Bakeram Yoga

I am going to teach a Baby and Me yoga class after Walter is born.  So yesterday I headed down to Campbell to observe thinking I should have some idea of exactly what this looks like.  Let me explain what observing a class normally involves:  I come in and sit in the corner with my paper and pen and furiously write down the poses that the teacher uses, the order and any other hints that I like about her style.  I don’t generally participate much in the class, but am just there.  I am not sure exactly what I was expecting.  Perhaps a somewhat normal yoga class with babies somehow involved?  Perhaps an extension of my pre-natal yoga class except now the babies were out of tummies instead of in them?  I got to the class a bit early, found the teacher and introduced myself. She was kneeling down playing with one of the babies.  She welcomed me to the class and asked me to go to the prop room and grab some pillows to prop up the babies and some chairs for the moms.  There were only about 6 or 7 women and their babies at the time.  It was a bit daunting, but seemed doable.  I quickly learned that if the baby is under 3 months then they need to be propped up on two pillows on their backs at the front of mom’s mat.  If they are older, then they get a little bolster to to put under their tummy so that they can lift themselves up a bit.

The minutes went by and the room filled with more and more women and babies.  I asked moms as they came in how old their baby was. I went to get more and more pillows and chairs.  We ran out of pillows so I started improvising.  By the time the class started, I was quite hot and thoroughly overwhelmed.  There were 16 women and 16 babies in a room that was bursting at the seams.  There were women breastfeeding, changing diapers and just generally trying to get their baby to calm down a bit. The teacher came up to me and said that she usually picks up the fussy babies and tries to calm them so that mom can have a break and that perhaps I should also do this.  It was a this moment that I realized I couldn’t really remember the last time I was around a baby other than in just passing.  I took care of my youngest sister when she was a baby, but I was 6 then!  I was slightly petrified to pick up a baby and concerned that the moms really shouldn’t be letting me hold their babies either!  Which promptly led to the thought, “Holy smokes, what the hell have I gotten myself into?  How am I possibly going to care for Walter once he is born? Alex and I are in big trouble.” As I was thinking this, I passed a little boy with his face all scrunched up and obviously very unhappy with the world.  So I took a deep breath and picked him up.  I held him close to my chest and just started walking and talking to him, trying to soothe him.  What do you know?  After a few minutes, he stopped fussing and lift his head up, opened big blue eyes and tried to look around the room.  ”Ok, I thought, this is doable.”  I walked him for a bit and then set him back down in front of his mom and looked for the next fussy one.

I did this throughout most of the class.  Surprisingly enough, I wasn’t bad at soothing fussy babies and I was glad to give the mom a chance to actually practice.  I learned a relaxation hold (you reach your right arm through the baby’s legs and spread your fingers out over the baby’s chest and then hold the baby close to you) to calm the baby down and tried that several times. While I was doing this, I was desperately trying to remember what the teacher was teaching.  She seemed to seamlessly move between the poses integrating the women and their children into the class.  The room was chaotic, but she didn’t lose her cool.  She had the mothers singing lullabies and cute kid songs while they did little flows.  The time was passing very quickly and before I knew it the class was over.  I walked out exhausted both mentally and physically and extremely thirsty!

I came home completely overwhelmed and tried to describe the scene to my husband.  It was intense.  I think it wasn’t the class that was bothering me so much, but more that I felt that I got a glimpse into how much our lives are going to change.  It was amazing to me that such a little one can completely take up all of you time without even trying.  Alex and I keep thinking that we are going to be able to maintain some semblance of our current lives in those first few months, but everyone keeps saying that will be impossible and neither of us can really imagine why.  I still don’t entirely understand it, but I feel like I have a window into exactly what that will be like now.  Hopefully this will help me be a better teacher too!

Note before I start: I am very excited to meet Walter and be his mother, I am just very frustrated at the moment and venting tends to help me let go of things.

“You have a stress fracture in your foot.  That means no running and no yoga for the next 6 weeks.” the doctor said to me after pushing on and poking my foot in different ways to see what hurt.  I was in shock.  I knew that my foot hurt enough that running for the next while was out of the picture, but yoga too?

