Rox Does Yoga

Yoga, Wellness, and Life

Vegetarianism: Further Restaurant Adventures May 15, 2011

Filed under: reflections,yoga lifestyle — R. H. Ward @ 1:31 pm
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I can now confirm officially that Quiznos wins over Subway. Quiznos’ veggie sub includes sauteed mushrooms and guacamole. They also have a veggie wrap. Now I know which sandwich shop works better for me!

F and I went to a fancy Mexican restaurant last Saturday, where I had my first “this ought to be vegetarian but isn’t” mishap. We ordered the elote appetizer: a corn and cheese dish that was amazing. After we finished, F asked the waitress about the ingredients, and it turned out that the corn was cooked in chicken stock. This wasn’t indicated on the menu, so there’s no way I could have known. I’m not going to guilt myself about this.

This made me think about how much I can control what I eat at a restaurant. At home, I know exactly what goes into my meal and how the food is prepared, but not at a restaurant. If I want to eat out sometimes (and I do), all I can do is to do my best not to eat meat. Sometimes accidents will happen, like at this Mexican restaurant. I don’t know what goes on in the kitchen – maybe my portobello sandwich is cooked on the same grill with F’s hamburger, or right in the same oil. If so, there’s nothing I can do about that. I try to choose restaurants that cook in healthy ways,and I order meat-free food at those restaurants, but I can’t micromanage and control every aspect of the cooking process. I can ony do what I can, and then let go of the results.

This incident also made me think of a friend of mine who’s been vegetarian since childhood and has never eaten meat. Once we went to a Mexican place together and she accidentally ate something that had been cooked in chicken stock, and it made her sick because her body just didn’t know how to process it. I’m nowhere near that point, but I may just email the restaurant to suggest that they add more information to their menu. No one wants to go out for a nice dinner and get sick afterward. This is also a reminder that I need to be careful at Mexican restaurants; my sister-in-law, who works in the food industry, says that most Mexican places cook their rice in chicken stock. Now that I know, I can be more careful in the future.

 

Yoga guidelines: when to eat? May 13, 2011

Filed under: reflections,yoga lifestyle — R. H. Ward @ 2:28 pm
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Let’s talk about food. The yoga guidelines that N & J gave me include #5, “Practice on an empty stomach.” I find this remarkably difficult, partly because I’m always hungry, and partly for practical reasons.

Before starting teacher training, I usually practiced yoga in the morning before work. F and I would get up, make breakfast, eat together, and then I’d do yoga while he took the first shower. Our usual breakfast is a bowl of cereal and a fresh fruit smoothie, so it’s not a heavy meal, but it’s still definitely a meal. Only occasionally did I find that the food was sloshing around in my belly or otherwise making yoga practice uncomfortable. I’m just the kind of person who needs to eat first thing in the morning, period. If I get up early and don’t eat right away, I’m likely to feel ill. It’s just the way I’m built, so for me if I’m going to do yoga in the morning I need to eat something first.

Now that I’m doing the training, I still sometimes practice yoga in the morning, but I also go to hatha yoga class after work at least one day a week. This throws my whole schedule into disarray. Instead of getting up early and doing yoga, I’ll now take the first shower and get to work early, so that I can leave early, so that I can eat something for dinner before going to a 6:15 yoga class. The 6:15 class runs until 7:30, which in reality ends up being closer to 7:45, and by the time I collect my things and drive home it’s after 8:15. Add time to prepare myself a healthy meal and it’d be after 9 PM by the time I was eating. My usual dinner time is around 7:00-7:30, which is smack in the middle of yoga class. I cannot wait to have dinner until after 9 at night. First of all, I would be starving and exhausted, and secondly, it’s not really very healthy to eat a meal before going to bed. Researchers say that it’s best to finish eating before 8 PM. I feel like my only option is to eat at 5:15 or so.

I brought some of these concerns up at the last training weekend. N says that, ideally, we would practice yoga on an empty stomach, but really you just don’t want to have a very full stomach when practicing. I can appreciate that; nobody wants to go out to a nice restaurant and then practice yoga, or practice yoga on Thanksgiving night. You can’t stretch when you’re stuffed, it’d be too uncomfortable. N further said that, ideally, we would all make lunch our main meal of the day. I have to say that, unless sandwiches and pre-packaged frozen meals are one’s idea of a “main meal”, that it’s really hard to make lunch the main meal of the day while working a full-time job. No matter what kind of job it is, if you’re in an office or a hospital or a factory, you just can’t cut out for 2+ hours at midday to go home and cook yourself a healthy lunch. There are many good things to pack for lunch, yes, but it just doesn’t feel like the “main meal” to me if I’m not cooking something. And financially, it’s not feasible to buy a hot meal for lunch every day, and eating out is proven to be less healthy than cooking at home anyway.

