My Other Guru, Ms. Pink

Every morning of the Croatian advanced seminar, with surprisingly little trouble, or drool, I managed to pry myself out of bed at 6:30 in the morning. Then, stumble into the dining room for an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord of foods that no yogi in their right mind would consume as fuel for class. Fortunately, I am never in my right mind before noon, so I shoveled increasing amounts of cheese blintz into my body each day as I tested the limits of my ability to hold food down before a class.*

This buffet was largely Croatian-style. From my observation, the Croatian diet consists of a wide variety of animal products. The breakfast buffet alone held five types of meat and ten types of cheese. I am captivated by a particular dish, a giant urn of oil you dunk a ladle into and fish cheese out of. Yes, congealed fat soaked in liquid fat. I am pleased to announce that us Americans do not, in fact, have a monopoly on overly-indulgent foods.

The Curious Vat 'o' Oil-Cheese Course

There was also a token pile of fruits.** In an attempt to avoid scurvy, Jen and I developed a habit of taking our purses to breakfast to fill with pears, kiwis and bananas. We were mere amateurs compared to a yogi whom we have dubbed, "Ms. Pink" (due to the fuzzy pink jacket she wore when we met and Bikram's penchant for referring to students by their clothing color). To watch Ms. Pink work was to watch a master.

Let me begin by describing our troubles which she so skillfully circumvented.

6:30am is too early to eat all the food you really want. Food from the free buffet must be transported to the room for consumption at a more reasonable hour. Jen and I, thinking ourselves clever, ventured into town to procure ziplock bags. There we discovered Croatia has no ziplock bags. There are also no rolls of plastic-wrap. No tin-foil. No tupperware. There is no food-storage of any kind. People do not consume leftovers in Croatia.

With our plans thwarted, we spent breakfast #2 perusing the buffet for items of food that would not slather the insides of our purses with seeping fats (the cheese-vat was out). It was during this perusal, we saw Ms. Pink produce from her Lululemon bag disposable tupperware from home. She deftly filled said tupperware and a bottle with juice, placing each tidily back in her bag.

If anyone knows Ms. Pink, make friends with her. Should the zombie apocalypse come, you will be in good hands.


* I was thrilled to discover that I had suddenly developed the ability to eat before class and enjoyed my super-power so much that I smelled like cheese blintz through the majority of the classes that week.

** The pile of fruits, I discovered, is mainly for display and will not be found anywhere in the country locals may be expected to eat. During my two weeks of travel I was fortunate enough to have friends willing to scrape the sour cream off their garnish and pass me the wilted display-only leaf to eat.

So Good to be Loved

I am back! The seminar was beyond all expectations, as was the week-long tour of Bosnia and Croatia that followed it. I have decided I will report my findings in chronological order after this post. First, I must share with you the adorable dementia that my cat suffers from.

Sidney is happy to have me home. So much so that she can not bear to leave my side. Not hyperbole.

Whenever I am out of sight she panics, afraid that I might have left her alone again. I can almost understand this fear when I leave the room, or wander into the front hall. I start to believe she is maybe not-so-bright when my darling wanders away from me and forgets where she left me.

This is now part of our routine:

Kinda Like the Green Lantern's Ring

This is the last post before the advanced seminar in Dubrovnik! While I am away the lovely Borislava will be posting for me. She is a close yogi friend of mine who's determination makes an ant bent on climbing a bear to lick honey off its lips look wimpy. Take it away, Borislava!!!

Still on That Road to Dubrovnik

My yoga buddy in crime, Jen Palma, is going to Dubrovnik with me. We are doing some homework to prepare. It's nice to have someone to encourage you. 

As always, the pictures shown are not accurate to form. Do not imitate cartoons at home, people. Bugs Bunny can't really hover when he runs off a cliff.

Followed by fits of laughter. This trip is gonna rock.

I Have Paid a Man to Kick My Ass

Here is my coming out post. I will be gone soon for two weeks (posts will still go up). Some observant yogis might note why. I am going to get my ass kicked by The Boss himself in Croatia. No turning back, they already have my money. ...dear lord, what have I done?

