Ummm....

I'm just not sure what to say about this.... Anti-Gravity Yoga.

A beginner all over again

My first advanced class was quite an experience. I went to the West Roxbury studio because Diane Ducharme was holding a coaching session for anyone who is going to compete in the New England Regionals. She suggested that I take the beginners class first so that I would be warmed up enough to get into some of the advanced postures. The first class was amazing. Really hard, really juicy, and one of those mind-over-matter classes that when you are done, you feel like you really accomplished something.

I’m sitting in the studio after class with some fellow teachers, sweating my ass off for a good half hour, trying to regain some semblance of normalcy, and realize that *shit* I have to take another class!! Whoa. A few grapes, some coconut water, a liter of Smart Water, some internal positive reinforcement, and I’m good to go.

The Advanced class starts. It starts with the same breathing exercise as in the beginner class, Pranayama Breathing - only, like, 168 times faster. After 4 breaths, I’m totally lost. I catch back on again toward the end. Just in time for the breathing to be over. Super. Next we do these salutes to the sun gods or moon goddesses or both, I’m not sure. Ummm… ok??!?! Can someone please slow down and let me catch up?!?! By now, I’m back to being completely doused in sweat, and we haven’t really even begun!

This is pretty much how the class went. Every so often I’d be in sync with everyone, but more often than not, I’m looking around, just trying to see what it is I’m supposed to be doing, or looking at other people completely dumbfounded. A few times, I would think ‘I will never be able to do that’. Only to remember my first few months practicing Bikram yoga, and realizing that YES, with practice, yes, I will be able do that. It has given me a whole new appreciation for the new students that come into class. We were all there once. But after you’ve been practicing for a while, it is easy to forget what it is like. As a teacher, getting those looks that say, “Am I doing this right?” or “What the hell am I supposed to do?” is always hard. I just want to say “Listen to my words; I’m telling you exactly what to do!” But when you are new to something, you don’t hear even half of what you are being told. In the advanced class, I was laughing at myself even doing the postures that I knew incorrectly! Sensation overload! Systems crashing!!

It was so wonderful to get that new student/beginner perspective again. I mean, I felt like I had never practiced yoga before in my life!! Lucky for me, I can easily laugh at myself. I certainly wasn’t getting frustrated at all, just amused at how clumsy I must have looked. There was a point in class, where I was doing a posture called Frog Pose (I think). You sit on the floor with your legs spread wide, then kind of get your arms under your legs and you sort of are flattened to the floor. I was much better at it than I thought I would be until... Uh oh. I’m stuck. Really stuck!!! Someone call an ambulance, my legs are strapped over my shoulders!!! Oh man, I laughed and laughed. (I almost dislocated my shoulder, but dammit, I’ll laugh while doing it!!)

It was so much fun to see the possibilities before me. I was completely humbled watching all of these amazing bodies go into such strong postures. Knowing now that our bodies (and minds) are pliable and can be trained to do things you never thought possible, I have new goals, new aspirations, new ambitions. I have a renewed sense of where I can go. All these fresh aches and pains have made me feel so alive, and so sure that there is so much more in me that I haven’t even seen yet.

I’ve only just touched the surface.

Just have to share...

I took my first advanced class today. Took the beginners class prior to that, which had already kicked my ass, then became a beginner all over again in the advanced class. What I want to share is that I've been staring at a blank page for about 15 minutes. My ass was literally handed to me today. I'm hoping tomorrow I have some brain cells left that did not sweat out onto mat so I can actually recap my experience. Until then... I'll just limp around. :)

Me, the teacher!

How about this… I freaking LOVE teaching Bikram Yoga. L-O-V-E Love it. Every day that I lead a class through the series, I fall more and more in love with it. I am starting to find my way up on the podium. I really feel like I am finally making connections with the students and the dialogue. I’m giving corrections without losing my flow of class. And I’m even cracking jokes and (what???) having FUN UP THERE!!