This turned out to be a pretty grumpy post, which wasn’t my intention. I just feel frustrated by the constraints of being a yogini in the world, I think. As J says, it would be easy to do yoga if you lived in a cave or an ashram all the time, but it’s hard to do yoga in the world. Living in a cave or an ashram, you could certainly arrange things to have lunch be your main meal of the day and set up your yoga practice to fall conveniently at an appropriate interval of hours after eating. But that’s a lot harder to do in the world, when you have to consider work schedules and commute times and, god forbid, dropping off small people at activities like soccer practice. You eat when you can, is what I’m saying, because we have to eat, and you fit your yoga in when you can, because you deserve to have your yoga. You try to be careful about what you eat before yoga (a salad or a pork chop? let’s go salad), but sometimes you just have to do your best and that’s all you’ve got.

What are your thoughts on this? I’m really interested to hear what you have to say about how you structure your day and fit both healthy eating and yoga into your schedule.

 

Vegetarian Update May 9, 2011

Filed under: reflections,yoga lifestyle — R. H. Ward @ 1:49 pm
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It’s been almost two weeks since my last official meat meal. I’m finding vegetarianism interesting so far. I think it must be different to make a dietary change for health reasons – if, when you eat shrimp, you go into anaphalactic shock, then you probably pretty quickly develop an aversion to shrimp. I don’t feel an aversion to meat, really, I just decided not to eat it. Although I feel strongly in an ideological way about meat consumption, I don’t have strong feelings about meat when I see it on a menu or on someone else’s sandwich. It doesn’t gross me out or make me feel ill, which I know happens to some vegetarians (and which does happen for me with broccoli, the one vegetable that I truly cannot bear). A dietary restriction not for reasons of health or taste but for ideological reasons seems sort of unnatural: if the food looks good and smells good, and I can reasonably assume it won’t make me ill, then it seems natural to eat it. I have to keep reminding myself that factory farming of meat isn’t natural. This is a conscious lifestyle choice I’m making for myself, and I guess I’m getting used to what that means.

Two restaurant incidents of note. Last Saturday, F and I stopped at Popeye’s Chicken for biscuits – just one biscuit each, to tide us over until dinner. When we walked in the door, the chicken smell almost knocked me over. I really like fried chicken. I practiced tapas and we got out of there without chowing down on bird flesh, but it was still quite an experience. Just the awareness that I couldn’t have the chicken made the smell more powerful.

Also, last Sunday I had lunch at Subway with my mom. I had never realized before just how meat-centric their menu is. Subway used to be one of my favorite fast food places; I have so many memories of getting the spicy italian sub with my best friend on Saturday afternoons in middle school. Now there is exactly one option on the menu for me – the veggie delite – and I’m not overly fond of Subway’s veggie selections, so this is kind of a letdown. (No pickles and no olives, please, and hold the sweet peppers too.) As soon as we realized that my choices were limited at Subway, Mom offered to go somewhere else, but I need to figure out how to feed myself at normal restaurants, so I said we should stay. My veggie delite was perfectly serviceable. No spicy italian, but pretty okay.

I had the thought that next time I could have them put marinara sauce on the sandwich – I often used to do that with the spicy italian, to turn it into a pizza sub, so this would just be a veggie pizza sub, something I could get excited about. Then I realized that the marinara sauce at Subway has the meatballs sitting in it. There’s likely to be little meat chunks throughout the sauce; I’ve encountered little meatball bits in my spicy italian pizza subs many times. This means the marinara sauce is out for me. I wouldn’t eat chicken broth even if there were no chicken chunks in it, so why would I order marinara sauce that had meatballs sitting in it? I guess I could, since unlike chicken broth the marinara sauce is not intrinsically made of meat, but it still feels like cheating. Overall, I need to measure how far I go with this, how fanatical I want to be. I think it’ll be a long learning process.

