Tag: 60-day Challenge

• I Did Not Run Away!

  “I did it,” I said as I completed the last pose, I did it and I felt this accomplishment deep within, I did it.

   

  The overwhelming emotional feeling of victory settled all around me as I was bathed in the feelings of success.  A success between my relationship with my body and I; I had kept my word!

   

  I am learning how to be present,  be aware and to be honest with my body, what I put in my body and how best to treat it.

   

  For so long my relationship has been distant, aloof, uncaring and neglectful and my body displayed that marvelously.

   

  The body is such an incredible living mirror; it can only reflect how you treat it, nothing more or nothing less.  It simply responds.

   

  I am with a body that lived for years and years without a connection with me, for I didn’t want to feel its pain.

   

  Geneen Roth explains in her book Woman, Food and God, “…I tell my students that the greatest blessing of their lives is their relationship with food.  They look at me rather quizzically, but the sentiment sounds so lovely that they are willing to hear me out.  Then I say that we are not going to fix their relationship with food; we are actually going to walk through the door of their eating problem and see what’s behind it.  Instead of using food to avoid discomfort, they are going to learn how to tolerate what they believe is intolerable.”  Geneen

   

  I found out that I loved sweets for their ability to numb my body and make me tired, I am learning that by doing yoga it can wake me up and give me energy.

   

  It makes sense to me that I distanced myself from my body that I tried to shut it down.  It was hurt and abused. As a small child I had to shut it down to survive and I escaped with food that numbed the body so I didn’t have to feel.

   

  As you awaken this body back up, you do have to feel what you couldn’t feel way back when, but you feel more alive than you ever have felt, more powerful and confident knowing you can feel deeply and still breathe!

   

  When you numb out the bad feelings you also take the good ones too.  I didn’t know this. 

   

  I felt the rush of victory and accomplishment I did it! 

   

  I stayed with my body for 120 days I did not run away! 

   

   

   

   

   

   

  May 2, 2010

  60-day Challenge, abuse, bikram yoga, body, food, Geneen Roth, God, neglect, woman

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• Going Beyond the Challenge

  Deadlines and completing challenges seem to divert our attention to what is really going on.

   

  I have been doing Bikram Yoga for 113 days, I am in the middle of my second 60-day challenge, and in a week, I can say that I was successful in completing those two challenges, but what I would have failed to see is the affects and where I stand today.

   

  Challenges and deadlines become more concrete than the actual practice, they loom larger and get more attention than the actual affects the body wears.

   

  As I was doing my poses today, I could see where I still needed work, but also how far I have come, witnessed the strength and muscles that I have grown in the past 113 days; I am growing a yoga body. 

   

  This challenge is almost over and I know that if I were to feel success was completing It, and not completing each pose to its ultimate, I would be done.

   

  Done with the challenge, but not done becoming healthy and strong.

   

  I like the challenges, they keep me continuing, but each time one ends, I look in the mirror and know I want to keep going beyond the challenge.

   

   

   

  April 24, 2010

  60-day Challenge, Beyond, bikram yoga

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• Another Yoga Day is Done!

  When I entered my ‘studio’ today, the heat was there blowing from my roaring fire, very warm, my new long johns, were tighter than my old flimsy worn thin ones, and I felt immediately smothered.

   

  Instead of opening the door or changing clothes, I pushed play, and Bikram’s voice entered my space, and we were off.

   

  The heat helped, whereas the tight clothes felt like I was being strangled, everywhere, ugh.

   

  My tenacity to stay with Bikram no matter how uncomfortable I am amazes me.  I should have stripped naked and continued on, yet instead I was like a hotdog over a flame, ready to pop!

   

  Near the Mirror on the floor lay a sign, “Find your Joy!”  The simple clean letters seemed at odds with the room’s messy clutter, and me.

   

  Find joy in Rabbit when you can’t breathe and the clothes are so constricting, hot air surrounding you, ‘find joy’ sure where!

   

  Joy is found in Dead Body Pose and Bikram is Singing, another yoga day is done!

   

   

  March 4, 2010

  60-day Challenge, breathing, joy, Uncomfortable, Yoga

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• A Journey within a journey.

  It is day 42, with 18 to go, and I am feeling okay, I wasn’t overly excited to begin, but did it anyway.

   

  It is in the actions, or as an old friend used to say, “Just arrive.”

