chest breathing, belly breathing and everything in between. (There is a whole lot of middle ground.) That's putting it very loosely. I could relate a lot of it to my understanding of pranayama breathing, and kapalabhati is discussed specifically.

My favorite "practical" advice is nestled in between various technical discussions: "Rushing yourself or someone else into developing new breathing habits will only create anxiety and disrupt rather than benefit the nervous system (pg 120)" and "the poses themselves correct bad habits (pg 113)."

Now I think I have just enough time to read another 20 pages before going to take class at 7pm. More later!

Proof is in the Pudding

2011-02-22T20:07:00.000-08:00

30 Day Reading Challenge... DAY TWO!

Well, I haven't read any of my anatomy book yet today, but I am planning on doing so before bed. Since it's past 10:30 and I am teaching at 6am tomorrow, this puts me a little bit behind schedule... but I will persevere!

Here's an interesting question that was brought up in the foreword to my anatomy book: will modern science ever accept the "proof" that yoga is an effective form of medicine?

This passage is written by Dr. Timothy McCall from Boston, and I think he sums up the situation especially well. He writes: "In a medical profession now itself dominated by a near religious reverence for the randomized, controlled study, knowledge acquired through thousands of years of direct observation, introspection, and trial and error may seem quaint."

He's got a point. How are we ever going to get a randomized, controlled study of yoga? Where would the money come from for a true, long-range study? Who would be the control group? And how would you manage to "hold everything else constant," in the case of a holistic therapy that treats all the systems at once?

Very simple example: Say that someone starts practicing yoga, then changes their diet, then loses weight. How can you ever, in an objective and scientific fashion, determine the true thread of cause and effect? Maybe it's true that the weight loss came from the diet change (although in the case of Bikram yoga, the crazy calorie burning effects will also help). But where did the diet change come from? Did it come along with the yoga, or was it a coincidence? Can you prove it? Oh, and where does the thyroid gland come into this equation?

When people ask us for proof, we point to anecdotal evidence. Now, in the world of the "randomized, controlled study," this is not considered hard, solid proof. But my god, we have some great anecdotal evidence! Each Bikram yoga studio - and there are hundreds of Bikram yoga studios - has dozens of students who will testify to the changes that they've seen. And teacher training attracts the ones who have really experienced miracles - the ones who were virtually crippled and now can walk, the ones who have stopped taking dozens of pills, the ones whose whole lives have changed.

One girl from my teacher training, a good friend of mine who was in my group, had been crippled by rheumatoid arthritis when she was in her early 20's. She walked with a cane. Her family had to help her use the bathroom. She couldn't grasp a doorknob to open a door on her own. I would never have suspected any of these things about her - I had no idea, until I read her testimony in our yearbook after graduation - because now she is completely fine.

Yoga did that.

Dr. McCall says that it is a philosophical question: "When you have an intervention which appears safe and effective - and when its side effects are almost entirely positive - should one wait for proof before trying it?"

I say, hell, just try it.

As we say in Bikram yoga circles - and I really want to get this on a t-shirt one day - "This shit WORKS!"

Breaking out the Books!

2011-02-21T12:55:00.000-08:00

Last week, in a burst of impulse shopping inspired by some yoga teacher message boards, I ordered TWO shiny new yoga anatomy books from Amazon. They arrived in the mail a couple days ago, and I felt like it was Christmas morning! The first book, Yoga Anatomy by Leslie Kaminoff, is a heavily illustrated book that I've looked through several times before. The first two chapters are the best bits of this book. Chapter one is about breathing and chapter two is about the spine. There are so many good tidbits in there, and I found this book really illuminating the first time I read it; I clearly never understood the mechanics of pranayama breathing until I saw the pictures in the first chapter. It's a fun read, and pretty easy to get through.

The second book, Anatomy of Hatha Yoga by H. David Coulter, is more intimidating. It's a manual for yoga students and teachers, fairly dense, and heavy enough to make a good doorstop. I've consistently heard two things about this book: it has excellent information and it's very hard to get through. Most people tell me that it's a really good reference book to have on hand, but I'm not sure if any of my friends have read it cover to cover.

Well, you might be able to guess where this is going. I wasn't planning on setting any challenges for myself, but I started reading the second book today and I loved it. So now...

30 Day Reading Challenge - DAY ONE!

Over the next 30 days, I am going to read this book from cover to cover. I could use a good fun challenge. And this Coulter book is about 600 pages long, which means I only need to read 20 pages a day, which seems manageable. I got through 20 pages today and it wasn't too hard at all. Once I got out my pen and started "interacting" with the text (i.e. scribbling marginalia all over the place), I had a grand old time. I felt like I was enjoying coffee with a friend named David, a friend who just happened to be an anatomy professor with extensive interest in yoga.

I think this will be good for me. I like having goals and intellectual stimulation. Gotta keep myself on top of my game.

Also, this might give me something to blog about, since I've totally been neglecting my blogging lately...

Reasons to Live! (Yoga Teacher Edition)

2011-02-10T15:37:00.000-08:00

My Bikram yoga blogging buddy The Missus used to write a weekly post called "Short List of Reasons to Live," which was exactly that: a round-up of all the good things that had happened recently that made life worth living. I am stealing this idea from her for my title, although I left off the "short" part.

In response to my last post, MLJosey wrote a comment asking "What kinds of student feedback make you feel especially valued?" I thought that was a great question, but I didn't have a short answer to it. It sounded to me like a good idea for a whole post!

So. As a teacher, what kind of feedback makes me feel valued?

First of all, I will say that as a teacher you have to be prepared to get all sorts of feedback. This was something that they tried to impress on us at teacher training, and the idea really stuck with me. As teachers, we don't have complete control over the experiences that our students have in the hot room, because every person is going through a unique, individual experience. We know this from our own practice. Think of a time when your favorite teacher was teaching, but you just weren't at your best and had a crummy sort of class. Now think of a time when you had a teacher who wasn't doing anything special, but maybe something just clicked in your body and you had a really terrific class. See? The kind of class that you have doesn't always depend on the teacher.

This means that, as a teacher, you might see some people coming out of class elated and some people coming out looking kinda defeated, and you have to remember that it's not about you. Not always. You never quite know what's been going on in someone else's body, or in someone else's life.

Oh yeah, and anytime there is a significant heat issue going on in the room, most of the students will ignore your contribution completely. This appears to be a universal fact. During my first month as a teacher, I taught a handful of classes at the LA headquarters while they were having issues with their heater. I would come out from teaching feeling pretty good about myself. ("Hey, lookit this, I'm actually teaching yoga at headquarters and I didn't forget the dialogue!") Then all the students would come out and say to me, "Augh, the heat, the heat, the heat, it isn't hot enough, this is terrible, not hot enough, absolutely terrible!! When is the heater going to be fixed, when is it going to be hot again?! Oh, but thanks anyway for class, you were good." HAH! I was so irrelevant. It was a good lesson for me: I cannot control all the variables that go into the class.

With all of that said, the teacher still does have a huge influence over the class. A good teacher might pull you out of a funk, show you something new, say something in a way that you've never heard it before, and turn your day around. (A bad teacher might do the opposite.) Teaching matters!

Here are some of the things that make me feel good:

- You want to take my class! It's always nice when students are happy to see me (instead of being like, "Oh shit, it's you again!") Of course, sometimes students end up liking me just because I was their first teacher. Don't you remember imprinting on your first teacher, just like a baby duck? We all have our pets, our babies. That almost doesn't count; if I'm your first teacher, then the deck is stacked in my favor. But every now and then I'll get more experienced students telling me that they came because I was teaching, and that's a great compliment. Earlier this week, some girls from a college field hockey team came and told me that their team is going to start coming for yoga on the weekends, and they wanted to know, "Can you teach the class? We want you!" Well, shucks. I am terribly flattered. Better not let it go to my head.

- You laughed at my joke. Hooray!

- You learned something! This is great. I love it when students tell me about their new discoveries. If you hear something new in class that really helps you out - whether it's something about the posture, yoga, or life in general - let you teacher know! Like I talked about once before, I'm always doing my best to say things that will be helpful, informational, motivating, and maybe even inspiring, but I have no way of knowing whether I'm getting it "right"... unless you tell me!

- "Your smile was the only thing that got me through that class." Enough said.

- My correction helped you! This makes me so proud. I gave a long-time student a little correction in class this morning and suddenly she was able to lift her hands off the floor in toe stand for the first time. It was so exciting! That moment alone would kind of make my morning, without anything else said. But then after class, we were talking again about her big moment. She was amazed at what a big difference the little details make. She told me that was still thinking about a correction that I gave her ages ago in triangle ages ago and it was making a huge difference. Then another student wandered out of the yoga room into the middle of our conversation and said, "Oh, yeah, your little corrections have made a huge difference for me, too!" Oh man. I am gonna sleep sooo well tonight.

- You like my energy. Thank you. I am basically a professional Energizer Bunny. I consider it my job to have the most energy in the room, because I'm the one who keeps everyone going. Sometimes this means I have to sacrifice other things, like going to bed early instead of going out swing dancing (sniff sniff). It is a full-time job, making sure that I save up enough energy for the times when I need it, and it is nice to be appreciated!

- You are listening. You don't have to tell me that you're listening. I'm watching you. I can tell.

- You are improving. You don't have to tell me about this one, either. I can see it. Sometimes, I can see it before you can. I love to watch people transform from ordinary newbies into real yogis.

- You feel better! This is one that I can't take credit for, because the yoga series is doing most of the work. But it's so great to hear about good results. "I felt more relaxed after class." "I had so much energy!" "My arthritis pain started to go away by the end of half moon." "I slept really well - lots of dreams." That stuff is so cool.

See, I told you this was not going to be a "short" list. I could go on and on. But I'll end with one more story, a simple one and a good one.

I was at the desk one morning a few months ago, waiting for the students to come in. The first to arrive was a woman who had just finished her first month of Bikram yoga. She had taken almost 20 classes in her first month and had decided to sign up for the annual membership. I was the one to set up her account for the next year. As she handed me her credit card, she gave me a huge smile, eyes tearing up just a little bit, and said, "I know you probably hear this all the time, but I just wanted you to know, you guys are changing my life."

Oh.

No, it's not something that I hear every day. I can still picture the way her eyes looked when she said those words.

That's a good reason for me to be alive.

Teacher Training vs. Teaching

2011-02-05T17:32:00.000-08:00

It feels like it's been a while since I said anything about teacher training. But I have had lots of thoughts about it recently. It's been almost 8 months now (what?!?) since I graduated, and here are some of my recent observations.

Similar: As a trainee and as a teacher, you typically spend a minimum of 3 hours a day sweating in a hot room, with a day-and-a-half off per week.

Different: As a trainee, you never really have to do more than 11 classes in a week (unless you have a make-up class or you on demo team in week 9.) As a teacher, I am sometimes in the hot room (counting both teaching or taking) for 11 classes in one weekend. "Weekend" as in "three day." This is one of those weekends. Basically, the amount that you sweat at TT is nothing compared to how much you might end up sweating as a teacher.

Similar: Hydration and sleep are top priorities at all times!

Different: As a teacher, nobody makes you stay up late watching strange Hindi movies. Now I only stay up moderately late, and I'm watching episodes Doctor Who instead of Mahabharat. (And by the way, David Tennant, how sexy is his hair?!)

Similar: Dialogue, dialogue, and more dialogue. Talk, sleep, and breathe dialogue.

Different: When you are a trainee, everyone around you is dialogue-obsessed. You hear it in the stairwells. People are practicing wind-removing pose in the parking lot. (I have pictures of this.) When you say the dialogue, you have a whole room of people checking to see if you're doing it right. When you're a teacher, no one is checking (for the most part). There are plenty of times when no one in the room knows if you're saying it "right" (nor do they care). This means that it is up to you to keep yourself honest and stay on track. (And if you happen to have a dialogue trophy sitting on your desk, it is up to you to uphold the high standard for the whole studio, so don't slack!)

And then here are some more differences:

Opposite: At training, you are always saying your dialogue for a bunch of people who already know it. You basically just recite the dialogue. At best, it's role-playing. As a teacher, you are giving instruction to a bunch of people who sometimes have no clue what they are supposed to be doing. You have to actually teach using the dialogue. This is a whole different ballgame.

Opposite: At training, everyone tells you what to do. When you are a teacher, you are responsible for telling everyone else what to do! It's the difference between being a passenger on the bus and driving the bus.

Opposite: In posture clinics at training, you're always kind of worried about "How am I doing?" When you teach class, you stop thinking about yourself. You think about your class and think, "How are they doing??" (And also sometimes, still, ".... but really how am I doing?")

Opposite: At training, people are always around to tell you how you are doing and clap for you when you do well. Heck, even if you kinda suck, your group will still clap for you! As a teacher, you have to chase people down and ask them if you want someone to tell you how you are doing.** And the clapping? Not so often.

Here's the thing, though: teaching is great. Teaching is like a million times better than being a trainee. Why? Because you're actually doing something! When you're in training, it's all just a big simulation, a preview, a teaser for the real thing. It prepares you, kind of... but really, nothing can prepare you for what it feels like to lead a class. With apologies to The Matrix, no one can be told what teaching is... you have to see it for yourself.

I had an awesome class this afternoon. I had been at the studio all day - I took the 9am, taught the 11am, then advanced class right after the 11 ended, and then I barely had time to shove some microwave Pad Thai into my face (thank you Trader Joes!) before students started coming in for the 4pm. And coming in. And coming in. And coming in. Um. I ended up having FIFTY-FIVE people in my 4pm class, which might be some kind of record for me. (Our weekend and evening classes typically have 30-something people, or maybe 40+.) I have no idea where all these people came from. It was some combination of Groupons, 30 day challengers, studio regulars, and random people who just decided to show up for some SuperBowl weekend yoga. I thought this was supposed to happen in January, not February?!

Anyway. My class of 55 people. Man, that room got hot. It was a constant balancing/juggling act to keep the temperature under control, keep everyone moving (or at least alive), and keep the newer folks from bolting for the hills! One of the new girls ended up sitting outside to get air for a couple minutes, but she was by the window where I could keep an eye on her (I have no problem with this), and she rallied and came back in after some coconut water. Hooray!

It was funny, because in the beginning I could feel the whole room being like, "Yo, holy crap, I dunno about this, this is a whole lot of people and it's really hot." I felt a tiny bit of doubt myself, in a very very small and secret place inside myself, when I looked around the room and thought, "Geez, all these people are here listening to me to find out what to do, and I have to convince them to do this whole yoga class?!" (I almost never think this. It's the equivalent of looking down when you're in the middle of a tightrope - you just don't do it. I take my responsibility seriously, but I can't dwell on it!)

But as class went along and we got onto the floor, there was a definite turning point - I felt it - when everyone was like, "ok, alright, this is actually quite cool." I got the fans running and started cracking little jokes, and I can't even remember what I said, but the whole room laughed. Not just once, but a few times. It was fun. We were having fun together. The great thing about Bikram yoga is that yes, it's so hard sometimes that it's almost a sick and twisted joke, but everyone is in on the joke. After rabbit pose, one woman headed for the back door (which I was standing near, adjusting the fans). I grinned at her and said, "Oh, stay! You're doing so great! There's only 5 minutes left." (More like 10 minutes - it was a white lie.) She looked at me and said, "Really? Promise?" I said, "Would I lie to you?" She turned around and went back to her mat, and the whole room surprised me by spontaneously bursting into applause. Someone even went "wooo!" It was terrific.

We finished the class strong, and everyone staggered out looking shell-shocked but happy. My favorite post-class reaction: "That was terrible and awesome! SO awesome!"

I'd do that again.

Of course, now I am torn between feeling awesome (because today was really fun) and feeling like I've been beat up by a gang (because today was no joke)! I am spending my Saturday night on the couch drinking Gatorade and watching more Doctor Who Episodes. (Exterminate!!) Just like at teacher training, I have no life. And just like at teacher training, I am having an unreasonably good time.

Same thing tomorrow!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

** Side story to go along with that point: I have found an exception to this rule. A couple months ago, when I visited Diane and Teri's studios, I discovered the funniest thing. At both (completely separate) studios, the students are used to periodically taking class from visiting/traveling teachers who are there to get feedback from the studio owners. And after almost every class I taught at either of those studios, the students would come out of class and tell me, "You did a good job." Not "great class" or "thanks for class," which are the usual comments - but rather, "You did a good job." And I swear, they would practically pat me on the arm when they said it. "Good job, dear!" It was the funniest, sweetest thing. It still cracks me up, just thinking about it. But that is an anomaly...