 

Being zen May 2, 2011

Filed under: reflections,yoga lifestyle — R. H. Ward @ 2:59 pm
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I’ve been slow with blogging lately. My life has been crazy lately – and as J says, everyone’s life is crazy, life is always crazy, it’s never going to be less crazy – but in my defense, life also rarely drops an overnight out-of-state business trip, a leaking kitchen ceiling and flooded kitchen, and a freelance job into a week where I’m trying to buy a house, have opera tickets with my mom, and need to plan and pack for a major trip that will include my only sister’s wedding. All while keeping up my regular work schedule and trying to fit in yoga time. I’m usually busy, but this is a little much even for me.

In all of this activity, my attitude has been to take things one step at a time. In buying a house, we are doing our best to plan for the future, but we can’t possibly plan for everything that could happen. All we can do is to make the best plans we can, and then we just have to take the risk. It’s inevitable that we’ll overlook something or forget something, and there will be plenty of things that don’t go according to plan, but we can’t do anything about those things yet. We can’t even predict which things they might be. But if we stop moving forward because we’re afraid of what could happen, then we’re never going to get anywhere. We do our best to plan and prepare, and then we have to take the leap.

This weekend was stressful and demanding. I tried hard just to focus on where I was and doing what I could do in that moment. There were a lot of things that needed to get done that I could not do while sitting at an airport or on an airplane, so I had to let go of worrying about those things. F felt stressed about our finances and about taking such a big step in buying a house, but it wouldn’t do any good for me to get all worried too, so I focused on being calm and supportive when he needed it. Last night F told me I’d been really zen all weekend, and I was glad to hear it. So often I get worked up over these sorts of things, but this time I was able to approach all the upheaval with a sense of calm.

This week will also be stressful and demanding. There are only so many things that I can do. I will do my best to do those things as well as I can, and then let go of the rest. Sometimes all you can do is just sigh and throw another few towels on the wet kitchen floor.

 

Practical Experiments in Asteya April 15, 2011

Filed under: reflections,yoga lifestyle,yoga philosophy — R. H. Ward @ 6:53 pm
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I’ve been thinking a lot about asteya lately. With writing this blog, attending yoga class frequently, and completing my other teacher training work, plus house-hunting, spare time is really at a premium, and it’s hard to find time both to unwind and to spend just relaxing with my husband, F. We try to cook dinner together 2-3 nights a week, and after dinner cleanup we’ll often head to the computer room to try to get work done on our various projects. No matter what, we always try to wrap things up around 9 o’clock so we can watch a little TV together before bed.

Except that, as I found out the other night, F and I appear to have very different definitions of what “around 9 o’clock” means. For F, when we say “around 9 o’clock”, that means that he starts keeping an eye on the time at 8:57 and finishes typing at 9:00 so he can be out on the couch before 9:01. I have a much looser definition of “around 9 o’clock”; my version includes the ten minutes before and after 9, and usually I don’t get moving till after. Then I use the bathroom, refill my water glass, maybe get a snack together, so that by the time my butt hits the couch, F’s been sitting there seething with the video on pause for a full ten minutes. This is clearly something we have to work out.

Yes, F could use a dose of santosha at times like this – he could approach the evening with a more relaxed attitude and more acceptance of his wife’s flakiness. But really, I’m kind of the one causing the problem. I find myself doing the exact thing that Devi described in her commentary on asteya: thinking to myself, “Oh, I can get one more thing done before 9”, and then thinking, “Really, I’m not THAT late!” Ultimately, I know that when I’m late, it upsets my husband who I love. It’s such a little thing, and should be so easy to fix, but time and again I find myself running around and yelling “Sorry, I’ll be there in a sec!” over my shoulder to the living room.

I need to practice some asteya here, because what I’m doing at times like this is stealing F’s time, not to mention his energy and good humor. He paid attention to the clock and wrapped things up on time; I should be considerate of him and do the same. Plus, the later we start watching our show, the later we’ll finish it and the later we get to bed, and with such a crazy schedule lately, I need my sleep! And of course it’s harder to fall asleep when we’re both tense because I was late. When I behave this way, I’m also stealing sleep time from both of us.

So what am I doing on the computer that’s so important? Usually it’s something minor: writing one more sentence of a blog post, or dropping a quick email to a friend, or (and usually this is what it is) checking Facebook for the 85th time. F understands about the blog and the yoga homework, but he points out, quite rightly, that with such a busy schedule lately, if I’m wasting time on Facebook, then that’s time we don’t get to spend together. When you put it that way, it feels like I’m choosing Facebook over my husband, and that’s a pretty sucky way for my husband to feel. It’s not an active choice, because Facebook-time creeps in so insidiously; if I were making an active choice, I’d be choosing to spend time with F, but I’m not choosing actively. This is something I want to change.

