I had all these grand ideas of what I would do because I was isolated by the snow storm -- revamping websites, reading books, taking online classes, writing some reviews, backing up my data, archiving my music collection, etc. etc. What I did not count on was the physical exhaustion from wrestling with the snow for hours. In the morning, I shoveled because I did not want to get overwhelmed by the snowfall. In the afternoon, I shoveled because I wanted to get newly purchased book (The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama.) out of the car. After dark, I shoveled because the snow had stopped — finally — and I needed to finish digging the car out from under the snow. There was at least 24 inches on the ground, though it could have been more because the bottom layers were getting more compacted as the snow kept falling
In between those episodes of physical exertion, I laid around on the sofa focusing on the dull ache in my back, the soreness in my hips, the dead weight of my arms. Who can engage in intellectual activities when corporal sensations are so amplified? I need to do a session of yoga nidra to heal.
In the end, we were digging out to go nowhere because the snow plow was unable to get into our neighborhood because a tree fell on the pavement. By the time the tree was removed, the plow could not get up the slope because it got stuck in the snow and ice. So we have not seen a snow plow in 24 hours, and have no idea of when the contractor will get back to clean up the street. For that matter, we have a serious problem of where we are going to put all the snow. Just doing the sidewalks has piled up the snow to more than six feet tall.
I was too tired to even pick up my camera and take some shots of the snow, like most other people enjoying the blizzard.
I took advantage of the unscheduled leave option and early dismissal at my job due to the looming snow storm (my employer, an international organization, follows the lead from the Federal Government) to get in one more session of yoga at Thrive before being trapped in my house for the weekend. Between fitting in a couple of hours of work and getting some time on the mat, I'll take the yoga this time. Next week, probably, I'll have to give priority to work.
Stephanie gave another hot vinyasa session at 9:30 and it was about the same as last night. The only difference was that my muscles were showing signs of fatigue. I had not had enough time to recover from the exertion of the night before. The room was full so there was plenty of energy to carry us along so it was not hard to let the sequencing take me through the process. I just had to take a break once in a while to allow my breathing to catch up. I noticed that I was able to get into lizard pose (Utthan Pristhasana) much deeper than I had in the past, a sign that my hips are opening up. I can get both forearms down to the mat without having to compensate.
After class, I ran around making grocery purchases to get us through a long weekend, checking on my parents, filling up the gas tank and other errands. In the evening, the snow started to pile up and I did two rounds of shoveling sidewalks, parking space, and our back patio (our dogs need access to some free space to relieve themselves). By the time this snow storm is over, I will wear out the shovel.
Labels: class
I made it to Thrive Yoga tonight and got in a hot vinyasa class before the region is shut down by a huge snow storm heading our way. I suspect that any yoga I fit in over the next four days will be in my own study or living room. We'll see how long it takes everyone to dig out. Despite the sweat dripping from head to toe, I repeated to myself, "Don't work so hard, Mike, grace and ease." It seemed to soothe my mind and body as we went through the sequences of postures -- until the instructor, Stephanie Rosenblatt, led us into abdominal work, and then I just caved in after a couple of sets of bicycle crunches.
These winter storm are becoming a real pain in the butt. It shuts down studios for 2-3 days so that means there's a hole in my routine, and shoveling snow does not make up for it. Home practice starts to look like a necessity. Where have I heard that before?
Labels: class
Yesterday I broke a personal rule about my yoga practice. I talked myself out of going to yoga on Monday evening because I was tired, had things to do at home and did not feel all that gung-ho about doing yoga. I thought I would be able to grab my Tuesday night class, as usual. I had even talked my wife into taking the class with me. Well, another snow storm moved into the DC area and Thrive Yoga canceled the evening class as a precaution because of the bad weather. To make it an even bigger downer, both evenings at home got sidetracked and I did not get to be as productive as I wanted.
