Laundry = EXCITING!

Massive excitement today: just got approved with my two roommates to rent this AWESOME 3 bed/2 bath house that we REALLY wanted. It's in a perfect location, ridiculously cheap for what it is, and so big and beautiful! I am in love! Signing the lease Friday.

Of course, I think the MOST exciting part for me is THIS:


THAT'S RIGHT. I'm a big girl now. I will have my OWN washer and dryer, inside my own house, that I don't have to pay to use! This is the best living-situation development ever. And you guys who commented on facebook cracked me up because you all had the exact same response as I did: "This will make it so easy to wash all the yoga towels!!!!"

I will also have a fireplace (don't know how to use it), a dining room that is not in the middle of the kitchen, a place to park my car (that is not a 5 minute walk from where I actually live), and a small backyard with a lemon tree and an orange tree. Yippee!

BRR! It's cold in here!

One thing that annoys me sometimes: once I'm acclimated to the nice hot yoga room, my body decides that 105 degrees really is the ideal ambient temperature, and I am cold for the other 22 1/2 hours of the day. It's a lovely 70 degrees outside today and I'm wishing I'd brought an extra sweater into my office!

I'm SURE that I'm not the only one with this problem, right?

The upshot was that last summer, when I was working in a restaurant in Boston and it was swelteringly hot and humid, I was the only one in the building who was actually comfortable. When I started to say, "hey, it is a bit warm in here," everyone else was passed out in the walk-in fridge trying to recover from heat exhaustion. I was kinda smug about that.

The sweat reflex sure does operate on a hair trigger, though! I bike for like 5 minutes in warm weather... or stand outside at a bus stop in the sun... and my body is like "Woooohoooooooo, here we go, time to sweat!!" and I'm like, "No no no, not NOW, does this LOOK like a yoga studio to you? We are wearing too much clothing for this!"

Daily practice; this is what is comes down to. Gotta love it!!

Back on the road - Home is where the YOGA is!

Seems I got to have a change of scene,

Cause every night I have the strangest dreams...

Got restless this week and drove down to LA on a whim on Friday.  The one great joy of being a grad student in summer; I have to put in all my research hours, but it doesn't exactly matter when I do it.  I wasn't in lab or on a big deadline this week, so when I got stir-crazy, I just hit the road!

I have to say, it is amazing the difference that a year (or 11 months) makes.  I just remember that the first time I went to Bikram headquarters in LA, at the end of last August, I found it to be such an unfriendly place.  I didn't know anyone, no one talked to me, none of the teachers seemed to care who I was, I was scared to talk to the "famous" people... it was depressing!

And now it is SO different for me.  Totally relaxed, comfortable, easy, flexible.  I know half the desk people.  We have long conversations about our careers (engineers unite!) and their pets (very photogenic puppy named Eggroll).  I always know someone in class.  I don't even get down there that often, but people remember me and are always like "oh yay, you are here!!"  The teacher at 9am on Friday (who I hadn't seen in months and months) got up on the podium, glanced around, and said "Hey J!!!  Wow, what's up?  How long are you here for?!"  He then kicked my butt in class, but was super cool about it when I went DOWN - "Don't worry J, it's just the headquarters, there's crazy mojo here."  My LA buddies pester me for my phone number in the locker room and offer me couches to sleep on anytime I want.  I practiced Emmy's advanced at noon, and the class was hopping, maybe 25 people, and the energy was awesome, tons of real pros, from senior teachers to a 12 year old kid, lots of hard work, lots of joking around with people, lots of friendly familiar faces.  I pretty much chilled out by the door and did my thing, and my postures went a lot better than I expected, which was a bonus.  A couple of the guys taught me these hilarious "Indian push-ups" after class and I am still sore two days later.  I thanked Emmy on the way out and chatted a bit with Craig and Juan in the parking lot.  I felt like I was back home, for some reason.  Got caught in traffic on the way back up (Friday afternoon in July, duh), spent half the day driving, and it was TOTALLY worth it.