"I can't die. It would ruin my image."

2011-01-24T19:12:00.000-08:00

Nope, it wasn't Bikram who said that, although it really sounds like something he would say! It was Jack Lalanne, "fitness guru", who died yesterday at age 96. I found the quote in this brief article.

This guy was way before my time, but I started reading about him and watching his videos tonight, and I liked them so much that I just have to share them. Turns out, he was way ahead of his time. He opened America's first modern fitness center in 1936. He taught people to lift weights when doctors were saying that "working out with weights would give people heart attacks and they would lose their sex drive." He was on TV in the 1950's with the first syndicated exercise show, teaching people that they could feel better if they would exercise regularly and eat sensibly. The guy has a ridiculous amount of charisma - he practically jumps off the screen - and his advice is genuine and straightforward.

He reminds me a lot of Bikram as a young man; both of them trying to convince the skeptical American public that they would feel so amazing if they would just take up some fitness training or yoga class (respectively.) Both delightfully charismatic, energetic people.

Here's one of my favorite Jack Lalanne videos that I've found so far:

Doesn't he just jump out at you? His approach in this one is identical to the approach that Bikram took in the 70's (and still takes today). He says, look, in America you have everything, but you are unhappy. In other countries, poorer countries, they have nothing, but they are still happy. Why? And how do we change this?

Another favorite of mine is the one about lifting one thousand pounds. "You know, there's a right and a wrong way to do everything, there's always a correct way to do something, there's always a way to accomplish an impossible feat.... If you have the know-how, then it can be done." Yes. I won't spoil the punchline for you. Here's the video:

There's much, much more where this came from, on YouTube and at JackLalanne.com. I'm going right back to watch some more videos now, but I was just dying to share. I'm watching this guy with a huge grin on my face, wondering if I should be taking notes.

I've never quoted a YouTube comment before, but there's a first time for everything. "No matter how long you lived, you died young." Well said. Rest in peace, Jack.

Jack Lalanne at age 95.

We will now return to your regularly scheduled programming...

All Of Us, In Costume

2011-01-18T16:21:00.000-08:00

This is a little something that I started writing last month and finished writing tonight:

When I first started Bikram yoga, I didn't own any "yoga clothes," and I liked it that way. I'd go to class in rolled-up tank tops, old cotton sports bras, running shorts, swim-suit tops, cast-off ballet clothes, cut-up leggings - anything I had lying around in my closet that would let me get through a 90 minute hot class without completely over-heating or over-exposing myself. I didn't expect that yoga would become a regular habit (hah!) and I didn't want to "dress up" for it. I wasn't there to look cute in spandex, I was there to get the job done.

A couple months after I joined the work-study program, which officially made me a "regular" at the studio, I broke down and bought my first part of yoga shorts. I got the classic black, side-string Shakti shorts. (I still have them, although by now they've shrunk a bit and I don't wear them much.) My first real yoga costume!

Have you noticed that the dialogue refers to your outfit as "your costume"? It happens a couple of times. ("Heel touching the costume, sole of the foot facing the ceiling.") It’s an apt description. We do put on costumes to do yoga. Everyone has at least one article of clothing - a favorite tank top or pair of shorts - that is For Yoga. And when you put that clothing on, you are in your yoga costume, looking like a yogi, ready to try to do some yoga.

At first it felt strange to be wearing a real yoga costume. Hmm, can I take myself seriously in this? Does this fit? Do I deserve it? Is this really me? But I quickly got used to the feeling, and then I grew to really enjoy it. Yes, world, here I am! All dressed and ready for yoga!

When I teach, I have a different costume. I wear shorts or a leotard for practice, but I always teach in capri pants. And I always teach wearing my red Swatch. I’ve never taught a class without it. (I replaced the watchband last month because the plastic had cracked from the stress of constantly going from hot to cold.) In my first month of teaching, when my identity as a teacher was still tenuous and unfamiliar, there were only two things that made me feel like I was a legitimate teacher: one thing was standing on the podium and the other was wearing my teaching costume.

Years ago, I read a short piece called “My First Day in Priest Clothes.” It’s one of the stories from I Thought My Father Was God, a collection of stories compiled for NPR’s National Story Project. This particular story is about a young man who has just entered seminary, still a few years away from becoming a priest. The first time he wears his collar and black suit out in public, he is on his way to a dentist’s appointment. He describes how strange it feels to be out in public dressed up like a priest. Here’s the punchline to the story:

"As I nervously and so very self-consciously made my way along the sidewalk to the office - dressed so strangely for the first time, looking like a priest, but not at all a priest - along came five or six small kids, running, dancing laughing. They were dressed up in costumes! A ghost, a witch, a bear... they were coming from a school Halloween party. My first day in priest costume, and it was Halloween. We were all in costume." - Eugene O'Brien

Love this.

Isn't it true? We're always, all of us, in costume. We dress up for work, for exercise, for play, for everything. I dress up as a yoga teacher when I go to teach class. Then I dress up as a professional, all business casual-like, for SAT classes and school presentations. I dress up in tights and dancing shoes for swing dance nights. (This is quickly becoming my favorite costume.) Last weekend I dressed up in a skirt and boots for a night out at the orchestra. There was a reception afterwards, the kind of party where a bunch of "young professionals" stand around tables eating little tortellini and talking about things. I, too, was dressed up like a "young professional," and I couldn't believe that everyone fell for it; they couldn't tell that I'll never work a 9-to-5 and that I spend most of my time dressed in spandex. The costume worked! It was rather bizarre.

They say that clothes make the man (or woman), and this is certainly fair. Our clothing has a huge influence on the way that we are perceived, and it also affects how we perceive ourselves. One of my favorite not-so-guilty pleasure TV shows is "What Not To Wear," because the women who get made over are always glowing by the end. They don't just get a wardrobe makeover, they get a whole self-esteem makeover! They are told that they are beautiful just as they are, and then they are taught how to shine on the outside just as much as they shine on the inside. I love this!

But it's also nice to let all of that fall away, and that's what happens for me in yoga. We all come into class in our costumes, carrying our identities and our ideas about ourselves. But as the sweat starts to roll and the dialogue washes over us, all of that melts away. When we look into our own eyes in the mirror, we start to glimpse something simpler, something cleaner, something more honest. We start to see our true Selves, which have always been there, sitting quietly, underneath all the layers.

During the day, we wrap ourselves in our identities. We wear them like costumes, telling stories about who we are. But it is so good to do yoga and forget all of that, if only for a few minutes. It is so good to sweat and open your eyes and breathe. Forget everything, peel back the layers. Just breathe and be. We are all equals, and we do this thing together, as honestly as possible. It is remarkable. It is so beautiful.

Turning Towards the Sun

2011-01-10T15:44:00.000-08:00

This whole year - all 10 days of it, so far! - I have been thinking about the different kinds of growth and change.

Sometimes change is big and dramatic, impossible to miss. We've all gone through those periods of growth, when it seems that everything changes - changing jobs, getting promoted, changing apartments, moving out of state, starting school, finishing school. Starting a new yoga class. And we're always looking forward to the landmarks that show us how far we've come - the diplomas, the promotions, the engagements, the trophies, the celebrations. In yoga, you look forward to those days when something big happens, the day when you finally do every posture, touch your forehead to your knee, lock your knees in stretching pose, wrap your foot in eagle, or touch your head on your toes. And you should be excited about those milestones! It's so exciting to see your body change and to measure your own improvement.

But I'm interested in subtle changes, too. After all, every big change is the result of hundreds of tiny, incremental changes. Those are the ones that are easy to miss, but they shouldn't be forgotten.

Here's an easy example: there's a terrific passage in How Yoga Works where the girl is coaching her student, the Captain, through a stretching pose. She puts a stack of paper on the floor and has him touch the top sheet of paper. Then she takes off one page. "One paper a day," she says, "That's the right speed for your back." (But that will take me months! he complains. Yes, she replies, but think about how fast it is compared to how long you spent hurting your back in the first place.) Taking away one sheet of paper is not exciting; the change is barely noticeable! But sheet by sheet, day by day, those tiny changes will heal the Captain's back.

And after all, nature works the same way. Ever since the Winter Solstice, the days have been getting longer again, at least in this part of the globe. Today, the sun set 15 minutes later than it did on December 21st. Between the weather and the lights of civilization, you'd never notice a difference; it's still dark by the time most people get out of work. But before we know it, it'll be summer again and we'll be enjoying the light long into the evening, past dinnertime, having drinks and desserts on the porch. Slowly, inevitably, we are turning towards the sun, into more light.

When we take control of this process, when we decide to take the steps to make those little changes happen, it all comes back down to gardening.

We must become

As gardeners.

IV.3B

(Yoga Sutra)

It's not enough to just plant seeds and then forget about them. You have to nurture them, bit by bit, day by day. You can't expect them to burst into bloom overnight. Even when you can't see anything happening, you have to keep watering your garden. Keep at it, whatever that "it" may be. Keep finding little ways to turn your house into a home. Keep going out and meeting new people. Keep finding new ways to cook for yourself and nourish yourself. Keep reading new things. Keep going to yoga class and just trying the right way. That's the only way to make your garden grow.

Under your tender care, one day all those seeds will sprout, grow, and open up - like a flower petal blooming!! (Of course.) When the conditions are right, it just happens. Stay patient, stay passionate, stay vigilant, and keep on tending your garden.

Looking Forward

2011-01-04T11:04:00.000-08:00

Since I am a huge mythology geek (and very proud of it, thank you), I always think of Janus when I turn the calendar page to January. Janus is a figure from ancient Roman mythology, a god who is always shown with two faces, one looking backwards and one looking forward. (This is, of course, where the month of January gets its name.) He is the god of gates, doorways, beginnings, and ending.

I just learned something else about Janus, thanks to Wikipedia! Apparently, lots of theology scholars have drawn comparisons between Janus and Ganesha, the awesome Hindu god with the elephant head, because they are both the guardians of gates and they are both associated with beginnings. More specifically, Ganesha is the "Destroyer of Obstacles," which I guess explains why he is so popular. So now I am thinking of Ganesha, too.

That was a bit of a tangent, but I thought it was interesting!

I'm interested in Janus and Ganesha and beginnings because, well, the beginning of the new year is the traditional time for such musings and it seems like a fitting moment for them. Intention-setting can be done at any time of year, of course, but it's always a good exercise! And if you do it like you mean it, it can have pretty significant results. (Hello, law of attraction!)

I've made great resolutions, I've made lousy resolutions, and sometimes I've skipped making resolutions altogether. For years, as a teenager, I would always resolve to stop eating junk food and lose 5 pounds. (Don't even ask me why I wanted to lose 5 pounds!) So on New Year's Eve, I would eat whatever junk food was available, and then on New Year's Day I would call it quits. Since I made this resolution every single year, I'm sure you can guess just how successful it was. (Not at all.) But then... one year, in a fit of brilliance and inspiration, I made a different resolution. I resolved to never go on another diet again.

That was probably six years ago now, and it's the one resolution that I've never broken. The next year, I didn't need to make any resolutions at all.

Why am I thinking of that story now? I guess because the "resolution" can work in two different ways. One on hand, you can use it as a weapon against yourself. It can become an excuse to find all the things that you think are wrong with you and vow to change them. And then you set yourself up for failure, because you set the bar higher than you can ever reach, always striving for some unrealistic ideal. Or... you can make your resolutions manageable and healthy. Resolve to do things that will make you happier and set goals that you can actually achieve! If your goals are aligned with your genuine well-being, then they will be easy to achieve, because they will feel natural and right.

This year, this month, I feel like I am at a pivot point. Instead of trying to get somewhere, I am learning to enjoy being somewhere, which is a real paradigm shift. And now that I am more or less committed to staying in one area, there are all kinds of things that I want to do. On New Year's Eve, I was telling one of the other teachers about all my "resolutions" for the year: I'm going to paint my room, re-organize the kitchen, get more plants for the house, clean up the entryway, fix the feng shui (I bought a book).... He laughed at me and said, "Those aren't resolutions, that's your to-do list!" Okay, fine, that's a good point. But I'm still excited about doing all those things! I want to create a good environment around myself where I can really do my best. I'd like an environment that makes it easier for me to listen to good music, relax, cook more, read more, write more. I already have bought a new bed frame, so I am no longer sleeping on a mattress on the floor, and I'm going to Home Depot today for paint!

My one huge resolution is that I want to get out more and meet people who aren't my yoga students. You can hold me to that! New Year's Resolution for Juliana: Get Out and Meet People Other Than Yogis. I love you all to death, but I need a real social life!

I am very proud to say that I have already taken steps towards achieving this goal! I went out last night (by myself) to go swing dancing! It was great. There's a group in my city that hosts dances (with drop-in lessons) every Monday and Friday night, and it's a really cool crowd. There are lots of great dancers, along with lots of enthusiastic newbies, it's a fun young crowd, you meet tons of people, and the dancing is great fun. I had fun watching the really good dancers at the end of the night, and I told the guy next to me, "Okay, that is my goal for next year!" I think that I might have to sign up for the actual lesson series in a couple of months. There's a series that starts tomorrow night, but it definitely conflicts with teaching. Oh well... let's not get carried away yet! I can easily see this becoming a new addiction...

As far as yoga goes, I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing. (Hah. Those of you who have been through posture clinics will understand the joke there!) I've gotten lots of good feedback on my teaching recently, so I know that I am pointed in the right direction, and I'm just going to keep moving forward! I have a couple of goals regarding advanced postures, but that's nothing new. I did make New Year's resolutions for my students - you know, so-and-so needs to lock their knee, so-and-so needs to get up higher in cobra, everyone needs to kick out - so... look out for me!! (Please picture me cackling gleefully as I say that.) I told my students in class that the only resolution they need to make is to show up. "If you've been coming once a week, try coming twice a week. If you've been coming twice a week, see if you can come three times a week. If you've been coming every day... *dramatic pause*... maybe you should take a day off!"

That goes for all of you, too! Don't bite off more than you can chew, don't beat yourself up over what's past, and don't set yourself up for failure. Just send up a little good thought to Janus, Ganesh, Buddha, God, or any other "Destroyer of Obstacles" who you like, and then keep moving forward. Gently, confidently, joyfully, keep looking forward towards more happiness in your life.

Looking Backwards

2010-12-31T12:30:00.000-08:00

"It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting." - From The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

I can't resist taking a moment to reflect on 2010. This was one hell of an eventful year!

January - March: Waiting for my real life to begin!

I started off this year living in California, only semi-employed, finishing up the last pieces of my Master's degree and counting down the days until teacher training. Those months were fun, I guess. To tell you the truth, it's all kind of a blur now. I seem to have done quite a lot of yoga and blogging. A bunch of us were running the Bikram101 blog, which was really good fun. (Although really, 101 day challenge? I doubt I'll ever do that again. I like my yoga, but I like a day off now and then!) There were some gems in there; if you missed it the first time around, it's worth going back and reading from the beginning! (TheMissus and I both went on to become teachers before the end of the year, which was exciting.) I also remember a lot of driving. I drove to LA almost every week. I miss seeing Emmy and Bikram and my LA friends, but I don't miss all that driving!

I think those months were all about anticipation. I wrote myself a note at one point that said "savor the anticipation," and I think I did a good job of that, but I got impatient towards the end!

April - June: Teacher training.

I may as well have been in an alternate universe for those months. The yoga bubble barely ever made contact with the real world. I didn't even know that the "oil spill" wasn't really just a "spill" until it had already been gushing for weeks and weeks. I had seen references to the spill on the headlines of USA Today when I was walking back and forth from the ice machine in the morning, but I had no idea what was going on until I finally googled "oil spill" over the weekend. "Holy shit!!"

Teacher training was pure wish fulfillment. It wasn't perfect by any means, but I got tons out of it. In the end, I got everything that I had wanted and more. Most importantly, I got the certificate! And then I got the heck out of Dodge.

July: Back to the real world: do they have a support group for this?!

Oh my goodness. I dove into teaching full-time right away, and that was great, because the yoga room was the only place where I felt normal after training!