I have this personal rule for a reason: I grab classes when I can, as early in the week as possible. All kinds of circumstances crop up to interfere with my yoga practice and there are only a specific number of classes at Thrive Yoga that are available to me, unless I don't go to work. For all I know, I'll have an urgent task at work or the Metro will be delayed and I'll miss the Thursday class.
Of course, the skillful response to this predicament would be to have a complete daily home practice that would satisfy my yoga needs. Instead, I'll be lucky to get in 20 minutes of meditation before going to bed.
My second rule of yoga practice is that I get up the next day and try to do the best that I can.
Labels: class
I went to Thrive Yoga for my Saturday morning vinyasa flow 2/3 class just as the snow storm was hitting the DC area. There were treacherous driving conditions. I took my camera with me because I thought I'd try to take some cuts with a 50 mm f/1.8 lens, which gives some interesting effects. After about 15 minutes of practice, I stopped and picked up my camera to take some shots. I wish I hadn't. After about 20 minutes, I got back on my mat and I did not get into the full swing of the inspired vinyasa that Susan Bowen had put together.
During workshops, like the recent ones with Rumbaugh and Kest, the sessions are 2.5 hours long. There are natural pauses and interruptions. I sometimes need a blow. Even then, I felt that my mind was divided; that I was rushing through the shots without carefully surveying the full scene to capture the details in my mind before shooting; that I was skipping steps in making sure the camera had the right settings.
Norm classes are shorter (75-90 minutes) and the segments hang together more integrally. For instance, today, I missed a segment to loosen up my shoulders so I was not prepped for the segment on revolved bound side angle pose. On the other hand, taking good pictures requires concentration and patience to capture the right angle, light and pose. If I'm constantly thinking about when I should get back to my yoga practice, I am not giving the photography sufficient attention.
Lesson learned: in most daily circumstances, either practice yoga or take pictures; don't try to do both. I need my yoga just as much as I need to practice taking photos, if not more. I put an example of the shoot (on right) in this blog entry.
Bonus point: I did feel the difference for having practiced three days during the work week and doing some simple yoga on the other days. I also fit in a hot vinyasa class with Stephanie Rosenbltatt on Thursday so I pushed myself physically at least once during the week.
I open my daily Google news alert e-mail this morning and a pattern immediately emerged from the selection.
- WOOD TV8 Yoga for better sleep - informative five-minute video feature on a bedtime routine
- Huffington Post How Laughing Yoga Helped Me Take Relaxation Seriously about this twist. Also see Yogalaff.com
- Globe and Mail Night moves: Sleep yoga may be better than counting sheep- more info about yoga as "foreplay before bed to set the mood before sleep."
- SFGate Restorative yoga for those who want to relax
- Reuters Rwandans reach to yoga as a trauma therapy
I had made a decision to refrain from posting a lot of news items on yoga and meditation unless I could really add something to the content. These short entries were easy to fire off, but others sites, like YogaDorks, do this job well and with a lot more humor that I can muster about the yoga scene here in the States and around the world. I wanted to refocus my blog on my practice, photography, reading, and other assets that a reader would not find elsewhere.
And to contradict what I just said, let me close by pointing to this New York Times article, When Chocolate and Chakras Collide about the trend towards mixing yoga and food. Anything that appears in the NY Times is an indicator of what's happening culturally around yoga.
Labels: life style, news, therapy
Let's just say that I appreciate the photographs of the Yoga Day USA event YoGA at MoMA. My problem when shooting at a yoga studio is that I have a limited range of angles from which to take a pictures, none of them giving me a wide shot that takes in the full array of yogis and yoginis. I also encourage you to take a look at the videos on Elena Brower's Virayoga. Elena was the lead instructor at the event, and has a beautiful practice. Better yet, I'll show it here.
