I M Perfect lady

Category: Yoga

  • Imperfect Yoga Lady.

    A dozen days of yoga, a dozen mornings where I resolutely walked downstairs and began yoga, twelve times that my body and awareness won.

     

    I am surprised that there are times when a voice or feeling wants to ‘not do the yoga’, but that it is outvoted each day.

     

    And the contest hasn’t been close.  The side that seems to have the most strength is the part of me that feels yoga is what I want to do.

     

    This surprises me, usually I feel the slippery slope that I am on, where all it will take is a day where the voice is really strong and I will fall into a lazy excuse.

     

    I remember that when I made up my mind that my father and his actions would not define me. The mindset was in cement.

     

    It seems that this is the case again.  That even if the voice comes in, I already have a set plan.  So it can complain, but it rains along side me as I am doing the yoga.

     

    In fact it surprised me that the body and I continue going ahead with yoga, one posture at time, allowing the voice to chatter on.

     

    It is like watching your self do what you don’t want to do.

     

    As I walked out of many dysfunctional relationships the same thing happened.  I would physically walk away while my mind protested loudly.

     

    Today, this is exactly how my yoga felt.

     

    That I was physically doing postures in the moment of today, that my past persona wasn’t happy about, yet I did them anyway.

     

    I know that this is a great sign, a great indication that the core of me, is with me doing yoga.

     

    There may be days where it will be difficult to begin, or days where it just seems that all balance is off, or that everything appears awkward and hard, but I have faith I will at least try.

     

    I remember feeling so inept so out of sorts, so bad at being normal, and I feel the same with yoga.  I am not a graceful balanced strong yogi.

     

    I am okay, being at the beginning again, being awkward and looking imperfect, for I am.

     

    I am an imperfect yoga lady.

     

  • I love my Lady. Day 11

    Well, this morning as my eyes opened, anxiety flew in, and a dream I had just completed left me unsteady.  I was dreaming, my childhood friend (who also was abused by my father), her and I were discussing whether to leave early or stay.

     

    I wanted to go and she wanted to stay.  I felt anxious to be going trying to convince her and distressed about staying.

     

    I didn’t like the fact that this particular dream ‘happened’ to be in my subconscious after yesterday’s yoga.

     

    Letting the dream go, I breathed deeply, gathered up my yoga clothes and strength, with my inner determination I walked towards my fear and my basement.

     

    Insides shaky, I began, not knowing what was heading my way.

     

    In the standing postures, the same sensation of air going into my left brain was there in most of the standing postures, which was odd, for it used to be in just a few. 

     

    I had told myself to just go with the sensation to not fight it.  So I guess it felt free to arise and often.

     

    I wasn’t going to stop doing yoga, so the only thing left was to continue on, no matter come what may.

     

    Yet each posture was strong, my body and I stayed together, and the breath kept us in balance and controlled, the sensation was secondary off to the side.

     

    As I dropped my leg on the last standing posture I said, “Thank you body, we did it!”

     

    And tears began to flow, again.

     

    But this time, they were in triumph, and they didn’t last long, for my body and I then went into the floor poses.

     

    It came to me that the standing poses may be for mental fortitude, while the floor ones are for emotional wellness, and doing both will strengthen the body to have the power to deal with whatever comes our way.

     

    I feel deeply joined with my body. 

     

    I have over the past few years found a nice connection, but this one just cemented a deeper trust, that I am not alone, and no matter where I am asked to go, my body will come with me, always being able to express what needs to be expressed and strong enough to endure.

     

    My body is a wise lady and I trust that she and I will be okay, as long as we stay in the now, feel what is, and breathe.

     

    I love my Lady.

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  • It Will Respond In Kind.

    Below is an interesting view of your awareness and your body, perhaps this will help us as we continue towards 50 more days of yoga.  Our bodies are our partners, 100%!

     

    (from Reinventing The Body, Resurrecting The Soul)

     

    "Relating to your body calls for the same basic attitudes that go into any intimate relationship.  Tending to them every day keeps the relationship healthy.