“You could bike or swim though, but nothing high impact on your foot.”  she continued on.  ”Great,”  I thought, remembering the last time I had a foot injury and was told to swim.  I like swimming ok, but being told that I should swim just makes me hate it.  I never feel like I get as good of a sweaty workout from swimming or biking, it just isn’t the same as a good long run or a good mysore practice.  It just makes me very cranky.

I walked out of the doctor’s office this morning and got in my car and just bawled.  I couldn’t stop, I felt like I was losing it.  I know that the hormones in my body are all sorts of nuts at the moment because of being pregnant, but losing my yoga practice in addition to my running was just more than I could take.  Pregnancy is hard and once you get towards the end everything just gets difficult to deal with.  You are bulky and big and it hard to get up out of chairs and tie your shoes.  Your organs are all misplaced and so you get nasty reflux (everything tastes very gross coming up the second time around) and you have to pee all the time.  Additionally you can’t sleep because being comfortable is a state you just can’t quite get to.  Even if you do fall asleep, you have ridiculous and crazy dreams that make sleep not all peaceful or restful.  This just all adds up to the point where you get stir crazy, very cranky and sad.

However, today it felt like I lost the last piece of my life that was really still mine, my running and my yoga practice and it just sucks.  Exercise (the very sweaty, exhausting kind) is how I have coped with my anxiety for most of my life.  I am not at all talented at running or yoga, I am just stubborn and I love the way I feel once I finish a long run or a good practice.  I feel like I can let go of all the crazy in my head and just relax, for a brief time in life it is ok to be exactly just me.  Whenever life hands me shit I put on my running shoes and head out the door.  Nothing has changed once I come back, but the chance just to be and think always helps me. Pregnancy brings a whole new level of anxiety to life.  You have this whole other being to care for and you desperately want to do everything you can to keep him safe and secure. Now I have all this anxiety and I have lost my favorite ways of dealing with it.  Logically, I know that I will just have to do other things to take its place, the problem is that they are never as good.  I know because I had plantar fasciitis about 7 years ago.  I hadn’t started a yoga practice at the time and running was what I did.  It took me a good year to heal and get back to any sort of running and then another six months before I work up to the same run I was doing before I got injured.  Let’s just say that the next six weeks (which ironically enough is the exact time to my due date) is going to be a bear and I am not looking forward to it nor the time it will take to rebuild my run and my practice.

Although, I have this nagging thought in the back of my head that says this is the universe knocking me over the head to start meditating which I dislike.  So here we go….

With pregnancy seems to come insomnia for me.  There is this witching hour around 4 a.m. where my body just gets too uncomfortable to sleep.  Today it happened at about 3:30 a.m. – so much fun!  So I made some honey walnut bread for breakfast (and I also cleaned up the kitchen instead of leaving it disasterfied for my dear husband to clean up), watered the plants in the greenhouse and iced the brownies for my yoga teacher training potluck today.  Which got me thinking, this is my last weekend of yoga teacher training. I feel some sort of need to think back on the past nine months and ponder what I have learned, the wonderfulness of the program and where exactly I want to go with it from here.  Yesterday, our teacher Joyce suggested that we write mission statements to read to today at our closing ceremonies.  These statements were to be short and sweet and apply to the next year or two.

This got me thinking, mission statements always sound like a good idea in principle.  They are supposed to keep you on track and provide guidance when you are making decisions about what to do in life.  They represent your ideals and hopes for the future. This is about the point where a little voice in my head says,

“but Eva, these are just wishy washy touchy feely things that don’t actually provide direction, but instead just make people feel better about not doing the right things.  They had good intentions, life just happened along the way.”

I think my problem is that far too often people, actually mainly organizations and corporations, have these flowery mission statements about all the wonderful things they believe in and then they go right ahead and completely disregard these ideals to do whatever is particularly expedient in the circumstances.  I saw this time and time again in political circles.  People had an idea of doing good, perhaps even really believed in it, put pen to paper and then it got shoved into a drawer or buried in a website never to be referred to again.