Still, a part of me is crying out for just some “stupid time”, some non-scheduled time when I can zone out and relax and not have to be smart or motivated, time when no one expects anything of me. Facebook definitely fulfills that for me, but there are plenty of other things (like watching TV with my loving husband) that can fulfill it too. I hope that in the future, I’m able to act with more consideration and kindness, because that will make both F and me happier.

 

Ahimsa and food April 14, 2011

Filed under: reflections,yoga lifestyle,yoga philosophy — R. H. Ward @ 1:33 pm
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For some yogis, practicing ahimsa (non-violence) means being vegetarian or even vegan. If you’re practicing ahimsa, then you don’t want to cause harm to anyone or anything; that goes for causing the harm personally or having it done on your behalf. They believe that, by eating meat, they are taking in and nourishing themselves on the animal’s pain and suffering. If “you are what you eat”, why would you want to be pain and suffering?

The counter-argument can be made that human beings are omnivores. We’ve been eating both plants and meat for thousands of years, and that’s what our bodies are designed to do. But humans haven’t been raising animals in factory farms for thousands of years, so there are different ways to look at this. How much suffering do my diet choices cause? As I understand it, chickens and cows in large factories are kept in small cages, fed food that is unnatural for them to eat, and are pumped full of hormones and drugs to make them fatter and their meat tastier. This seems to me to constitute a suffering overload. Also, I am lucky enough to live in a country where we have access to a huge variety of foods. In the past, humans had to eat whatever they could to survive, but our modern society allows for different choices than previous generations could even imagine. We have the luxury of not eating meat if we don’t want to. And… I don’t want to.

For a while now, F and I have been trying to buy our animal products organic, because the animals are humanely treated and allowed to live with a cow’s or a chicken’s natural dignity before they become our meal. We don’t buy beef anyway, but we’ve been buying organic hormone-free milk for a few years now, and we prefer organic chicken meat and eggs from free range, cage free chickens. It’s hard to make this kind of change on everything, though: we buy organic milk, and we’ve started buying organic yogurt, but I like Activia yogurts too – what kind of milk do they use? What kind of milk is used to produce the cheese at the deli counter? And (and this is huge) I rarely pay attention to this issue when we go out for dinner, and we eat out often. I doubt Panera is using free range chicken breasts or organic cream in their sauce. We should be thoughtful about what we eat; it’s not just food, it’s your lifestyle. If I’m going to make a lifestyle choice, I ought to be making it across the board, no matter where I’m eating.

We’ve also been working to add more vegetarian options to our daily meal plans – originally with the idea that we wanted more variety in our meals, but then more and more with the idea of trying to phase out meat. Our honeymoon in Belize was a huge eye-opener for me on beans, because people there eat beans with EVERYTHING, and the beans were always delicious. We haven’t managed to recreate Belizean rice and beans here at home yet, but we do a lot more with black beans and refried beans. I’m also in love with edamame, and F discovered this terrific chickpea salad recipe last week. There’s so much more out there than meat and potatoes.

All of this combined so that I had a revelation at dinner one night two weeks ago: I feel really passionately about this issue, and I am already ideologically a vegetarian. I was so surprised, but it’s true! I just haven’t totally stopped eating meat yet. In a typical week of meals, I was only eating meat maybe 1-2 nights, so I was already almost there. I’ve been paying attention since my first teacher training weekend, and I’ve been a practicing vegetarian all month now, even while traveling last week. With beans and soups and salads, and oatmeal with pecans and raisins and cranberries (yum), I’m already doing pretty well on the nutrition front, and that’s without even really trying. All I need to do is take the next natural step.

So I’m going to finish phasing meat out of my diet. I’m going to eat the last of the meat that’s in our freezer (because it seems worse and more disrespectful if I throw out the meat than if I eat it), and then that’s it. We have a free range bison chuck roast in there, and that will probably be Easter dinner, and then I’ll be done with meat. I’ll still eat seafood, dairy products, and eggs (I don’t want to try to make too big of a change, plus I can’t imagine life without cheese), and will try to eat these organic when I can, but no more meat.

