Our Expanding Universe

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

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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 _______?

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

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

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

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

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

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.