Yoga, and the philosophy surrounding it, has such high ideals.  It really speaks to me, I believe in it in a way that I haven’t believed in anything since I was a young, idealistic politico.  The problem is, politics hurt me really badly.  It stabbed me in the back time and time again when I just wanted to make the world a better place.  Like an abusive relationship, I keep trying long after I should have thrown in the hat and left.  Logically, the answer is that I just shouldn’t believe in something that much.  I shouldn’t expect people to be good all of the time and when they do bad things, I should remember not to take it personally.  But there is still that bright eyed and bushy tailed 18 year old in me that really wants to believe that this time I have found something that is real and that I can believe in again.  She isn’t sure she can take the destruction of her ideals again.  However, I would like to think that I have more wisdom now than I did at 18, and am more capable to protecting myself and standing up for myself.  I guess only time will tell whether I will be able to protect myself while still being able to keep myself open enough to find that idealistic hope if it exists.

This weekend is my last weekend of yoga teacher training and it involves a test, which I should be studying for and am not.  Well, at least at this moment I have found a way to procrastinate, but make myself believe it is possibly related to studying.  Anyway, here it goes!

The word “om” is considered a vital part of yoga philosophy.  One little word seems to encompass so many things.  It often begins or ends a yoga class either by itself or repeated three times.  It is called the seed sound of the universe and has four distinct parts to it: A, U, M and the silence which follows these sounds in which one is supposed to reflect on the vibration of the sound in her body.  Each of these sounds is formed distinctly with the mouth and then linked to the next sound.  A is the first letter of the sanskrit alphabet, M is the last and U stands for continuity and connection.  So it is thought that to go through om constitutes everything.  Such grandeur for two little letters.

I have always enjoyed chanting om.  I enjoy feeling the vibration of the sound throughout my body and the silence that follows it.  When I was first beginning yoga, it was my favorite because I had no idea of how to pronounce or chant any of the other sanskrit, but om always seemed approachable and easy.  I have since learned to pronounce and chat a bit more sanskrit, but still om is an interesting part.  My current interest in it is to listen to how people chant it.  Each person’s om seems to be unique and it seems to be relative to the type of class I am taking.  In my fast moving mysore class, each letter is drawn out and everyone seems to want to prove how much breath capacity they have.  I can rarely keep up with this as I am out of breath from doing my sun salutations and trying to draw out my breath at that point is just too much!  In my pre-natal class, the om is much quieter and I often find myself still chanting the M when everyone else is done. Men tend to have deeper om’s (whether this is due to an actual deeper voice or just the need to sound manly is quite unclear!) and women have softer, but more vibrant om’s.  They all combine together in a class to create a deep and rich sound which always soothes my soul and also somehow makes me feel connected to the other people in the room.

So I am pregnant, 29 weeks, which is the major reason for my non-blogging as of late.  Pregnancy is way harder than I would have imagined.  I thought that I would just basically go about my normal life for the first part, feel a bit big and bulky at the end and then once I had the baby, that was when the real hard work would start.  Boy was I ever wrong.  I spent the first half very nauseous and exhausted.  I was always a healthy eater with a significant sweet tooth.  Now the foods I could keep down mainly consisted of burgers, fries and animal crackers.  The very sight of a salad made me want to hurl.  I made Alex sit far away from me when he ate any kinda of vegetables because I could smell them and it wasn’t pretty.  I couldn’t walk through the garage where the onions and garlic from our garden were curing.  The worst part of all these food issues was that while this was happening our garden was at the height of production.  We had worked so hard all year to make lots of tasty vegetables and now Alex ate as much as he could and the rest was given away to a wonderful neighbor across the street.

I have also been a high energy person, but now I couldn’t make it through a yoga class or a run anymore and the bike ride to said yoga class or run was completely out of the question.  In fact, until week 16 or 17, I didn’t exercise much at all.  In fact, I spent most of my time on the couch napping or reading and my daily accomplishments were limited to a load of laundry.  By week 21 or 22, I was finally feeling a bit better and was able to go back to my normal (well modified for my growing belly) yoga practice and was able to start working up to a decent run again.  The silver lining to all of this is since I basically had to start over again in the amount of both yoga and running that I did, Alex started running with me and now is much faster than I am!  He also started learning the primary series for his own mysore practice which makes me deliriously happy.  It so wonderful to be able to go for a “pack” run (Alex, Sophie and me) and to have my partner share my yoga practice with me.