I have to start off my saying, I know teaching is not about me. I know this. But I think it is healthy and wonderful to have my own sense of accomplishment. I think back to the panic attacks I would have during posture clinics at training, and can see just how far I have really come. Deep down, I always knew I would be ok when I got back to actually teaching, but there was always that anticipation and anxiety and unknown element. So here I am. Me. The teacher. It’s finally happening. I’ve had the certificate for about 11 weeks now. But in the last few weeks, I really feel like I have become a teacher.

This just occurred to me: I think it might all be connected. My previous post about my own practice suddenly evolving into this power-house 90 minutes, I think it could be connected to the real understanding that I am having of the dialogue. Of course it is connected!! (Dope slap to the forehead.) It’s all developing simultaneously, 50/50.
This is the reason why we were told time and time again that our own practice is just as important as teaching. You can’t have one without the other. Well, I suppose you can but without one, the other will suffer. The fact is, I have finally gotten back to a consistent practice. For a while, I was struggling with the balance of everything in life, and I was only taking class 3 – 5 times a week. But I am back to practicing almost daily. Can I say it again? Of course it’s ALL CONNECTED!!

So I just had the above revelation while writing, and at this point have no idea where I was going pre-dope-slap. (Crap!) For fear of not making any sense at all, I will sign off and catch some early zzz’s., so I can get up early for 6am class and keep this momentum going!! Good night!!

Manifest impeccable form

Something is happening. And it is WONDERFUL.

The past week I have felt like someone new in my practice. I walk out of the room after my 90 minutes feeling a strength that I have felt very few times. And it’s not just physical strength I am feeling, but focus, determination and will-power. We talk about our yoga practice as a meditation, but how often do we actually clear our minds for the full 90 minutes? There is always something that trickles in. Did I pack my underwear? What time is that meeting? God, I can’t wait to get a coffee!! (The coffee one seems to hit me around Fixed Firm Pose every morning!) But lately, I get to final savasana, and suddenly “snap out of it”. Whoa. Class is done. And I rocked it.

There is a statement that has been running thru my head every time I step into the hot room. It is something that Craig Vilanni said during training. “Manifest impeccable form.” It has become my mantra. It has opened the door for me to constantly concentrate… meditate. I’m practicing presence. In the moment, in the posture, I am 100% invested. Is this what we call meditation? I challenge you to still your mind for 90 minutes and be completely present in that room. By manifesting impeccable form from start to finish throughout the postures, we have no other choice.

Hello World!! (It's been a while!)

It’s been a while since I’ve written. I’ve been back from training for 2 months now. My hiatus from life seems like it was eons ago. I miss it a lot at times, but at the same time, I have so much of it with me that I’ve been able to harness. But the friends, the routine, the intensity… I do miss.

Teaching. WOW. I love it. It is such an awesome thing to be able to help people from the outside in, to watch the transformations of people right in front of me, to see a first-timer new student come back for more. I love being up on that podium and giving students all that I have. And I love watching myself begin to evolve as a teacher. From my first class, where I think my husband was going to have to slip me a valium so I could get through it, to the last class I taught on Friday morning, where I felt more connected to my students than I ever have, I’ve enjoyed every single experience. I am seeing more and more (sometimes too much, I think!), and I’m slowly but surely getting better at corrections, without losing the flow of class. There was a really cool point in class on Friday when I was saying the dialogue and thinking, “Hmm… something’s not right there, she’s got to get her upper body back. That’s odd, he’s got to sit down more”, and as I’m thinking it, I make the corrections (not just in my head). I found it amazing that I could be doing all these things all at once in a matter of seconds. I know I’ve sort of been doing it all along (perhaps??) but this was a bit of a revelation to me. And as I’m doing all of this, I’m also having a revelation!! I guess when they say that teaching is just like juggling, I now understand a little bit more. I seem to have added a couple more balls to my juggling routine!

