7 Jan 2017

I Did It! (And So Can You!)

by | posted in: Day In The Life, Paean | 7
Fiber artwork depicting adaptive yoga by "FiberArtGirl" in 2012. Image: Wikipedia!
Fiber artwork depicting adaptive yoga by “FiberArtGirl” in 2012. Image: Wikipedia! See footnote.

 

I did it! Yesterday was Day 30 of my 30-Day Bikram yoga challenge. I did 30 classes in 30 days without skipping a single day. How about that. It took serious dedication, I ain’t gon’ lie. But it also wasn’t the hardest thing I’ve ever done because I was genuinely grateful to be there.

When I walked into the studio a month ago, my body was crying out for help. My knees were junky, my shoulder hurt all the time, and bad habits were catching up to me in all kinds of ways. I was hungry to do some work in that hot room, even if it hurt — and it frequently did. But when you have the right mindset about something, the struggle bus doesn’t seem like the worst way to get from Point A to Point B. At least you’re gonna get out of where you are, right? At least you’re going to have Point A in the rearview mirror before too long and if Point A is just that lousy, you can’t wait to see it getting smaller and smaller as you go forward. The struggle bus feels pretty good when you see that, even if where you are is kinda rough.

I don’t usually prescribe things or give advice — a girl needs to figure out her own life before she starts telling others about theirs — but tonight, I can’t help myself:

My dears, try some yoga.

There are PaperGirl readers out there who are practitioners already and I am mentally high-fiving you all. But for those who haven’t ever tried yoga or have fallen off their practice, I urge you with not a whiff of ecstatic-weirdo-convert or tiresome “Let me tell you how much you’re missing by not doing [insert thing here]”: Give yoga a chance.

It’s about breathing and stretching. That’s all. Yoga is not a religion. It’s not a threat. It’s just you.

“Yoga” means “union,” as in the union of your body and your breath, for example. You don’t have to be fit to start; that’s never been true. You can do yoga with injuries because there are modifications for every pose. People in wheelchairs do yoga;* people who have had spinal surgeries (and all kinds of surgeries) do it. You can move your toe one little inch and if that’s your yoga that day, if that’s you doing something good for your body, that’s terrific! You’re doing yoga!

I’m telling you, my knees don’t hurt right now. Really, after just 30 days of stretching and breathing and stuff, they feel great. My shoulder hasn’t felt better in two years. And I’m a very skeptical person! But the proof is in the mirror. My pelt is shiner. My eyes are sparklier. I don’t feel as sad as I did 30 days ago, either.

Hey, don’t take it from me. My mom — the one-and-only Marianne Fons — does regular yoga. She started years ago when a studio opened in Winterset and she credits yoga with helping her be more flexible. She loves how during “relaxation” at the end of every class — yoga classes end with “savasana” pose, which is basically like taking a mini-nap!  — she often gets great ideas, like what her next quilt will be, or how to end a chapter of her novel. Mom also says yoga gives her extra pep. We all want more pep, even Marianne, who was born with a pep surplus.

Yoga is not a contest. You don’t have to go in being “good at yoga”; the big revelation is that no one is ever “good at yoga.” Because that is not the point. Having yoga in your life is about taking a few minutes each day to love your sweet, tired, beautiful, tough, hard, soft, aging, sick, strong, fabulous, confusing, mysterious, gorgeous, true body. Nothing more, nothing less. You are so powerful. Did you forget? Yoga can help you remember. I promise.

Give it a shot this year. Tell them Mary sent you. Do any kind of yoga, whatever feels good. It can be “old lady yoga” or Bikram yoga. Ashtanga is way cool but it’s pretty demanding. Lots of gyms offer it, many cities that do Groupons will offer awesome deals to get started. Shop around. Get a pal to do it with you; that could be fun. Don’t see it as a New Year’s resolution; see it as your birthright to be a friend to yourself, to act on your own behalf.

Okay, advice over.

You know what I did to celebrate the completion 30 day challenge? I went to yoga. So I’m 31/30. Well, I also got a veggie burger from Devil Dawgs around the corner from the studio and mercy that thing was good. It’s the spicy sauce and the grilled onions.

*The image for this post came from Wikipedia as usual, but how neat that when I searched ‘yoga’ I found a quilt about yoga!! This was made by someone called “FiberArtGirl.” Way cool. Thanks, quilter. This is really lovely. 