     

    Trust

    Consideration

    Honesty

    Mutual cooperation

    Loving appreciation

     

    These are all aspects of awareness. People focus too much on the physical choices that the body presents – whether to take vitamins, how many calories to ingest, how much to exercise. Without awareness these considerations tend to be fairly useless.  Your body knows if you fear it; it rebels at being disciplined like a disobedient child; being ignored makes it grow dull and inert.  The whole purpose of consciously relating to your body is to provide the kind of foundation that is really needed.  After that, you can take any physical measures in the right spirit, and that will bring the best results.

     

    Trust.  Real trust is implicit.  It doesn’t depend on shifting moods.  It doesn’t need to be tested or proven.  Most people only trust their bodies so far. They anticipate a time when the body will bring pain and the distress of aging.  If you are on the lookout for what can go wrong physically, you are relating out of distrust, the opposite of what needs to exist.  So reframe the situation.  Think of the millions of processes that are being carried out perfectly in billions of cells every second.  Compared to that steady, faithful, perfectly coordinated functioning, the few times that the body shows distress are minuscule.  It’s far more realistic to trust your body than mistrust it.  After all, you trust you mind even though it occasionally breaks out in irrational reactions and is susceptible to moods of depression and anxiety.  Your body stands by you without asking for any reward, and its steadiness far exceeds the shifting winds of the mind.

     

    Consideration.  Your body doesn’t demand consideration, but it will reward you amply if you show some.  It’s considerate to walk away from stressful situations.  Stress puts enormous pressure on the body’s coping mechanisms, and that includes the stress of loud noise, congested work environments, excessive physical demands and emotional upset.  You may consider it recreation to run a marathon, for example, but you should consider your body’s viewpoint.  Another basic consideration is rest and regular daily rhythms.  Instead of waiting until you are too tired to go on, provide rest several times a day to your body – all it takes is a few minutes sitting quietly with your eyes closed.  A predictable routine for meals and exercise also shows consideration.  If you are used to irregular habits, it may bore you to adapt new habits, but if you persist for only a week, you will notice a positive response from your body.  It will be more relaxed and at the same time more responsive and energetic.  Even the most minimal effort at exercise, such as getting up from your desk and stretching every couple of hours, injects a bit of personal attention to the body.  Keep in mind that your attention is a basic nutrient that your body needs.

     

    Honesty. In personal relationships, it’s a strain to keep up a false front, and the same is true for relating to your body.  In both cases the falseness usually comes down to self-image.  You look at your body and want it to match your ego’s desire to look good in the eyes of others.  People spend thousands of hours in the gym, not for the sake of the body, but to satisfy an ego-ideal of beauty, vanity, strength, and security, and to fit in with someone else’s expectations. Body image is a huge problem for many people, and classically woman are the most distressed about it.  You can reframe the whole problem by comparing our body to the person you love the most in the world.  Do you really care what that person looks like in the mirror?  Do you denigrate that person for not fitting the image of a supermodel, not being at their ideal weight, not having biceps or big enough breasts?  Does growing older make that person less valuable in your eyes?

       The reason those considerations don’t matter is that you are relating to a person, not to an object that must match an ideal image.  Now think of your body as a person who is just as intimately related to you.  You don’t even have to call this person “me”.  By any name your body has been relating to you as the most faithful of friends, and once you regard it that way, ego image becomes irrelevant.  In short, learn to personify your body, and they you won’t be so tempted to objectify it.

     

    Mutual cooperation.  You can’t expect your body to serve you if you give it nothing to work with.  The body of a middle-aged executive isn’t out to sabotage him when the man decides to shovel a foot of snow from the driveway. But if he has ignored his heart for years, there is a danger in sudden hard exertion, perhaps fatal danger.  The key to the body’s reliability lies in cooperation: only ask for as much as you have given.  Compared with other intimate relationships, your body asks for a fraction of what it is willing to give in return.  This is another area where it helps to personify your body instead of objectifying it. Think of your body as a willing worker who wants only a meager salary, but who cannot survive on nothing.  The salary it asks for is paid in personal attention. If you genuinely want to cooperate with your body, paying it a little attention makes proper diet, exercise and rest easy – you will be providing those things because you want your willing worker to be happily employed.

