Bakeram Yoga

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. 

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!

I could hear the inhales and exhales around me of the uji breath.  It struck me as harmonious: like the waves of the ocean.  It was oddly comforting and allowed me to melt back into the flow of my sweaty vinyasa.  I was in a small room with lovely wooden floors and the sun streaming in.  It was a lovely crisp morning and the room was quite cozy and filled with people who were excited to be there.  Their energies shown around me.  I could feel the santosha, or contentment, swell up around me.  I was sweaty with exhausted arms of jelly, but content.  I felt like I belonged. I love this feeling in yoga, when I feel exhausted and sweaty, but also peaceful and that somehow this is one of those wonderful moments to savor in life.

I was in the middle of an Ashtanga yoga class.  I had been invited by a teacher of mine, Rossana Lo.  It was a lovely class.  I had only done Ashtanga yoga once before in a mysore setting and hadn’t had a good experience.  I was overwhelmed by not knowing the series and intimidated by all the yoginis around me doing many contorted things with their bodies that I could not fathom ever doing. This was different.  The people were more accepting.  Most of them were still doing very contorted things that maybe someday I might or might not ever do, but this time it was ok.   I remember that yoga is about the journey and the destination is irrelevant because even if I were to get to the crazy pose point, there will always be something more. So I sweat and take chaturanga on my knees and remember to do the uji breath and it is good.

Yesterday was a good yoga day: yummy as a favorite teacher of mine would say.  I have been feeling very low energy lately and getting through yoga and my runs has been something of challenge.  But yesterday was good.  Alex took Sophie to work with him.  This left me with extra time and energy before yoga because I there was no Sophie walk to do.  So I decided to bike to yoga for the first time in a bit.  It felt so nice to stretch my legs.  They had so much energy running through them and it just felt wonderful.  I felt unstoppable.  The cool morning breeze blew through all around me and I flew to yoga.

I got to yoga all nice and sweaty with my muscles feeling nicely stretched out.  The class isn’t normally particularly difficult for me and this morning I just flowed through it.  I felt like I could get just a bit more out of the twisty poses.  When the choice of child’s pose/down dog/another vinyasa came up, it seemed the natural choice to go through the vinyasa and then press back into down dog and just feel the nice stretch in my arms and shoulders.  It was just lovely.  I remembered what it feels like to really feel apart of my practice and to feel at one with my body instead of constantly feeling like I was fighting it (and then yelling at myself for fighting it instead of just accepting where I was that day – my brain is capable of creating so many chances to yell at myself!).  My body felt very connected and it was very nice.  Now if only I can accept with grace the other days my body is not quite so happy with me

This spring has been full of starts and stops and I keep waiting for it to actually stick.  One day it is bright, sunny and warm out and the next day it is cold and cloudy.  My mood seems to follow this ebb and flow of the weather too.  Last week it was so sunny and so warm (a bit too warm for my non-air-conditioned house) and I was happy and soaring with the thought that spring had finally arrived and hoping that it would stay warm.  I brought out my favoritist brightly colored sun dresses and wore them with abandon. This week it is cloudy and downright cold and I am cranky and the world just feels so very blah.

After I took the bar at the end of February, I had great hopes for the start of Spring.  I figured that out here in warm California land, like my home state of Texas, March would signal the end of the coolness and the beginning of the warm up to summer.  I was very much looking forward to the new start.  I would be done studying and worrying about the bar and I could begin to get my life (and the house!) back in order again.  While I studied through rainy, cold February I imagined myself sitting outside at a cafe sipping coffee and typing away on my computer while the warm sun warmed my shoulders.

Alas, this did not happen.  It has gotten warm a couple of times, only to get cold again.  I feel like actual spring/summer has to be quite around the corner, I am just not sure where or when it will appear.  I feel like this mirrors my life at the moment.  I am trying to start out on a new path, but at times it is harder than I expected.  I feel like there is something wonderful out there just waiting to happen or for me to stumble upon, but I don’t really know where it is or how to get to it.

I keep retreating in: back to the safety of my home.  I am sleepy in the morning and it is hard to leave my warm bed.  I feel like I need to be dealing with things at home and getting them prepared for something.  I am just not quite sure what that something is.  Even my yoga lately has been very slow and I seldom have the energy to get through the more difficult sequences or hold a pose for very long.  I find myself often choosing child’s pose instead of holding down dog or taking the extra vinyassa.   I am no good at waiting so whatever I am waiting for, I hope it reveals itself soon and I can go back to being me: back to bounding out of bed in the morning, back to attacking my to do list with excitment and lots of energy and back to a yoga practice where pushing myself to new levels feels so good to my muscles and my body.

Spring, wherever you are, I am waiting for you!  Not so patiently, but I am doing my best.