I love, love, LOVE the Bikram community.  Seriously.  These are my PEOPLE.  (And all of you guys, my lovely readers, those of you who I saw in class for years, who I talked with online for months, or who I have never even met or spoken with - you are all included in this, of course.)  And you have to understand... I am not spectacularly outgoing in other settings.  I stay home with my roommates on the weekend and make avocado-kale salad for dinner and watch So You Think You Can Dance and Harry Potter movies.  I am not really that cool.  But with the yoga people, at the yoga studios, I'm kinda different.  I'm an extrovert, I get to know everyone, I find out about everything that's going on... I get IN there.  At advanced seminar, my roommate said, "holy SHIT you've moved fast out here... everyone I've said your name to already knows you!"  I really enjoy being like this!  It is a very unexpected side effect, but I've been seeing it for a long time, and I like it a lot.

Back in town now, things are a lot more chill, not so many excited yogis rolling around as there are in LA, but I've been finding them.  Been getting to know new people, and been discovering new sides to people I already knew.  Spent the morning at the studio today, signing in classes, practiced at 10am, talked shop (and politics JUST a bit) with a couple teachers, then hung out with a friend and went through advanced series.  It was nice.  I looked at apartments yesterday, getting ready to settle in for the next year.  This can be a home, too.  I feel like a snail; I just carry my yoga practice around on my back, in my spine really, and I can be at home anywhere I land.

Like your hair is on fire!

I see that my theme lately has definitely been balance.  And I always wonder, geez, is there really anything new left to say about this concept?  It's basically the definition of yoga.  Asana and savanasa, struggle and relaxation, strength and flexibility, kicking and stretching (equal and simultaneous, 50-50, the harder you kick, you can balance forever...)  You know the drill!

However, I've been remembering something important about balance lately: it is an incredibly active process.  You can't always just sit back and wait for it to find you.  Even though this word "balance" has these rather calm and relaxing connotations for me, you ain't gonna get there by just sitting back and waiting.  You have to KICK.  AND stretch.  Balance comes from a combination of active processes.  Even in the simple act of standing still, balanced on your two feet, your body is making hundreds of tiny adjustments every second to keep you in equilibrium.  It's physics, it's chemisty; just because you're in an equilibrium state, that doesn't mean that there's not a LOT going on!

The Tibetans have a saying about meditation that I am absolutely in love with: we should do our (meditation) practice "as if our hair was on fire."  That's the level of immediacy and urgency that they bring to their practice.  

The idea (and I'm paraphrasing horribly here) is that we are here in this painful place (an unbalanced life, a world full of pain), and we need to get out of it, just the same way we would immediately try to escape from a burning building.  Don't be complacent.  Your hair is on fire!  You've got to do something about it!  And as Bikram says... (I just love this)... "What you waiting for??  Somebody come and help you?!"  It's all up to you.

You've got to balance like your hair's on fire, and this is the only way out of the burning building... through your asana practice, through your meditation (moving or still), through the yoga of your life...

"The posture REALLY begins when..."

"...it becomes easy."

Huh.  That was not the answer I expected.  And it came from a post-class discussion with Juan, the mastermind of the awesome bloodbath class that I talked about in my last entry.  This is the guy who tried to make us miserable just so that we would fight.  But after all, my favorite dichotomy in Bikram yoga has always been: "Take it easy, sweetheart"/ "KILL YOUR SELF!"  So I think he is onto something here.

(First, a moment of "Boooooo!" to technology.  I just spent almost 30 minutes writing and editing a blog post when I wasn't connected to the internet, and the whole thing disappeared into thin air when I hit "publish."  LAME!  I am so bummed!!!  Ah well.  I'm so much less inspired now, but I'm just gonna try to recall what I was talking about....)

Back on track: I am not saying (now or ever) that you don't have to struggle in yoga class.  Of course you do.  You have to struggle harder.  Kill your self!  But the thing is, on the other side of the struggle, there is something else, someplace quiet.  Easy.  Like fighting through a tornado and abruptly finding yourself in the eye of the storm.  That's the whole reason why we struggle.  We're not just beating our head against a brick wall here, not for no reason.  Maybe we are hitting our heads again bricks sometimes... but it's not a wall, it's a door!