     

    Loving appreciation.  Your body is going to serve and uphold your interests for a lifetime.  It’s only fair to appreciate it for this service, and if possible to appreciate it with genuine affection.  Most people are far from doing that.  Instead they look on their bodies like old models of cars that will need more repairs and cause more trouble as they wear out.  This causes a serious disconnect.  What they want from life-a future that’s more comfortable and fulfilling-is mismatched to a body that grows more uncomfortable and disappointing. The mismatch isn’t the body’s fault, however; it’s the product of beliefs and assumptions born in the mind.  We all relate to loved ones who grow older, and if we’re lucky, we relate to them better as they age.  Familiarity breeds fondness in this case, and appreciation flows more naturally.

     

    The same should hold true with your body. Being a familiar companion, you can grow fonder of it over time.  The two of you settle in to a shared life, knowing things about each other that no one else can possibly know.  If this sounds like a marriage, that is rightly so.  The highest aim in life is the marriage of mind and soul, and since the body links the two, it deserves to be part of a more perfect union as the years unfold.  This isn’t a fantasy that tries to compensate for the advance of physical aging. It’s a realistic way to approach you own awareness.  If you aim to be more aware, wiser, and more fulfilled in the future, invite you body to join that future as an equal partner.  When the body, mind and soul are matched, the results will be far different from when they are alienated from one another.”

               Deepak Chopra

     

    So, as you head into our studio for your next practice, just remember, you are not alone, but with your closest buddy ever, your body!

     

     

    Imagine the attention, love and appreciation we are putting into our bodies each time we do our yoga. 

     

    It will respond in kind!

     

  • One Step Off……………..day 9

    Yoga and I were just a tad off today.   I was a little late in all postures, and didn’t seem to have full throttle, just second gear. 

     

    The wood fire wasn’t roaring like usual, so I was lukewarm but not sweating warm, and my mind once again intruded.

     

    Some postures found me out of breath, which I noticed because; I then began to breathe again.

     

    It is funny that more than one thing seemed to be just a little off, but the lady kept going through the motions, forever it seemed trying to catch up.

     

    By the time I would have the energy or breath to push harder, the posture was over.  Or when I had the breath to stretch deeper, it was time to relax.

     

    I think I needed a slower yoga, a gentle start, some breathing space, and then the serious bending/pulling, and then a long rest… with plenty of warning that the next one was coming.

     

    Yoga and the Lady one step off.

  • Out of a Cocoon. Day 8

    When I was doing the standing postures today, I felt very deeply that I was the one who controlled this body.

     

    Meaning It is up to me to get up each day, to push it as far as I can in each posture, and to be aware of my body.

     

    The feeling that no one was coming to step in front of me and do this physical fitness had two distinct sides.  

     

    One being great no one can stop me, and the other was oh boy will I be able to keep going?

     

    In Deepak’s latest book, Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul he writes.

     

    “Expect the best.  You don’t let go so that something good might happen. You let go so that the very best in yourself, your soul, can merge with you.  By itself, letting go of a bit of anger, a bit of fear, a bit of resentment, might seem tiny.  I’d reframe the situation.  Imagine that you are used to living in a small cramped house.  You’ve become so used to this claustrophobic space that you almost never go outside.  Yet there are carefree moments when you think it would be nice to experience a wider world.  So you open the door, and as you step outside, you confront a vast landscape, filled with light and extending to infinity in all directions.