In addition to being a baker and yogi I am also a runner.  Today, I had a revelation of sorts, but first some history of me and running that seems like a good thing to share with you my lovely readers.  I have been running ever since my freshman year of college when I realized that I wasn’t going to play tennis for 3 hours a day so in order not to pile on the pounds I should do something else.  So I started running.  I didn’t enjoy it at first.  It was hot and sweaty and involved really early in the morning to get it done before I went to class.  But over the years, I have grown to love it.  It has been one thing that I have consistently done for the last 11 years.

The problem comes is that all my crazy head issues come out in my run and seem to be amplified because in running you are supposed to be hard on yourself and the “better run” comes when you just beat the crap out of yourself.  But the victory is sooo sweet.  When I beat my personal best and have just a really good run, I feel like I am walking on air, like my whole body just flows together and it is lovely.  So I push myself and heavily criticize myself when I don’t measure up. This makes the good runs really good, but the bad ones just suck. I am working on having just ok runs and being fine with this, but it kinda a struggle.

Enter my wonderful new puppy, Sophie (pictures!), who is just wonderful and the cutest thing ever.  I always tend to shy away from running partners as my run is generally my time to just be.  Although in recent years, I have had really nice runs with Jake, Jane, my sisters and some adventuresome friends.  You see running is way more personal that you might imagine.  Everyone has a different pace and different way of going about the run.  I have always wanted a dog to run with though.  I had visions in my head of sprinting along the path with puppy at my side, tongue hanging out (off the leash of course because the dog would be very well trained) and the two of us  just being at one with the trail and lovely day outside.

Yeah, not so much.  It turns out that a dog has an even more different pace than humans which is further complicated by the fact that they have four legs instead of two.  This is further complicated by the fact that Sophie enjoys running, but she would just as rather go chase the nearby bird, squirrel, bike passing us, or bark at the nearby dog and starting lunging for him.  So a run with her involves me winding up the leash and not being able to use one of my arms to pace myself and then letting the leash go as she settles into the run, but being constantly wary of any approaching interesting object to her.  It doesn’t sound like much, but I am realizing that it has basically turned my run upside down.  My times are bad and it is much more tiring to run when you are constantly on alert and reigning in a puppy. So I have been a bit down on running and sad that things didn’t quite measure up to what I had envisioned.  I know, shocking, expectations not met.

But today, I was running along and I had one of those lovely “aha!” moments.  I realized that if I were to apply yoga philosophy to my run, then each day the run should meet me on my path exactly where I am that day.  If there are lots of things for Sophie to chase, then I need to take the time to address that and somehow let go of my need for a good running time.  Besides, there is no reason that I have to get good running times.  It is just my ego.  Theroeticallly I am running for the exercise for both me and Sophie and I would do good to remember that original aim.  Sophie needs me to be patient with her while she learns to be a good running puppy.  Perhaps she also trying to remind me that there are so many interesting things to sniff out there that I really should do some sniffing myself.  This won’t be easy cause a good run releases so many endorphins, but perhaps that is no longer worth the cost.

I have been studying for the California Bar for the last two months which would account for my blogging silence.  It has not been pleasant because law has never been particularly nice to me and being required to work on it full time was an interesting experiment.  In this intense studying period, I have notice something slight, but interesting to me.  In both yoga and law, it is referred to as a practice.  I have a legal practice, but I also have a yoga practice.

As I think about my yoga practice, I feel that it is a process of learning and discovery.  There are those “aha!” moments when I finally figure out exactly how to get into a pose or oft-repeated words of a favorite teacher finally make sense.  These moment are often followed in rapid succession by  having a completely off day where my body does not want to do what I want it to do or insists that it just wants to go into shivasna.  But overall, I feel that in yoga it is ok and accepted that you will gradually make your way through the asanas in whatever way you need to that day.  As a favorite teacher of mine said, “Yoga meets you on your mat each day wherever you are.”  It is encouraged that you should listen to your body and even rest when you are tired and not getting anything more beneficial out of the pose.  All of this combines together to make me excited and not afraid to try new things for fear of failure.  I almost need to fall over or do something ridiculous to really learn the new thing and incorporate it fully into my practice.

I say all of these things about yoga because the practice of law is so fundamentally different, but yet I wonder if it was more in the way of yoga would be a nicer profession for everyone involved?  Law practice is filled with fear.  It begins your first day of law school.  You inevitably have one of those stereotypical professors who feels it is his job to beat you into submission.  All in the name of teaching you to “think like a lawyer.”  It is furthered through a brutal grading process and jobs that only go to the top of your class.  Once you get out of school, you have to take and pass the bar.  This is a brutal two month study marathon followed by a test that is somehow supposed to measure whether or not you know enough law to practice.  Then once you actually get a job, the partner you work for reigns supreme and often he or she is not a nice person and makes the office environment toxic.  There is no room for learning from your mistakes, there is only harsh criticism for anything that goes wrong, because of course, it is your fault.  It has nothing to do with the fact that you don’t know what the hell you are doing.