Will there be challenges? Of course. I keep coming up with new difficulties: Bacon. KFC. Hot dogs. These are things I adore, and so I may slip from time to time. But overall this is a new adventure that I’m excited about. I’m finally going to find out what lentils are for! Think of all the kale and spinach in my future! Maybe I’ll try beets! (Okay, not as excited about beets.) But being vegetarian just feels right. That was the biggest surprise in my realization the other night, that this is absolutely the right path for me.

 

mid-month check-in April 11, 2011

Filed under: checking in,Pose of the Month,yoga — R. H. Ward @ 3:22 pm
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It’s been three weeks since our first teacher training weekend, and there’s a week and a half until the next one. How am I doing?

  • I’ve read most of The Royal Path (I’m on page 109, so I really just have one more short chapter to go, since the glossary doesn’t count)
  • I covered all the yamas and three of the niyamas, with two niyamas to go (and I read the sutras on those niyamas this morning)
  • I’ve been blogging like a fiend and posting almost every day (I even scheduled a post for Saturday, when I was out of town!)
  • I made it to yoga class twice the first week, twice the second week, and once last week, and I’ve taught twice in class

The thing giving me the most trouble right now is the Pose of the Month. I’m finding it really frustrating, I feel resistant to it, and I admit I haven’t been doing it. It’s not being asked to do a certain pose every day that’s the problem – at first I was enjoying focusing on a specific pose, and after a few days of practice I noticed my body was improving and I was able to go deeper into the pose. I also understand that practicing the pose will help me to understand it better and therefore be better able to communicate how to do the pose to my future students. The part I’m having trouble with is being aware of and examining my feelings while I’m in the pose. This is surprisingly hard.

These particular poses (forward bends: I chose a standing forward bend and paschimottanasana, seated forward bend) do not inspire a lot of strong feeling in me. They’re enjoyable poses; they feel good and I like doing them, but I don’t have any particular feelings around them. When we got the assignment, N gave the example of a woman in a previous class who hated paschimottanasana because when she bent forward, her stomach got in her way, reminding her that she was overweight. That’s gold right there. There are other poses that I do have strong feelings about: I don’t like chair pose because it’s uncomfortable, I do like tree pose and warrior 2 because I feel strong and confident when I do them. I like dancer pose because it’s challenging and I feel accomplished when I do it. With forward bends, though, I don’t feel anything really. Good pose, good to do, I get a good stretch, end of story. So I feel kind of like I’m being asked to make something up. Seriously, I don’t feel anything earth-shattering here. What I feel is kind of annoyed that I have to analyze my feelings about this pose, which is perfectly nice but not really noteworthy.

But then I started to second-guess myself. Maybe I’m supposed to be feeling something that I’m not. What do other people feel in this pose? N and J always describe paschimottanasana as a pose of surrender, when I learned it as a much more active pose. So I started trying to practice it in a surrendery way, but I couldn’t tell if I was doing it right. And this hooked right in to my worry that I’m not doing meditation right. There will be a longer post on meditation later, I’m sure (so save your comments about that), but I’m really struggling with quieting my mind, and when I’m doing these poses, instead of noticing what I feel while I’m in the pose, I spend the whole pose thinking about the fact that I’m doing the pose and wondering what I should be feeling right now. Not the most useful thing ever.

So I started to feel resistant to the Pose of the Month, because doing the pose was no longer the pleasure it was before. It’s hard enough to fit yoga time into my schedule, but when yoga time isn’t enjoyable, when I have to spend all my yoga time analyzing my yoga, then yoga time becomes and chore and I don’t want to fit the yoga time in. So I haven’t done the Pose of the Month since probably Wednesday. I’m trying to be gentle with myself about this while still trying to enforce the fact that this is a requirement I need to fulfill. I don’t want to get to a place where I think, “I haven’t done the pose in five days, so what’s one more day?” I still need to practice the darn pose.

But if the weather’s nice tonight, then I’m skipping yoga and going jogging. (Hey, at least I’m not skipping yoga to eat cheese puffs on the couch.)

 

The Yamas: Brahmacharya April 3, 2011

Filed under: reflections,yoga philosophy — R. H. Ward @ 8:44 pm
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The fourth yama, brahmacharya, means to have control of your sensual cravings. Yep, this is the one about sex. (So far, this is the most difficult yama for me to write about. Interesting.)

