After yoga class, I'll have a latte

This morning I had an…er …text from a friend who attended my class earlier. She had a lot going on in her life and for the 75 minutes she devoted to herself, it would seem that that would have helped her unload a lot of grief, stress, tension. And for that block of time, she might have. However, in this particular text she was ranting about the traffic, and the inconvenience of having locked herself out of her house, of her children’s screaming demands, of the weight and entirety of the day that unfolded before her. I quipped, “a lot of good the yoga the did.” We joke like that. “Well,” she wrote back, “you should have seen me b4 the yoga.”

Which of course got me thinking about yoga and it’s residual effects on the rest of our day. We take class, and work hard to incorporate the instructions, we will our breath to make it’s magic and introduce us to a new place, a deeper place a more patient, more resilient more consistent place inside of us. Only to fold up the mat, walk out the door to a rushed latte and a back log of missed calls – and did we really change anything about the way we might choose to move in the world that day?

Is it too high of an expectation to think that 75 minutes practicing to breathe a little better, stretch out some tighter places within us, might actually help soften the side of us that so easily unravels at the lost car keys, the wrong directions, the litany of daily pressures that may present themselves, one after the other? As a student, there are many times I come to class and leave a completely different person. My body feels looser. My mind for a nano-second might even feel clearer and there is a lingering moment where this clarity grabs hold of me and my awareness kicks in and I can take the short walk from the studio to the car, like a 3 year old might (minus the tantrum) and take my time noticing things like leaves rustling, or cars whooshing by, or rain falling and actually liking it.

How long does it last? At what point does that spaciousness get swallowed up by all life’s frustrations big or small? I suppose the lifespan of that feeling fluctuates. Even in the midst of my yoga practice, I grapple with how I want poses to feel, versus how they might actually feel that day. I work sometimes tirelessly to re-direct my focus to the task at hand – my body, my breath, a specific instruction instead of the ten million other things that start mentally cramp my space. The practice itself is filled with moments of deep contemplation, and straining overexertion – of triumph and of vulnerability. Of calm acceptance and over-reactiveness.

As a teacher, I always have this urge to encapsulate that post yoga feeling for my students. To help my students feel so weighed down by the bliss of their own experience that nothing about their day would rattle them. That the work they have done, the focus they have chosen to cultivate would somehow create a force field of protection against an easy tendency to break down or fall apart.

But then I recognize how unreasonable I am being. Yoga is not a cure for our bad days. It is not a magic spell we cast and become immune from our own little tantrums. If we keep placing those expectations on our yoga practice, then we have removed the very source of who is creating the behaviors and making our choices in the first place.

I DON'T DO YOUR YOGA

The other day I was sitting at the pool at my parent’s East Norwalk apartment and was talking to a woman about, what else, yoga. I was... er pigeon-holed into the subject matter as soon as her mother swam toward me and said, “Oh, you are the yoga lady.”

Truly, I am always happily surprised when people have heard about our yoga studio.

Her daughter, about my age, talked openly about all the great things she heard about the studio but then said, “I don’t do your yoga. I do Bikram.” She almost sounded apologetic.

Of course my immediate reaction is always a little defensive. (Immediate reactions I suppose have a history of hurting and not helping situations). Luckily, my defensiveness was concealed and I was able to affirm her preference for “her” yoga by saying my stock response which speaks to the tune of, “whatever helps you to connect to a fuller, healthier life is good yoga.” This piqued her interest, not that I was earnestly trying to sell her on “my” yoga. And while this may have been my own version of subliminal SYJ advertising, I was being completely sincere. I truly believe that if your yoga practice makes you feel good in your life, makes you see and experience your relationships with a deeper and richer perspective, makes your body feel strong and healthy and pain free, then it’s a good working yoga. It’s natural for us to spend our energy defending and protecting our practice, our systems of choice. We covet the deep experience our yoga teachers and yoga studios create for us. We want everyone we know to get what we get. Mitchel often says, “you are a yogi hidden in plain sight.” Yoga is not a messianic world. You are not yoga’s messenger or yoga’s evangelist nor should you care to convert others close to you to do your yoga. Just be yourself, and let other’s be themselves and you will be doing your yoga a great justice.
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LIfe is good