     

    Ah, you think, here is joy and love.  Here is real fulfillment.  So you roam outside, wanting to abide in this land of light forever.  Yet after awhile you get tired of this love and joy.  Somehow the space outside is too vast, the horizon to infinite.  You miss your familiar house, and it pulls you back.  So you return, and it feels safe to be back.  You resume you familiar existence.  For a time you’re content again, but you keep remembering the vast, unlimited space outside.  Once again, you step out, and this time you stay longer.  Your sense of love and joy isn’t so tiring.  The space outside is still infinite but that doesn’t frighten you so much.  The light that shines everywhere isn’t so blinding, and you resolve that this time you will abide here forever.

     

    This is a parable about the ego and the soul. The ego is your safe house; the soul is the unbounded space outside.  Every time you feel even a moment of joy and love, freedom and bliss, you have stepped into the land of light.  You feel so wonderful that you want to keep the experience going, the way two infatuated lovers never want to be apart.  But your ego, your safe house calls you back.  This pattern of coming and going is how letting go works.  It takes repeated exposure to the unbounded soul for you to know that it is real. But your old conditioning will keep pulling you back.  In time, your trips outside will last longer and feel more comfortable.  Your soul is starting to seep into you; with this merging you begin to understand that you can live in the unbounded permanently. It becomes more natural than your safe house because in the unbounded you are the real you.”    Deepak

     

    It is so good to know that it is normal to want to sneak back to the comfortable cramped place.  And that it may take a few times of coming out into the new landscape to feel comfortable.

     

    Sometimes fear arises, but now it seems I am more fearful of getting left in the dark, cramped, unhealthy, and old conditions.

     

    Doing this 60-day yoga challenge has me going outside each day getting used to living unbounded.

     

    It literally feels like I am unraveling what has kept me bound and motionless. 

     

    Like coming out of a cocoon! 

     

     “Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over, it became a butterfly.”   -proverb

     

     

  • My Truth is showing…..

    Yoga photos on day 7 of 60- day Bikram Challenge! 

    The Yoga Lady being created in my sewing place.  This is where I do my yoga.  IMG_1827
      My feet are usually together…..

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    It feels like I have such a bow, sorta disappointed……

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    And it doesn't improve upstairs bow still the same….oh well it is the beginning.

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    And this feels like my thighs are horizontal…oh my, I have a ways to go.

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    Wow, what a roll, I mean a bow!!  It feels so different then the picture looks!

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     I am hopeful that someday I will be happy I took these revealing photos, showing just where I am at week seven.  I hope this inspires you!

  • Seven days into the reconstruction of a stronger healthier me!

    As emotion poured out of me, and down my cheeks and into my ears, with knee quivering, hands softly rubbing my body, I lay there and listened to foreign words, being sung by a kind man, Bikram. 

     

    He is very tough and demands lots from me in each pose, as he twists and wrings my muscles, or points out my weakness as my knees wobble striving for balance, he requires 110% always.

     

    I am happy he set the bar high, that he won’t allow less than my utmost best.

     

    In the past I felt that those who loved you should give you slack, what I now know is that those who love you the most demand the most from you, never letting you slip into a lesser version of your self.

     

    As he ends the floor exercises, he comments, “one of these days, you will know what this yoga is all about, this yoga makes you you.”

     

    He also says, “no one on this earth knows the purpose of your birth.” 

     

    I hear him saying we are free to be who we are meant to be, that others don’t know what our inner desires and needs are, and we may not, for I for one served so many, but never myself. 

     

    I feel such gratitude that this yoga will return this body to me, and give me the strength and courage to be more and more myself. 

     

    Thank you all my yoga buddies for walking with me, for it brings me great peace knowing you are all there.  Each of us will be much stronger and more ourselves by the end of the 60 days.

     

    Seven days into the reconstruction of a stronger healthier me!

     

  • I took the first 90 minutes! (day 6)

    It is day six and I once again I pushed this body out of bed, put on my yoga clothes and began.  There were no aches and pains as I began.

     

    I had slept much better last night, so I felt awake and aware, but yet my mind kept wandering, like it wasn’t interested in yoga, and it led me everywhere.