   

  Arrive to the mat, just place your feet together, hands under your chin and begin the breathing process.  Taking it one step at a time, and I will know when I cannot go a step further, and it is incredible that with an unwilling enthusiasm, I can still do yoga.

   

  In the acceptance mode I still get fully involved, and expend lots of energy, sweating and breathing, until an hour and a half slip by.

   

  The Spin Twisting Pose comes up and I know that I made it again, a journey within a journey.

   

  
  

  February 11, 2010

  60-day Challenge, arrive, begin, bikram yoga, journey

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• Yoga Is On Your Side!

  Mastering the Mind.  By Bikram Choudhury in his book, “Bikram Yoga”

   

  You will also require the will to insist on going- even when people are telling you you’re stupid to do so – and the discipline to make yourself try over and over again, to never give up no matter what the obstacles, until you reach your goal.  You need both mental toughness and physical toughness.  In all there are five qualities of mind that you have to instill; faith, self-control, determination, concentration and patience.  Like the eight forms of yoga, they operate interdependently and simultaneously.  The good news is that you’re already learning them.  As you continue to improve your body in Bikram Yoga classes, you will also naturally increase all five Raja Yoga powers.  And your mind will be tested and toughened under the duress that only my Torture Chamber and my unrelenting Dialogue can supply.  You will become distraction proof, emotion-proof, mood-proof, attitude-proof yogi, because you have entered into cosmic consciousness.  Here’s how.

   

  First, understand that the mind is at once the most important and the most complicated subject in human life.  With a foundation of mental strength, you can truly accomplish anything.

   

  Without control of mind, you can do nothing.  You have something, but you don’t know how to use it.  The greatest challenge we face as human beings is controlling and properly using our own minds.

   

  The mind is the communications system between the physical body and the Soul or Spirit; its primary responsibilities are to control the body and supply the Spirit with immediate and exact information.  When the mind instead gives distracted and wrong information, the Spirit cannot govern properly – in fact, it cannot assume control at all.  The ego-driven mind has had to rule for itself, and now it does not want to give up its ultimate authority over your life.  This is a bitter, perverse fact about human beings, but it is the truth.

   

  Without proper training, the mind will continue to give you the wrong information and divert your focus from your Spiritual goals.  The way it does that so successfully is with fear and desire – its primary weapons.  Like a drug dealer, the mind gets addicted to these two opposite but conjoined emotions, and when we are constantly reacting to our attractions and aversions to people, things and situations, we can’t see what really is and reopen the channels of our true Self, the Spirit.  That’s why I say that the mind has become our worst enemy.

   

  To overcome this will not be easy. The weak mind is ever growing, constantly feeding on your fears and negative habits.  And as my Guru taught me, the natural human attraction to something negative is NINE TIMES more powerful than our gravitational pull to toward the positive– another inconvenient fact.

   

  In the philosophy of yoga, we say there are five big negative behaviors, or Don’ts, which collectively are call Yama (in Sanskrit).  They are: harming or injuring others; stealing; lying; possessiveness or greed; and neglecting or rejecting the Divine.  The five Do’s, or Niyama, are keeping the body and mind pure; self discipline; training the senses; studying the Divine; and surrendering to it.  Now think of our own life:  Why are you so often drawn to the Yama, things you know are bad for you?  Why is it so hard to resist them, to get off your fat, lazy butt and go to yoga class?  The power of negative attraction.  Negative attitudes and emotions are like black holes in space, so powerful that they swallow everything that passes in front of their mouths, so even light cannot escape.

   

  Resisting them demands much mental strength and supreme control.  By regularly practicing Hatha Yoga and developing your faith, self-control, determination, concentration, and patience, you can break those powerful distractions…..”  Bikram Choudhury

   

  If you take nothing else from this section, know that each time you are about to change an old negative habit you are going against something 9 times stronger than the positive change you are making.

   

  I know this is true, coming from where I have walked; it literally felt like I was going up against an army of negative voices, to one solitary positive force. 

   

  But little by little you find your faith in your Self and your Spirit is walking with you cheering on each time you wrestle another choice from the mind.  It is once again the two choices, mind or you.

   

  Yoga is on your side.

   

   
  

  January 17, 2010

  60-day Challenge, Bikram Choudhury, bikram yoga, mind and negative pull, quilted yoga art

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