In front of me driving home from dropping off my son at school this morning was an old red jeep. The wrangler model. The one many of us maybe fantasized about having in high-school. Soft top, open on all four sides. Compact enough and somewhere between a convertible sports car and a four wheel ride. An unpretentious, laid back cool car that sits somewhere on the spectrum of freedom and security. Today was a bit too cold for the sides to be off and the top to be down but I noticed it anyway mostly because I was trailing behind it for the eight or so miles back to my house and mostly because as I was finally left alone in my car, at not even 7:45 in the morning, I turned up the music, finally able to listen to the songs I chose to blast and sing, belt freely out loud with my hand thumping the wheel - I stared out at the signature spare tire that hung onto the back of this red jeep like an old school backpack: "Life is good" was branded in bright white bubble letters across the cover that apparently was custom to fit the tire.
Life is good. And when I stopped at a light, I got close enough behind to even see the slogan's familiar commercial trademark. Funny.
But it got me thinking about the driver. I could see into the front seat and noticed something beaded and dangling from his front mirror. Did he remember his anthem that he so casually called out to passersby and drivers everywhere. Life is good. After all, he emblazoned it on the back of his car and rode around his world like an advertisement, a mobile banner. It was not a bad message to be reminded of. Especially some days when sealed up inside your car, doing the perfunctory drive, lost in whatever initial mood set you off that morning.
I looked up again and smiled. It's a good thing to have reminders because life is good, mostly good. It wants to be good inherently. It wants to recognize the places in the world where good can even be good enough. My life is good, I reflected. Now I was sharing, instead of my assumptions and my tendencies toward comparisons and my wondering about the driver in the red jeep. Life's richness was all around me.
It is filled with the banter of 3 growing boys and their noises and pleas for my attention constantly. That is good, I suppose.
It is filled with the conversations I get stirred up in with my husband and his ideas about the world and his projects and yes at some point he will move the beautiful new fixture over the dining room table eventually. And it is good that he can do that and I don't have to call somebody to do it.
It is filled with the beauty of still getting up at night sometimes with a toddler, but also with a young man toddling into adolescence. It is good that he still wakes me up too sometimes to tell me he needs something because in a few short years that will be a memory in a story only.
It is good that I am healthy. Life wants to be healthy, doesn't it?
It is good that I make eye contact, even with those who might not want it. Life wants contact always. I know that.
It is good to say things like I was grateful for the reminder. Certainly, it is not only easy but damn automatic for us to shield ourselves up in our cars warding off the sounds, smells the sights or the way that life always wants to reach out and touch you like I chose to see that it did to me this morning. Reach out with it's car tire messages which if you chose to you can make the turn and never hear it, see it or think about it. Or you can sit in front of it, remembering what you might have forgotten when you drove out of your driveway this morning.