Teachers always laugh about this because we've all been through it, but seriously, that reintegration period is wild! I just remember that I had no idea how to live without a rigid schedule anymore. You mean, I can cook in a real kitchen? I can go to the grocery store any time?? It was too weird. I couldn't remember what I used to eat, or when I used to do laundry. I barely remember how to drive my car! You know all those stories about people who finally get released from prison after years and years, and then they end up committing petty crimes just so that they can go back to prison because they can't handle life "outside"? It's kind of like that for a couple weeks. Part of you wants so badly to go back.

But you move on...

August: On the road again!

Cleaned out the beautiful house in Santa Barbara (which I still kinda miss) and hit the road with my sister for an epic cross-country road trip. If I had to write a "short list of reasons to live," the National Parks would be pretty high on that list.

After driving across the country and up and down the east coast, I settled down in the city where I'm living now and got down to business, just teaching, teaching, and teaching. The interesting part about moving to a new part of the country? Nobody there had ever known me before I was a yoga teacher! I didn't meet them as a yoga student or a grad student or a dancer or a waitress or anything else. I really did just walk in there every day and say "Hi, I'm Juliana, I'm your yoga teacher," and that was my introduction to a whole new community of people. And oh my gosh, I was a baby yoga teacher. Ok, I'm still a baby now, but I was a really new baby then, only a couple months old! But I didn't tell anybody that (unless they asked). I just taught.

That seemed to work out pretty well.

September - December: New equilibrium?

Here's the interesting question. After all your dreams come true.... what do you do next?

As it turns out, life just kind of goes on. The incredible, life-changing new job is still sometimes just a job. There's laundry to be washed, groceries to be bought, dinner to be made. Still have to take out the trash and buy toilet paper. Still practicing yoga all the time. Still teaching. Still learning.

Back when I was in training (more than six months ago, now!) I always thought "oh, it'll come with experience" was kind of a bullshit answer. I had all these questions about teaching class, because there were so many important things - how to correct, when to correct, how to know how much an individual can do - that we didn't really go over very much. They just told us that once we got used to teaching, we'd figure that stuff out. I didn't find this very satisfying. I didn't want to just "learn by experience," dammit, I wanted someone to teach me!

Well, here I am, learning by experience. And I am absolutely eating my words, 100%, because learning by experience really works. I still seek out feedback sometimes, and good feedback is still really helpful, but I also just... well... figure it out! Because I can tell when things are working well, and I can tell when they're slightly off. For example, if I give someone a correction and she responds by sitting out the next set of the posture, I learn, "Okay, that wasn't the right moment for her, she was already doing the best that she could." Or if I give a new student some encouragement during her first class, and then she comes back again and again and again, and she thanks me for being her first teacher, then I learn, "Okay, that worked!" (Honestly, the yoga itself does most of the work with the new folks; my job is just to pass along information and not scare anybody.)

Speaking of experience, I've taught somewhere in the ballpark of 230 yoga classes this year, at 13 different yoga studios. Not bad!

I'm finding my place in my new community, and it feels good. And it's such a joy to finally be a real part of the big yoga teacher family! I spent so many years trying to get somewhere. Now I'm there. Wow.

My plans for tonight? Teaching yoga, of course. 10:30pm to midnight. I'm pretty excited.

Happy New Year, everybody!

Merry and Bright

2010-12-26T10:17:00.000-08:00

Hello to the internet!! I know, it's been a while. But I have been busy and without internet connection. Now it is Sunday afternoon, the day after Christmas, and I actually have some time by myself! I am camped out in the basement of my favorite coffee shop/ juice bar/ hippie restaurant, in my hometown, finished with yoga class for the morning, awaiting the "blizzard" that's supposed to come in this afternoon. Mmm, life is good. I love the holidays. I think the only thing I'm missing is hot chocolate....

Aaaaahh. Hot chocolate success. Wobbly table fail!!! Fortunately, the splash narrowly missed my laptop, and I still have most of my hot chocolate left in the glass. Now where was I?

Oh yes, the holiday season. This holiday season has been festive and busy. I hit the road on the 17th and basically did a little yoga tour of the eastern seaboard. I drove up and down (found some good new back routes), stayed with studio owners, taught at one familiar studio and 3 where I'd never taught, got feedback, ate lots of Cheddar cheese (for some reason), went to a Solstice party, quoted The Birdcage incessantly (long story), and then finally drove back to my hometown for a belated Chanukah at my Mom's house and a timely Christmas at my Dad's.

Here are some highlights, mostly yoga related, not in chronological order:

- I taught a Thursday morning class for my friend Maria, at her beautiful new studio in Natick. She is definitely in "my generation" of yoga teachers - she went to training a couple years before I did, but our birthdays are only a month apart - and it was cool to see her in charge of her own yoga studio and doing a great job of it. The lovely Danielle surprised the heck out of me by showing up for class, and she has the cutest little baby bump you have ever seen. Glowing, literally glowing. It was great fun to have these two rocking teachers in my class, along with several regular students and two first-timers, young men (teenagers really) who gave it the old college try. I felt really comfortable in Maria's space, and it gave me a good chance to incorporate all the feedback that I'd gotten on my class recently. It was very satisfying. I had so much fun teaching that class.

- I made it to Diane's studio in West Roxbury to teach a class. (Diane had never taken my class before, and she is really good at giving feedback, so I was really excited to finally teach for her.) This was on Monday night, when there was a giant snowstorm all over Boston, so it turned out that making it to the studio was really the hardest part! Holy crap. It was dark and snowing, traffic was a mess, and I had no idea where I was going. After about 10 wrong turns, assistance from 3 Dunkin Donuts patrons, and one very distressed phone call, I arrived in the studio parking lot about 75 minutes later than I had planned on. (We switched class times and I taught at 7 instead of 5.) So that was a bit more drama than I had planned on, but I still got to teach class and it went fine. I was thrilled to spend some quality time with one of my favorite people ever, and the blizzard just made it, well, cozy.

- Speaking of West Rox, advanced class last week was awesome. Surprising new progress on full wheel: I actually went back and grabbed one of my ankles from standing! And then the other one! But NOT at the same time. That will be the next step. (In case you're not sure, that is exactly what it sounds like: stand there, bend backwards, and grab your ankles.) It was very exciting. So was lunch.

- I stayed at Teri's house up in North Andover for a few days along with my friend Ignacio, from my teacher training. Ignacio was my neighbor until recently, but now he is up in New England and boarding with Teri for a while. Now, Ignacio doesn't decorate - he is "not that kind of gay" - but he's very good about cleaning, so we decided that he is officially Teri's houseboy. Does anyone remember the Hank Azarea character in The Birdcage? Agador Spartacus? That is exactly his new role in the household. I didn't realize that so many people have watched The Birdcage, by the way. Pretty much everyone knew what we were talking about and could produce a quote to prove it. The Solstice party ended with four of us in the kitchen quoting The Birdcage and rolling around on the floor for probably 30 minutes. It is a very funny movie. Although we all feel sad for the Nathan Lane character when he dresses up in the suit with the bright socks on. ("One does want a hint of color!" Awww.)

- I spent a lot of time holding the world's largest cat, Mr. Sweetie. I know a lot of cats are big, but this is no joke; he is a 30 pound cat. (I suspect that he has a weird pituitary gland.)

Please be clear: he is not FAT, he is just BIG. If you stretch him out, he is about 3 feet distance (36 inches.) The kids love to hold him, and he's very docile, but it's hard for them because he tends to outweigh them.

- Then I went to my Dad's house and spent a lot of time with two very small cats. Here they are.

Their names are Romeo and Olive, and they are freaking adorable. I've never really considered myself a cat person, but I am falling in love with cats all over the place! These guys are very sociable and will come right up and sit on your shoulder. They also like to chase toy mice and sleep. For a while, Olive slept on my lap while Romeo slept on Olive, which was just absurdly cute. Here is Romeo again with my sister:

Awwwww. Baby!

- This is so not a food blog, but I must say, my sister and I did a great job producing a vegetarian Christmas dinner for 10 people. Here is the broccoli cheese baked risotto that we made, which was a big hit. Even my cousin's baby liked it, and he is the pickiest eater out of the group. Great success!

- If anyone is looking for a geeky new obsession, check out the new(est) Doctor Who series! I got my sister the second season for Chanukah and we watched the "Christmas Invasion" episode, which really got me into the Christmas spirit! This series stars David Tennant (I think he is the 10th Doctor now?) and he is delicious. Great hair. In the Christmas episode, he has a swordfighting duel against an alien leader while he is wearing pajamas. I think this may be the best scifi I have ever seen. Campy, dramatic, clever script, great acting, and lovely eye candy.

Alright, that's enough of that for now. Hope all of you have been having terrific holidays so far! And I hope this "blizzard" lands so I can stay in watching movies and then go skiing.

May your days be merry and bright, and may all your Christmases be white.... :)

The Great Standing Bow Disaster of 2010 (Championships)

2010-12-11T10:59:00.000-08:00

***SPOILER ALERT!!* **

.
My routine for championships did not go exactly as planned.

***END SPOILER ALERT***

As many of you know, last weekend I competed in the regional yoga championships for my area. I spent a decent amount of time working on advanced postures and getting my routine ready. I did lots of those backbends down the wall, which I've never done consistently before - they seemed to make a difference! - and I made a lot of progress on crane and full standing bow, which are kind of my dream postures. Neither posture ended up being ready for stage this year - I need to lock my elbows in crane and get my foot to STAY under my chin in full standing bow - but they are both a lot closer now.

I ended up choosing to do my two "back-up" postures as optionals, peacock in lotus and full cobra, which are still pretty respectable postures. I'd done full cobra on stage before, so I didn't need to worry about that one. I'd never done peacock on stage, or any kind of balancing/strength posture for that matter, so that was still a good challenge for me. (I discovered some new muscles in my butt that should be useful for all the lotus postures, too.)

I ran through my routine for an "audience" a few times during the week leading up to championships, and it felt really solid and good. I was able to nail all my balancing postures, no problem, and I was hoping that the little extra burst of adrenaline on stage would help make everything a tiny bit better. For example, I was about half an inch from being locked out in standing bow, but I had a feeling I'd be able to do it when it really counted.

Dun dun DUN....

I drove down to Richmond (the location of the championships) on Friday afternoon and spent the night with an awesome lady from my teacher training. (Thanks Marcia! Love the TT connection everywhere.) I got up early enough to take class on Saturday morning before the event. Suzanne Elliot from Florida taught. She was one of our judges for the day, and I already knew her from my visit to San Diego in October - we visited training at the same time - so it was fun to see her again and she taught a great class. I had a sweaty but rocking class. I actually held standing bow for the full length of time for three out of four sets, which is virtually unheard of for me. (Irony! Foreshadowing!) I finished class feeling really relaxed and energized.

With the aid of my trusty new GPS, I navigated around a major Christmas parade and made it to the theatre without incident. Our event was at a cute little dance theatre, 200+ seats. Being onstage in December (in a leotard!) reminded me of my Nutcracker days; I felt like Tchaikovsky should be playing. All the yogi and yoginis were hanging out backstage in the dressing rooms or on the stage warming up. I tried out my balancing postures on the stage, which went fine, and then spent the rest of the free time stretching and socializing. The backstage socializing is always the best part. It was a fun chance to meet new people and to catch up with some awesome yogis who I hadn't seen for a while.

Once the event started, we all had to be very quiet backstage, which made for a more stressful environment, lots of nerves in the air! We all get nervous for each other. I tried not to watch very much before my turn, because I didn't want to psych myself out. When my turn came, I did a quick pranayama and a little dance, put on a big smile, walked out onto the stage, and bowed to the judges.

First posture: Standing head to knee pose. Standing head to knee is often considered the toughest of the seven postures, because it is such a psychological test. The moment you doubt yourself, you fall! I had a teeny wobble when I went to pick up my foot, but I quickly pulled myself together, got into the posture, held it quite comfortably while I counted to 5, and came back out step by step. (The dreaded dismount.) Success!

Here is a very blurry picture that was taken by a friend's iPhone from the back row:

(There was an official photographer who took non-blurry photos, but I have to pay to get those. Might do that later.)

Second posture: Standing bow pulling pose. Because of the way I chose my sides for head to knee and standing bow, I had to change directions in between poses and face the opposite side. So after finishing standing head to knee, I turned a quarter turn to the right, paused for a split second facing the audience, and then turned again to face the other side. In retrospect, this may have been my fatal mistake; I think that it freaked me out when I had to see the audience again in the middle of the routine.

I confidently announced the name of the pose and picked up my foot, and then everything pretty much went to shit.

In the past week, I have done a few humorous re-enactments to describe exactly what happened next. For the purposes of this blog, since you can't see my attempts at acting, I have prepared a series of pictures. Here is what happened:

Here we go, standing bow!

Uh oh, what's this??

It was like the connection between my brain and my leg had been completely severed. Despite my best efforts, I just couldn't seem to get my leg to respond. I might as well have been holding a dead fish in my hand.

However, you are allowed to take a second chance (for only half the points) if you really fail at a posture, so I figured I might as well take another whack at it. When's the next time I'll have a chance to do standing bow on stage in front of hundreds of people, right?!

Okay, for real this time!

Tragically, my leg is still doing its "I'm a dead fish!" act.

Just make a standing bow!

ANY standing bow!!

Aw. Fail.

Here is a close-up of my thoughts at this moment. The image below is a panel from my favorite online blog/comic-strip, and it sums things up perfectly.

(Click picture to see original comic.)

But hey, I'm still on stage, so...

Third posture! Bow pose. No problem. I am once again in control of all my facilities, and I am able to do a perfectly fine bow pose. I followed this with a respectable rabbit pose and a nice long stretching pose. Stretching is always a good one for me - knees locked, backs of the legs on the floor, spine mostly straight, eyes forward, forehead to toes.

Sixth posture, peacock in lotus. Goody, more balancing! Actually, this posture went okay. I was pretty determined to not fuck this one up, because frankly, one huge fuck-up per routine is enough. I got my knees up, held the pose still for the requisite 3 or 4 seconds, and got back out with control. No face-plants, hooray!

Seventh and final posture, full cobra. I took my sweet time with this one, because at this point I didn't really care about the clock and I was still on stage in front of a whole ton of people. I might as well do something nice before hanging up my leotard until next year! So I gave myself a moment, took a deep breath, came up niiiice and slow, put my toes to my lips, held it for a bit, and then came back out niiiiiice and slow with a big grin on my face. Ta-daaaa!

Blurry full cobra:

Aaaand, scene.

Then I went backstage and did a perfectly normal standing bow in the hallway just to see if I could. (Of course I could!) At the intermission I put on some clothes and went out to find my friends in the audience. My friend Eleanor came down from Baltimore with another yoga geek friend, which was awesome. (Thank you for coming and I can't wait to see you up there next year!) I sat with them in the back of the theatre for the second half of the event, and they were very tolerant of my un-yogic sulking. (I joked about it a lot, but I admit that I was kind of bitter for the rest of the afternoon - every time someone did standing bow, no matter how well or poorly they did it, I was like, "Well they did better than I did!!" Sulk, sulk, sulk...)

I continued to feel depressed about my inability to perform on stage - the one time when it "counts"!! - until the next afternoon. Then I watched a Christmas parade, bought a hat, had some hot chocolate, taught a yoga class, and realized that what happened on stage didn't really matter. I tried analyzing what happened, but just ended up running around in mental circles - "Did I try too hard? Did I not try hard enough? Was I over-confident? Was I over confident? Did I care to much? Should I have cared more? Am I thinking about this too much?!?" Oh, whatever. Forget it!

The fact is, I'm still really happy that I competed, because it gave me such good motivation to develop my practice. I liked doing a little bit of extra practice after class, and I'm going to try to stick with that next year. (Christmas vacation, of course, is an anything-goes time zone!) I'm really excited to get back into a regular schedule of advanced class. I feel like I'm on the verge of lots of tiny breakthroughs. It's been almost six months now (!!!) since I finished teacher training, and my traumatized body finally feels "normal" again (thank you hamstrings), so it's time to move things forward! By this time next year, I will be best friends with crane and full standing bow, and you can hold me to that. Also, all the students and teachers at the studio were really sweet and supportive of me competing, and now a whole bunch of people are interested in doing it next year. Yay, we can be a team!! That will be so much fun.