I am giddy and scared to death at the same time but I don't think this is generated from the physical undertaking. I think it is the idea of coming face to face with Bikram himself.

It's certainly not a hero-worship thing. In fact, I fear that he won't live up to the meager bar I have set for him. I currently explain away the eccentric, controversy-loving man behind the mission with reasoning I can admire. His showmanship, flashy cars and pimp-like fashion sense has done wonders to draw in publicity, as an advertiser myself I don't count this as a bad thing. With all his sex-talk, wild living and complete lack of regard for what we think a yogi should look like, he isn't so 'other.' He can be human. Like us, flawed....way flawed. The practice seems less out-of reach that way. I don't have to 'om-shanti-shanti' my way through life to practice.

I also love the admission that some of this stuff hurts. Hurts like heck, in fact. He acknowledges that we want money, that we hate to work and that self-improvement can suck a lot of the time. If we can admit that, I am willing to step in and curse my way (as nicely as I can muster) to a better me. I mean, after all, isn't being honest with yourself the first step? I'm not being honest with myself if I can't even admit that I have a really rough time getting myself to class.

The only controversy I think holds any traction with me is the copyrighting issue and it doesn't hold much. Yes, we want free and open things. Open-source = good. However, quality control is also good and let's face it, there is virtually none in the yoga world. We've all paid for a class only to discover this studio's version of Hatha yoga is sitting in lotus listening to a woman drone about tree roots for an hour. That's not really the class I have the beef with anyway. It's the one where you can hurt yourself because you aren't being watched and the teacher has no idea what they are doing. It's the wild-west of yoga out there and I just want one section of yoga to say, "If you find yourself in Iowa I still promise you can walk into my studio and know you are getting quality." To take that 1 step further, I am glad he is willing to protect those teachers who take the time to put his name on the studio too. Maybe Ill expand upon this later, I think it's a subject that deserves addressing further.

So here we have the problem. I am now going right to the man. I would hate to discover he is not, in fact, ensnaring our egos to capture the ego-centric Western mind, engaging us on our own territory, playing with our sense of 'right' and 'justice' but is, in fact, just an ass. An ass who has a lot of my money.

The Boss

So here we go, the proverbial 'belly of the beast.'  I take solace in the fact that, no matter how wonderful or heinous the man is, I walked into Bikram yoga expecting nothing and received amazing benefits. He gave me something wonderful. I can take that gift without taking the parts I don't agree with. You can call this cherry-picking in an admonishing way but I choose to see it as common sence. There are very few things I buy into whole-heartedly and none that I buy into without a healthy dose of examination. I am a firm believer in Buddha's teaching, "Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense." I love that.

This is how I see my Bikram practice. I like what I've gotten. I ask a lot of questions and my teachers answer in ways I agree with. Pieces I don't agree with I put on a shelf to examine later and decide on when i have gathered enough facts.

When I get home, I will report on my experience. I will do so honestly as I can. Ass or genius, I hope I can still appreciate the plethora of benefits I've gotten from him. 

Of SOPA and Whale-Song

First off, if you haven't written your representatives about SOPA/PIPA yet, please do so now. Yesterday was the day of action but I won't fault you for getting on the bandwagon late. I will wait. .....welcome back.  Thank you for helping us all live outside of an Orwellian nightmare. Compliments of theoatmeal.com I have included this educational animated gif. 

theoatmeal.com would like you to know pirating this is a-ok by them.

Now that we are all back and have participated in the great democratic process, I was at the Bikram studio in Rome... hmmm? Yes, Rome, lovely city. Very sweet little studio. Okay, enough pretending to be all continental and stuff. I WENT TO ROME! And did YOGA THERE! It was awesome. It was also over a year ago, so I am getting rather nostalgic about it and I figured I would share. 

If you have been to the studio in Rome, or are a regular, please refrain from rolling your eyes at this American yahoo who did everything she could to blend in. This included wearing nicer clothing, putting on make-up and trying my best to speak Italian. To say I am bad at languages is to say that a child of seven is bad at communicating via whale-song to a hump-back.*  I took three years of Spanish and a Spanish language course as an adult, never once progressing beyond Spanish 2. To my credit, I can order a beer in Portuguese and Korean, and learned to order red house wine in Italian. Once back from my trip I forgot that one though. Mock-Chu Chu-say-oh is far more engrained because Koreans, in my experience, drink even more than Italians. 

