I Will

My studio is doing a wonderful little thing where it is currently documenting some poses of the yogis who have taken more than 500 classes. Being one of these yogis, I had my own little rock-star photo-shoot.* 

Chin-to-shoulder cheating; I move my jaw; causing this flattering face.

During this shoot, the wonderful teacher taking pictures asks me to do short-man. "You can hold it right?" she asked.

I replied, "Sometimes." in a bald-faced lie. I have never once managed to hold short-man. 

It wasn't my intent to lie, in fact, I was a little shocked after the words emerged, fully formed, from my lips. I may have said, "sometimes" because I actually believed that yes, I can do that, despite all the accumulated months of evidence to the contrary. The reason why I believed is that I always tell myself I am about to do it. 

Mary Jarvis, a senior teacher I am fortunate enough to have attended several seminars led by, says to "Make declarative statements; 'I am going to kick now.'" This way you don't give your mind wiggle room to baulk at your asinine requests of your body. Consider the following:

Scenario A:
Mind: Body, we are going to kick.
Body: Okay. *it kicks*

Scenario B:
Mind: Body, we are going to try to kick.
Body: That sounds hard, but I'll try. *body gives a dramatic tug at it's leg* Ugh! This is HARD!

If you doubt that your body will give you drama the second you allow it to, consider your last difficult class. Yeah. It's a queen, capital Q. 

For months I have been telling myself, "I am going to take one hand off the ground. I am going to take the other hand off the ground.  I am going to balance." I never get to that third part, but the step is already in my mind so one day that is exactly what will happen. I don't know that it ever sunk in that it wasn't yet happening.

So, under the scrutiny of the lens, I, once again, put the idea out there that, 'I am going to balance' and tried like heck. I tried at least four short-mans (short-men?) before the teacher/photogapher finally said, "Um....let's move on." 

Note to self: I can't actually hold short-man. Huh. Learn something new everyday.

* Few things will make you feel so rock-star as busting out a standing bow in-front of a camera. You know, with all the grunting, falling, laughing and intense focus on your spine that is still refusing to curve.

Pranaburgler

Whether you call it vibrations, prana, or peer pressure, we have all experienced the difference between practicing next to a rubber-spined robot with lazer-beam focus and a spaz who is about to lose their lunch, mistakenly consumed only 15 minutes ago. 

When I am super tired I will strategically place myself in a vortex of good energy — in the middle of yogis I know to have great focus — to pull me through. My friends and I like to joke that we are 'stealing' the energy of those around us. I think of it like this: 

the Pranaburgler

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.

Bikram the Man

As promised, I am about to report my findings on Bikram, the man. First, the disclaimer: obviously, a full impression can not be garnered from a one-week seminar. As much as I would love to lay claim to the man's inner-workings, even with my astute insight I can not grasp the full depth of a man's soul from four rows back, five mats to the left.

From my corner I braced myself. I was prepared for a myriad of behavioral... um... oddities. Most of which I am happy to report, I saw. On day one we got the obligatory fat comment. "Are you a teacher? Yes? What happened to you between teacher training and now? Did you open a burger-joint?" Followed immediately by the odd dietary restriction, "You eat strawberries from now on. They are the perfect food. Nothing but strawberries." 

I witnessed the little old (he may not look it, but let's not forget this is a 60-something man sporting a banana-hammock) man bouncing backwards across the stage, butt out, hands forward, "PUSH, PUSH, PUSH!!"

I also heard the man claim greater longevity and fame than Jesus Christ and Buddha combined -- one hour after telling jokes containing the word, "pussy." For the more sensitive readers, you can pretend it was the whiskered sort. 

All this I was prepared for. All this and a cart-load of shouting that I didn't hear. What I was not prepared for was that this man was, in general, nice. If I had to summarize the man I would be as likely to chose the word, "nice" as the word, "garish." This is not at all what I expected. 

We had several children in the room, which he doted on. He called them to do demos, helped them into poses and only spoke shock-talk when they were not present. He even had one of the children sit on her dad's back to get him deeper into final stretching. While I would not call the man selfless, you could certainly see it in him when he taught.

His dancing across the stage was not to get attention to himself, it was to get us to push harder. And we did. It lightened the mood too. This man would do anything to get you to your potential. Dancing, laughing, telling bad sexual jokes, calling you fat.* He clearly did not give a rat's posterior what anyone thought of him. If you needed him to be mean, lively, outrageous or deep, he would be that for you, critics be darned. The man really put himself out there for his students and I found that a very nice thing to do. 

* Let's be clear on two things:** 1. He did establish that she was a teacher before chiding her. This is important because it means she has specifically sought out his guidance, requested he push her hard and proclaimed herself worthy to carry on his teachings to others. 2. He called out a potentially sensitive issue and poked at it. Intentionally. This doesn't address the physical issue, it addresses mental one. If she has a healthy body image and is comfortable where she is, what Bikram said shouldn't touch her, she would let his disapproval roll right over her knowing she is at her personal best. If she isn't at her personal best, then he is correct, she can change it. As for her reaction, she laughed. Right answer, chika. He loves it when you laugh.