Plus, it's kind of hilarious when things go completely wrong. Nothing got hurt (except for my pride), I definitely had a new experience, and I managed to get people excited about competing! And it makes a good story!

Next on the agenda: I'm heading up to Massachusetts for the holidays next weekend, hooray! I'll have several great opportunities to teach for different studio owners and get feedback on my class while I'm up there. (I'm psyched and just a little bit nervous that D is finally gonna take my class!) Maybe I should go crack open that old dialogue...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Footnote: Just for the sake of my poor bruised pride, here is a picture of my standing bow pulling pose that I took 2 days after the competition. It's not totally locked out here, but please note these two developments: my grip isn't sliding down and my shoulder is really on my chin. (Those have always my two biggest issues in this posture.) I'm happy about this. I can't wait to do it on stage next year!!

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Footnote #2: This post was written under the influence of "Hyperbole and a Half". Amazing hilarious blog, definitely worth a read. Don't try to read it while you're drinking water.

Giving and Disappearing

2010-12-03T11:06:00.000-08:00

Just a quick post before I hit the road for the weekend, inspired by a pair of quotes that I've read recently.

First, I am in love with an Annie Dillard quote that Hannah mentioned a couple days ago in this awesome post:

"[T]he impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes."

These lines really speak for themselves, but I'll mention one reason why they resonated with me so deeply. I spent most of my life, and certainly most of my yoga career, simply collecting knowledge and information for myself. I was a learner; learning was what I did. Teaching never occurred to me. But then gradually, this certainty came over me - I actually needed to start teaching. I had all this information to spend, and it was burning holes in my pockets. That's what led me to the career that I'm in now, and as I've said before, that turned out to be the best decision ever.

Sometimes I notice people who do attempt to hold knowledge to themselves, in an attempt to make themselves more powerful or influential. And I do think that this is destructive behavior. The more we can share our skills, wisdom, and information, the better off we all are.

The second quote is from (again) my Zen quote book:

"When you do something, you should burn yourself completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself." - Shunryu Suzuki

This is one of those great Zen principles - the idea of immersing yourself so fully in your task that your self, your ego, disappears. We do the exact same thing in yoga; what did you think "kill your self" was supposed to mean? Kill your smaller self, destroy your ego, leave no trace of yourself.

And again, this really makes sense to me in the context of teaching. Before we were "set loose" on the world as teachers, we were reminded a thousand times of one crucial fact: "It's not about you." When you teach, you can't be thinking about yourself. You can't stand there thinking, "Do I sound ok? Are they looking at me funny? What do the students think of me? Did I miss a word? Am I doing this right?" No way! It doesn't work if you just try to say stuff that "sounds smart" or "sounds like a yoga teacher." In order to teach, you really have to forget about yourself and think about serving the students.

In other words - and this is another comment from one of the visiting staff at teacher training - I don't want my students to get home and think, "Wow, that was a great class from J!" I want them to get home and think, "Wow, I just had a great class! Hey, who taught?!"

(Of course, Bikram is the exception that proves the rule.)

And now (for my next adventure), I'm driving off to Virginia so I can balance half-naked on one leg in front of a bunch of people tomorrow afternoon. I guess that would fall under the category of "giving freely and abundantly"? I will be sharing my love of yoga with anyone who cares to come and watch. Hooray!! Should be fun. My only goal is to relax and have fun, and I plan to be successful. :)

"Welcome to your new life, Terry Two."

2010-11-28T11:31:00.000-08:00

If you don't know the source of that quote instantly - off the top of your head, without pausing to think about it - you should probably go out, pick up a copy of Bikram's blue book (i.e. this one), and read it. Cover to cover. If you have it on your shelf gathering dust, pick it up and crack it open.

I've had a copy of the book since 2007 (and it actually lived on my bedside table for a year), but I'm telling you, every time I read it I still find something new.

I picked up the studio copy of the blue book and re-read the first 50 pages over my lunch break a couple days ago. And it turns out that reading it as teacher is a totally different story, because I am even more amazed at how complete it is. Please forgive me for stepping onto my soapbox here, but this is really good stuff. All the concepts that I'm always trying to explain to my students, over and over again? It's all in there. In like, the introduction. In the first 6 pages.

For example, here's a paragraph from the 2nd page:

"This Hatha Yoga is for everyone and every body. It doesn't matter how well you do each posture, only that you try the right way. Even if you can only do part of the posture, you will recieve one hundred percent of the benefit medically if you try the right way. I explain this by giving you step-by-step instructions for each posture."

The book also show the crazy, fun, and gentle side of Bikram that you don't get to see so much in the media. He's really kind to his new students, no weird aggressive drill-sargent stuff whatsoever. He tells his newbie student:

"All beginning students are scared, and it is the biggest obstacle you must overcome to make progress. Don't fright, don't scare, I will take care of you. Okay? You do just as much as you can honestly do the first day. You don't have to be a hero. The best you can do is all that I ask. That is perfection in Yoga, the best you can honestly do on any particular day."

Now that is a nice little opening speech! Much better than the lecture filled with rules that you often hear: "stay on your mat, don't fidget, don't drink you water until after the 3rd pose, only drink in between sets, don't move when people are balancing, don't leave the room..." None of that! Just "do your best, don't be scared."

The book is also very funny, especially when it's describing what the postures feel like to beginning students, the "ideal" versus the "reality." After explaining how the postures SHOULD be done, the book also explains what will probably happen on the first try. For example, here's what it says about pranayama:

"After a couple of inhalations and exhalations, you'll swear your arms had been poured full of lead. You'll begin to cheat by cocking the wrists and flapping your arms like waterwings. Soon even your hands will grow heavy... By then your toes will have crept apart, your knees will have bent (not necessarily both in the same direction), and as you try to correct those problems you'll forget if your chin was supposed to be going down while the arms were going up and whether you were inhaling or exhaling and why. You will understand the meaning of eternity at last, for surely you've done many more than ten cycles, and yet the class just keeps going on and on."

Now that is spot on. Don't you remember your first class? That is definitely what I felt like when I first started! But then the book also gives a very lucid explanation of what it means to breathe through your throat, and I've gotta say, there are students who have practiced for YEARS who still don't know how to do this properly. But it's right there, on page 7, in black and white. This book is like a free posture clinic; it can answer your questions about your practice that you didn't even know you had!

One of my teacher friends made a comment about the "reality" section a few days ago, saying "teachers should know that shit inside and out," and I really couldn't agree more. (I am still working on this, by the way.) It's basically the text version of Bikram's week 9 lectures at teacher training, where he goes through the postures and discusses them in the context of a very new and struggling student. I think it's so important for us to remember what our students are going through, so that we can address them with compassion and understanding instead of just thinking, "Dang, what's wrong with that guy?!"

My favorite new discovery this week was a very simple little sentence hidden in the middle of page 43. In the middle of the paragraph, there's this one short line: "With Yoga you add to yourself, and thus to the world." That's a big deal. Think about it...

Now I'm gonna hop back off my soapbox - thank you for your indulgence - and go stretch my poor body, which is feeling awfully creaky today. My last request is that you go and read something written by Bikram, instead of just written by me, because an awful lot of the stuff that I talk about is really from him. And then let me know about your favorite parts... cause you'll probably find something that I have missed...

"A" Apple, "B" a Bat, "C" a Cat

2010-11-18T15:08:00.000-08:00

A couple days ago, my studio owner and I had Jim Henson on the brain. (One of our mutual friends posted a note about him on Facebook, and we are both slightly compulsive Facebook stalkers.) In case you live in another country (or under a rock) and you are not familiar with Jim Henson, he was the guy behind The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, Labyrinth, The Dark Crystal (which I still need to see!) and all kinds of other brilliant stuff.

We had fun with our Jim Henson theme. When she was teaching standing separate leg head to knee pose in the morning class, my studio owner S was like, "Turn your hips 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 times... I sound like The Count!" ("Vun, two, three...") I carried this thought into my evening class, and in between sets of balancing stick I told my class: "You know, this is really like Sesame Street yoga if you think about it. Make the letter 'H'! Make an 'L' as in Linda! Make a 'T' as in Tom! This posture is brought to you by the letter T!!" That actually got everyone laughing, and for second set my dialogue went something like: "Your-body-should-look-like-a-T-as-in-Tom-THIS-POSTURE-IS-BROUGHT-TO-YOU-BY-THE-LETTER-T-body-down-leg-up-chest-down-leg-up-stretch-and-stretch-stretch-stretch!"

I rarely improvise with my dialogue, but this was a great hit...

But in a certain sense, in all seriousness, this is totally Sesame Street yoga. That's one of the things that I love about the instructions. Bikram takes a truly challenging subject - classical yoga asana practice - and breaks it down so that anyone can understand it. You can take any average idiot off the street and say the dialogue to them, and they will do a pretty respectable approximation of good yoga asana on their first try! No joke. We've been getting a huge influx of beginners at my studio - I taught a class a week or two ago with 40+ people and 17 first time students - and it's taught me one thing: the dialogue fricking works. We get people from all walks of life - it's not like I'm teaching rooms full of professional athletes or rocket scientists here - and pretty much everyone can pick this stuff up.

Bikram definitely teaches this way on purpose. At training, he always told us, "No one else can make it so easy! So simple, just like 'A' apple, 'B' a bat, 'C' a cat, 'D' a dog, 'F' a father." (He always skipped the letter 'E', and he never used his favorite 'F' word, even though we all thought we knew what was coming...) When we studied together, my roommate would always say, "I looove how Bikram breaks it down Sesame Street style!" So simple.

And why do we make it so simple? Well, that's the point. The yoga is meant to be accessible to everybody. It's actually easier to teach a class for advanced students full of jargon and Sanskrit and technical language. But that's a form of discrimination; if you teach that way, you discriminate against the raw beginners and the people with no yoga background. Bikram also told us that he intended for the dialogue to be a universal language: "No discrimination." That's a big deal!

On that note, I've gotta go put together a 7-layer dip for a yoga party. Our studio finished an awesome 60-day challenge today (which I should talk more about later), and we are having a potluck tonight after class to celebrate. Hooray, I'm so hungry. More later!

_____________________________________
Edited to add: Just for fun, here is one of my favorite old Sesame Street videos. So many great moments in this one. "Dum, dum, dum, cha cha cha." "Me just, uh, sauntering by..."

Pointing at the Moon (I Have Rediscovered "Zen")

2010-11-11T10:46:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I'm still kind of wrapped up in this little Zen quote book that I picked up at the used book store last week. I'm not actually reading it straight through - that's not really what you do with a quote book, right? - but I'm picking up bits and pieces that are really resonating with me right now.

I was tossing ideas around in my head for a few days before I got around to reading this little definition on the first page of the book:

"Zen is a Japanese translation of a Chinese translation (ch'an) of the Sanskrit word (dhyana) for meditation."

Oooooooooooh. Okay.

This makes great sense to me, because all this meditation business comes back to the same damn thing! I've gotten used to talking about meditation in the context of yoga and Sanskrit (though I could never quite keep track of all those foreign words that Bikram would tell us in the middle of the night). At the same time, I had a vague idea of what "Zen" meant that was floating around in the back of my head, but I hadn't give it any thought in a long time.

But language is just language, and all these words are pointing back to the same thing. "All talk, as the Chinese masters of old say, is at best a finger pointing to the moon. The finger is not the moon and cannot pull the moon down." So that's all that we're really doing when we talk about "Zen", "meditation", "dhyana," or even "yoga"; we're just pointing fingers at the moon.

Of course, here I still am, writing more words. But pointing is still fun and helpful. "Look over there! Look! It's behind that tree! Can you see it?"

I've caught a common thread, in my yoga and in all this "Zen" stuff, that talks about meditation through action. Everyone's heard of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," right? "Zen is not some kind of excitement, but concentration on our usual everyday routine. (Shunryu Suzuki)" That's your basic Zen, right there. You simply meditate by immersing yourself on whatever task is at hand, so that your ego disappears, your self disappears, and you are pure concentration. Bikram says exactly the same thing. People ask him when he meditates, and he says "I meditate while I'm waxing my cars. I meditate when I'm teaching yoga, when I'm shopping, watching old Hindi movies, driving, dancing, singing, talking, eating and spending time with my kids. (Orange book, pg 78.)" Same, same.

A lot of people have this mistaken idea about meditation, that it involves being very still and thinking about absolutely nothing. Well, I guess that's one kind of meditation, but it's certainly not the only kind! In the kind that I understand, you're not thinking about nothing. You're thinking about something, with such focus that everything else falls away. You don't necessarily need training to do this. You do it naturally when you're totally concentrated on a task or physical activity. You might get this feeling when you're running, playing sports, working on a math problem, writing, or dancing.

In other words, "The practice of Zen is forgetting the self in the act of uniting with something. (Koun Yamada)"

A lot of people get this feeling at yoga class, which is really what we're going for in there. We give you so much to concentrate on, so many instructions to follow, that you cannot think about anything else. It takes such tremendous focus to stand on a locked knee for 60 seconds that everything else falls away, you forget your job, your problems, your life, everything! And that is your meditation. When five, ten, or even 90 minutes go by where you don't think of anything else - you just listen to the words and move your body - that is meditation, that is yoga, and that is Zen. We can't just tell you, "Okay, start meditating!" - that doesn't really work on you guys - but we can keep so busy with all those instructions that you end up meditating without even realizing it.

And my Zen? These days, I practice, I teach, I practice, I teach. I work with my body, I walk the neighbor's dogs, I go to the store, I eat good food, I write, and I teach. I like browsing the antique stores before going back to teach a class. I like the feeling of the cool Fall air and the sight of the colored leaves. I like spending time with other wonderful yoga teachers and students, and I like spending time with the brand new students and welcoming them in. It feels great. I am having so much fun. It's supposed to be fun!! I'm pretty certain about that. And right now, it really, truly is.

Repetition, Repetition, Repetition

2010-11-05T16:09:00.000-07:00

Bikram yoga. It is repetitive.

Everyone knows this. If you've done it more than once, you know that the class is the same, the postures are the same, the heat is the same, the words are the same, it's the same damn thing over and over again!

If you're a student, even just a casual one, you repeat the same postures, in the same order, every time you come to class.

If you're training for competition, you repeat the same routine and the same advanced postures over and over and over again. There really are no short-cuts. You just do it again, and again, and again.

If you're studying to be a teacher, then WOW, repetition has to become your best friend, because it's the only way you're going to cram those 40+ pages of text into your brain, word by word. You say the dialogue out loud all day long - in the shower, walking to class, walking to lecture, in your sleep. In posture clinics, there are plenty of cases where the only "homework" for the struggling teacher-to-be is more repetition.

If you're a teacher, then your job consists of saying the same instructions over and over and over, almost every day, often two or three times a day. And you guys know - I've talked about it enough - that there's so much else that goes into teaching, and it's such a joy, but still. I have said, "From the side, your body should look like a Japanese ham sandwich" a lot of times!!

So yes, monotony is a fact of our yoga life. But today, as I was browsing through the (awesome) antique bookshop down the street from my yoga studio, I found a fantastic little book with bits and pieces of Zen-type wisdom, and in the book I found this quote:

"Monotony is the law of nature. Look at the monotonous manner in which the sun rises. The monotony of necessary occupations is exhilarating and life-giving."
- Gandhi

Wow. Instant clarity!

And we all know this already, in our hearts, but it's good to be reminded. Because yes, life is monotonous. Every day we wake up, we do work, we eat food, we go back to sleep. The earth turns on its axis. The planets go around the sun. The seasons come and go. The tides come and go. We breathe air, in and out. Monotony is not just a necessary evil in life; it is also life-giving and therefore joyful. Our hearts beat out a rhythm, that same monotone beat, keeping our bodies alive.

Just because something happens every day, that doesn't make it less miraculous. Every day, the sun rises. Every day, our bodies turn oxygen into life. Every day, we get another chance to do our work and do our yoga. What a gift, to do the same necessary and beautiful things over and over again.

Exhilarating.

Hello, Shoulderblade-Scapula!

2010-11-04T10:53:00.000-07:00

Right before I left for San Diego, I finally sucked it up and registered myself as a competitor for this year's regional championships...

(For those of you just joining us, or for those who are new to the concept of yoga competition, please refer to this post that I wrote up last winter: Yoga Competition?! I was very organized and did a whole little mini-series of posts on the international championships last February.)