However, all this exercise requires a lot of showering, as in I am supposed to probably do it after each time that I get all sweaty.  Before I was pregnant, I loved my morning shower after yoga or running.  It felt so nice to feel the warm water washing all the sticky sweat away.  It felt lovely to put on lotion and clean clothes and even a bit of make-up.  In the winter, the blow dryer felt so nice and warm as I dried my hair.  I felt ready to attack my day afterwards.  Now, showering seems like this insurmountable task.  I am exhausted after it and tend to avoid it. So each day there is a battle in my head between the voice of the showering and overwhelmed part of me that says showering is waaaay too much effort.  It generally goes something like this….

Voice of showering: “Ok, Eva, time to get up and go shower.”

Other voice: “But I don’t wanna…..(yes, this voice is capable of whining like a 5 year old and does it frequently)”

Voice of showering: “well you are kinda sweaty and stinky and could use one.”

Other voice: “but, I don’t really have to…can I not blow dry my hair?”

Voice of showering: “Only if you promise not to go outside before it dries.  It is cold out there and you could get sick!”

Other voice: “Ok, fine. Here we go….”

Then the showering commences.  I am better about it these days, I can usually convince myself to shower most days.  However, that first trimester, there were a lot of days where the voice of showering just completely lost.  Here’s to hoping that at some point I enjoy showering again, at least for the benefit of everyone around me!

At Common Ground, we bought a book on Biointensive gardening. It’s a method for growing as much food as possible in a small space, while also maintaining a healthy soil. Long ago, people perfected these techniques. Now that monoculture and industrial agriculture are depleting our soils, we will probably need these skills again!

We recorded this video of some digging we did recently in the backyard. Take a look!

If you’d like to try for yourself, I recommend the book we got, The Sustainable Vegetable Garden by John Jeavons. It’s a quick introduction to biointensive gardening, so you won’t be overwhelmed, and it explains how double-digging works a bit better than I can.

So remember that post a couple ago where I said I was attempting to being a meditation practice every day?  Well not so much.  I can seem to do it every couple of days, but every day seems to elude me.  I can say that there are lots of little technical things that have kept me from it.  I was sitting on a yoga block which hurt my bum and it took me a bit to go buy the meditation cushion.  My legs keep falling asleep and I am having a hard time finding a good way to sit so this doesn’t happen and I am comfortable.  But the honest truth is that it is just hard to fit into my schedule.  I know, I know, it should be a priority and as a priority it should get done.  Problem is, there are a lot of other things in my life that are important to me and I really value and I want to do them too.  Things like watering the seedling and the plants each day, making healthy food for myself (way more time consuming than you would think!) and just generally dealing with and doing the things in life that need to be done.  They are important too.

Can you tell that I just finished meditating and my mind was going all over the place?  I am told that the best way to do it is to set up a time when you meditate each day.  This sounds like a good idea, you have a routine, something gets done.  My problem is that if I want something to get done each day, it really needs to get done first thing in the morning. Currently I am either doing yoga, running or biking to work first thing in the morning.  This doesn’t leave me with an extra half an hour to spare really anywhere.  It does work when it is a day like today.  I got up and went to mysore and then came home and I don’t have to work so I can sit down and meditate.  This might even work on days when I close so I don’t have to be to work until later in the day.  I have a romantic notion that it would be nice to do before I go to bed, but there is generally a puppy walk to go on or I am just too tired to do much of anything.  The problem is, my schedule is so all over the place that it is hard to have one set time a day to meditate and so therefore it is far too easy for it to get lost in the day.  I would like to say sometimes is better than nothing, which I suppose it is.  However, I keep reading in my homework that the benefits of meditation aren’t really present until you reach doing it everyday.  At this point, I think I need to take a deep breath, let it out slowly and go curl up on the couch with my coffee and just try to realize that maybe I am overdoing it. 