     

    Everywhere but doing yoga!

     

    There I was in the middle of a pose, and not paying attention.  It was funny in a not so funny way.

     

    I remember when I first did this yoga many years ago; I would close my eyes in the floor postures just to stay focused on the yoga and my body.  And I had to have the volume up high to drowned out my thoughts. 

     

    So, today I did both.  I am sure Bikram would not approve, but I had a blind friend who did this yoga, and so I thought, what is the difference if I close my eyes.

     

    Everyday there seems to be a new ‘enemy’ or thing that wants to get ahead of the intention of doing yoga.

     

    As I lay on the floor with the yoga completed, I felt like I had stolen something from the nagging laziness.  That I had gotten ahead of the day even and took my piece first, before it could overwhelm me with all its needs.

     

    One of my yoga buddies talked about carving out a piece of her day for yoga, to make the time.  What I am thinking is all we have to do is steal it ahead of time.

     

    To jump in before the day gets busy and life pulls us on, to wake before the day awakes. 

     

    When I can begin moving before my old habits stumble awake, before they are even aware, I am in my yoga clothes standing on the mat.

     

    Today they tried to play with me while in yoga, but I was just as determined to do whatever it took to stay with the yoga, with eyes closed and Bikram speaking loudly in my ears, I took the first 90 minutes!

     

     

     

     

     

  • Tug-O-War Yoga! (day five)

    Woke up not as enthused today, but continued down the steps, hoping my attitude would change sometime during the next 90 minutes.

     

    My night was broken up with kids going to bed at all hours, and for some reason I didn’t stay unconscious of the activities of the house, so I woke up feeling tired in body. 

     

    I work today tossing mail, so I was determined to get a good nights rest, so I could bounce up to do yoga and off to work.

     

    It seems the more I focused on resting the less rest I got! 

     

    It wasn’t a bad yoga session, I just wasn’t fully into it, but instead just accepted the next position he put me in.

     

    I lost track of what pose we were on and even if it was the first or second set.  Confusion doing yoga it seemed.

     

    My balance was off on the one-leg postures, and I gave 100%, but didn’t push that extra 10% he wants.

     

    I think if I would have tried the extra 10, I would have just sat and given up totally or cried.  It seemed like 100 was all I had to give.

     

    It was a struggle just to be doing the yoga itself; I wasn’t capable of adding the extra push, for it was a push just to be doing yoga.  My usual interest to see where my body was, or how much has improved was nowhere to be found.

     

    I was just a tired lady trying to maintain day five.

     

    When it was all over, I felt great relief and actual success in having done it when my body was very reluctant and my spirit in acceptance mode.

     

    The only part of me that wanted to do yoga was the inner desire to be healthy, and it seemed I fought the body and energy to do get through each pose.

     

    Tug-O-War Yoga!

     

  • I did it my Self….(day four)

    Today before my mind could even grab onto a different plan, I was standing in the basement, putting in the CD.

     

    I wasn’t as sore, but still a tad tender in my back and rib area, but way ahead of the past three days. 

     

    My brother told me I wasn't supposed to be sitting on my feet, but they were to be off to the side, and my bottom in the air descending slowly, so today I did that.  I have only a few inches to hit the floor.  Progress!

     

    It really does pay to keep doing this every day.

     

    What I think we all need to do when we begin something new is to be okay learning, being awkward and out of our depths.  To relax in the newness to this yoga, chuckle even at how far we are from where we need to be.

     

    On a scale of one to ten, I thought I was about a 2 or 3 in most poses, but I think after watching myself in the mirror, I would rate myself closer to 5, about half way there.  It feels good to know how far I have come, by doing this on and off for many years.

     

    Imagine how far I will leap ahead, If I can make it downstairs each day, and give 110% to each pose, and allow my body to feel pain and discomfort for 90 minutes and for 60 days straight!

     

    I will be in territories I have never been before. 

    Amazing!

    And I can say, I did it my self!