** Heaven help me, it's going to sound like I am blindly condoning whatever the man does. I swear this is my honest opinion and that if the man tried killing a student I would not try to justify his actions. I don't think so, anyway.

First Impression: Happier Had He Been a Pizza

I had plenty of time to prepare for my first encounter with Bikram Choudhury (the yogi who put together the series of hatha yoga I engage in). Not that the trip to the 3rd annual European Advanced Seminar was well planned on my part. The entire trip was the result of a joke I made regarding my multi-cultural friendships being motivated primarily by a desire for world travel. In other words, "You seem nice, are you from abroad? Good. Let's go visit your home-town! By the way, my name is Kate."

I said this at the Lululemon warehouse sale where I purchased my much beloved hoodie-of-shame. I was getting a pre-sale pizza with my yogi friends from Bulgaria, China and the Philippines (more recently Hawaii) when I made this joke. During post-sale beers, the advanced seminar in Croatia was mentioned. One month later I was dragging The Boy to the Balkans, where my Filipino friend, Jen's, partner was born and raised.

I feel the need to state that I love my friends, even the ones who have no international ties.

Yes, because of my impetuousness the longest time I really had to debate the gravity of what I had just roped all of us into came on the plane, bus and taxi rides to the seminar.

This time was unexpectedly expanded when our plane from Zagreb to Dubrovnik landed in Split, where we traded our plane for a bus seven times the recommended* size for the twisting, cliff-hugging roads we took along the coast to Dubrovnik. The bus ride was four hours longer than the paid-for plane ride, so we were compensated with a 6oz bottle of water and a fancy Croatian Kit-Kat bar.**

We would have arrived several hours too late for the introductory lecture but The Boss has the gift of gab, (okay, maybe the gift of endless jaw) so he was still going. We slid immediately into the lecture.

This was maybe not the best way to meet the boss, with my blood-sugar swimming in the Adriatic far below us. The impression was not good. I will not bore you with the details, but here is an excerpt from what I heard: "Kale, celery watermelon. Bread hot soup. Sandwiches Danish-cheese!"

Mercifully, he closed the lecture with just enough time for Jen and I to dart to the hotel restaurant to mow down everything placed in our path.

Summary
Day one, impression one: misdirected anger at the person blocking me from caloric intake.

*Recommended by me. The driver was fine with it, judging from his maniacal use of the gas pedal.

** I eat every two hours. The Kit-Kat bar looked great for four minutes until I realized that was going to be all the food offered. Going into hour four my teacher, sleeping next to me, started to look like a pork-chop.

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:

Respect the Millimeter

If you have done yoga for more than five minutes you have probably found yourself boring people to death with photos of perfect standing bows. If you have done yoga for a year or more you have advanced to boring your friends with poses of nearly identical bows, which you insist are nothing alike, to highlight the mammoth difference a rolled out hip makes. Rolling your eyes, you say, "Can you believe she did that? I mean, sure, her leg locked out, but at what cost? Her spine is a hot mess!"

Your friends' (if you have any non-yogi friends left) glassy eyes roll over yet another picture of a girl in a swimsuit. They regret the days they feigned interest. Now they are in too deep. Subtle hints do no good and they are afraid that just running is no longer an option -- yoga has made you a beast of pure endurance that could hunt them down like a cheetah after a lame wildebeest. A cheetah bearing photos of people in swimsuits. Swimsuit photos not resembling those found in Sports Illustrated Magazine.

The Boy enjoys yet another round of, "Guess What's Wrong With This Pose?"

I would like to draw attention to the photos. We have been so bombarded with Lululemon videos, International Competition videos, Equinox videos and the like that we see near perfection at every turn. It gives the impression that tiger scorpions are a dime a dozen. It can be discouraging to say the least. We forget to show...no... to worship, the years of work between seeing your toe creep up over your head in standing bow and a vertical leg with locked out knee. And, brother, there is a lot of sweat betwixt. i would like to give a shout out to all the millimeters in-between. If you haven't mastered bow, well, buddy, you and 50 million other people. That does not mean your progress is worthless. It does not make that millimeter small. I mean, technically it is, but we are talking a whole different scale here. Ask the nano-scientist if a millimeter makes a difference. That's the sort of changes we are pursuing, nanometers. Tiny, incremental changes that can be gained and lost a thousand times before the advancement becomes a part of our consistent pose.

That first time your toe appears is a milestone. So is when you can see the baby toe too. And the heel! Whoo-boy! You are talking sweat-hours worthy of praise! I raise my glass* to each tiny change that I will hold proudly in front of The Boy in the coming years. I know full-well that he has no idea why picture A is a vast improvement from picture B, but I will know that a tiny sliver of my shoulder has disappeared behind my head, like a waning moon it is getting smaller and smaller in the mirror behind my giant head. This process will take a lifetime and every phase is important and hard won.

So, Boy, this is your fair warning: you have years more of standing bow pictures to look at and none of them will look any different to you. I don't care. Those millimeters contain buckets of sweat and you are going to appreciate every one of them with me.

*What? It's kombucha! Okay, so it's beer. Sue me.