I know, I know, this is a bit of an odd post to follow right on the heels of my post about weight dilemmas.  However, I very strongly feel that part of eating well is eating closer to nature and closer to the ground.  I have this notion that if I could simply just eat real food (with the sugar in moderation) then my weight would adjust itself accordingly and I would be ok.  However, I haven’t ever successfully been able to accomplish this.  Which leads me to homemade butter.  When we were in France, the butter was fantastic.  The flavor just popped in your mouth.  Then spread on a fresh baguette made it just fabulous!  Since coming back, I have tried in vain to find something that approximates the same taste to no avail.  So I decided that I would try to make it myself.

My first stop was Whole Foods, where I had been told that I could find the sea salt from the Island of Re which is off the northern coast of France.  This salt is particularly good for some reason that I don’t know.  I found the sea salt and also picked up some Strauss Family Creamery heavy whipping cream. They have the best dairy products that I can currently find in a store.  I am still working on finding an actual dairy to get some raw cream from for butter.  The French butter is made from the raw cream and I think there is something there, but more on that later.  Then I started googling for butter recipes.  I had an idea of how to make it, but just wanted to make sure I knew what I was doing.  I found this recipe on Cooking for Engineers.  It is amazingly detailed and complete with pictures of what things will look like.  It made very tasty butter and I used their approximations for the salt to add.  My only addition is to make sure that when you are removing the buttermilk, that you pour the butter through a strainer.  It helps put the butter into a ball so that you can knead it in the cold water next.  The recipe was fairly simple to make, just throw the cream into my favorite kitchen aid mixer turn it on, put the splash guard on and let it rip.  I checked on every 5 minutes or so, but spent most of the time cleaning up the kitchen instead of working on the butter.  It was really surprisingly easy.  It was all finished in about 20 minutes and then you can spread the butter on bread and ohmygoodness it was fantastic!

Morale of this story – go out an make yourself some butter!!

And then don’t keep it in the fridge – it spreads better and has a better taste when it is room temperature!

I have always struggled with my weight.  I love to eat and there is such an emotional tie for me to food.  I also yearn to be one of those French women who only eat a couple of bites of everything and seem to be effortlessly thin.  I remember when I was about 10 and I weighed 106 pounds and I was a bit chubby so I decided that I needed to get back down to 100.  Needless to say, I grew before I could lose the weight.  In my adult life (well at least since I stopped growing), I have gone back and forth with my weight.  I lost 20 pounds in high school and got down to my thinnest at 150 and then went to college and promptly started the upward climb.  Then there was law school and campaigns and taking the bar and just general unhappiness which topped me out at 5′ 11″ and 190.  According to the doctor’s charts, I should be somewhere between 143-174 for my height.  So it was time to do something.  So I joined weight watchers and got back down to 158.  Then there was my honeymoon, a move cross country and taking the bar again and again.  This has taken me back up to about 173, which is right on the line of acceptable from a health standpoint.

My vice is mainly sugar and I work to try to figure out how to manage it.  My younger sister, Peggy, and I are constantly trying to figure out what will help to keep us on a moderation track.  We have tried all sorts of things and generally it seems that avoiding it is the only full proof way to do it.  However, this isn’t sustainable either because at my birthday I want a piece of cake and at other times there is such a connection between something that someone has made for you that you don’t want to not be able to have some of it.  But once I start eating it, it is very hard to stop myself. Then there is the barrage of other junky bad for you things that you encounter in everyday life and have to attempt to avoid which is really hard.  I get worn down or am tired or hungry and then I eat it.

