Mixing it up!

Well, I had a lovely yoga weekend! (And I am bummed to be back in my office right now but oh well.)

I did my usual Bikram classes at 10am on Saturday and Sunday. But there was also a guy named Brian in town (one of my internet buddies, in fact) who was doing a hot yoga workshop downtown which I went to on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. He's been teaching for like a million years, and he was trained by one of Bikram's students, not by Bikram, so his yoga class is different from Bikram's but very closely related. He's kinda like a stepchild of the Bikram family. He teaches a great class and I learned whole a bunch of things!! The class on Saturday was ALMOST the same postures as Bikram's beginning class, but with a bunch of little changes in sequence, and the class on Sunday had a lot more postures from the advanced series and basically felt like 45 minutes of hip openers. (At first I was like - hm - hip openers - that's what I need like I need a hole in the head - but it ended up feeling really good.)

And ALSO, one of my old teachers from Boston sent me a message the other day saying, "J, are you doing backbends?" and I was like "...... noooo I never do that...." and she gave me some instructions for doing backbends down the wall at home, and it actually sounded like a good idea. So on Saturday, after I did regular class and Brian's class, I went home and did 25 backbends down the wall. Then woke up Sunday for two more yoga classes again.

I think there must be some benefit to mixing things up like this, cause I did something BRAND NEW after the last class on Sunday (and it wasn't even really hot in the room)! After I took my savasana at the end of Brian's class, I was like, hmmm, my body feels so bendy right now, I wonder if I can do anything interesting. So I tried pushing up into full cobra - toes to nose - and that felt good. So then I though - Hmmmm, I wonder if I can take my hands off the floor and hold my feet. (Which is something that I've attempted doing several times in the past, but never with any success. I usually just hold my knees.) So I grab one foot - Hm, that's easy enough. Other foot? Fumbled around a little (damn tight shoulder) and then got that one too! Then I just... PULLED.... and all of a sudden I'm wearing my feet like a damn necklace. I was like.... HUH!! I did not expect that to happen! Came out, looked at Brian - Dude, did you see that?! Let's see if I can do it again. I try it again. It still works!

Brian goes - Man, I can't believe your head was almost on your BUTT. I'm like - Whaaaaat?! NO it was not. Do you have a camera?!? He has an iphone. Hooray! I do it a third time and he takes some pictures. Brian - Look at how close your head is to your butt!! Me - Nooooooo that's just an optical illusion cause I have black pants on... actually..... oh my god...

Check this out. I am totally shocked by it. New party trick!!!!! (Just kidding.) I am posting since you guys had a good respose the last time I posted a picture! :) The NEXT step is to let GO of my feet and have them stay there by themselves. Maybe I try that tonight.

OMG that's not even normal. I think my hips need to be DOWN!!!!

"The data is always innocent."

Yawn!  I stayed up til 2am with my sister last night watching this freaking AMAZING TV series called "Being Human" that we DVR-ed from BBC America.  There are only 6 episodes of it so far and it ROCKS.  It's a supernatural drama/comedy show about these three roommates who are a werewolf, a vampire, and a ghost, and it might be an idea that's been done a million times, but they do it SO well.  It had us laughing hysterically and screaming in horror in basically the same breath.  This has absolutely nothing to do with my "yoga post" today... I just wanted to pass on the recommendation.  If any of you guys are into the slew of vampire stuff that's out right now (so trendy ugh), or if you liked Buffy back in the day (so good), you will adore this show.

Meandering back onto topic now... I finished off my grad school "work week" last Friday with a meeting with JS, my research supervisor.  JS really leads my research group because the professors are very busy and important and not so "hands on" with the students.  So he reports to them, and I report to him.  And he is GREAT.  He's one of the reasons I'm still here.  He comes from industry in Korea and is slightly high-strung and hardcore about deadlines and results, but he still is SO easy to work with, he never gets mad when one of us screws something up, and he threw a big barbeque on the beach one day for all the students in the group when my advisor was out of town.  When he's giving me a lot of work to do, he spends half the meeting telling me ALL the stuff I need to get done and the other half of the meeting apologizing for it.

Anyway, that's JS.  I went to his office on Friday feeling totally bummed out, because I had worked all week (including a 2am lab session) to get a certain set of data, but the very first step of the process had not gone so well.  I had put in my "good faith" effort to get the data, but I was feeling pretty sure that the results would be useless.  So I told JS everything, and he said, "Actually I think you have succeeded.  I think we can use the data.  Don't be sad.  The data is always innocent."

