I M Perfect lady

Tag: Bikram

  • Who has Control?

    My expectations of the New Year aren’t about the New Year but rather about me.

    The New Year is neutral, a pile of days linked together, and many hours in which we live our lives.

    What we do within those hours is how our year will unfold, or more importantly how we will emerge on the other end.

    I went back on my blog and read some of my entries in January 2010, the beginning of my first 60-day Yoga challenge.

    It was incredible to read about the beginnings of my year doing yoga.

    Below is a section I quoted from Bikram’s book, and it shows the reality of what we are up against when we strive to make changes in our lives, what we are battling is gaining control over the mind.

    “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.”
    Bikram

    So if you are endeavoring to make changes in your life this upcoming year, please take note, that what you will be going against is a very powerful pull, 9 times stronger than your thought of change.

    Say your desire is to stop eating sweets; you will have the power to eat sweets 9 times stronger.

    And if your desire is to exercise or do yoga each day, you will be fighting a powerful pull 9 times stronger to stay in bed, lay on the couch, and do nothing.

    What I am most impressed with as I look back upon my year of doing yoga (332 out of the 365) is the sheer effort was exerted in getting to the mat.
    Even though the actual 90 minutes of yoga is rough, it is nothing compared to the struggle to begin.

    The real battle is not in the actual doing; it is in the seconds or minutes prior to the event.

    The fight ensues in the actual debate about whether you are going to abstain or succumb.

    To do or not to do is the where the war is fought.

    It isn’t about the sweets, the beer or the exercise; it is about the seconds of power right before, the space before doing or not doing.

    It is on that edge of time, that second where your life is determined, who has control?

  • Joined them back together.

    The way I described this past Christmas was an ugly beautiful one, where inside I was so dark and the outside so light, how mental psyche steers my world, not the decorations on the outside.

    I was clearly shown that no matter how I orchestrated and decorated and baked and made perfect the outside, it had no influence upon my inner world.

    It wasn’t even a blue Christmas it was black.

    Frozen darkness inside…is that called depression?

    Yet it was a moving depression where I was working on the outside to cheer me up inside.

    I always pictured depression as sitting in a stupor, unable to move. Is there a moving depression or a fallacy that if you can create a warm peaceful atmosphere you will have the same inside?

    What I think I thought, was that if you were dark inside you could change it up on the outside to help alleviate the feelings, yet what needs to happen is that you have to go deeper into the feelings, leaving the outside alone.

    When I started to spiral into darker feelings, I kept
    cleaning, instead I should have stopped and sat with my feelings.

    Writing and exploring why I felt the way I felt.

    I wonder if depression is repressed feelings, if denying them and focusing on changing the environment you live in, instead of investigating your feelings and relationships is the cause?

    What I feel is I was given a real life experience, situations and feelings that represented the flavor of my childhood, and then a dream to show where the seed was planted, how my mental psyche was developed.

    A main piece of the puzzle was cleared up for me.

    My father was happy and desiring me.
    And I was happy to please him.

    The sheer terror wasn’t there, perhaps too young to know…in my mind no terror.
    And my head seemed detached from my body.

    My body and head separated.
    Hence, no memory in my head, but my body held on tight to the trauma.

    I am filled with admiration for the little girl who so bravely withstood such trauma, who did her best to please in the most horrific of circumstances, all she wanted was her daddy to be happy.

    When it is over, and the child seems ‘unaffected’ it is because they no longer are one.

    The mind and the body separated.

    The body holds the truth while the mind was elsewhere.

    Bikram Yoga is about bringing the mind back to the body.

    In the 360 days that have passed, I have missed 32 days, days in which I was working so hard to reconnect my head to the rest of my body.

    To live as mind body and soul.

    Yoga is the yoke that joined them back together.

  • Yoga is the Winner this year.

    I began this year with a promise to do 60 days of yoga in a row, and I did. I then decided to do another 60 days in a row and I did, I believe I did 4 back-to-back 60-day challenges before my streak began developing holes.

    Today I am down 20 for the year.

    As I approached the mat today my body was stiff and weak and just not in the mood.

    Each posture I did my best, but my best looked like a beginners effort. I felt I was being asked to perform something far beyond my level of effort.

    What continues to surprise me is that the pain in my joints, my hips and lower back still persist.

    And along with the pain come the tears.

    You wonder how much a body can hold.

    What I wanted most was to be wrapped in a cotton blanket and swaddled in a quilt with a fluffy pillow and suck my thumb…to not move to make another joint scream.

    It still surprises me that I go to the mat for this torture, for the blanky option is available each day as well.