This gets further complicated at the moment because Alex and I would like to have a baby.  Foremost, I don’t want the baby to have the same sugar addiction that I do.  This means that I really need to somehow reach a happy ground with the sugar sometime soon.  Secondly, I would like to think that I can eat more healthy and cut out the chemically things that I eat and just generally be healthy about my food choices.  The problem is when I get to work and there are nacho cheese Doritos staring me in the face or yummy chocolate from See’s and I am almost drawn to them, or when I have just finished dinner and I want a bit of something sweet.  Or a million other times when it seems somewhat appropriate or yummy to have something that I know isn’t good for me.  It is so enticing and so far I have no lasting good solution to this.  Peggy is starting her residency and really worried about gaining weight and eating too much because she is tired and stressed.  So I think we are going to implement the start of another no sugar stretch and see how it goes this time.  It is always easier to do it together because then we are accountable to someone else.

As a forerunner to this, a friend has recommended a juice cleanse (the juice is so tasty!) and allowed me to borrow her juicer so I think I am going to embark on it first.  The juicing is connected to yoga and meditation and just generally exploring your relationship with food.  The juice follows your chakras.  So for instance you start with the root chakra which is red so the juices that you drink that day are red.  It also combines the juicing with a broth too.  It sounds interesting and fun so we will see how it goes.  This journey is an ongoing one and perhaps sometime I will come to a point of peace about it all.

This last weekend I began my yoga teacher training.  It is one weekend a month for 9 months. It was kinda fantastic.  I had forgotten just how lovely a group of women can be.  There are 15 of us and we range in age from 30 (how come I am always the youngest at these things?) to probably mid 60s.  There are mothers and teachers and engineers, but the important thing is that they are all very open-minded and loving.  This sounds so simple, but when you are apart of it, it is amazing.  Everyone is happy and excited about life and thrilled to be there to be deepening their yoga practice and learning to teach. The teachers are vivacious and lovely people also.  I was a bit afraid of them not being approachable as they seem to be important people.  Not at all, they were happy to chat and relax and just share stories too.

By the way, this teaching thing – super harder than I would have expected.  My teachers over the years just make it look so easy that I never really thought it was that hard.  I guess this just means that they are good and I am just beginning to grasp exactly how good they are.  This weekend we learned Tadasana (Mountain) and Uttananasna (standing forward bend).  These are basic yoga poses that one learns quit quickly and easily when you are learning yoga.  I can’t count the number of times that I have done each of them.  However, try leading someone through the poses and suddenly the words that seemed so easy on your teachers lips, aren’t there anymore.  But after stumbling through it a couple of times, it seemed to get a bit easier….if only I can remember to tell people to inhale and exhale!  One woman remarked, “My students are all dead! I forgot to tell them to breathe!”

A hefty part of the teacher training is classes in meditation.  I guess I logically knew that the physical practice of yoga was meant to prepare the yogi to meditate, but I haven’t really ever put the two together.  Meditation has always scared me just a bit.  I mean you are just supposed to sit and do nothing except attempt to still your mind for somewhere from 20 minutes to all day.  It is intimidating! I am a person that does things and I have an awfully hard time sitting still, which is all the more reason I should, but still….  We had a class each day on meditation and giving us the basic technique on how to set yourself, relax yourself and then just try to be.  The teacher, Sundari, challenged each of us to try to develop a daily meditation practice of anywhere from 20 minutes up to an hour if we could get ourselves to do it.  She said that it has completely changed her life for the better.  So I thought I would try, I have wanted to for years, but there were always excuses.  I thought I might blog about it from time to time just to keep myself honest!

So today I started.  I set my iPhone for 20 minutes and sat on a yoga block. (Your knees should be lower than your hips and my hips aren’t that flexible).  I am going to try to increase 5 minutes a week at least until I get to 30 minutes, then I will reevaluate.  My mind was rather scatterbrained.  I had a really hard time bringing it back to just being.  I tried to concentrate on my breathe and give myself the mantra of “om” on the inhale and “shanti” on the exhale.  I had mixed results.  I kept thinking about all the things around the house that needed to be done.  Then towards the end my leg fell asleep, which was very distracting, so I moved it a bit to wake it up.  The yoga block was a bit hard on my bum too.  I used meditation cushions this last weekend and I am thinking one might be a good investment.  Perhaps at some point my hips will be flexible enough that I can just sit on the floor.  However, until then I need some propping up!