Satchidananda translates the sutra like this: “By one established in continence, vigor is gained.” (137)
Devi’s version is a little different: “Devoted to living a balanced and moderate life, the scope of one’s life force becomes boundless.” (193)

In the past, brahmacharya was interpreted as necessitating celibacy. Satchidananda talks about continence, meaning “self-restraint or abstinence”, and tells us that our sexual energy can give us great power to use in our meditation (i.e., “vigor”), which is why monks practice a celibate lifestyle. However, he states that each person should practice brahmacharya as best suits his or her stage in life. Over time, each person passes through different stages: being young and a student; becoming an adult and perhaps marrying and supporting a family; eventually growing more interested in spiritual pursuits as age comes. Most of us are in that second stage – we’re adults, householder yogis, yogis who live in the world, and so for us, brahmacharya isn’t about abstinence, but about spending sexual energy in an appropriate manner.

Devi talks about brahmacharya in terms of moderation and balance. These are important words to keep in mind. We should try to practice moderation with all things that give us pleasure – not just sex, but food and drink, going to the gym, watching TV, everything. When we go overboard with these activities, we tire ourselves out, maybe make ourselves sick. That disturbs our mood and makes it harder to do our work or be kind to others. If we’re being moderate in our activities, then they fill us with energy, not the opposite.

I think for me, it’s very easy to binge out on things I like. If one cookie is good, ten cookies will be better; if one episode of Buffy was pretty awesome, then clearly I should spend all day Sunday watching seven more episodes. This is something I do struggle with. Instead of packing the whole bag of chocolates to take to work, I will pack five chocolates in my lunch – if I brought the whole bag, I’d eat ’em all, arguing with myself with every bite, causing a great deal of stress, plus guilt and shame once the bag was empty (and probably an upset stomach and a headache). So I’ll just bring a few, and then they’re a nice treat, not something that weighs me down. A day of marathon TV watching can be fun, but you can’t do it every weekend. Go hiking, visit your mom, go to a museum, cook a new recipe, and when that rainy day comes around, you can enjoy all the Lord of the Rings extended edition movies back to back, guilt free.

But back to the sex, because I know that’s what you’re really interested in. Satchidananda argues that making love should be saved for one’s marital partner. Don’t be out there sharing your sweet energy with anyone who wanders by – save it for someone special, and when you release your energy together, it’ll be a celebration of everything that’s great in your relationship. Satchidananda notes there there are many different kinds of love, not just sexual love; he says, “If people want to know each other before marriage, they can become friends. That is how our ancestors lived” (140). Even from my modern feminist perspective, I have to admit he has a point there.

On the topic of sex, Devi recommends the following approach: “Your only desire is to pleasure the other person, and their only desire is to pleasure you. Each is fulfilled and satisfied, and when we are satisfied, we are moderate and balanced” (200). I think this links back to asteya, too – if you’re all “me, me, me” when making love, aren’t you taking the other person’s energy and love without giving back? I like her idea of approaching the act with generosity, not demanding gratification. If you go into the bedroom just wanting your own pleasure, nothing will ever be enough to satisfy you, but if both partners come together just wanting to be generous to each other, they’ll both be happy afterward.

 

Let’s explore that annoyance March 28, 2011

Filed under: reflections,yoga lifestyle — R. H. Ward @ 9:38 pm
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So, the carpet + dog hair + sticky mat issue at the yoga studio (which I mentioned last week) really is driving me nuts.  In the interest of exploring my reactions, getting to know my brain better, and nurturing my yoga lifestyle, I thought to myself, what exactly is it about this situation that’s so maddening? Well, first, I just got this nice new yoga mat, and it happens to be super sticky, so it’s getting all gunked up with hair and crud. Now I cannot use my nice new yoga mat at home, because my father in law is deathly allergic to dogs and we try not to bring animal hair into our home, plus I don’t want to transport this gunk to my floors at home, so I am still using my old mat at home and I only get to use the nice new mat at the studio, where I look at it and don’t feel excited about my nice mat, only annoyed about the ick issue.  I tried the lint roller but it’s just not sufficient for the level of stickiness combined with the level of gunk. So I feel annoyed, and further, I feel indignant – like, why can’t you have hardwood instead of carpet, how often do you vacuum this carpet anyway, why do bring your stupid dogs to the studio – at which point I get derailed, because that isn’t fair, they are nice dogs, N & J are entitled to run their business however they want, there may be any number of reasons why the studio is carpeted, and everyone leaves their shoes by the door so they are at least trying to keep the floor clean. So really what I am feeling is helpless, because I am experiencing a problem and I have no way to resolve that problem (the mat is gross, I can’t effectively clean it, and I can’t change the place where I bring the mat).