Being back home is great, of course. I took a couple of weeks off before going back to work, which is the best thing I could have done for myself. I definitely needed that adjustment period to reconnect with Tim and my family and my home and just the regular things in life that I didn’t have in training. I was able to teach a bunch of classes in that time, which was wonderful, too. It kind of helped to get me over that little “oh shit I have to teach” hump. Getting back to work was a whole other adjustment. What? I have to sit at a desk? I have to dress up? I have to wear a BRA???? Oh no, I’m not liking this AT ALL! (Have I mentioned that one of the best parts of training for me was that I didn’t have to wear undergarments for 9 weeks?? ☺ ) After getting over the culture shock of being back at work, I slowly began getting back in my groove and back into the swing of things. It was hard for a good month though. I really just wanted to be teaching. I just spent 9 weeks learning this amazing new craft, and I just wanted to be doing it!! That was the hardest part. After some time, I had a little one-on-one talk with myself. I decided that I have to give my 100% at my job, like everything else that I do in life. Give it my all, and give it a chance. If after 6 months or a year, my heart is just not in it, well then I can at least say that I tried. I’d hate to have quit only to look back and wonder if I’d done the wrong thing.

So with that mentality, I’ve picked myself up and gotten right back into the swing of things. And I remembered that I do actually like my job! I like the people and the work, and yes, even the stress (although I don’t seem to get nearly as stressed as I used to!). I’ve noticed that I’ve become more organized, more efficient, and more assertive. Look, it’s that “better me” I talked about before embarking on my journey!

Right now, I’m working on finding balance in my life. I’m only teaching a couple of classes a week. I wish I could teach more, but having a full time job, keeping up with my own yoga practice consistently, softball, and spending time at home just doesn’t allow for much more than that. Perhaps when the cold weather hits I may add another class, but for now, I think that this is what I can do. Eventually, in the future… well, only time will tell what happens then.

How Sweet It Is

I’ve been back at home for a little over a week, and it has taken me about that long to wrap my head around what just happened to me. It is kind of crazy being back home. I feel like I was just packing my suitcase in my guest bedroom and bawling my eyes out on the way to the airport. But alas, a mind-blowing, life-altering 9-weeks has occurred, and now I am back. Full speed ahead.

I’m trying to figure out how to wrap up my overall teacher training experience, and without further ado, I think a continuous stream-of-consciousness chronicle may ensue. First of all, I have to say, teacher training was the hardest and best thing I have ever experienced. What a profound thing, having 9 weeks to 100% focus on myself. I found a deeper sense of self in those 9 weeks. It’s funny, I realized about 3 weeks in that I was a lot different at training than I am at home. But maybe that was the start of this so-called transformation. At home, I’ve always been the ring-leader, surrounded by friends, and this outgoing life of the party. I didn’t know what to do with myself at training. I felt out of place the first couple of weeks, not knowing where I fit in. Not knowing who these people were that I was with, and not sure if I was really ready to let them in. I ended up being more of a loner. I most definitely made a few life-long friends along the way that I had some absolutely wonderful experiences with. But I enjoyed my time spent with a couple of friends at a time, if not by myself. I got to spend time taking things in at my own speed, with my own heart, without any distractions. I was introspective and spent a lot of time reflecting on life. It was such a valuable time for me to learn about me.

The hardest thing for me throughout training was, by far, coping with my irrational fear of public speaking. Every single day, I’d have anxiety about it. Will we have posture clinic today? Will I be able to breathe? Will I be able to control my shaky voice so that they can’t see how out of control my fear is? It was a constant monkey on my back. And what was hardest was I truly had no idea how to control it. One day, a few Pranayama Deep Breathing exercises would do it, but the next day I’d have sweat dripping down my back, blurry vision and a thumping heart. The fact that I got up there every day, even with my inner craziness, was a huge accomplishment for me. Not that I actually had a choice! I can’t say if I will ever be 100% confident getting up in front of people, but now that I have started teaching, I know I can do it. THAT is when the real accomplishment sunk in. (More on teaching later.)