Everybody on the same page? Great. So I was a huge wimp last year and didn't compete. I was still in grad school at the time and my practice was at kind of a low point, so I had a good excuse. But this year I'm a fricking full-time yogi, so I had no excuses at all. Time to dig up a leotard and get my butt on stage!

The championships for my region are happening in one month. Plenty of time, right? Sure. Starting this week, I'm doing beginner's series pretty much every day, advanced series 2 or 3 times a week, and practicing extra postures on my own almost every day. Also need to start actually doing my 3 minutes routine...

So far it's totally been worth it. Okay, "so far" I've only been practicing for comp for 4 days!! But to my total surprise, I've already had a little breakthrough. I've started practicing some extra backbends, working on finding my upper back muscles, and I'll be damned. I found my shoulderblade-scapula muscles! I can actually move my scapula forward and glue my shoulder onto my chin in standing bow! (Finally! Finally! Finally!) This has always been a goddamn struggle for me. I mean, I think every teacher who I've ever practiced under has been like "J, shoulder to chin, shoulder to chin," and it still was fricking killing me. I can do it in a do-or-die situation (which I discovered at teacher training when I was trying out for demo and Brandy said "Anyone whose shoulder isn't touching your chin, you can leave, you're not in the demo." Magically, my shoulder stayed on my chin that time.) But normally, in class, there's this big fricking gap that just comes and goes and generally drives me nuts.

But now... I can actually move my shoulder forward to the right spot and glue it there! I have a muscle that does it! And it's easy. And it took me, like, 3 days, I shit you not. I'm so baffled. But delighted. Definitely not complaining. Shoulderblade-scapula, you will not defeat me anymore! Folks back home, you will be so surprised when you see me practice again. Even my studio owner was already like, "Um, whoa, what did you do?!"

I sure hope I haven't jinxed myself by writing this post.

And that's probably the second-most exciting thing that's happened to me all week. (The most exciting? I had 18 first-time students in my class last night! I love Groupon.) Aah, the glamorous life of a yoga teacher. Now I'm off to Trader Joe's... I need me some microwave pad thai!

In the Middle! (BKTT Fall 2010 Visit)

2010-10-29T19:19:00.000-07:00

"Clowns to the left of me,
Jokers to the right, here I am!
Stuck in the middle with you..."

Hello blog, I've missed you!

I spent the last week and a half - Oct 16th to 25th - in San Diego visiting the Fall session of teacher training. And whew, it was quite a trip! I won't even try to tackle the whole thing in one post. I guess I'll just start in the middle and go from there...

Hmm...

It was equal parts cool and weird to come back to training as a visiting teacher. I mean, I really liked being a trainee. I liked having a room number and having a group and having a line to stand on. There wasn't much thought involved in the whole process; someone tells you where to go, and that is where you go! Being a visitor, especially as a new baby teacher (as opposed to an important senior teacher) is totally different. You just kind of float in and out whenever you like, and occasionally wave your arms around saying "Hey, does anyone need anything?"

I spent most of my time floating in rather than out. I did every single class with the trainees, double classes Monday through Friday. (Next time, I think I might sleep in once or twice.) I went to all the lectures and took notes. I even... yes... stayed for an episode of Mahabharat. (It wasn't until 2am rolled around and I was the last visiting teacher standing that I realized that it was time to exercise my free will and go to bed "early.") I did enjoy going out to dinner at P.F. Chang's and coming back to lecture "late" (i.e. after the end of sign-in). I did enjoy having the freedom to walk around the back of the room and sneak out to the bathroom any time. I enjoyed practicing at the back of the tent, where I could basically spy on the entire teacher training class at once. (Forget about "focus one point in the mirror." Never even saw a mirror.) I loved seeing familiar faces from my training and spending time - as a teacher! - with some of my other favorite teachers who were there.

But it took me a while to get a handle on the whole concept of "you are not a trainee ANYMORE." I got in trouble with Bikram when he lectured on Monday night. It was the first time I'd seen him since I left California. He was giving one of his usual yoga lectures, asking lots of questions to the audience, and I couldn't help answering them (to myself!) in the teacher's section. But naturally (this will surprise NO ONE), I managed to answer a question a little too loudly when no one else was talking, and Bikram was like "Who said that??" I tried to look around and look innocent (never works!) but the girl next to me waved her arms around and pointed me out. (Thanks Jo.) Bikram found me and pinned me down with his 100-yard stare for what felt like a very long time, while I sat there beaming up at him with my best shit-eating grin. Finally he said, "You are not in the training. Idiot!!" and went back to his lecture. Hehe, oops. I got a big hug from him at the break...

I sat in on posture clinics every day, and in that situation there is NO confusion about who is who. The teachers are on one side of the room, sometimes on a couch, holding notebooks, and the students are on the other side of the room, muttering dialogue and looking nervous. Actually, these guys didn't seem too nervous - a lot of them were really good!! I had the chance to give feedback in all of the posture clinics (sometimes only a little bit, sometimes a lot), and that was a big learning experience. Here is a big secret about posture clinics: occasionally, the person giving you feedback is just as nervous as you are. Giving feedback is weird and uncomfortable at first, just like saying the dialogue. It reminded me of learning to teach (which makes sense). The first time I taught, I couldn't get past the weirdness of being on "the wrong side" of the podium and I didn't enjoy it very much. Once I got over that, it became really fun. Giving feedback is kind of the same way. The first time I sat in posture clinic, I was acutely aware of mind-numbing weirdness of being on "the wrong side" of the notebook. Once I got over it... it became fun. It's just like teaching the class; it's just one more opportunity to help other people. The biggest difference between giving dialogue and giving feedback is that the dialogue is set ahead of time. So for me, saying dialogue is very easy. But when you're giving feedback, you've got to think on your feet!! Very, very interesting.

And just when I felt like I was getting the knack of it, it was time for me to leave! Whoops. Next time, maybe I'll try to save up extra cash and stay for two weeks...

The whole "visiting teacher" thing is such an open-ended process. So different from training. (Did I mention that yet?) I mean, training is so finite. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. You arrive, you get oriented, you go through your weekly schedule, week one through week nine, you get a graduation certificate, you take a picture with Bikram and you leave. "Bye! Nice meeting you! Have a nice life!" Visiting is the opposite. You just kinda plop down in the middle of everything, after it's already started, and then you leave before it's over. It's such a tease!! It's like... like re-reading the Harry Potter series by only reading the 4th book. You vaguely know what happens in books 1-3 and 5-7, but you only get to read that one book!

It's good to be home, though. Back in the real world! Back to teaching and taking class, doing laundry, paying bills, going to the grocery store, buying Halloween candy for the trick-or-treaters... all that good stuff. :)

I'll probably write more about training later, but I would be remiss if I didn't give a shout-out to all the great people who I saw in San Diego! First of all, many thanks to Cira, who let me crash at her guest room all week! Many thanks also to all of the visiting teachers who let me use their hotel room showers after class - phew, you guys are lifesavers. It was awesome to see my fellow Bikram Yoga Boston alums, Heather and Mary, along with Aaron and the other future BYB teachers! And all the bloggers... Josie (with her happy smiling face!), Johan (who gave me a Cheezit as soon as he saw me), Brandy (I really do want to come visit!), Jane (of course I would come find you!), Chrissy (total rock star of course)... Also, I saw Henri from my studio (I can't wait to take your class!), and Phil, Katie, and Becky from some of the other area studios - they were all rocking it out. And class of Spring 2010, very good representation! There were at least a dozen of us floating around that week, which is a great showing! We are the best class.... so far. These guys will hopefully be even better, which is as it should be.

Happy Halloween weekend, all. Bust out some good costumes for your classes on Sunday... I will be teaching in costume for sure...

I need this shirt....

2010-10-10T22:31:00.000-07:00

My friend Tomek from teacher training just made a website to sell T-shirts that he designed. All I can say is, WOW. I cannot stop laughing at his artwork.

Here is a teeny version of the design that Tomek made for his first shirt. (You can see a bigger version by clicking.)

I have so many questions about this picture! For example, why is the second guy wearing a party hat? (Because he locked his knee.) Why does he look like Lord Voldemort? (Not sure.) Why does the first guy have a black eye? (Maybe somebody punched him because he didn't lock his knee.)

The last shirt that made me laugh this hard was one that I saw on the bargain rack at the LA headquarters (the old one on La Cienega). That t-shirt featured an unhappy stick figure doing the kicking-out part of standing head to knee - the part where you make your legs look like a "perfect upside-down L like Linda" - and the text above the picture said: "See you in HELL, Linda." I stood there and laughed at that for about 5 minutes.

In any case, I think I like Tomek's shirt even more. It says "Lock the knee Lock the knee Lock the knee" on the back. I want one immediately. You can giggle over the artwork and order a shirt for yourself at awesomegasana.com, if you are so inclined. These would make fun Christmas presents for the special Bikram yoga teachers in your life! (But Mom, please don't buy me one, I've already ordered it myself.)

Incidentially, the "yogavangelist" term is totally up for grabs if anyone wants to make that idea into a t-shirt. It'd be a good one! (Just give me 75% of the profits after you do all the work. Just kidding.) Who wants it? Teri, you want to go into business with me?

I'm still in love with Teri's t-shirt idea from ages ago. She said that someone should make t-shirts for teacher training graduates that say "See you in the back row!" (Because when you're a trainee, you practice in the middle and the front of the room, but when you go back to visit as a graduate, you practice in the back row.) I thought this was totally clever and I ran around trying to tell everyone "See you in the back row!" but they told me I was a total dork because I hadn't even gotten to training yet. "No, J, you can't say that right now, you're not going to be in the back row! We're going to see you in the front row!"

And though this is a very fluffy blog post, that thought does lead me into one piece of news: I will be in the back row at teacher training next week. Hooray!! I'll be there for all of Week 5.

A lot of people (or maybe it was just Hannah, repeatedly) have asked me, "What do you do when you go back to visit training?" Well, to tell you the truth, I've never done it before, so your guess is as good as mine! Ha ha. No, but really we just go to help out and re-live our glory days. We can take all the classes with the trainees (and Bikram, hooray), we can go to lectures (and Mahabharat, or maybe not), we can sit at the sign-in desk looking moderately important, and we can help out with posture clinics. Since I am a lowly new graduate, residing at the bottom of the totem pole, I will probably be "helping out" in the sense of "sitting around listening and taking notes while other people give feedback," but that's totally cool with me. That's where you've gotta start! Oh, and I will be saying hello to a bunch of old friends who are now trainees (hi Mary! hi Heather!), attempting to meet all the bloggers from this year (who have been keeping me very entertained for the last few weeks), seeing friends from my teacher training class, and spending time with the awesome senior teachers who go to training to help out.

I am very excited. Still-awake-at-1:30am-on-Sunday-night excited. Or maybe that's just the effect of teaching 3 classes today? Who knows?!

More stories soon...

Yogavangelism

2010-09-30T10:42:00.000-07:00

It always starts the same way. You take the first class. Maybe you love it right away, maybe you hate it, maybe you're not sure. But for some reason, you go back for the second class, then the third class, then the fourth, and then you're hooked. Maybe it's been a few months now, and you don't know what number class you're on anymore. Maybe you've signed up for a 30 Day Challenge. You've bought your first pair of Shakti shorts. You have a Spot at the studio. All the teachers know your name. You plan your schedule around the yoga class times You have a separate pile for yoga laundry. You're starting to feel really good - your spine is straighter, you sleep better, and your skin is glowing.

And now everybody knows about it.

Why?

Because you can't stop telling them!

I refer to this phenomenon as "yogavangelism." As in yoga evangelism. Noun. "Yogavangelism, n. The irrepressible urge to extol the benefits your yoga practice to everyone you meet, including your close friends, your immediate family, your distant relatives, the grocery store clerk, the Starbucks barista, your tax accountant, some guy at the bus stop, your cat, and your golfish Goldie."

And it's totally awesome. It's good for the yoga studios, which get most of their advertising by word-of-mouth. It's good for the people who you manage to drag into the hot room with you. (I had to be dragged into class on several separate occasions before I started going on my own. Thank you, Amy from Kennewick, WA and Anita from MIT!) And it's great fun for you when you can get more of your friends involved in your little obsession, not to mention the good karma!

Yesterday I tried to post a Facebook update on the topic of my new car insurance, and within minutes the topic turned to Bikram yoga. Everyone wanted to know: "Did you recruit your insurance agent to come to yoga??" There's no escape!

I do end up inviting an awful lot of people to yoga, because the "what's your job?" topic inevitably sends me in the direction of yoga. When I was helping my sister shop for cars, all the car salespeople would ask us both about what we did for work, and then I'd end up spending the whole test drive answering questions about yoga. "Is it good for diabetes?" "How long are the classes?" "What if I'm out of shape?" "What if I have a knee problem?" (I bet this drove my sister nuts.) So I recruited the heck out of all those guys, and I really hope that at least one of them will end up in a class sometime! I also nag my parents about yoga periodically. And I've very proud of my friends who have become addicted since I introduced them to Bikram - shout-out to Cat from MIT and my roomie Alex (aka Slappy)!

On the other hand... I'm really not the world's most fervent yogavangelist these days. I haven't been for a long time. I prefer to just plant the seed of an idea - "Hey, there's this yoga class..." - and then let it grow in its own time. I don't pressure anyone into coming. If someone shows a spark of interest, I'll fan the flames a little bit, but that's it. I'd rather let people come in their own time, on their own terms. When the time is right, they'll show up. You know that saying, "When the student is ready, the teacher will appear?" I think it might work in the other direction, too. Students come when they're ready, when their seeds are starting to grow.

I remember one lecture during my teacher training when someone asked Bikram a question along these lines. One woman was concerned that not everyone would want to listen to her message and do yoga. She wanted to know, "What do we do about the people who don't want to learn the things that we have to teach them? How to we convince them to listen to us if they're not interested?"

Bikram's response? "Tell them, eat shit and die!!" (A favorite Bikram phrase.)

After the laughs died down, he explained himself further. He said that when he was young, when he first came to this country, he felt the same way. He said that he wanted to "stand in the middle of the road" and shout to everyone about how wonderful it is to do yoga. But after a while, he realized that "it doesn't work." Some people just aren't interested. Forget about them. They're not your students, at least not yet. As a teacher, you do still wish that everyone could do yoga, but you don't lose sleep over it. You can't spend your nights crying over the students that you don't have. Instead, you have to focus all your energy on the students who are in the room right now. That's how you teach a good class.

And then, if I teach a really good class... all of my students will go home and tell their friends about it!! Ahaaa. It all loops back around. The yogavengelism is up to you guys! So get going, get talking, and bring me your friends. I'm always there waiting for you, ready with the rental towels, the new student registration forms, the intro spiel ("breathe, everything else is optional") and a smile.

Let it Rain, Let it Pour

2010-09-26T19:16:00.000-07:00

It's a rainy Sunday evening, which has put me in a writing kind of mood!

There was a ridiculous late summer heat wave all week, so I was excited when I woke up to the sound of rain this morning. There's no place like the hot room on a chilly, rainy weekend! So naturally, I managed to spend about 10 hours at the yoga studio, all told, and more than 6 hours in the hot room. Sheesh. It never rains, but it pours!

It's been a great week at the yoga studio. We started our "60 Day Challenge" on Monday, on the same day as the start of teacher training. We have a student at this session in San Diego, and we are marking off his classes with stickers on our challenge board. We're doing a slightly different take on the 60 Day Challenge: instead of having students come to class EVERY day for 60 days, they just have to come 4, 5, or 6 days a week. Basically, they can set their own challenge. The "ultimate" challenge is 6 days a week for 60 days, no doubles. Our studio owner set it up this way because she doesn't want people burning themselves out on overly ambitious challenges, and I totally agree! I love this! It makes the challenge really accessible and sustainable for everybody.

Anyway, there's definitely been a boost in attendance this week as a result of the challenge. I feel like there's been a boost in the studio camaraderie, too - there's something about that ritual of putting stickers on a poster that REALLY brings people together! (I decorated the board myself and I am very proud.) New students are getting more involved, regular students are recommitting to their practices, and the energy is palpable.