    I am not stopping on December 31st I will continue to yoga along, in hopes that one day I will come to the end of the body’s pain.

    339 days have passed by and I have tossed my blanket aside and stood on the torture mat for 319 times.

    He says, you can either suffer for 90 minutes or 90 years, pick one.

    Yoga is the winner this year.

  • Yoga Heals a Loveless Self

    “The purpose of yoga is to heal.

    Most people start practicing Bikram Yoga to flatten our stomachs, stretch our tight hamstrings, and/or to prevent future injuries. And yes it will do all of that, but those are the secondary benefits to practicing Bikram Yoga. The purpose of this yoga is TO HEAL and that healing takes place from the inside out. It works on a mental level (and spiritual level) to heal our minds. Only then can we begin to change our self on the outside.

    Bikram says, the yoga practice teaches us how to like our self and we start taking better take care of our self then we fall in LOVE with our self!”
    Karen Buckner

    What I didn’t know when I began this practice was how out of love I was with myself, and how my love of my self depended upon another.

    If they loved me, I was okay.

    I never loved me alone, by myself without doing for another.

    It is shocking how dependent we are taught to be on another’s good opinion, how we act/be/live/think/believe to be loved.
    To have another love us, yet we don’t stop and think what it would take for us to love us, alone.

    Doing was my self worth, which I mistook for love.

    I was worthless unless I was doing.

    Imagine this type of self-love where you give and give and give until there isn’t any energy left, until you are filled with resentment of the takers who are your love givers.

    Giving to get love?

    My damaged body is what drove me to doing yoga, with an arm hanging limply at my side, my upper shoulders and neck one huge knotted ball, I began to work on self.

    What I didn’t know was that I was actually filling up my empty tank inside and dumping out all the past beliefs about how to love, changing my inner beliefs of my self, one-second at a time, as I paid attention to my breath and body.

    Each day I brought my body to the mat, and focused on my breathing, as I twisted and bent this constricted body into unimaginable poses, I was changing deeply inside.
    It is a like strenuous physical magic, while I was concentrating so hard to change my body, my insides were healing, my sense of self blossomed, my inner strength to be me became strong, my mind sought clarity and the willingness to face what is…the list goes on and on.

    Yoga heals a loveless self.

    IMG_3331

  • Love of Self

    A good friend responded to my post on Sprouting Self Hatred, with a great visual, a thought that I could picture.

    “That picture is: yoga being poured as if out of a fancy vessel and killing the sprouting self hatred–over and over again. This yoga is like emotional Round-up!!!! What a concept. There is “out of body Beth” pouring Yoga on self- hatred.”

    She is absolutely right, doing yoga has been killing me softly, the me that was birthed in Self Hatred.

    Taking all the false beliefs and destroying them, eliminating the source of low self-esteem, little by little, pose by pose, I have been wrestling with hatred of self.

    What a battle.

    Sometimes it took Herculean energy to get me off the couch, out of bed, and on to the mat.

    Bringing my old self to do yoga, an old self that didn’t have any energy to love me, to care for me, it was that person that arrived on the mat.

    And each time I successfully accomplished another day of yoga, the hating me weakened and the Loving Me was strengthened.

    The stronger love I have of self, the stronger I can love.

    Jane Fonda yesterday was speaking to Oprah and she was talking about falling in love, how it is best to stand strong in love.

    I am learning to stand strong in love of self.

  • Thy Will Be Done

    A thought came to me last night as I lay down to rest, “Being a Victim is easy….”

     

    Being a victim requires NOTHING from you, you get to just sit and wait for the world to change.

     

    Victims always have someone to blame you are never held accountable, you are blame free, a loving kind individual and the world is beating you up.

     

    Someone is always coming in and wrecking your world so you lose your kind demeanor.

     

    It is by far easier to point a finger at the cause of why you act the way you act, than it is to change your actions.

     

    “If someone can steal your peace, You are the Loser”…says, Bikram.

     

    I just never felt to the depth of my soul, that being a victim was the easy way out that it required less than actually making a change.

     

    It seems that it is more painful to be a victim, but now I am wondering if that is true?  Maybe it is actually harder to change, to walk out of the old patterns, and do something different.

     

    Make a new response; require more from your self and less from the world, to bring back to you the ownership of all your behaviors.

     

    Instead of people out there pushing your buttons, keep your fingers on your own buttons; turn the buttons inward, so when you explode, it was you who did it, not some outside source.

     

    Changing from victim to empower is wearing your emotional clothes inside out, so all the buttons are on the inside, where there is no one to blame but yourself, each and every time you speak or act out, you are the only one hurting yourself.