In general, I feel like we had a really great class. Most of the people I met were just plain good folks. We had a strong group of yoga practicioners. No major drama happened in the hot room. In fact, from all the hype I heard prior to going to training, I don’t think that anyone ran out of the room puking. In the 97 classes that I took, I left the room once, and sat out postures in a total of 8 classes. In those eight classes, I sat out only one posture in four of them. I’m proud of myself for the way I practiced in the Big Top. I had very strong focus and determination to just do the damn yoga to the best of my ability. Even when I was surviving off of 3 hours of sleep from the night before, I told myself that the harder I worked, the better I was going to feel and the more energy I would gain. And when my poor, beat down body (you know the one that was possessed by the 84 year old man with bad knees) was begging for me to stop, I pushed through. I did what I could do on that day, to the very best of my ability.

Regarding the hot room, well, I think we were pretty lucky. For me, the conditions were completely bearable. In my central Massachusetts studio, we have to deal with HUMIDITY. The Big Top conditions in the desert were actually a lot easier for me than my home studio. The heat was dry. It was definitely HOT, don’t get me wrong. And with 350 human bodies generating heat, the humidity was decent. But I feel like we were very lucky, especially since I had heard such horror stories about the past training held in Alcupulco. Which brings me to my next topic… Sleep (or lack thereof).

I have a theory. Since our conditions in the yoga room were pretty good, and as a whole, we were all really strong in there, Bikram had to find a way to “break us down”. And so our class was the guinea pig on extreme lack of sleep. When Bikram was around (which I’d say was about 6 weeks), our average time out of lecture was about 3:15 am. We felt incredibly lucky to be out of the lecture hall at 2am, and cursed our watches other nights as we watched the minute hand tick, tick, tick… 3:30… 4:00… 5:00… 5:30… Oh, hello sunrise!! I never expected to be having high school flashbacks of drug-induced, all-nighters, walking out into the bright morning sun, AT YOGA CAMP!!! I may never understand the mentality behind this aspect of training. All I can say is that I was there, every night, for every lecture, every movie, and every episode of Maharbarhat. Then I was up every morning with a fairly happy, smiling face, ready to take on my day. One of the best pieces of advice I got from one of my teachers, Sunny, was to simply set my intention every day as a positive one. Instead of waking up with dread, knowing I only got 3 hours of sleep for the night, I’d wake up saying, “I got 3 solid hours of sleep last night! SWEET!” And you know what? It worked. The power of the mind is incredible. As Bikram told us time and time again, “Negative energy is 95% more powerful than positive energy.” With that intention set, I feel like I really was able to allow myself to have the best experience possible. Again, I’m not going to fool anyone on this, I did have my days where I was nodding off in the middle of lectures and wanted to just crawl to my room for a long final savasana. But the overwhelming majority of the time, I dealt with it, and dealt with it well.

Removing myself from everything in the world that I know was also a hard thing for me. I was insanely homesick for the first few weeks, and missed Tim more than I ever thought I would. What a wonderful thing that is though. I’d sit back sometimes and feel like I was the luckiest woman in the world. I think I didn’t know how lucky I was until I signed up for this 9 week extravaganza, and once I did, my whole world turned upside down. I remember driving to the airport with Tim and suddenly saying, “What the hell am I doing?” And now I know that it was 100% the right thing to do. Our marriage has grown even stronger, and the love I feel is brand new. The support Tim gave me throughout training was impeccable. Somehow, he knew what I needed and when I needed it. And he knew when I just didn’t have the juice to communicate, and just say good night. I don’t think I quite explain it, but it was astoundingly powerful.

I learned so much about myself. I found how strong I am. I found how happy I am. I found a power within myself that I never knew I had. It is so hard to explain the way I feel. It’s kind of just an inner peace. I am present every moment, and feeling more than I have ever felt before. It is a knowledge that I have deep within me that no one can take away from me. It’s not something I can’t write about or talk about, it just is.

And how sweet it is.

(Oh yeah, chopped off 11 inches of my hair when I got home, too!)