I put my name up on the challenge board and somehow managed to practice every day this week. In all honestly, this might be the first time I've practiced 7 days in a row since teacher training... no, since BEFORE teacher training, since trainees get a day off on Sunday! It feels good. I also did THREE advanced practices this week - an unprecedented feat for me - bringing my class count for the week to 10, the same as the trainees. Whoa! I accidentally was hard-core there for a minute! In the spirit of the "6 days a week" challenge, I think I will take a day off tomorrow. When it rains, it pours.... but all good things in moderation! (Burnout is the nemesis that lurks in the corner for a full time yoga teacher, but I am being vigilant against that enemy.)

Fortunately, I've been really energized by teaching lately. In addition to the 60 day challenge, our studio also did one of those online coupon deals (similar to Groupon). Basically, a third party website hosted a Bikram yoga coupon for 24 hours, selling a 5 class card for $20 (ridiculously cheap), and we sold over a thousand coupons!! Our coupon was live on Thursday. Since Friday morning, we've had a steady stream of new business coming in - some people who are familiar with Bikram yoga already, but also TONS of newbies! It's so awesome. Our attendance is picking up pretty significantly, and there are little handfuls of new people in almost every class. Did I mention that I love teaching new students?? I love them. They inspire me so much. I love when they come out of class with that WOW! expression on their faces and start asking me questions. My new ones were so sweet tonight. They come to me after class and tell me about what brought them to yoga class - the stress, the knee problems, the tension - and I'm so glad that they're come to the right place. I know that the yoga can help them to feel better, and I get to see that little spark of hope in their eyes when they start to believe in it, too.

Man, I can't even talk about that topic without getting carried away!

Where was I? Oh, yeah. I had maybe 6 brand new students in my Sunday afternoon class today, plus a whole collection of folks still on their first month. It never rains, but it pours. (I knew there was a theme in here somewhere!)

One more thing worth mentioning: I passed the 100 class mark last Wednesday! I have now taught one hundred and something classes. I think I'm going to lose track now, but that was one milestone that I wanted to catch! I "celebrated" by recording my 101st class and then actually practicing to it a few days later. "Celebrated," hah. I've been talking about doing this since my first week of teaching, but this was the first time I actually had the balls to record a class and listen to it.

So I finally took my own class on Saturday afternoon, and I was pleasantly surprised - it did NOT make me want to stick a fork in my ear or swear off teaching! It actually sounded pretty good! The experience was more than a little bit surreal, because it was like having an audio guide to my thoughts; I was thinking the dialogue and hearing the dialogue at EXACTLY the same time, at the same pace, in the same tone. Hah! I also laughed at my own jokes, because I'm a huge dork and I totally forgot that I'd said those things! I definitely found a handful of things to tighten up, but overall it was solid. I guess I'm really not going to lose or forget my dialogue any time soon. Good for me! (Never hurts to check.) Also, my timing rocks - the vast majority of my savanasa on the floor were right at 20-25 seconds, and I never time those anymore. I was amazed. The recording experiment definitely made me recommit to the clarity and cleanliness of my dialogue, but it also reassured me that I have a strong foundation and I can keep focusing more on teaching. And it made me want to keep recording, because I had no idea that taking my own class would be so much fun! My studio owner and I have decided that we're going to "sneak attack" each other - I want her to record my class when I don't know that she's doing it!

Good times at the yoga studio... good times.

I love the rain...

The Invisible Dartboard

2010-09-22T19:58:00.000-07:00

First things first: Huge congrats to all the folks who started their teacher training journey this week! Today is the third day of Week 1, and I'm quietly counting down until Week 5 when I get to go visit. I'm having fun stalking you all on Facebook, Twitter, and various blogs. Guys, stop blogging so much! I'm never gonna get anything done here!!

When I was nearing the end of my teacher training, I started to get a tiny bit worried about teaching. I wasn't worried about saying the dialogue. I had that part down cold. But like many trainees, I was kinda baffled about the parts in between the dialogue. Bikram gives us all the words that we need to teach the postures. He even gives us some bits and pieces to say in between the postures. (I am very faithful about using some part of his "instructions during savasana" in every class I teach.) But still there are... let's see... 21 short (twenty-second) savasanas in the class, along with a 2-minute long one in the middle and another long one at the end, where we can say whatever we want. It's improvisation, and you do it for the first time when you teach your first class. Yikes!

Well, it turns out that I had nothing to worry about. (Trust the ____... ) After obsessing over yoga for ages and being totally immersed in it for over two months, I found that I have plenty to say. (If you've read my blog, this is not exactly a news flash.) I actually got a lot of compliments on this when I had first started teaching, from students and from other teachers. I thought it was hilarious when I taught these classes that were nearly 100% verbatim dialogue and nothing else (like seriously, saying the exact same thing 4 times in a row) and students would come out saying "I loved how you used your own words!" How I did what?!? That is, like, the opposite of what I did! But they meant that they liked the stuff that I said in between poses.

So where do I get that stuff?

Number one, I steal it. Hello, this is not news. Any Bikram teacher who claims not to do this is lying through her teeth. We steal from each other liberally and enthusiastically. I took class with a friend a while back who had tons of great stuff that she said in her class. When I asked her after class if I could "steal" a certain line from her, she said, "Yeah, I didn't come up with that either, I stole it from so-and-so!" We love to copy each other. (In some cases this leads to trouble, which is why we have to keep checking the dialogue...)

Number two, I have been brainwashed by Bikram. No lie. It's totally awesome. I've read every book from cover to cover, multiple times, and I stayed awake for every one of those damn lectures, except for that one time when I closed my eyes for 3 seconds and he caught me. But this makes my life really easy, because I have Bikram's words in my ear all the time. It's like having a mini-Bikram riding on my shoulder. And if there's one thing that Bikram knows how to do, it's talk. I try to keep listening to my mini-Bikram.

Number three, I just come up with stuff. I guess this is the "personal practice" aspect. This is the part that I really can't explain or describe very well, because it just happens. I think of something that I think the students might need to hear - something that I'd want to hear if I were in the class - and I say it.

So here's the giant question. How do I know if I'm saying the right thing?

Well... I don't. Not usually.

At first I thought it was like fishing for invisible fish, but tonight I came up with a better analogy. It's like throwing darts at an invisible dart board. The darts are my words, these little pieces of information that I know are right and true. And the students are all holding up invisible targets. No two targets are alike, and I can't really see where they are. Sometimes one dart might graze several targets at once, and sometimes it will fly right past them all without leaving a mark. Sometimes a dart will fall short of the mark completely, and sometimes it will fly straight and true to pierce the very heart, the bulls-eye. But of course, once the darts leave my hand, they're not mine anymore. I don't get to see where any of them end up. I just keep sending them out, with all the energy and honesty that I have.

There's a fine line between intuition and guesswork. I know a lot of amazing teachers who never plan their classes ahead of time. They say that they just know what to say. It comes to them. They'll say something in class, without knowing why, and then a student will come up to them after and say, "How did you know? That was exactly what I needed to hear!" I've had a few of those moments, here and there. But it is intuition (vibrational energies align) or just dumb luck (the law of averages)? Hard to say. It's probably both.

Earlier this week, I was sitting at the desk after class and chatting with one of the regular students. We struck up a conversation about the meditation that happens through yoga practice. I didn't say anything that struck me as particularly new or radical, but my explanation stopped him in his tracks. He said, "I've been practicing for 6 years and I've never heard anyone put it that way. That really makes sense." It was the proverbial "light-bulb" moment for him. It was a perfect bulls-eye for me. But... I wasn't even aiming! I just said something that I knew was true, and it connected to another person. Fate, skill, or luck?

I just keep practicing. I have a good supply of darts, and I collect more of them every chance I get. I send them flying every day, and I doubt that I'll ever really see those targets, but that's no reason to stop. Because when I do hit those bulls-eyes, when I pierce the heart of the invisible target, I do - sometimes - get to see the result. The result is yoga glow. And it's awesome.

"Struggle HARDER!"

2010-09-18T20:47:00.000-07:00

Damn, but time flies when you're teaching...

I taught one of my favorite classes ever last Tuesday night. I actually tried to write about it that night, but couldn't figure out how to translate it into words. I didn't mean to let THAT much time pass, but then I had a full week of teaching and taking, plus SAT tutoring, plus a fantastic day off yesterday that I spent hanging out on a boat, playing "water frisbee", and jumping off a rope swing into a creek.

But anyway, let's rewind to Tuesday! My day began innocently enough. I was teaching at 5pm and decided to practice at 7pm, so it actually felt like a free day, which was terrific. I slept late, went to the coffee shop, took a walk, called my mom, took care of some car insurance stuff, and made some peanut noodles.

As I was mid-peanut noodle-ing, I got a text message from my studio owner saying that the X State Basketball team had changed their schedule and would be coming to my class that night. Now, this is great: there's an ENTIRE basketball team that has started bringing them to our Bikram yoga studio once a week - usually on Wednesday nights when I'm not there. I'd been dying to have these guys in my class. I thought it sounded like a blast.

This was a lucky break for me!

Naturally, I was pretty excited when I went in to teach the 5pm class. All the regulars were there - the annual members, the work-study students, a teacher, a teacher-to-be - and then the back row was almost completely taken up by the basketball team. (They also spilled into the middle and front rows.) They were all young college guys, almost all African-American, all tall and well-muscled and gangly. (One of the guys was over 7 feet!) A couple of them had done Bikram yoga before (last season) but most of them had only done it twice, ever.

Well, any time you have more than a dozen beginning students in a class, you're in for an interesting ride! When they're all young guys who are kind of self-conscious and not sure that they really want to be in a yoga class, then it becomes even better.

It was the best class EVER.

Before the first exhale in pranayama, I knew that this class was gonna be a good one. The room was more packed than I've ever seen it, and as soon as I said, "Inhale, head down, arms up, start please," this awesome buzzing sound rose up from the room, and I swear I could actually feel the air vibrating. I felt the raw energy filling the entire room. My voice was just another vibration in the air, conducting and directing the energy in the room. It was fun and effortless immediately, like when your kite gets picked up by the first gust of wind.

Of course, the team was a total mess. Poor guys. They're barely more than kids! And in yoga, they're newborn babies, just trying to figure out if their head is supposed to be up or down, if their mouths should be open or shut. They seemed kind of embarrassed and awkward, staring around the room, watching their teammates' postures dubiously, startling themselves by falling out of postures, and gaping openly at the ability of the regular students to bend way back. Some of them really tried hard and did their best the whole time, most of them tried sometimes, and some of them decided that the floor was a great place for a hot nap. (Our teacher-to-be finally elbowed one of them in the side when he started snoring.) They were all just collections of long legs and long arms, and the difficulty of the yoga positions had them baffled. In short, most of them were total yoga WIMPS...

And I just loved teaching them.

Here's the beautiful thing: this class is really, truly designed for these guys. It's Bikram's Beginning Yoga Class. It's tailor-made for the students who are kind of wimpy and who are totally clueless about yoga. When Bikram started teaching this yoga in the United States, in the 1970s, there weren't yoga studios on every corner. No one had seen this stuff before. His students were all "sooo bad" because none of them had done anything like this before! It kinda blows my mind when I imagine Bikram as a young man, teaching yoga classes every day, from dawn until dusk, to people who didn't know the difference between "yoga" and "yogurt." The class that we teach today has been refined and distilled a bit, but it's still essentially just a transcript of that same original class.

I often think of those early years when I'm teaching classes filled with beginners. Especially on Tuesday, I was really floored by how easy and fun it was to teach a bunch of really "bad" students. The dialogue is so perfectly designed for this situation. It says, "don't be scared," "your back is supposed to hurt like hell," "wait for me, please," and "everybody together." I tell every class to "struggle harder, don't give up," because it's part of the instructions and it makes perfect sense. But when you have a roomful of people in front of you who all really want to give up, it makes the words feel authentic and urgent and spontaneous. "Come on, struggle HARDER! Don't give up!" The words resonate. They fit the situation perfectly, like a key in the ignition of the car.

This is all a roundabout way of saying that the basketball team really gave me a run for my money, but I had way too much fun with them and I wish I could have them in my class every week.

And I'm teaching Sunday triple tomorrow, so now it is bedtime for yogis...

Mornings and Nights

2010-09-09T11:15:00.000-07:00

Here's something crazy: in a couple weeks from now, probably right around the time that the Fall teacher training starts, I will have taught my first 100 classes. Phew! That's an interesting number for me to wrap my brain around...

I've been teaching genuinely full time for the past month, pretty much ever since I visited Massachusetts. (Full-time meaning 8 or more classes a week. Usually more. Like last week, when I had 12.) I kept waiting to settle into a routine and wondering why I wasn't. I couldn't seem to figure out the rhythm of my days. I moved into a new place since the last time I wrote (an awesome new place less than two blocks from the yoga studio), so that's made me feel much more settled, but there still is something weird.

But I think I've figured it out. Yoga teachers just keep a weird-ass schedule. No getting around it. I thought that I was prepared for this after a couple years of service industry. When I was waiting tables full time, I got used to being on an opposite schedule from the rest of the world, always going to work when everyone else was finishing their day. I thought it would be pretty similar.

I totally did not take the early mornings into account. Late nights are pretty normal and easy for me. But the combination of late nights and early mornings is totally confusing! I do half of my work before 11am (sometimes starting at like 5:45am) and the other half of my work after 5pm. (Also weekends.) This means that my "down time" has shifted, pretty consistently, to the middle of the afternoon.

Unfortunately, there is NOTHING good on TV in the middle of the afternoon! I need DVR.

Ha, ha.

So now I'm starting to figure it out. All those things that I habitually do in the evening - cooking, paying bills, making phone calls, blogging, etc etc - need to get shifted to the middle of the day, and then everything works. And actually, it can be quite lovely! I broke in my new kitchen this week with a big pot of corn chowder, made from scratch (even the stock!) with veggies from the weekend farmer's market. It was a nice day! I woke up, took class, taught a class, came back home, cleaned the kitchen, started the soup, went back up the street to the studio, taught another class, then came back and finished making the soup for dinner. SO domestic. I definitely need to get back to cooking. But with my house so close to the studio, there are so many possibilities! I could make bread, let it rise all day, and run back to my house in between classes to punch it down!! I foresee a lot of baked goods in my future.

Also, I have a question for the other full-time teachers. Important question. When do YOU usually practice?? I strongly suspect that I need to start practicing in the mornings. Like at 6am, because I teach most of the 9:30 classes. This sucks, because I hate mornings. But I think that I teach way better when I've practiced first, and then I don't have to worry about missing out on my practice later in the day (which has been happening more often than I'd like, and I feel like my practice is getting kinda shitty). Thoughts??

Ultima Give-Away Wrap-Up

2010-08-29T16:29:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to my 5 lucky winners: Clortie, Tiabla, Brandy, Greg, and and Mindy! Greg and Mindy, please email me back with your mailing addresses. The rest of you, your goodies are already in the mail.

I wanted to give free stuff to ALL of you, of course, but I only had five sample boxes to give away. Sigh. But if you're still interested in trying the stuff, they DO have free shipping on order over $30. And as Annie Law posted in my comments section, there's also a limited time coupon that'll give you $7 off your order AND free shipping. Just go to their online store and use the coupon code "yogayoga". Thanks Annie!

Happy hydrating! Hope you're all enjoying your weekends. Personally, I am spending my Sunday night eating pasta and watching "House" re-runs on Bravo after teaching a string of 5 classes this weekend... woo hoo...

Easiest Job in the World

2010-08-26T12:47:00.000-07:00

I'm going to start this post off by contradicting myself. Lately, I've noticed that teaching can be hard work!

At first, fresh out of training, teaching was ridiculously exciting. Every time I went into the studio, I was like "omigod omgod I get to teach again!" I'd be nervous, I'd be excited, I'd even be tripping over myself a little bit. New relationship jitters. You know what I mean! And I've been traveling around a decent amount - I've actually taught at ten different studios now! - so the constant variety has definitely kept things new and interesting.

But even with all this, a certain amount of.... repetition.... starts to set in. Let's be perfectly honest. We teachers say the same exact thing, sometimes word for word, every single day. So yes, there are times when it feels repetitive. Yes, there are times when it's tiring. Yes, there are times - just like practicing - when it's time to go to the studio and you'd rather just sleep in a little longer or stay home and watch TV (but skipping out is not an option now!) Yes, was a moment when I read someone's chipper Facebook update saying "I'm teaching class tonight!!!!!!" and I just thought, "Uuuuuuuuuuuggghhh... I wish I had your energy!"