Of course this made me feel better, and I was also totally struck by that sentence that he used: The data is always innocent.  So cute.  And so... true.  So useful.  In research, in yoga, in everything!  Data is data.  Information is information.  It's not good or bad.  It's "innocent."  It's our interpretations that make it good or bad, right?  Isn't that a line in Hamlet?  "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."  That could practically be a quote from the yoga sutras.  It's such a central idea.  I was so delighted to see it pop up in such an unexpected place.

I think that the bottom line here is that we can learn observation without judgement.  And I think I MUST have mentioned this here already at some point, but for me, that lesson was the single biggest change that I saw in myself when I started yoga.  I came into the practice so programmed to look at myself in a mirror and judge, oh, that was bad, that wasn't right, it should have been different, etc etc.  But for some reason, the way that the yoga class is set up - so safe, so objective - helped me to drop that.  I could look in the mirror and think, "oh, ok, I need to move my right hip forward, aha, that's better now" instead of thinking "my right hip's not far enough forward, OHmygod-I-totally-suck-at-this-I'm-so-embarrassed-I-fail-at-life."  Just observe.  See the data, listen to it, find out the next move.  No knee-jerk emotional response, no judgment.  (We misunderstand our world.)  I remember that I recognized this change very quickly and I recognized some - though not NEARLY all - of the implications.  This was what kept me coming back to the class.  I didn't give a SHIT about doing "pretty" postures.  I just wanted that mental clarity that came from seeing something as it was without constantly projecting onto it.  

And if my personality has changed or developed at all in the last few years - which my close friends and family tell me that is has - this is the root of it all.  Observation and innocence.

Reality check for me!

Today I abruptly realized just how busy I'm going to be this fall. I am going to be VERY, VERY BUSY. Here are the grad school-related things that I am going to be doing between now and November.

- I have to take my quals (qualifying exams) probably by the end of September. This involves intensively studying a research topic and giving an oral presentation on it to a bunch of hardcore professors. I have not yet chosen a topic. Where did the summer go???

- I have to try to get some good data from my never-ending research project so that I can give a talk at the big annual review session during the first weekend of November, which is attended by all the member companies who supply our funding.

- I also have to try to write a paper on said research, assuming it ever works.

- I also have to work on our group LED research project.

- I also have to take a class.

- I also have to TA for one of the first year materials courses, 200A. This happens to be possibly the MOST labor-intensive and time-consuming class in the entire materials graduate program. I just found out about this 12 hours ago and I am kind of horrified. The upshot is that I get paid extra, and I get to meet all the incoming first years (as they collectively have a stroke). The downside is that it's gonna be a lot of freaking work!!

I looked at all of these things today and realized that certain things, such as a 60-day Bikram challenge in Sept/Oct or the championships in the beginning of November, should maybe NOT be high on my list of priorities right now!!!

I love yoga soooooo much... sometimes I have to remind myself that the object of yoga is to help you do BETTER in the rest of your life, not to distract you from it!

This is not to say that I WON'T end up doing 60 classes in Sept/Oct or getting my butt up onstage in a leotard in the beginning of November. (The SoCal championship appears to be like two days after the massive annual review that I'm involved in... this is just not great TIMING.) But at this point, I've got to just let it HAPPEN. I'll go to class when I can, and I won't when I can't. I'll practice my routine when I can, and let it go when I can't. I'm just gonna do my practice. If November rolls around and I feel like my practice is worth sharing at that point, I'll probably hop up on stage and have a good time. If not, no biggie! I can go down and cheer on some of my friends. There's always next year, and the next year, and the next year. It's all good. It's ALL yoga. Hatha, raja, karma, all of it. Even when I'm not in a class, I'm still doing my yoga.

On the OTHER hand...

So in my last post I talked about how sometimes your poses totally go to shit when you aren't paying attention.  But on the OTHER hand... sometimes you get to pleasantly surprise yourself!

First, a word on the yoga championships.  I am hoping to participate in them again this year - it would be my third year now! - so I decided that I might as well get my shit together and start ACTING like I'm going to give it a try.

In keeping with this, I decided to do a first "rough run" of my competition routine after class tonight.  But since the competition is done in an unheated auditorium (or possibly a mall this time?!), I've decided that this year I want to practice "cold" as much as possible.  So I took class at 4:30, showered off, came home, put on some dry clothes, set down a yoga mat in my backyard, and practiced postures while my sister cooked dinner for us.  My friend came by at 7 and I asked her to be my camera-girl and take a video of me.  This was actually a great idea, because having somebody watch me - even a good friend who is totally ignorant of yoga and impressed by everything - gave me a considerable performance adrenaline jolt, like "oh, ok, we are seriously doing this now!"  (She was a great audience - she goes, "I'm pretty sure that cobra thing you did defied the laws of physics."  She also said, "That doesn't look like a rabbit!")