     

    Is it possible to be Masochistic to self?

     

    It is a cycle of self-abuse.

     

    How is it easier to remain in that role, than it is to stop the pain?

     

    It just doesn’t seem right that it is easier to be hurt over and over, to have your hopes and dreams dashed again and again?

     

    How is it so much easier to be so out of control of your self?

     

    And yet, most of the victims I know are working so hard to control the world and yet are unable to see that they are the ones out of control in their own world.

     

    There is a slight but profound difference between being in control in a world that’s in control, or being out of control by and out of control world.

     

    The mirror affect yet again.

     

    If you are a victim, the world is out to get you.

     

    When you are not, the world is out to give you all that you could ever dream and more.

     

    It is literally impossible to be kind in a mad world, the laws of the Universe works beautifully always, "Thy will be done".

     

  • 254 days and counting….

    Today is day 260 on my yoga every day this year, and I missed 6 in the last two weeks. 

     

    Each of those days seemed impossible for me to either gather the mental strength or the physical stamina needed to do the 90 minutes of yoga.

     

    Yet if I look upon the other 254 days it seems like a huge achievement, a monumental success for me. 

     

    My body also is defined by the 254 days that I have done yoga, the muscles are stronger, the joints are looser and my mental clarity is way up, not to mention the unexpressed emotions that have been expressed in the 254 days.

     

    The days I missed, I was struggling with a twisted up emotional thread and it took all I had to untangle it, left zero energy to begin yoga.

     

    I am not sure how the final score will be at the end of this year, but so far the percentage is way in my favor.

     

    I may not be able to recoup my loses by doing doubles, I may end up with a few more days of no yoga, but what I know for sure, is already this year I have surpassed any of my previous years.

     

    As I look upon the last few weeks, they have given me huge amounts of relief and knowing, enlightening me on who I was and who I can be.

     

    254 days and counting….

     

     

     

  • Naturally relaxed….

    The more yoga I do, the deeper I go, the more places of stored tightness I find.  It is like there is a bottomless pit of resistance.

    When it comes time to relax and go to sleep these muscles flex subconsciously.

    I will notice my neck and shoulders are rock hard.

    It maybe my thoughts prior that urge them on, but I have to breathe and focus to get them to unfold and lay down.

    It seems my 'natural' state is to be stiff and now I am working to relax and reprogram my body.

    I look forward to day 146 of Bikram yoga and wonder how long it will take to be naturally relaxed.

    Imagine having to work to become naturally relaxed!

  • All the Gifts Awareness Brings!

    One hundred and four days into a new habit, the habit of being aware, of being responsible for my response to life, of knowing that I will always get the results I want depending upon my actions.

     

    My actions in the past 104 days has been to do yoga daily, to make it a priority to take care of this body, by giving it my attention, by moving stretching bending and stretching it into becoming more and more flexible and strong.

     

    I can’t get the results I want, without doing the action step.

     

    The action step is to get out of bed, to carve out time and space in my day to work on my body, to begin sculpting it into a new design.

     

    There seems to be only two habits in the world, the mindless effortless sleep habit or the action based awareness.

     

    I am making it a new habit to be aware in all things.

     

    It makes life alive and very responsive and I have the best seat in the house to experience and feel all the gifts awareness brings!

     

     

  • Relaxation Response.

    When I began doing yoga 92 days ago, the view was to make it to 60 days, yet I knew that 60 days of doing yoga and then returning to my old life, wasn’t what I needed.  I needed to add this to my life daily, for it to become a way that I treated my body, a habit, and not just a fleeting experiment in my life. 

     

    I didn’t know how I would endure this 90 minutes of Bikram yoga each day, but I wanted the results. 

     

    The requirement of me is do get to the mat each day, to challenge myself when things are the busiest, when time is crammed full of things to do is when I need this the most. 

     

    Once I begin my focus is on my breath, this pose, this second, and it enables me to then bring the same to my life outside of the yoga mat. 

     

    Below is a great example of why to do yoga daily.  I want to remain out of the flight or fight pattern, and in to the relaxation response!

     

    ”The autonomic nervous system is divided into the sympathetic system, which is often identified with the fight-or-flight response, and the parasympathetic, which is identified with what's been called the relaxation response. 

     

    When you do yoga – the deep breathing, the stretching, the movements that release muscle tension, the relaxed focus on being present in your body – you initiate a process that turns the fight-or-flight system off and the relaxation response on. 

     

    That has a dramatic effect on the body.  The heartbeat slows, respiration decreases, blood pressure decreases.  The body seizes this chance to turn on the healing mechanisms.”  ~Richard Faulds