yogalila

A New Road -A Secret Gate

Still round the corner there may wait a new road, or a secret gate.  J.R.R. Tolkien

 

 All you have to do is a quick google search on “yoga and fear” and you’ll learn that yoga is the path to overcoming the fear of cancer, falling, death, insecurities, and the irrational fears that stem from childhood.  Social workers and therapists, beware.  Your (our) jobs are in jeopardy.  If people find out about this yoga thing, we’re going to be on the bread lines.

Needless to say, it hasn’t worked out quite that way for me –yet, anyway.  Much of my new life makes me afraid, but I’m trying to learn to embrace that fear rather than conquer it.  Nothing in my old life made me afraid, exactly –or if I was afraid I had stomped down on it pretty hard and did not allow myself to feel it.  So, on a day to day basis, it wasn’t the emotion driving me.  Despair, defeat, feeling unlovable, the need to put on a good public face…. those were much more the top-level emotions in that life.  Nor is the fear I feel these days the terror I felt in the first many months of having my life abruptly rearranged for me.  No, this fear is instructive, for the most part.

At first I couldn’t do yoga at all without having a little panic attack.  There was lots of crying and the feeling of not being able to breathe.  How tiresome to be next to such a person in a yoga class!  So yoga was exclusively at home.  Then I stopped crying (quite so much) but I still couldn’t really do anything.  My body had become unresponsive to my requests.  Annoying.  So I lied to my own subconscious.  We do this all the time, without paying much attention, but this time I did it on purpose.

I told my subconscious that I believe I can have a body that joyously works –that does what it’s supposed to do.  I can have a body that moves through a whole range of motion –a body that is both strong and flexible.   And I’m not afraid of my body’s apparent insistence that I am limited.  As much as I want to be able to do yoga again, even more than that I want to question limitations.   Limits are real, but I’m tired of accepting them just because someone says they’re so  (Cue the music from Wicked!).  Believe me when I tell you that none of these statements is true in the higher-order-functioning part of my brain.  Frequently, I think and say quite the opposite.  But when I feel fear rising up with that slimy “you’re not good enough” feeling, I try to figure out if it's a truth or just a thought.  Even if it's just a thought, it can sit in the room with me, but I try to quiet its insistence on attention.

Which all sounds wonderful and like a perfect commercial for yoga conquering fear.  But I have a really racket-y subconscious, apparently; much like the rest of me, it's not noted for being obedient.  In spite of being able (sometimes) to turn fear into something constructive and instructive, I’m still not wild about it.  Fear is a kind of measure that we’re facing something monumental.  It may not appear to be monumental to anyone else, but in these matters other people’s opinions don’t matter.  Even little fears can hold us still.  Tragically, though, waiting doesn’t make fear go away.  You either live with it and stop where you are (a perfectly valid choice, I might add) or you stare it down and make it go away.   Why would reclaiming my own body make me afraid, I wonder.

I think it's that I know that yoga is going to take me through a secret gate to a new place -and I'm really nervous about where that is and what that means.  I can't say more just yet about what's on the other side of that gate, but I sense its presence.  I guess I'll just keep looking at it, until the day when walking through it is easy and right.

Getting Lost -Yoga in Italy

I've had the privilege  -and the just plain good luck- of traveling quite a bit.  And in my experience, people sometimes say that they are traveling to find themselves, but really what they want to do is lose themselves.  When I was a spry young thing, the place of choice was India -to sit on a mountain top and commune with the wise ones.  Now I don't know where the fashionable people go, but I know MY place of choice.  I have come to Italy to practice yoga and eat pasta  -surely two of my favorite things in the world.  Throw in a bike ride, a rock to climb, and a glass of wine at the end of the day, and I'm yours forever.

I knew when I was packing that I was putting too much pressure on this trip.  I knew that it couldn't possibly live up to my dreams for it.  I wanted to lose the part of me that is afraid of travel -even though I've done loads of it.  I wanted to lose the part of me that doesn't take risks.  I wanted to lose the part of me that is unfit and unhappy about that, by focusing on yoga for eight days.  I wanted to lose the habits -of thought and action- that hold me to an old life, a life that spectacularly did not serve me.

Oh, is THAT all????

I came to Italy, and I'm still me.  What are you gonna do?  I can still get lost anywhere, and now I don't speak the language well enough to ask for help and understand the answer.  I am practicing yoga three times a day, when my longest practice for the past two years has been a highly-modified 45 minutes.  (Did I think my muscles were going to say, "Oh my God, we've come all this way.  Let's make this easy for the poor fat dear."????)  Everyone (else) has come here with someone.  I'm the only alone-person, as I feared.  Why go to Italy alone, for heaven's sake?

I'm irked -IRKED, I tell you- at how much courage it requires to leave my beautiful bedroom overlooking the courtyard fountain and head down to morning yoga.  I'm flabbergasted that I have trouble asking for help when I need it.  I've done nothing BUT ask for help lately, it seems.  I'm embarrassed at the state of my yoga.  The teacher has me modifying savasana, I kid you not.  Seriously, that has to be a low point.

I'm telling myself that I don't have to do anything other than what feels right.  Simply having packed my suitcase and gotten here counts for something.  It counts for quite a bit, to my mind, that I chose and arranged for this trip on my own.  It counts for quite a bit more that I'm staging my 'comeback' using yoga as a centerpiece. I don't really believe those things to be true, quite yet, but I'm telling them to my subconscious -a subconscious which has believed significantly less credible things in the past, so I'm optimistic there.