 

9 Dec 2016

If I Tell You, There’s No Turning Back: My Bikram 30-Day Challenge Begins!

by | posted in: Day In The Life, Tips | 21
From Wikipedia: "Spc. David Kocian from the PA National Guard's 28th Combat Aviation Brigade teaches a yoga class at Camp Adder, Iraq. The 21-year Army veteran began teaching yoga during the 28th CAB's mobilization when soldiers showed significant interest upon discovering he was an avid student of yoga."
From Wikipedia: “Spc. David Kocian from the PA National Guard’s 28th Combat Aviation Brigade teaches a yoga class at Camp Adder, Iraq. The 21-year Army veteran began teaching yoga during the 28th CAB’s mobilization when soldiers showed significant interest upon discovering he was an avid student of yoga.”

 

I have committed myself to doing a difficult thing. I didn’t want to say anything here until I had actually begun the thing because I suppose I needed a head start or something. Here goes, for accountability’s sake:

Today was Day 2 of my 30-Day Bikram yoga challenge.

Bikram yoga, for the uninitiated, is a 90-minute yoga class that takes place in a room heated to 105-degrees. There are 26 postures and two breathing exercises; you do everything twice. The room has mirrors at the front and side. Everyone basically wears slingshots and hotpants because within 60 seconds of practicing the yoga, you are positively drenched with sweat. To say something is “hard” is to make a qualitative, subjective statement, I realize. But Bikram yoga? S’hard.

If you’ve been reading this blog from way back, you know I used to be a real Bikram nut. Almost daily, you’d find me in the hot room. I once did 100 classes in 100 days straight just to prove I could do it. I also did it because there is nothing, nothing like the feeling you have when you finish a Bikram yoga class. Even the ones that almost kill you — especially those. And I believe that several of my surgeries went better because I was doing regular yoga. Who knows? It didn’t hurt.

So why did I stop? In the past eight years since I found Bikram yoga, I have ceased my practice twice.

The first time I stopped was because something really awful happened. It’s so awful that it’s hard to say it but I am so buoyed and encouraged by the past couple days’ post comments, I truly feel like I can do anything — and that nothing feels better than telling the truth.

The first time I stopped my practice was because my ostomy bag leaked in class.

Yep, I did hot yoga for a number years while I had my ostomy. (I talked about it a couple times including in this post.) It was a pain. I’d tape it up with athletic tape and the top of my shorts would come up over it and I got so I timed when I ate and when I practiced so that nothing would be, um, active during class.

But accidents happen. I was doing the spine series, which meant we were all on our respective bellies doing locust and cobra poses and things. Well, I had a leak. When I got up to flip around and do the next posture, I had leaked onto my towel and mat. It could have been so much worse. But it happened. I just quietly gathered my towel and held it against myself, grabbed my mat and gave the teacher a, “I’m okay, but I am leaving now” look — I still remember what teacher it was and where I was in the room — and I didn’t come back for a long time. Maybe a year?

It wasn’t just the leak. I was probably burned out, which means I was probably doing the yoga for the wrong reasons or something, I don’t know. But I was so tired of being afraid that my worst fear would come true that when it finally came true, I had an excuse to rest. I think that’s called “giving up” and you know what? Sometimes, we give up.

But not for good! I returned! I was once again sweaty and half-naked in public while I was living in NYC and it was good. But then everything got so sad and tumultuous with Yuri. I tried to practice when I got to D.C. but I just didn’t have it in me. This yoga is the best medicine for anything — heart, mind, head, body, all of it — but it takes commitment and determination. All I could commit or dedicate myself to in D.C. was trying to learn a new world and let go of Chicago. I’m thrilled I gave up on that one.

So why now? Because I miss myself.

I miss hanging out with the me that can stand on one leg in 105-degree heat as sweat pours from the top of her head down into her eyes. I miss seeing that girl in the mirror. I feel like I’ve been making choices lately that aren’t serving me at all: late nights, too much wine, stuff like that, and I feel bad and sad about that a lot lately. It’s gone on too long. Besides, my shoulder still hurts terribly bad and my knees, too. I’m a jalopy right now and Bikram yoga is a body shop. In 30 days, I’ll walk out of there looking and feeling like a Maserati. Trust me. I’ve done it before.

So, yes. Every day. Thirty days. I promise I will not write about yoga much. But I’m doing this. For me. And now there’s no turning back the cat’s officially outta the hot, sweaty, bag. Gross!

p.s. Is there a Bikram studio near you? Wanna do this with me?? Woah, that would be so cool!!! There could be prizes!

6 Feb 2014

ArtSpy #071862: George B. Luks, Allen Street, c. 1905

by | posted in: Art, Day In The Life, New York City, Travel | 1
George B. Luks, Allen Street, c. 1905.
George B. Luks, Allen Street, c. 1905.

I was there today, right there to the left of the red chair. You can still see my imprint! I have a yoga mat on my back and I’m wearing really insane winter boots with saw soles.