That last thought mainly crops up when my teaching-to-practicing ratio gets off, by the way. Word to the wise: the surest way I've found to put myself in a cranky mood is to teach a string of classes in a row (like more than 3 or 4) without practicing in between. Even if I practice in the morning, then teach 2 in the evening and 2 the next morning, I can kinda feel it by that 4th class. So I am learning to be clever about scheduling. Clever-er. I don't think that's a word. I am learning to be "more clever."

Anyway!

Here's the saving grace: just like practicing, teaching can GIVE you energy when it goes right. And I mean TONS of energy.

I was talking about this with my friend Teri last week, who has taught for 5 years and opened a studio 2 years ago. We were talking about teaching by the dialogue and how it's not rocket science. In fact, I kind of want that on a t-shirt. "Use the Dialogue. IT'S NOT ROCKET SCIENCE." As Bikram says: "Just say what I said!!" So I was saying, "You know, with all due respect to the amount of time and effort that everyone puts into this job, it's pretty damn simple. I mean, you already know what you have to say. It's kind of tiring, but it's not rocket science here."

But Teri's answer was even better. She said that no, it's not rocket science. And when you do it right, it's not even tiring! You get so much energy from your students, from their successes and breakthroughs, from seeing their bodies change. She said, "This is the easiest job in the world."

This morning, I kinda hauled my butt out of bed, grabbed an apple and a couple crackers, and rolled down to the studio. High ho, high ho, it's off to work we go! Opened the studio, turned on the humidifier, signed in the class, made introductions, gave smiled, fired up the microphone, started pranayama breathing. The usual.

It was one of the most awesome classes I've ever taught. Not because of anything amazing that *I* did. I just did my job. But I did one thing right. I helped a woman who had the wrong hand placement in fixed firm. Just flipped her hands around. Simple correction, but it got her down onto her elbows much more easily. Then I told her to relax her head, and suddenly she was all the way down in the full expression of the posture, surprising the heck out of BOTH of us! It put the biggest smile on her face. Then she grabbed both her heels in camel - I think that might have been a first time for that, too - and wow, it was like someone had lit up a spotlight inside of her. It was SO cool. I don't have a better word. Beautiful, maybe.

After class she came out with this big smile on her face, and I couldn't stop smiling either. I was so excited for her, excited WITH her. I was high for hours after that class, pacing around the living room, drinking a totally unnecessary iced coffee, raving on the phone to another teacher about the amazing experience I'd just had. Because after the first 59 classes, here's what I finally discovered: when your students have these breakthrough moments, you get to ride along with them. It was like it was ME, having that brilliant experience for the first time. It felt JUST like that.

Yeah.

This is the easiest job in the world.

Time to go do it again!

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Also, the Ultima giveaway is still going on through the weekend. Please see the last post for details if you haven't already entered your name!

Ultima Electrolyte Give-Away!

2010-08-24T14:22:00.000-07:00

And now for something completely different... who wants some free stuff??

No, I'm not gonna give you the shirt off my back, my collection of yoga books, or my footstool in the shape of a turtle. That stuff is mine. But I AM gonna give you some tasty electrolyte. The folks at Ultima Replenisher have offered to send out 30-packet sample boxes to five of my lucky readers! *drumroll, please*

Now, I don't normally do the whole product-placement thing on my blog, but I have very affectionate feelings towards this company, since their product basically kept me alive during teacher training. It's a powdered electrolyte that you can add to water to make an instant sports drink. It's super convenient and it works great.

For the yogis heading to teacher training next month: I had three 90-serving canisters of this stuff with me, two in lemonade flavor and one in grape, that I polished off during the 9 week course. These canisters are surprisingly TINY, they weight less than a pound each, and they will last you for a quite while. I was dumping this stuff into my water bottle by the scoopful in Vegas, and I never got dehydrated out there, which was quite a feat. Also, I was drinking it constantly and I still didn't get TOO sick of the taste, which was quite impressive. The lemonade is definitely my favorite. It just tastes like... lemonade!! Aaah, lemonade. Tastes like a summer afternoon.

For the "normal" folks practicing at home: this is actually an ideal supplement for the times when you're feeling kind of depleted after a sweaty class. It's not super sugary and it's not overpowering - it's just enough to pick you up and get your body chemistry back where it belongs. It's a nice alternative to Gatorade or Coconut water, which can be sugary (and pricey!!) habits. And it's great when you have a canister of the stuff sitting by the fridge at home, because you can just scoop out as much or as little as you need. No more stopping at 7-11 for Gatorade on the way home (which I am soooo guilty of doing).

Also, they have free shipping! Hooray!

So here's how this give-away works: just leave a comment on this post with your name and email. You have until... hmm... let's make it Saturday. Then on Sunday I will randomly select 5 names, let you know if you've been chosen, and get those freebies in the mail to you on Monday.

Thanks to R at aliveinthefire for directing the Ultima folks to me and convincing them that I am very busy and important. (Hehe.) If you're looking for something more to read, go and check out her blog!

Here It Goes Again! (Thoughts on preparing for TT)

2010-08-22T11:02:00.000-07:00

"Opinions are like belly buttons. Everybody has one." - Unknown
"It's kind of a long term process." - Bikram

I just got caught up on blogs and Facebook and all that, looked at a calendar, and realized that the next teacher training session starts in less than one month. WHOA! When did this happen?! Has it really been more than two months since my class graduated?? Time flies.

I remember the month before I went to training so well. A lot of WEIRD things happened in my life that month, and I don't think I was convinced that I was actually going to training until I pulled into the hotel parking lot in Vegas! I couldn't wait to get started. I also remember that, towards those last few weeks, EVERYBODY had different advice on what I should be doing to prepare for training. God bless them all, but it got to the point where I started thinking, very aggressively, "Okay, I get it! Everyone has a fucking opinion!!"

So here comes my fucking opinion, for all you wonderful, crazy people who are about to take the plunge into the world of teaching Bikram yoga. You can take it or leave it. But after reading through your thoughts, worries, and questions, I do have a couple of things to say!

I want to talk about the dialogue and posture clinics. Ok. Memorizing the dialogue is always kind of a hot topic with the teacher trainees, and by "hot topic" I mean "the only thing on your minds from the time you wake up to the time you go to sleep." My advice for pre-TT is to quit worrying about how much you've memorized and focus on how you're memorizing. (This advice is totally unoriginal, by the way. There will be people at training telling you this until they're blue in the face. I'm just giving you a heads up.) Once you find a solid memorization technique that works for you, your life will be busy, but not so stressful. Whatever technique you choose, you will get better and faster at it with practice, so don't worry if you're not super fast at first. Just find something that works for you, and you'll be fine. There are tons of ideas out there, which I won't go into. But seriously, it doesn't matter if you've learned the whole thing at this point. Just start with half moon and go from there!

Next, posture clinics. I had a huge revelation about posture clinics recently. Here's what I realized: it doesn't matter if you're good at posture clinic.

Wait, what?!

No, really, it doesn't matter. You guys are kind of missing the big picture. I realized this over the past month when I got the chance to take classes from some of the people from my own training. I think I've taken class from 9 of my classmates so far. And here's what I saw:

- There are people who had verbatim dialogue at training who have gotten a lot "looser" very quickly.
- There are people who were amazing in posture clinic who are having a tough time actually teaching.
- There are people who teach exactly the same way they did in posture clinic. Some people who started good are still good, and some people who had trouble still have trouble.
- There are people who struggled like crazy in posture clinic who are now teaching AMAZING classes with full-on, verbatim dialogue.

Basically, it's all over the map. But it's not random. I want to talk about the last case, the guy who couldn't get through posture clinic but has started teaching amazing classes. There were a few things that made this happen. First, he comes from a great, supportive studio where the students are behind him and the owner gave him lots of classes. (He's taught about 40 classes so far.) You HAVE to teach as much as you can after training. Second, he comes from a studio that teaches by the dialogue. And third - this is the part that took me by surprise - he did actually learn the dialogue at training. He worked super hard and spent tons of time studying. He just couldn't get it out of his mouth during posture clinics because they stressed him out. But he still studied the dialogue, and at the end of the day, that's the part that matters. I was shocked at how well he knew the dialogue when I took his class last week. He was awesome.

So get your focus off the posture clinics. You're not studying for posture clinics. You're studying for teaching. BIG DIFFERENCE. Your job is to study as well as you can, so that you are prepared to teach class when you step out into the world as a yoga teacher after 9 weeks. The posture clinics are a means to an end. The posture clinics are just another teaching tool.

Don't get me wrong, the posture clinics are totally useful. You learn about delivery. You learn about studying. You practice teaching postures on real people. You practice being nervous. You practice teaching when you're tired. You practice faking it when you're not really feeling it. You practice being excited. You practice being TOO excited. You practice getting through the posture when you're not sure what to say next. You practice taking feedback, some of it helpful and some of it less so. You practice patience. You practice performing under pressure. You practice hearing the dialogue. You practice saying the dialogue. Most of all, they force you to study the dialogue. The more engaged you can stay, the better off you'll be. But please remember this one thing: none of it is about posture clinic, and all of it is about teaching!!

And just like practicing, teaching is a lifetime practice. Teacher training is just the start. After I taught class this morning, I spent the afternoon at a restaurant down the street eating "Eggs Rothko" (so hipster), drinking coffee, and re-reading through the entire dialogue, noting down the parts that I want to go over. Last week, I taught class for three different teachers whose opinions I really respect, and they all gave me constructive feedback with things to fix, things to tweak, and things to keep doing. You don't have "just nine weeks" to learn this stuff. You just have nine weeks to learn it in a highly controlled environment, before they set you loose and you start learning everything out in the real world!

So that's my opinion. That's the stuff that I've figured out so far. You'll figure this out all on your own, eventually. In the future. You have to see it for yourself to REALLY believe it. It's fun.

Oh, and for fuck's sake, I don't want to hear anything about people doing crazy double classes the week before teacher training! At this point, your practice is your practice. It's not gonna change much between now and training. Keep practicing a moderate amount, keep figuring out that memorization stuff, but do yourself a big favor and take it easy for the last month! There's no point in killing yourself at home. They'll kill you plenty when you get there. When Bikram tells you to start killing yourself, then and ONLY then, you can start killing yourself for real.

Alright, that's enough from me! No more opinions. Have fun. I'll see you there. :)

"Come out exactly opposite the way you went in..."

2010-08-15T19:20:00.000-07:00

Hello again!

Yeah, that was a long break. And yes, I am back!

Of course, now it's been so long since I've written that I can't remember where I left off. Whoops. Let's back track a bit. I feel like I need one of those "previously, on [insert TV show title]" montage bits, or something like that.

Previously, on my blog, I was packing up the car and leaving California - not necessarily "for good," but definitely "for now." That was about two and a half weeks ago, and it feels like it was MONTHS ago. After 3 National Parks, 4 nights of camping, 5 days of solid driving, 4 thousand miles (give or take a few), various detours, and too many Cliff bars to count, I am now sitting on the couch of my Dad's house in Massachusetts. Listening to the rain outside the window. Sipping on a glass of water, after taking class this morning, teaching class this afternoon, and having a lovely glass of Shiraz with dinner. Life is good.

It's been really fun and strange to retrace the path that I've made over the past few years. This wasn't the first time I drove cross-country. Two years ago, almost to the day, I loaded up my brand new car, left from my Dad's house in Massachusetts - I have a picture of the car parked in exactly the spot where it's sitting now - and drove west towards California. From Massachusetts, my best friend and I drove to Chicago, then took Route 66 and explored the Colorado Plateau, then Vegas, then Calfornia. This time, I took a different route and had a different driving companion (my sister, actually!), but I hit a lot of the same spots. Still drove past Vegas (though didn't stop there). Still had an amazing time exploring and hiking the southwest - Zion and Bryce Canyon this time. In Chicago, we still went to Millenium Park to take pictures with "the bean" (which hasn't changed a bit), and we went shopping at the same shop on Michigan Ave where I bought some postcards the last time I was there.

It feels kind of backwards to travel the U.S. from west to east. The classic USA road trip ALWAYS goes from west to east. Into the west! Go west, young man! Ride away into the sunset! Traveling westwards was always exciting, watching the landscape change from the (less than thrilling) great planes into mountains and canyons. This time, the scenery got somewhat less thrilling as we went along; we went from Bryce Canyon to the Rocky Mountains to Iowa to the Jersey Turnpike. Hmm.

The payoff, of course, is that I LOVE the east coast. Love, love, love. I'm definitely an east coast girl. I like the crazy weather, the bluntly straightforward people, the culture, the old cities, and the YOGA. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I still think the northeast region is the best part of the country (that I've experienced so far) for Bikram Yoga. There are just so many great teachers out here, all of them teaching solid, clean, energetic, DIALOGUE-driven classes. It's good to be home.

There's this concept that gets floated around a lot at teacher training about "completing the circle." They tell us that in order to complete the circle (or perhaps The Circle), you have to teach your first class. Until you teach for the first time after training, you don't have any closure on the whole teaching training experience.

Well, I've taught plenty of classes around California since training, and I guess I completed ONE circle, but it didn't feel like I'd completed THE circle. Because I didn't learn my yoga in Calfornia; I learned it in Massachusetts. But now... well, I am coming out from California exactly opposite the way I went in, so to speak. Retracing my path, retracing my steps. And naturally, inevitably, my path leads me right back to my front doorstep, and then to Boston, where this whole saga really got started. Today, I taught at the studio in my hometown. This one wasn't my original studio, but it's closer to the root of my travels. And in a couple of days - tomorrow, actually - I will be teaching in downtown Boston and Harvard Square, at the same studio that got me involved in this whole "hot yoga" thing in the first place.

Circle completed?

I'm not convinced that "circle" is the right metaphor. If you travel in a circle, don't you end up exactly where you started, like nothing ever happened? That's not right at all. EVERYTHING has happened. And a circle is too linear, too one-dimensional. You just go around and around, clockwise or counter-clockwise. Simple. Boring!

Maybe this whole thing is more like a web. We travel on all these different paths, circling around each other, intersecting and diverging. No matter which way we turn, we always get drawn back into the center.

Or maybe it's a spiral. We go around and around, but every time we loop back around, we end up at a different point. A little higher up, a little farther out, every time. That wouldn't be bad.

Anyway. That's what I've been doing.

Heading East

2010-07-28T07:27:00.000-07:00

Am just about to shut down my computer and attempt to shove everything into my car. THIS should be interesting. Cars are always bigger than they look, right?!

Hitting the road and heading back east today. Stopping along the way in Zion, Bryce Canyon, Rocky Mountain National Park, and Chicago... should be a good trip! Five nights of camping and hiking mixed in with four solid days of driving. My sister is with me and has burned lots of CDs of ridiculous 80s music to keep us entertained.

Have tons of stuff to write, lots of half finished posts, but no time for that now! Will probably be silent for a couple of weeks. So be good. Drink your water. Lock your knee. And I'll catch you on the flip side...

Peak Experience (In Three Parts)

2010-07-19T21:46:00.000-07:00

"Every moment is the peak experience of your life." - Diane, Week 5

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1. Friday, July 16th

On Friday afternoon, I taught my last class in Fresno, after a week of teaching doubles there every day. The class started at 3:45pm, and it was the smallest class I taught all week, with only 12 students. All of them had already taken my class earlier in the week, and I knew almost everyone by name.

It was a slightly mellow afternoon class, but it was a strong one. Standing series moved pretty quickly - smooth, efficient, relaxed. I loved having the smaller class size, because I could actually see each individual body. Without thinking about it too much, I started throwing in little bitty individual corrections here and there - feet 2 inches closer, leg down 1 inch, hips down more, more, little more, and there! Right there! Hold it! Yesss, that's it.

I remember that in separate leg head to knee pose, I told the students that they really have to get the forehead touching the knee, and I saw one gentleman in front of me who was struggling to do it, but not quite getting there. In the next set, I told him to open his legs more. It's a simple correction, straight from the dialogue. It worked - he touched his forehead. But the great part was when he came up out of the posture with this look of discovery on his face and blurted out, "That helps!!"