At the Desirée Rumbaugh workshop, I was explaining my knee injury to Desirée and how I had recovered from the surgery. I told her that although the downtime from yoga had been felt, I did not look at it as a loss. In fact, it had helped in many respects; most importantly, it had allowed me to approach yoga from a beginner's vantage point. My muscles had softened, loosened up and become more malleable. I had to slow down my practice and become more aware and alert to what my body was telling me. And even though I was once again a beginner, I was not coming at yoga from the same point of five, six years ago. I had learned a lot about yoga; I was less fearful of "doing something wrong;" I understood the importance of consistency.
In other words, to paraphrase a quote from the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, you can never step in the same river twice; for other waters flow flow over you. And, for that matter, you are never the same person.
It occurred to me that this is good advice to any beginner (or practitioner). You have to accept the injuries, the illnesses, the interruptions in practice, as opportunities to approach yoga from a fresh angle. The lapses are also chances to emphasize the other aspects of yoga beyond the physical asanas: meditation, pranayama, seva. After "backsliding," the first reaction is to feel regret or peeved.
Tonight I went to a Hatha yoga class with Marylou McNamara at Thrive Yoga. Some practitioners would look down on it and consider it only appropriate for novices. I call the Tuesday night session my "remedial" class because it always makes me come back to the basics. Last night, Marylou gave a masterful class that was full of nuances and subtleties grounded in Anusara principles. These details probably went over the heads of most people there because of the peculiar vocabulary of cuing that Anusara instructors use and because their practice probably is not yet mature enough to recognize the ins and outs of this type of instruction, but the yoga still did them a world of good and they will reap its benefits, as I did.
As part of my intention of "not working so hard" at my yoga, I've been practicing more seated poses, usually cross-legged Easy Pose (Sukhasana). In the evenings, I get up from my computer and take a seat on a zafu cushion in the middle of my study. I'll listen to some music, read or simply rest my attention on my body. I don't necessarily intend to meditate, but it often moves in that direction. Sometimes, I will transition into yoga nidra or a restorative pose as a release from being seated more than 15-20 minutes.
I notice that it takes a while to sink into the seated posture. It feels different after 10 minutes, and not just because my legs are losing sensation. I start working through my musculature, which is pretty substantial, lots of thick muscles working all day to keep me upright and moving. It takes time to get through the resistance and "touch bottom." By the end, I feel that I'm resting more on my sit bones than on the muscles. I also notice a change in my breathing as my upper torso (rib cage, diaphragm, solar plexus, thoracic spine) gains freedom from the lower half.
Obviously, if I lived in a non-Western culture, I would be spending a lot more time seated on the floor and the uniqueness of what I experience on the zafu would be routine.
One benefit I find so far is that it makes for much sounder sleep. Because I am really working my core in seated Easy Pose, my torso and thighs are really grateful for the relief of lying doing. I've exerted a lot of effort holding the upright position without really working up a sweat or increased aerobic activity. I sense that it bleeds off a lot of the nervous energy that builds up during the day.
Labels: breathing, core, meditation
Every year, I set an intention for my yoga practice that I bring to the mat every time I take a class or do my home practice. Last year, it was "Listening with the whole body." In 2008, it was "discovery" and empowering my brother's health.
This year, my intention is a kind of mantra that I repeat silently to myself: "Mike, don't work so hard."
I've been practicing yoga for six years, often with explicit goals, like "changing my life," "managing my depression," "improving flexibillty," — and the list goes on. Any when I come up against my limits, whether physical, mental, spiritual, whatever, my instinct is to try harder, to redouble my efforts, to suck it up. But that approach does not necessarily get the results that I want. Yoga is different than Western disciplines and sports in that it requires that you be present in the moment, dwelling in the body as it is now, aware of the present. If I am constantly measuring my posture against some ideal or counting how long I can hold headstand, I am not fully grounded in the moment.
There will be times when I want to explore my edges, as during the Desirée Rumbaugh or Brian Kest workshops, or trying a pose that I had never attempted before. That's fine. But I also need to find the ease and grace that allows me to fully inhabit my body as it is here and now. At my recent workshops, I became aware of what could be called "black holes" in my body — areas that I could not touch or access so I could not move past them to attain certain poses because I could not exert any power or control over my "black holes." Pushing hard does not do anything.