I took one surfing lesson when I first moved out to California.  I sucked at the paddling parts.  But I was really struck by the experience of standing up on the surfboard.  It's like this: you're in the water, paddling like a maniac, working like crazy, and it's really loud, the surf is in your ears, the water choppy, the water is in your ears, you set yourself up, you push up on the board... and then suddenly, stillness.  Quiet.  Suspended animation.  After all that struggle and work and noise, you are suddenly, unexpectedly, in this totally calm state of balance, standing there like you're just standing on the street, as the ocean moves under you.  It reminded me of yoga.

I think we've all had little tastes of this in our personal practice.  Third part of awkward, anyone?  It's a bitch if you've got bad knees, but otherwise, once you figure out the mechanics, it's a piece of (cheese)cake.  Emmy said at seminar that "this is a wonderful posture for meditation" because "it's the easiest one in the series."  If you haven't felt the ease in this posture, I bet you've found it in another one, in a posture that you had to struggle to achieve at first but that you do now without a second thought.  Think of that.  Now imagine being able to do the whole series that way.  What a thought...

I remember at the judge's clinic (at seminar again), there was a discussion of how long competitors need to hold their balancing postures.  One person's answer was so good that it basically ended the entire discussion.  He said, "When the judge knows you could hold it forever if you want, the posture is done."  So the posture finishes, and begins, when it is controlled.  Calm.  Easy.

I've been thinking about this for the last couple of days, especially in standing head to knee, of all postures!  That one has always been my nemesis.  The last part stresses me out.  I'm fully capable of doing it and holding it, but as I was saying on hannahjustbreathe the other day, it is the ultimate mind-fuck.  I make myself fall all the time.  But lately, I've been going into it with a mindset of "fight back, fight harder" along with "it's so easy," and wow.  Today in class, I went into the final position, somehow relaxed, took a couple breaths, and then came out step by step when I decided I was done.  Both sides.  I am knocking on wood right now, big time!!  But it was pretty cool.

One of my favorite moments in Bikram's first book is when he talks about how it can be frightening at first to freeze in a posture with no one to help you, nowhere to go except inwards.  He says, "don't fright, don't scare.  It is so peaceful in there, so good for your mind and your body to forget the outside world for this time you do Yoga.  You hear my words now, but I know you don't understand them yet.  That's okay.  You got to feel the understanding happening in yourself, like a flower unfolding, to understand."

Further up and further in...

Fight Back!

I had one of the greatest ass-kickings of my entire yoga career on Thursday night. Seriously, I'm still sore. It was epic and brutal and beautiful! It's not that I'm a masochist, not really, it's just that there is something totally awesome about having your ass handed to you on a platter by an experienced and talented teacher.

The ass-kicker in this situation was the infamous JUAN. This was the first time I'd ever taken his class, though I'd seen him demo postures at advanced seminar and practiced in the same room as him a handful of times in LA. Juan is someone who I had heard of before I even moved to the west coast, generally in context such as "Watch out for Juan!" He has a seriously killer practice - the one time Bikram got him to compete in the championships ("I don't know why I did that," says Juan), he placed 2nd internationally. (Esak Garcia placed first.) He is known for talking like an auctioneer and being merciless.

Needless to say, I LOVED the guy. He's actually quite cool - insightful, sarcastic, smart, and very low key and quiet when he's not on the podium. And I seriously loved his class. I would take it every day if I could.

My absolute favorite moment in the class was during the balancing series. My body was (sadly) not at its best for his class - legs were super weak for some reason - and Juan was holding all the poses really long. Standing head to knee felt inhumanly long, actually. His dialogue at the end of the first set went like "now slowly bring your elbows down to your calf muscles, eventually elbows should go below - *claps* - nevermind I'm talking to myself, you all fell out." I did, shamefully, fall out, though I'm sure it had been WAY more than a minute. I wish I was conditioned for better stamina!! So anyway, standing head to knee nearly kills me. Standing bow, I suck, I even get called out for the fact that I can only balance for like 10 seconds cause my legs are just NOT with me anymore. Then, at the beginning of balancing stick, he says "Fight BACK!!" I swear to god, it was like he reached inside me and flipped on a switch. I was like, "oh, that's right! I need to fight!" and then I held every one of his 30-second long sets of balancing stick and just powered through the rest of the standing series even though my heart was racing the entire time. It was awesome.