I have such awful feelings associated with practicing law and such warm and fuzzy ones associated with my yoga practice.  I can’t help but think that lawyers would be a much happier group if law was practice like yoga.

Today in yoga we started a couple week series of adding on a few minutes of meditation to the end of each class.  I have done some meditation before, but I have a very hard time calming my mind down enough to really just be in the moment.  The class was structured around waking up the body and opening it up so that we could be comfortable to meditate at the end.  This involved a lot of stretches that I am simply not good at even getting into the beginning phases of them.  For whatever the reason, my muscles are very tight.  So there I was crossed legged and attempting to go forward to get a stretch in my hips.  I was frustrated because yet again, I could barely sit up straight much less go further forward.   I could hear my yoga teacher’s voice in the background.

“Check in with your body.  See how it is feeling today.  View this as an invitation into the pose.  See if you can make your practice into a meditation today.”

An invitation?  I had heard teachers say this before, but it didn’t really ever make sense to me.  My muscles generally did not go anywhere without a lot of prodding and work.  It didn’t seem to matter how much I attempted to get them to relax into whatever I was doing, they were not budging and they frequently told me so. But this time, something clicked.  I closed my eyes and began to concentrate on my breathing.

“Let go of your expectations.  You don’t want to have expectations when you meditate.  You want to be open to the experience and whatever you are experiencing at that moment.”

No expectations.  Hmmmm….ok, maybe just for this moment I can let go.  I felt myself sink a bit further into the meditation and a sense of relief wash over me.  Lo and behold, I felt my hips open a bit and I began to go further.  Not much, but just a bit, which was just lovely.

Yoga was hard today.  While we do the poses my teacher always talks about something to bring your mind and thoughts into the poses.  It is a way to approach the different poses in different ways each day.  Today is Election Day.  So today she talked about voting and making choices both for you life and for the world. She asked us what choices we wanted and needed to make in our lives.  My heart almost screamed out, “I don’t know what to do.”  I could feel the tears coming to my eyes each time she repeated it.  I am at a crossroads in my life right now.  Growing up my dreams for the future centered on work and finding my “dream job” in politics.  I desperately wanted to be a part of the “Beltway” and work to make the world a better place.   My dream didn’t work out and I am still mourning it while trying to figure out what I do next.  My dreams each night are filled with conflict and people yelling at me.  They range from mildly frustrating to all out awful and I wake up drenched in sweat and petrified.   I am constantly exhausted from all this.

As we moved into the standing poses, she asked us what we stood for.  I could answer that easily.  I stand for caring and loving other people and trying in my own little way to make the world a bit brighter.  I enjoy taking care people and like to help them where I can.  For as much as my life did not go in the direction I originally wanted, there have been many wonderful things along the way.  I have a wonderful husband, a supportive family and the best friends ever.  I get to live in Silicon Valley where is generally sunny and a perfect temperature.

Then she asked us to stand up for ourselves in this world and speak back to all that criticism whether internal or external.  My inner voice spoke back and said, “but what about if the criticism is true?”  I am more than capable of standing up for other people.  I am a lawyer, I can walk into a courtroom and convince a jury that my client was wronged.  However, talking back to the critic in my head is much less easy.

My yoga teacher also told us that one of the definitions of voting was to vow.  She asked us what we would commit or re-commit ourselves to in our lives.  My inner voice replied that I needed to re-commit myself to figuring out what comes next.  However, this leaves many more questions than answers.  I left yoga today with my thoughts running in circles in my head.  I guess I have lots to ponder.

I am trying out a new yoga studio.  Tentatively, I like it.  I originally went to this studio when I first got here, but the class I went to was not so much a class as a self guided yoga time in a studio.  There was a sequence of poses that you were supposed to follow, but unfortunately I didn’t know them when I went in.  I got through it, but it was a bit intense for me.  However, since the studio I have been going to provided wonderful physical exercise, but very little of the meditative side of yoga, I decided it was time to branch out and try it again.  This time instead of the super intense class I picked a beginner’s class.  It was lovely.  It wasn’t physically challenging, but the teacher was wonderful at bringing the spiritual side of yoga into our practice.

She talked about vata which is the energy of the fall.  It is an excited nervous energy that causes us to run around and work on feathering our nest for the winter.  I am particularly prone to nesting and with the recent move have felt even more so inclined to nest and make my house comfortable and welcoming.  The negative side to vata is that it causes irritability and anxiety.  I am also very prone to worrying about things so this also struck me as very interesting.  As a way to balance out vata, we did a practice that slowed down our movements and made sure we were very supported in each pose.  Then at the end of class, I got a proper shivasna!   I came out feeling much better.  My whole being felt balanced and relaxed again.