What's required at this stage of my practice is to pause, pull back and focus on determining the topography of my "black holes." I have to let yoga itself show me the way, let yoga do the work. I don't have to "work harder," but sit back in patience, ready for a new compass to guide me forward.
I am unable to write any comments about the Desirée Rumbaugh workshop; just no time to string together more than a few lines. I have posted more photographs on the Thrive Facebook gallery. I was trying to take shots without a flash, relying on opening my lens as wide as possible. The more settings and options you have, the more likely you'll forget something or just get it wrong. Plus people are moving, which may complicate things with slow shutter speeds. In other words, I am saying that there's a high failure rate in these photographs. I might be able to rescue some of them with Photoshop, but it's a steep learning curve.
I want to spotlight to news items:
- Detroit Free Press Matthew Sanford links yoga's self-awareness and healing about a paraplegic whose experience with yoga sheds light on the mind-body connection. Desirée mentioned Matthew at the workshop. She also recommended his book, Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence
. He has a team of professionals working with him at MindBodySolutions. Here's a series of videos at a 2008 Yoga Journal confernce.
- San Francisco Chronicle Restorative yoga for those who want to relax because I'm focusing on this facet of yoga and the reputation of West Coast yoga is usually the opposite: upbeat, intense and driven.
I have put in ten hours of yoga in three days at Thrive Yoga, participating in the Desirée Rumbaugh workshop this weekend. It was intense, fulfilling and insightful, thanks for Desirée's infectious dynamism and deep knowledge of yoga. I also had the distraction of taking photographs whenever I could break free from the mat. I filled up one memory card with shots, and it will take a while to process them all. Since getting back home after the class, I have been blissed out (or burnt out) and don't think I could muster the energy to write too much about the experience.
Labels: workshops
This weekend I am participating in the Desirée Rumbaugh's "Heart Stimulus Plan" workshop at Thrive Yoga as resident photographer and yogi pretender. Four two and a half hour sessions. Thankfully, we had MLK's birthday holiday on Monday so I will have a day to recover from this excess. Tonight, it was a sizeable class, but there was still room to spare. I've heard that there are still spaces available for the other sessions.
Tonight we worked on hip-openers and inversions: inversions were stuffed into the last 20 minutes (not a complaint), and Desiree really led us through a series of demos and highly focused postures that gradually led us deeper and deeper into the contradictions of how to spread your sit bones. This was not a vinyasa flow class with sequencing to work up a sweat and work the whole body (as with the Brian Kest workshop in October.) No, Desirée had us apply "shins forward and hugging to the midline, thighs back and spiraling inward, hips scooped to support the core and spine." Anyone who has taken an Anusara class knows the alignment principles that are repeated over and over again. If you confront this vocabulary for the first time, you're baffled, but Desirée does a good job of wittily describing and joyously demoing how the principles are applied in poses.
- July 2008 workshop at Thrive and more comments
- Tale of my knee injury coming out of the workshop
At the end of the class, I sat crosslegged in Easy Pose (Sukhasana) on my mat. In the past, my right hip was always so tight that my knee would jut up at a 45 degree angle. More recently, my left hip had actually opened up substantially and came close to resting on the ground ("cheating" with a blanket under my hips). Tonight both hips were open and I could rest both legs on the ground. Even though I was protecting of my right knee like crazy, not pushing it too far, pulling back from the edge, that's progress. Maybe I should not give up all hope of one day doing Lotus (Padmasana)
The danger with Desirée is that she is so inspired and energetic that you want to follow her off the deep end, take a pose to the next level and compete with your neighbor as to who can get deeper in a split (not me). Desiree warned us that we need to protect ourselves with the right tools and techniques.
Well, I have two sessions tomorrow so I should to bed. I need sleep.