But, you know, that’s not really true either. I could vacuum the heck out of the mat when I got it home. I could take that sucker in the shower and hose it off. That would just involve a lot more time than I’m willing to invest in bi-weekly mat care. OK, then, if I cleaned it really well once then I could switch and take the old mat to the studio and use the nice one at home. Which I don’t really want to do either, because (1) the time to spend to get the thing actually clean, and (2) I don’t want to be limited to not using my good mat for the majority of my yoga practice. But I do have options – I just don’t want to explore any of these options. So now I am at the point where I need to either find another option (like buying a second nice mat to use at home) or accepting that the current situation is not going to change for the duration of this program. This should make me feel better: at least now I have considered all my options and concluded that I am not helpless, it is my choice to perpetuate the current situation, and there is a specific time when the problem will end.  But if I choose this last option, that of acceptance, then I need to be at peace about the cleanliness of the mat. Period. I’ll lint-roll it periodically to keep from getting gunk on my feet, but other than that, peace. So why does that seem like the hardest option of all?

 

First Week Round-Up March 27, 2011

Filed under: checking in,Pose of the Month — R. H. Ward @ 8:00 pm
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I thought it might be useful (for me, at least, I don’t know about for you) to check in periodically and see how I’m keeping up with my teacher training workload, and how it’s balancing out with the rest of my life.  TT began just over a week ago, so how did I do during my first week?

  • I’ve read about half of The Royal Path.  (It’s short and easy, I’m trying to stretch it out.)
  • I’ve started on the yoga sutras and have considered the first two yamas carefully (and there’s one more post in the queue on ahimsa and satya, too).  On schedule with this (especially since the next two are pretty easy – maybe I’ll make it through three this week).
  • I blogged Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday (a total of seven posts), so I’m keeping up with my rough goal of doing this five days a week or so.
  • I made it to yoga class at the studio twice, Monday and Thursday evenings.
  • I practiced my Poses of the Month (forward bends) almost every day and started keeping a journal about it.
  • My husband hasn’t throttled me yet.

I will start posting about classes and actual yoga at some point.  This week I had the weekend sessions to post about, plus some introductory things like the books.  Also, ahimsa is kind of a big topic.  I do see myself posting about the actual yoga I’m doing and the people I’m now doing it with.

The forward bends are interesting so far.  The idea here is to practice these poses every day, paying attention to how I feel in the pose, and see where it leads.  Right now I’m feeling really scatter-brained and unable to focus – hopefully that will improve over the course of the TT.  I will probably hold off on any big posts about the Poses of the Month until later on in the month when I’ve observed more.

I did, however, discover something interesting about my practice of paschimottanasana (seated forward bend).  N & J teach this as a pose of surrender.  They instruct their students to relax into the pose, let themselves go, just focus on the breath.  I’ve been having a lot of trouble with this, and I figured out why: I learned this as a much more active pose!  With my old teacher Gene, we focused on keeping a flat back, finding a strong grip/catch on the legs or feet, lengthening the spine on inhales and moving deeper into the pose on exhales.  So, for the two years I practiced with Gene and ever since then, I’ve practiced this pose in a very active way.  No wonder I’ve had issues with the way N & J teach it as a more passive pose.  Neither method is “right” or “wrong”, just different.  This month I’ll try to practice it N & J’s way and see what happens.

I haven’t been shirking my normal life, either, although there are definitely some bumps in the road to work out.  F is really understanding of me needing to spend extra time on yoga practice and homework, and therefore sacrificing some of our time together, but we’re still working out how we’ll handle things that we usually split evenly, like cooking and dishes, when I’ll be out the door to yoga two nights a week and needing to spend time on homework on other nights.  F also raised a concern about Facebook/computer time – if we’re sacrificing time together, then maybe we should be making some Facebook sacrifices too and not wasting time that we could be spending together.  He definitely makes a good point.  On the whole, though, I think we managed this week pretty well: got our taxes done, looked at some houses (we’re thinking about buying), had a nice dinner with my parents, vacuumed, cooked meals, even made it to church this morning.  I hope we’re able to continue fitting the TT commitment into our lives in a healthy way.