My NYC yoga studio is in the Lower East Side at the corner of Stanton and Allen, the very same Allen Street George B. Luks captured so brilliantly in his painting. His version of the scene in oil and the handful of versions I snapped of it in Instagram aren’t dissimilar. These days, there are fewer bonnets — or are those burkas on Luks’s women? — on Allen Street, but there’s just as much stuff for sale and there are dress shops and people stacked on top of one another.

Luks was an artist of the Ashcan School. If “The Ashcan School” sounds fancy, that’s just what the Ashcan painters want you to think, but the name comes from the actual object: the ash can.

These guys were a belligerent bunch. It was around the turn of the 20th century they were doing their thing. The grand poo-bah of the (loosely affiliated) group was a newspaper illustrator named Robert Henri. He said he wanted art to be more like journalism: hard, honest, unflinching. The John Singer-Sargent stuff was starting to rot everyone’s teeth out, and Henri and his band of super grumpy painters wanted to portray the real people they saw in the cities where they all hailed from, New York City and Philly. Down-and-out beggars, rag-pickers, elderly indigent women, the unwashed masses — these were the subjects for the Ashcan guys. They painted on wood panels they found, on boards, on window shades. They got into bar fights. Luks was such a bad boy, he actually died in a bar fight in 1933.

In New York, on Allen and Stanton, I can feel the past bear down so hard on me, I actually tend to walk a little faster. I love it down there on the Lower East Side, but the air has an edge and it ain’t the rock clubs. It’s the tenement houses, long burned down. It’s the rag-pickers. It’s that Allen Street was Asylum Street for a good while — why? Because it was where the New York Orphan Asylum was, of course. There’s something in the grime that produces slides in my brain: hungry faces and brawling drunks; the smell of boiling meat, boiling clothing, boiling hot days in August.

Yoga was good. I’ve returned to my Bikram practice. It wasn’t so rough today, but I’ve been in class when there were forty or fifty people packed into that room. It’s no more than 450 sq. ft. and it’s heated to 105 degrees. I’ve been in classes so packed that when I did my forward standing bend, I’ve hit the butt of the girl in front of me with my forehead.

And the grime becomes you.

9 Jan 2014

Losing The Punishment — But Keeping My Figure.

by | posted in: Day In The Life, Story, Tips | 3
"And lift! And lift!"
“And lift! And lift!”

On and off (mostly on) for three years or so, I was a Bikram yogini. Bikram yoga is the hottest of the so-called “hot yoga” practices. The room is heated to 105 degrees. For 90-straight minutes you stand in very little clothing in front of full-length mirrors with the rest of the class. The twenty-one poses in the practice are always the same. And it’s as hard as it sounds, which means that it feels fantastic. Exercise is like that: the tougher the better — at least when it’s over.

But I got a little too into Bikram. The practice is advertised (!) as being most effective when it’s done daily; I jumped onboard with the fervor of a new cult recruit. I would frequently take two classes in one day. Two classes a day! Once, just to prove I could — I’m hesitant to admit this — I did three. Three Bikram yoga classes in a single day. But why?

Subconsciously or consciously, I thought Bikram yoga could fix me, cure me, make me acceptable as a person. Acceptable to whom, I do not know. I spent much of my twenties, I see now, concerned about everything that I felt was wrong with me. I don’t do that anymore. There’s plenty wrong and I haven’t given up aspiring to be more happy, more helpful, etc., but rather than seeing myself as a damaged, cute-but-junky heap in need of major renovations, I simply make tweaks and modifications to a person that I actually like pretty well. Dammit, I’m not broken. You’re not either. That’s the key to the lock.

Bikram drifted away, eventually. At some point, there came some peace; I needed it less. But to tell the truth, there was also a traumatic event that helped me let go: my ostomy bag leaked in class. Oh, yes. Yes, it did. If you’d like to live a nightmare, I recommend that one. The combination of feeling like I didn’t have to kill myself in class everyday and the desire to actually die when that happened put me off my yoga.

To keep my figure these days, I do dance aerobics because I love to dance. I mean I love to dance, though I’m hopeless in classes. In classes, I have two left feet. My dancing is best when I’m at a club or in my living room. Even in the construction, my condo becomes my dance floor. I put on legwarmers and short-shorts and pull my hair into a ponytail and hop around like a bunny rabbit, leaping and twirling and whipping my hair all around.

When I’m dancing, it’s fun. It’s not punishment. It’s not obligatory. I don’t do it three times in one day for 90-minutes a pop. Dancing like this comes from a place of spontaneous joy: it doesn’t work, otherwise. I sweat, I keep my figure, I smile. And I hope the neighbors in the mid-rise building across the street can see me. I do better with an audience. Always have.