Labels: hips, inversions, Rumbaugh, workshop
Over the past seven days, taking advantage of vacation time from work, I've tried to balance my yoga practice with daily trips to the gym to get in aerobic exercise so that I can increase my stamina and to burn off some of the pounds gained over the Holidays. I've included 30 minutes of stationary bicycle and another 30 minutes of either jogging/walking or elliptical trainer. Hopefully, I'll be able to continue this routine through the weekend. Next week, I am probably going to have to cut back the gym time to 30 minutes because I'll be back at work and unable to spend so much time on conditioning. The other objective is to get back into jogging and running, which I dropped after my knee injury. Running really helped my hips.
I've also tried to combine vinyasa with hatha, yin and restorative yoga, trying to cultivate more relaxing undertows in yoga to counteract the muscle activation in the flow. I wanted to acquire awareness and suppleness as well as muscle strength. In the past I've tended to harden around a partial flexibility in certain poses so that I could not deepen the postures. I don't know if I've succeeded. Last night, Susan Bowen led a hot vinyasa flow class at Thrive Yoga that really tested my physical edge. I had to stop repeatedly to catch my breath and my mat had puddles of sweat. I don't think she aimed to have an exceptionally difficult session, but the sequencing hit me where I feel the most vulnerability now, in the hips where I seem to be accessing a different combination of muscles.
At my age, the drop off in conditioning is unexpectedly sharp. For most of the last quarter of 2009, I could only grab practice sessions a few times a week, with no routine, and I even lost entire weeks because of family matters or travel. I do not have a home practice that can maintain a kind of physical and flexible foundation. Now I am paying the price. It's not something you can reverse in a week or two. I had been hoping to use my vacation time but weather and family matters kept me getting into a routine until this week. I also can't discount that my conditioning may also be a result of the lack of physical exercise following my knee injury, convalescence and recovery two years ago. It's only been a year since I really got back to yoga, and I've been treating myself gingerly over that time.
I have to find a way to create a full home practice, with active, yin and nidra yoga, as well as pranayama and meditation, while not being anal-obsessive about the whole routine. Understanding this need and taking action is probably what differentiates a beginner from an intermediate practitioner. It's not being able to achieve a certain level of difficulty in postures; that can depend just on hereditary traits or athleticism.
Labels: class, conditioning, running
I took at morning vinyasa flow class with Susan Bowen at Thrive Yoga. It was my first physically demanding class in a week (if not more), and I really felt the lack of conditioning and ease. It seemed that I was fighting against myself the whole session, and I had to remind myself constantly to let the yoga do the work. I could tell that I was physically fatigued having done a lot of aerobic exercises the day before: 30 minutes of stationary bike and then another 30 minutes of jogging/walking, on top of Saturday's workout. After class, I could tell that I need recovery time so I did not go on to the gym for more aerobic work.
Yesterday, I took in Marylou McNamara's Hatha yoga class, which is strong on alignment, but does not make me break into a sweat, also at Thrive Yoga. That's not to say that the class did not have its challenges. I winced while holding Warrior II for what seemed like an eternity. Marylou focused a lot on opening up the shoulders, and I ended up doing a couple of strong wheel (upward facing bow or Urdhva Dhanurasana ) pose, which she complimented.
After class, I chatted with Marylou because she likes to put funny names to yoga poses adapted to other environments ("church yoga, bed yoga") and I had a pseudo-posture that helped me locate the muscles between my shoulder blades. I call it "Proud Indian Chieftain." I have this image in my head, probably from some drawing I saw in my childhood because I can't find anything like it on the Web, of an Indian warrior standing with his arms crossed over his chest, his head raised high. What's striking is how high the arms are positioned over his chest, almost as if he's posing by puffing up his rib cage. But really, his arms are pulled back fully into the shoulder joints, and the the rhomboids fully engaged so that the shoulders are broad and pulled back. What would be the Western antithesis in this pose? the folded arms would be resting on the lower rib cage because the shoulders are slumping forward. This is a posture acquired from slumping over keyboards.