In my short-sightedness, I did not clear my memory card beforehand, so we only captured about 1 minute of the 3 minute routine.  Whoops.  But I got to see the first two and a half postures, and that gives me plenty to think about!

First posture: standing head to knee.  Hmmmm.  Why does my kicking leg drift up in the middle?  How long has this been going on?!  I can't tell whether it moved BECAUSE I was loosing my balance, or whether I started to loose my balance because it moved.  But very good to see!!  Also, would love to get forehead higher on the knee.

Third posture: floor bow, cut off in the middle.  Not sure if I saw the final posture or not.

Second posture: standing bow.  The topic of this post!!!  I am totally surprised and delighted to see that my standing bow is NOT the total train wreck that I was envisioning.  This might actually be my new favorite picture of this posture on me.  (Posture-wise that is.  Camera-wise I think it's like 1 megapixel resolution, pretty ugly.)  Hooray!!  There are still plenty of things that I want to tweak (like the shoulder alignment and the placement of that free arm, which is in a really odd position), but the essentials all look okay to me.  I was so sure that I was loosing the grip on what used to be my favorite posture... but I guess I've still got it in there somewhere!  And I have to admit that it really is MUCH easier to do without all that SWEAT.

Don't hate me for being vain enough to post the pic... it's late at night, I'm just now seeing it for the first time, and it is making me kinda happy.  :)

Taa daaaa!!  Keep it locking....

CONSTANT VIGILANCE!!

You know what I've noticed?

Just because I was doing something right last year... or last month... or yesterday... that is no guarantee that I don't have to worry about it today! I've been through this cycle so many times, but it always amazes me a little bit. First you learn how to do something. Then you have to concentrate really hard to make sure that you're doing it. Then it gets easier. Then maybe it gets so easy that you're like "oh great, I can totally do that now, I don't have to worry about it so much." Then you start thinking about other details in the posture. And then you wake up one day, months and months later, and go "uh oh... what the %$#& happened to my locked standing leg in standing bow pose?!" And boom, back to the beginning. It was SO obvious that I forgot all about it.

That's why we have to exercise CONSTANT VIGILANCE!!! (And yes, of course that is an intentional Harry Potter reference. But seriously.) You've got to listen to the dialogue word by word. Every time. If you realize that (uh oh...) your instructors might be leaving something out, then you have to remind yourself of it. Every time. Even (especially!) if it's something totally obvious that you figured out how to do ages ago. Like locking the knee. Like fixing the eyes. (I busted myself for slacking on both of those things this week.)

I practiced to a recording of one of Craig's TT classes one time, and he said something at the beginning that I loved: "Be patient, be passionate, be vigilant. No fear." I thought that was perfect. No fear...

It's all true!!

More fun reading material!

I had a great "HOLY CRAP" moment just now when reading today's New York Times online. There is an article titled "Does Exercise Reduce Your Cancer Risk?" The result from the medical studies is that, even when you control for other factors such as weight, the answer is YES. This is great, but not TOO shocking. Here's the line that really got me:

"What these recent studies, including the one from Finland, share is the suggestion that, in order to use exercise to reduce the risk of cancer, you must make yourself sweat."

Can you believe it?! Everyone laughs at Bikram when he claims that he can prevent cancer, and he's been right this whole time! Hooray for us. It's all true. Do Bikram yoga, wear sunscreen, and live longer.

A word from someone else

I'm finding it impossible to write anything this week. A few of you know why. Something pretty amazing actually happened in my yoga world and I may spill the beans at some future date...

For now I'm just gonna redirect you to a nice new little blog from one of my former Boston teachers. She has a good review up of a seminar that she went to last weekend. It's very articulate, and I am 100% on board with every word in it. Especially that bit about "modifications." I was absolutely "raised" on the concept that there are no modifications in Bikram yoga (just like "there's no crying in baseball!" ha), but so many people seem to have trouble getting their head around that idea. (The number of times I've heard teachers say, "just modify the posture like this"... aaarghh.... )

Go here!

EDITED 8/21 TO ADD:  I've gotta go with my first instinct and keep my mouth shut on this topic, mainly because the story could reflect really badly on a certain other person, and I've always made a point of avoiding bad-mouthing on here.  So if you were holding your breath.... stop doing that.  ;-)