For some reason, when he told us to fight back, I just had this moment of perfect clarity - of course he's destroying us right now, but it's only to make us wake up so we can do better. And it totally woke me up. Thinking about it now, it makes me think of the simple mechanics of our bodies - how in order to stretch one muscle group, we have to contract another. Newton's law - equal and opposite reaction for every action. You can't stretch or strengthen anything without having some kind of resistance to pull against. And Juan, he just gave me that resistance. I guess I just really needed someone to start pushing on me so that I could have something to push against, so I could get somewhere.

I did better in class yesterday, too, just thinking of that directive: fight back. I took class from a teacher who I really don't like, and instead of getting distracted or dragged down by her energy, I used it as resistance to push against, and told myself, fight back. And it helped. Lately, these last few months or even longer, my practice has often been something that just happens to me, and not in a good way. But there's no reason to go along with something that you don't like. You can change your own experience just by your will. You can fight back.

It might seem weird to be talking about yoga in such combative terms (though I suspect a lot of you crazy Bikram yogis understand me perfectly already). And I don't think class needs to always be a fight, not by any means. But you know, Emmy said something cool at advanced seminar about the pacing and structure of the class. She says that the standing series is supposed to be pretty fast-paced and energetic, and it should have a "warrior" feel to it, because you are literally going to war against all the aches and problems and imbalances in your body (and in your mind). Then the floor series is, as they say, the "real yoga." I loved that, though - in the standing series, you have to just do battle. It makes sense to me.

And this fight back is a great reminder for life in general. Don't take the backseat in your life. Trust the process, but don't let everything just happen to you. Be a warrior. Change your own world. FIGHT.

The yoga sutras tell me to stay in school...

Last week (ok, and for a bit of this week, too) I was in my disgustingly predictable "post yoga-bubble slump." This is what happens to me every time I have to return to the "real world" after being totally immersed in yoga yoga yoga for a while. I come home to my life as a grad student and question whether I really want to be in grad school, or whether I should ditch the whole endeavor, take out a credit card, get myself to the next teacher training, and become a kick-ass traveling Bikram teacher.

I dragged myself out of my hole last Saturday, took class, and then went to this REALLY fun raw food potluck at another yoga studio downtown. It was a blast. I spent all night eating and having great conversations with random people - two of my favorite activities ever!!

The yoga studio that was hosting the potluck has an awesome yoga bookstore, which of COURSE I had to spend some time browsing. So there I am, on the edge of the yoga crowd, amidst the books, thinking "what am I going to do with myself?" I pick up a translation of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, open it to a random page, and just start laughing. No magic eight ball could have done a better job at giving me a direct answer to my question. The sutra that I opened to says, "The practice of concentration on a single subject is the best way to prevent the obstacles and their accompaniments." Which means... what? Well, the commentary explains:

"The point here is that we should not keep changing our object of concentration. When you decide on one thing, stick to it whatever happens. There's no value in digging shallow wells in a hundred places. Decide on one place and dig deep. Even if you encounter a rock, use dynamite and keep going down. If you leave that to dig another well, all the first effort is wasted and there is no proof you won't hit rock again. Before you start digging, analyze well and find out which spot is good. Then, once you decide and begin, you should not question it further. Go right at it, because it will be too late then to think whether it is worthwhile or not; you should have done that before."

Hah. I actually really like this! It's a very, very old-fashioned kind of sentiment; just pick something, and then stick to it no matter what. Reminds me of the days before we had the luxury of career choice, when if your dad was a baker and your last named was Baker, you were going to be the town baker. These days, it is so common for people to cycle through jobs and careers every 5 or 10 years, and for the most part that suits me really well, but you know... there is also a lot to be said for just making a decision, committing to it, and then just digging deep, using dynamite if you have to. I especially like how it says: "you should have done that before." So merciless, but so TRUE.

Bringing the scale down a bit, I'm sure this is great advice for asana practice as well. Don't second-guess yourself! Once you're in the room, once your in the set-up, once you're in the posture, you should not question it further. Instead, "go right at it." Dig deep. You're already there. Nothing to do but blast on through.

As a friend of mine said - (I don't know where he got this from) - "Once you've gone too far, that's a good time to keep on going!"