I don't remember too much of what I said, but I remember having an easy rapport with the class. I knew that we were connecting and that the instructions were getting through. I don't know how I can tell, but that connection is so tangible. When it's missing, you know, and it kind of sucks. When it's there, you know, and it's awesome.

Just one week earlier, I'd written in my teaching notebook that I couldn't even imagine giving individual corrections throughout a whole class. Where would you start? How do you know when to correct? When not to correct? Which students are doing the most they can, and which students can do more? But one week and a dozen classes later, I found myself starting to do it without even thinking about it. I just knew what to do. Which is such a weird solution, right? If someone had told me, "Oh, you'll just know," I would have said, "Well, thanks a lot!" That's like asking me to believe in the tooth fairy! But it works. It happens. When I get in there, I know what to do. Not all the time, but sometimes.

Bikram always asked us, "How do you know if something is right?" The answer was, "If it WORKS, it's right." When the students come out into the lobby, give me big smiles, totally worked out, totally relaxed, tell me that they learned something new, then I know that I'm doing my job right. Because it's working.

It wasn't until hours later that a thought occurred to me: I probably just taught the best class of my life. A month ago, I couldn't have taught anything like that. Wow. Progress. It feels so good.

Peak experience.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

2. Saturday, July 17th

By a stroke of luck, I got the chance to spend a day hiking at Yosemite before driving back home on Sunday morning. I went with two people who I'd met during the week, both students at the yoga studio. One was the 22-year-old girl who had hosted me during the week, the other was an older guy who's practiced yoga for a few years and goes hiking and backpacking all the time. We took a 22 mile round-trip hike from Yosemite Valley up to Cloud's Rest, a peak at almost 10,000 feet. I'm pretty amazed that I was able to pull this off! (All yoga.)

It was a hot, sunny day, perfect hiking weather. The path started down in the valley near a river, and climbed up alongside a giant waterfall for the first hour or so. We could feel the spray from the waterfall - it soaked us, actually! - and we could see the constant rainbow that was created over the stairs. Then we continued up, past the waterfall, along the river, up into the tree, climbing higher and higher. We stopped and snacked by a lake. We saw some deer and some wild turkeys. A butterfly landed on my friend's nose.

As we got higher, we had new views of the entire valley every time we turned the corner around another switchback. I don't think I've ever used the word "WOW" so many times in my life. Every time I looked at something, I just said "WOOWWW!" Everything was so beautiful, it was almost impossible to process it all at once.

The last half mile ascent was tough - lots and lots of stairs, steep ones, in the sun - but when we got to the top, we had this amazing 360 degree panoramic view of all of Yosemite. We could see the valley, the lakes, the mountains beyond the valley. The sky. I lay down on my back on the rock and watched falcons fly above my head. One of them flew so close that I could see each feather on its wings, and I could hear the wind rustling in the feathers.

Peak experience.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

3. Monday, July 19th

After teaching class this afternoon, I spent about an hour scrubbing my bathroom. Apparently, I'm not the world's cleanest person, because that was how long it took to get my shower all sparkly clean again! I turned on the Jodhaa Akbar soundtrack for background music, a little piece of teacher training in my ear. I opened all the windows, and still nearly got myself drunk after inhaling copious amounts fumes from the "Scrubbing Bubbles." (Those work great, by the way.) I just kept thinking, "That security deposit is mine! One thousand dollars for a clean shower!"

I'm moving out of this house in less than two weeks, and the whole place needs to be returned to the relatively pristine state that it was in before I got my life all over it. So this means that a good portion of this week will be devoted to cleaning and purging - throwing away extra junk, selling everything that I don't need, and cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. I spent the better part of my afternoon on my hands and knees in the bathroom, spraying various chemicals all over the place.

Peak experience??

Well, this one's not so obvious. But sure! Why not? I mean, what am I really doing here, underneath the piles of Windexed paper towels? I'm cleaning all the clutter, getting rid up all the build-up. I'm getting ready to turn the page on a new chapter in my life. I'm making a big change, yet again, and I just know that I am doing the right thing and moving in the right direction. I'm heading to a new place when I can live my life as a yoga teacher. Everything that I do right now moves me in that direction. Even when I am just scrubbing the shower, I am doing my duty, my sacred work, my "right action."

What could be better?

So, yes. I say yes. Why the hell not? If that's not a peak experience, then what is?!

Peak experience.

Definitely a peak experience.

Have Dialogue, Will Travel

2010-07-15T13:28:00.000-07:00

Been taking the show on the road this week! I'm up in Fresno right now, where I've been teaching twice a day since Monday (and practicing every day), and I am having a great time.

It's in the triple digits outside, so I've spent a lot of afternoons hiding in coffee shops (which is where I am right now). I meant to go exploring yesterday to see some tourist attractions, but I was kinda wiped out and ended up just taking a nap instead. Such is the life of a full time yoga teacher! Lots of naps. As it turns out, naps are very important, since teaching 2 plus taking 1 is very similar to practicing 3 classes every day. Putting out lots of energy. I get lots of it back - teaching is a great high - but I'm still pretty sleepy in the afternoon. Bikram always made fun of us for sleeping and eating so much at training. Well, that's basically all I want to do these days! Yoga, sleep, and eat. Yum.

I'm teaching my 30th class tonight - can you believe?! - and even though I still have tons to learn, I'm feeling comfortable with my classes here and I'm having FUN when I teach. Everyone is surprised to find out that I'm a new teacher, because I've been teaching with a lot of confidence. I keep remembering Bikram when he talked about his own confidence: "I am most confident man in world! Is not arrogance, is confidence!!" I'm not as confident as Bikram - NO ONE is as confident as Bikram!) - but I feel good, because I know that I'm doing what I'm supposed to do, and I'm doing it well. I'm teaching solid dialogue, I've figured out my pacing (mostly), I help the new people, I'm enthusiastic, I smile, I make them sweat, I make them laugh. I always know what I'm trying to do, even if it doesn't come out perfectly. There is plenty of trial and error - sometimes I'll say something and get a bunch of blank stares, and then I'll just make a mental notes saying "ok, that one went down like a lead balloon, try something different next time."

But mostly, I just say the dialogue. It's amazing how little you have to add to give the class "personality." I really don't say anything extra during the postures, except occasional little corrections, but I'll talk about benefits in between the postures on the floor and I say whatever comes to mind, and then people come out and say that they loved my personality. This is kinda neat, because I'm barely using ANY of my own words - I'm just teaching the way I've been taught. And smiling. Not all the time, but a lot of the time. :)

Also, holy crap, I appreciate the dialogue more every day, because it makes my job so much easier. I can't imagine teaching without it. The dialogue speaks to EVERYONE, so as long as you're saying the whole thing, you're taking care of your regular students, and that frees you to focus all your mental attention on the newbies or the ones who are struggling. So for example, I might spend all of eagle pose watching my new students like a hawk, figuring out how to help them out in the next set. I might not be thinking about the rest of the class at ALL. But as long as I'm saying the dialogue, the rest of the class think I'm still talking to THEM. I was talking to one of the students after class the other night, a regular student with a really strong practice. She knows exactly what she's doing in class, so I didn't have to watch her at all. I mean, I SAW her, but I wasn't focusing on her specifically - but after class, she said that it felt like I was talking to HER the whole time. Holy multitasking skills, Batman! I've figured out the secret! As long as you keep saying the dialogue, EVERYONE thinks that you are talking to JUST THEM. Muahaha this is amazing. I am everywhere at once. Brilliant.

Anyway.

Did I say something about travel? I guess I might as well mention this now: I'm leaving California at the end of the month! Eep! I gave my official notice at my studio last weekend, and now I am working on telling all my friends and packing and all that. (If you are my friend in California, and you just learned this news through the blog, I apologize about that.) I'm packing up the car and driving cross country with my sister, back to the east coast. I will be teaching at an [undisclosed] studio on the east coast. Not in Massachusetts. Sorry. I WILL be visiting Boston and Northampton in the middle of August, and then I'm going to a completely new city where I can settle down and teach full time for a few months. (The studio in my town right now does not offer ANY full time teaching positions, maximum is 6 or 8 per week, and I haven't even been getting that much. Hence all the traveling lately.) I am super excited about this move!! There have been lots of signs lately showing me that I am moving in the right direction. I'm not going to tell you guys where I'm going right now, because I don't feel like being stalked, but if I'm in your neighborhood, you will find out about it. :)

I'm also saving my frequent flier miles for a visit to San Diego in the Fall, to visit the next teacher training session!! I can't believe it's starting in only 2 months! It is CRAZY weird to be on the other side of it now. I'm having so much fun seeing all the new training blogs and discussion boards popping up all over the place. SO excited for you guys! I'm trying to come out for a full week sometime in October, so I can sit in on posture clinics, take classes, come to lectures, and laugh at you as you try to stay awake through Mahabharata. HA!

More later! Many new adventures coming soon!

If You Take a Yogi Hiking...

2010-07-11T14:54:00.000-07:00

... you'd better watch out, because she will not feel any heat at all and she will want to run up all the trails. Energizer Bunny mode: activated!!

The alternate title for this post is: "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the (Balancing) Stick"

So I had a GREAT time up in Sequoia and King's Canyon National Park with my sister this week. We were up there for 3 days and 2 nights, which was the longest break I've had from yoga and teaching since before teacher training. Did NOT teach Bikram yoga to any of the squirrels or bears or deer, but thanks for the thought, guys, love ya lots. (We DID see a bear, by the way, but only from the car. Saw plenty of deer, though!)

The first couple days ended up being kind of low key because my sister got kinda carsick/heatsick and was down for a bit. Important note to fellow yogis: for people who are not Bikram yoga freaks, 95 degrees is considered pretty hot. When you do activities outside with normal folks, it's a good idea to check on them and make sure they are not dying. Lesson learned!!

Happily, she made a good recovery, and on the last day we went on a great 9 mile hike in King's Canyon, along the river, up to a huge waterfall. It was SO beautiful there. Absolutely ridiculous. Every time I visit one of those parks, I end up making crazy plans for how I'm going to become a park ranger when I retire from my job someday. (Because, like, there's such a high demand for retired yoga teachers as park rangers.) My other crazy dream is that I will sell my house (assuming I ever buy one), buy an RV, and go spend a few weeks in like EVERY national park. Because I love them all.

But seriously, here is the ridiculous thing: after I spent all day hiking, I still didn't feel like I'd had a real workout. I used my legs, I used my lungs, I moved my body... but it was so EASY. Everything was in such good working order that running up a mountainside was no big deal. I had to almost run up the rocks just to get my heart rate going, and it still didn't feel as intense as that dizzy heart-pounding feeling that happens right around balancing stick pose in Bikram class. At the end of the hike, I was thinking, "That was a great walk! But boy, I could sure go for a good workout right now."

I got back into yoga class yesterday morning, and it felt so fantastic to move my spine again. (Did I mention that I must have spent at least 20 hours driving over those 3 days?) From the very beginning, half moon pose, my body was going "ouch ouch ouch" but also "yes yes yes"!

And balancing stick... this one is my most hated posture. I don't know why, but 9 times out of 10, I am totally miserable about being in the posture and I can't wait for it to be over. My arms hurt, my shoulders hurt, my heart is pounding like crazy after standing bow, and I feel like I'm having a fricking heart attack. Which is actually the POINT of the posture - flush out the horseshoe artery of the heart, give yourself a mini heart attack in 10 seconds so you don't have the big one later. However. I have never enjoyed this experience.

Until yesterday! Because as it turns out, there is NOTHING else I can do that has the same effect on my heart and lungs. I kept trying to get a similar feeling when I was out hiking, and I couldn't get even close. So yesterday morning, when I felt like my heart was attempting to make a kamikaze leap out of my chest after standing bow, I just thought, "yessss, here it is, here we go," and then I KILLED it in balancing stick. It's not like I got any BETTER at the posture. My posture is exactly the same. But I was actually HAPPY about doing it, for once! After a few days without it, my body was totally craving that heart-pounding feeling, and I enjoyed ever second of it. (All "ten seconds" - hah - that is such a lie.) At the end of the posture, I just thought "phew... now THAT is real exercise!" It felt soooo good.

I just think it's so awesome, that feeling that comes at the end of a good Bikram yoga class. It's the feeling of a TOTAL body workout - the feeling of using EVERY part of your body, inside out, from the bones to the skin, coccyx to the neck, fingertips to the toes. (Yes, I do still talk in dialogue. All. The. Time.) Five years of practice down so far, and I'm still amazed by the completeness of that 90 minute class. It's nice to get away from it for a few days, because it makes you appreciate it even more when you get back.

Having fun at King's Canyon...

"Real World"? Not really...

2010-07-06T23:14:00.000-07:00

"I wanna run through the halls of my high school
I wanna scream at the top of my lungs
I just found out there's no such thing as the real world
Just a lie you've got to rise above..."
- John Mayer

Does life ever go back to normal? I have my doubts. Or maybe I just need to change my definition of "normal." What IS normal, anyway? (From over here, you look upside-down...)

And here's another question. When you get everything that you wished for... what do you wish for next? In the fairy tales, that's where the story ends. Happily ever after, finished, no more, nothing here to see. But what does Cinderella do when she wakes up the next morning? She marries the Prince at the end of the story, right? (I'm a little rusty on my fairy tale knowledge.) So then she's a fricking Queen, with a whole kingdom to manage! That's gotta be a whole other crazy adventure. Politics to navigate, servants to manage, crazy people to deal with, and all kinds of other tasks to deal with! Bet it made sweeping the fireplace seem easy, in retrospect.

You know what I mean.

Maybe.

It's still totally crazy that I am teaching yoga as my "job" right now, but it also feels really... well, normal. I know, I'm contradicting myself. But it feels natural. I'm doing all the crazy things I used to do with my spare time - spending all day at the yoga studio, driving around LA, going to Bikram's classes, hanging out with friends from yoga - same thing. But now I get to go up on the podium and teach sometimes! And now this isn't just how I spend my "spare" time - it's how I spend ALL my time. (In my spare time, I do crossword puzzles, go hiking, and watch Doctor Who with my sister, in case you were wondering.) I'm doing exactly what I like to do... All. The. Time.

The actual teaching is getting smoother, I think. Taught number 20 tonight. Wow. I taught at 3 different studios in the past week, including two classes at Headquarters. (Bikram was totally in the building for the second one - he watched a bit from the lobby. That wasn't weird or anything...!!!)
I've had some really big, fun, high energy classes. The craziest was probably the one a week ago when I had 41 students and TEN of them were brand new. I felt like I worked as hard as everyone in the class put together, just saying the dialogue, keeping the energy moving, and doing crowd control over the 25% of the class that was distressed about the heat and trying to escape. Hah!! The 4th of July morning class was a really good one - had a bunch of friends in town visiting (Greg, Lindy, Ayesha, Ricardo: shout-out!!) and that made it exciting and fun to teach, because none of them had taken my class before. It was a fun class - people were awake, working hard, good energy.

Teaching is so much like practicing - every class is totally different. My mood changes, of course. Some days I feel like BOOM, rock and roll, let's go, let's do some YOGA! Other days I feel more low key, like okay, let's just do this nice and quick and clean, no fuss, no mess. I had one class where I was just kind of spaced out and I actually fucked up my dialogue a couple times. After that one, which I thought was a total trainwreck, one of the regular students commented that it was my "best one yet." Go figure!

But the BIG wildcard is the mood of the CLASS. Because now, I'm not just dealing with mySELF when I go into the room, I'm dealing with everyone. When you practice yoga, you know that your body is going to be different every day. But when you TEACH, you might have 40 different bodies in the room, and THEY are all different every day, too. And the different combinations of people - how many are new, how many are young, how many are injured, how many are tired, how many people are in the room - those things all make a big difference, too. I've noticed that you have to tune into the mood of the room, or the class feels weird. There was one class that I taught where I was really excited to teach, but it felt like the students were just feeling like "uuggh, let's get this over with," and that was a weird class.

Anyway! This has been kind of a rambling little update. I'm trying to keep up with the blog, maybe once a week or so. (I miss the routine of teacher training, a bit. Can you TELL I lack structure in my life right now?!) I'm going on a camping trip for the next couple of nights up in King's Canyon - hooray! - and then next week I'm going on sort of a "working vacation" to another Cali studio where I'll get to teach twice a day for the whole week - yay! This is work?! I like it...