Three Years of Spanish One

So, with my limited repertoire of, "House red wine, please," "Where is the bathroom, please?," "I do not speak Italian. PLEASE, do you speak English?" and, the Swiss army-knife of phrases, "Sorry, excuse me, please!," the phrase "twist your arms like wet ropes" was a wee past my linguistic capabilities. Fortunately, there is one English class taught each week at the Rome studio! Unfortunately, I was in the middle of a very large bowl of pasta while it was being conducted. I, much to the relief of The Boy, managed to carve out some time between wine and pasta bowls on day two. I say, "much to his relief" because I am very bad at relaxing. It seems this skill is not well suited for me. When I went to visit my friend in Portland, the land of retired 20-somethings, I was confronted with such a lack of anxiety it made me anxious. I wanted to shake every bearded man I met and ask him how on earth he thought he would live out his old age without a 401k. Granted, I do not have a 401k, but at least I have the good common sense to fret over it until I have ulcers.** So, when visiting Rome, The Boy knew it would take a while of twitching until I got used to a vacation's pace. 

He was a good sport as, for 24 hours, I rushed him past fantastic ruins to walk to...nowhere. That's right. We walked roughly 12 miles that first day. He tried to stop maybe 5 times as we passed giant monoliths of history. Tried. I would pace back and forth like a caged animal until he put his camera away and continued the walk/run pace I had set for us. On day two we decided he would catch a bite to eat and grab some wine while I took a cab to The Vatican and walked to the studio from there. I charged to the studio and began to unwind. 

At the front desk, I established right away that I did not speak Italian but had done this before and would do my best to follow whatever the teacher told me. They were so nice to me. One of the ladies, not the teacher I would have, spoke a little English and we mimed the rest -- she was happy to have me, I was grateful to be here, etc, etc. 

I was starting to feel grounded, partially from the sudden familiarity (it felt a little like discovering you have a relative in the area), partially from my independent foray (proving that separating from The Boy wouldn't equate to being instantly nabbed by the Italian Secret Service and held indefinitely for a crime I did not commit unbeknownst to the outside world). I set up in the room, nodded to the nice Romans I would be taking class with and got down to savasana. The class went really well, considering I could understand nothing. I moved from one pose to the next in time with the rest of the room, focusing on myself but feeling the general flow from one pose to the next. I thought I was doing pretty good. 

I was just in the middle of thinking how very good this was going when I noticed the teacher was getting very loud. We were folded forward in separate leg stretching. As I looked between my legs I could see that her, now overly enunciated, words were quite possibly meant for me. Oh dear. She walked toward me repeating the same phrase over and over, each time pulling her lips away from her teeth in a more exaggerated manner. In my head, it was just a more precise version of Charlie Brown's teacher, "WAH-wah-wah-wah-wa." I tried pulling my head closer to the mat, "WAH-wah-wah-wah-wa." I tried pigeon toeing more, "WAH-wah-wah-wah-wa." I moved my elbows closer to my knees, "WAH-wah-wah-wah-wa!" Finally realizing that she was in the presence of a seven-year-old attempting whale-song translation, she spoke the three magic words in English "Lock your knees." AHHHHH!!! I should have guessed. I locked my knees. She smiled and flipped right back to Italian. 

For the rest of the class, the only other mistake I made was to get into final stretching when we were supposed to be getting into rabbit. Wishful thinking. The nice Roman next to me gave me a little nod to her folded legs, as opposed to my strait ones, and I got the message before any Italian need be uttered. All in all, it was a lovely experience. The studio is great, with a little zen fountain by the changing rooms and the staff were accommodating. Besides, you can say you practiced IN ROME. I am fairly certain you get like +30 Cool Points and at least a bazillion Provincial Points for that.

* If Science Officer Spock had a hard time I assume it is exceedingly difficult for a seven-year-old.

** If I have told that story before, please forgive me, I am still working through the trauma.

This is for Dalia, who learned to talk to her whale today. See comments if you are confused.