But right this minute?  Yeah, I'm a little lost. 

I Can't Breathe

These past two years have taken a toll on my body. It's stiff. It aches. It is significantly heavier than it ought to be and than I would like. I've done my share of whining and fretting about all of that. Yet, at the same time, I clearly wasn't ready to do anything about it. I cop to never having had a healthy body image. Never. But really, even by my standards, things have been pretty dim around here. It sounds facile -and maybe it is- but I wonder if I just figured I WAS unlovable so I might as well look that way.

The thing is, I've watched myself start to heal from other aspects of the demise of my marriage. What I've learned through that is that my path is the only one I can walk. Things happen -even become easy- when the time is right. That path has been slower and quirkier than I would have predicted and has taken longer than I could EVER have imagined. But I've learned that the next-right-thing is all I can do. It doesn't matter if I go slowly or stay longer at one point or if my recovery looks very different from someone else's. After all, I have to grow my own life, not someone else's.

And in that spirit and for whatever reason, it now seems possible that I will start exercising again. Why now and not two months ago? I really couldn't say. I figure, though, that it might make some sense to chronicle my return to fitness in general, and yoga in particular. I know it will happen. My muscle cells aren't any different from anyone else's. They will get stronger when they are repeatedly asked to work hard. My connective tissue works just like other people's; it will eventually give way when invited to and will allow for the return of some lost yoga postures. It will all take longer than I like, because I'm that kind of girl. But it will happen.

So here's the baseline. I can't breathe. I did the easiest of the easy yoga videos last night: Barbara Benagh's Power Yoga for Every Body. There is no reason for it to be called power yoga, so let's just dispense with that right away. Rather, it is slow and precise and very gentle. In the old days, I used this DVD on rest days or when recuperating from an injury. Last night I couldn't even get the breath right. My breath would literally get stuck in my chest and then I would start little non-scary gasps. I was lying on my back at the time, so exhaustion is probably not the explanation ;)

So, forget the fact that I can no longer -for now- tangle myself up in fun pretzel-y knots. I can't even breathe. But I'm starting from here, and walking my path.

Book Review

It’s a compelling title: Power Yoga: An Individualized Approach to Strength, Grace, and Inner Peace (Ulrica Norberg, 2007). I hoped for a book that would help me craft a yoga practice that meets my unique (possible quirky) goals –and would help you do the same. Sadly, I didn’t get that. There are still reasons that this book might be interesting and valuable in a yoga collection, but not the reasons that the title suggests.

The book opens with a quote from Deepak Chopra misunderstanding Einstein. My first thought was “please, shoot me now”. But it gets better. You just have to get past that first bit. Norberg starts with a brief description of the types of yoga and the historical roots of yoga. There’s nothing particularly deep here, but it’s nice that she doesn’t shy away from potentially thorny questions such as ‘is yoga a religion?”. (No, in case you were wondering.)

From there, she moves on to the chakras, bandhas, and breathing. Again, there’s nothing particularly new (how could a description of yoga be new, exactly, anyway?) or deep, but her explanations are solid and helpful in their concise way.

Asanas, described in word and photographs make up the rest of the book, for all practical purposes. The photographs from Andreas Lundberg are beautiful. I have some quibbles here and there with Norberg’s form, but heaven forbid someone should take pictures of me doing those same postures. There are some rounded backs here and there. There’s a peculiar malasana variation whose point I don’t understand. And her sequencing within the sun salutations is new to me. I haven’t seen malasana in surya namaskara B before. I’m entirely willing to believe, though, that that could be because of my lack of experience. She repeats common yoga assertions regarding the benefits of certain yoga postures. Vrksasana reduces pancreas problems. The liver and spleen are energized in marichyasana. Really??? I get a little tweaked by these unsubstantiated, and probably unsubstantiatable, claims.

And I feel like the catty queen of the universe even typing this, but really, she chose the wrong outfit for doing yoga. There’s just not enough of it, and it’s distracting. It’s sort of like Rodney Yee and his Speedo. Sure, you look cute, but there’s such a thing as too much information. If someone came to class wearing that outfit, I’d spend the whole time worrying that there was going to be a disastrous wardrobe malfunction. It sort of messes with my meditative state.

But let’s not let cattiness rule here. There are genuinely good things about this book. In the posture descriptions, she offers both a beginner and advanced version. I think that must be the “individualized approach” bit. I guess I can say that it is both insufficient to my needs and nonetheless valuable. I particularly like her periodic mention of where drsti should be and where one’s anatomical attention should be. She occasionally points out common beginner misunderstandings of a posture, which I find to be really helpful. And there’s a strategy for getting into my all-time-nemesis posture, ustrasana, that might actually work for me. I’d buy the book for that alone. 

The book concludes with a section on meditation and another section with questions and answers. The meditation section is similar to the asana section –similar strengths and similar weaknesses. The question and answer section is interesting. Again, she doesn’t shy away from the questions that some people stumble over. “What is a guru?” “Is yoga theory important?” These are good questions and she provides sensible, thoughtful answers. I’m a little daunted that she suggests that the Pradipika is an essential text. It probably is, but yikes. That’s a slog-fest if ever there was one.

To sum it all up, Norberg’s book is not an essential addition to anyone’s yoga library. On the other hand, it’s a friendly and helpful overview of and introduction to yoga. It’s not quite what the title suggested it might be, but it’s practical, and literate, and useful. That’s not a small addition to a corpus that includes more than enough nonsense.