Bar-Mitzvah mom

A few years ago, my son was asked by an acquaintance of mine what his religion was. He paused for a moment and then in his most serious and high pitched young boy voice he said matter-of-factly, “My dad is Jewish and my mom is a Vegetarian.”
The humorous irony to this statement is that I am Jewish too. Yet, at the time my son said this I was so staunchly devoted to my yoga practice, so invested in all the trimmings of what I thought defined me as a yogi (like hardcore vegetarianism) that he perceived me as belonging to a different faith altogether. Wearing all the spiritual emblems and trinkets was not nearly enough. Instead of keeping kosher, I kept vegan. Instead of acting on my tendencies toward mild hypochondria, I renounced antibiotics altogether. While my peers were renovating their kitchens and bathrooms I was replacing my four- poster bed with a mattress on the floor; and my refrigerator door was stamped with photos of my children and of my latest Indian gurus. ,At this time, it was the trappings of a yogic life that made me feel closer to being a yogi.
I was young in my yoga relationship. And if it was a new love in my life it resembled more a dynamic of a controlling lover boyfriend who was trying to turn me (literally twist me) into what it wanted me to be rather than giving me the space to realize and become comfortable with who I was at the time. Though it was an incredibly powerful time to have found yoga, I was willing to lose myself in the rapture of my new passion that I felt I had to become something else altogether.
No wonder my son was confused. I had so apparently adopted a whole different lifestyle, an “other” lifestyle, an identity stitched together by different rituals of other cultures. I had shrines next to my menorah. I had a mezuzah at my door and burned Nag Champa incense in my bedroom. Yoga was new to my life, and I was so captivated by my practice, so enraptured by the peace and energy it afforded my hectic life after I twisted and bound my body into the poses, that I wanted to decorate my life with everything I associated yoga with. It was only many years later when I realized that it wasn’t yoga who was the controlling lover boyfriend, it was me trying to renounce and change everything I was. It was the yoga that led me back to the very point of yoga: that engaging in my life, communing with its beautiful chaos, it’s richness and challenge and beauty gifted me the freedom to recognize who I really was, and thus, made me feel more affirmed, more comfortable to be myself – to be even greater than the self I knew.
So, many years later, this past December when I watched my son stand on a Bima holding a Torah about to become a Bar-Mitzvah, I was flooded with the deep sense of these connections. The most poignant moment for me was an intimate one. It was before the service actually began and the Rabbi and Charlie were taking photos together. The Rabbi took the Torah out of the arc and handed it to Charlie who held the scroll over his shoulder and posed for the picture. I watched my son hold the Torah and something in me stirred. I have always felt a closeness to my Jewish heritage, even when I had moments in my life where circumstances and life choices might have distanced me from my "Jewishness," there has always been a deep regard and sense of loving the faith with which I had grown up, the customs that often served as a gentle reminder of a people I belonged to in some regard. So watching Charlie stand there - a young man holding this emblematic book - touched something in me that spanned a long history, both a personal connection I felt toward my religion, but also an historical and ancient bind where I felt the beaming pride of mothers in every time looking to the value of this day.
How did I move from the radical yoga fundamentalist who refused to acknowledge the existence that another faith existed outside of a devoted asana practice to where I am now? How did I get get there? I guess the answer is simpler than it might appear. To be in any healthy relationship you have to be comfortable with who you are. At the beginning, I was restless and unsatisfied with who I was. I thought I needed to fix things about myself, adjust my life to complement this idea of yoga I had yet to understand. I thought I had to squeeze all the qualities and aspects that made up who I was into the confines of a myopic and stifling superficial yoga box. This would always be a struggle, until I recognized that at the core of it all, my yoga has lead me to develop a deep comfort in who I am as a person, and has gifted me the freedom to participate and relate to the world through the many kinds of relationships I have with and as myself be it a Jewish woman, a mother, a teacher, a friend, a daughter, a sister, a wife and a yogi.

Saraswati is the Word

One of the things I love most about my job is the chance I have to play with words. While so much of Hatha yoga in our culture finds itself confined almost obsessively by the talk of physicality and alignment; the body and its possibilities -- it is the access I have to words that inspires me the most.
And there are a lot of words tossed around the yoga room. Elusive, ethereal words that float across the air and hang almost oppressively out there like someone's stagnant shallow breath. You know, "those" words. There's the word but not the meaning. There's the word but not the story. There's the word but not the content or the connotation or even the subtext. Words loiter around like movie extras, some more jaded than others but still they wait like undiscovered talent costumed with images waiting for that big break, the right delivery, recognition, to land somewhere. These words have potential and talent and possibility to reach us deeply, touch us in places where contact is so surprising that our body literally softens. "Ahhh." Yet, we as teachers so often and so impulsively and even somewhat promiscuously toss them into a verbal nonsensical salad of pseudo spiritual wisdom and maybe a little grasping humor.

Breathe.
Consciously.
Breathe.
Consciously.

We remind ourselves often of the most obvious things on our yoga mats: To breathe more fully, to think more expansively, to feel more possibility. To affirm and re-affirm the most fundamental parts of our daily human lives. Do we forget? Do we get confused? Do we get so bogged down by the spell (of our own casting)? The curse of our unreasonable expectations, the grip of our overreactions, the emptiness of unresolved, stubborn behavior that sits perched in our lower backs or our hips; Like Hanuman's shadow, pulling us back by the ankles from our inherent desire to plunge forward into the gutsy dance of life and union and party and community? We get fixed in place like an old armoir that sits in the same corner of your bedroom leaving a permanent impression in the plush carpet. We get immovable and weighty. Weighty with our own thoughts, our own sensitivities, our own diets, our own choices, our children, our own daily dailiness.
In yoga, the word "guru" and weighty mean the same thing. It is the guru who is heavy with knowing, literally one who is weighted down with possibility, with recognition, with the knowing and seeing of a moment. The "guru" possesses such fluency of life that life's gifts are never dulled, or absent or denied. The guru is weighty with value, so much so that choosing the right word, the right career, the right fit, is no longer elusive or a challenge. Choices are clear and doubt becomes only a momentary border to consider and then release. Just the idea of being that grounded. Heavy. Earthly. Guru.
Yoga is beloved by so many because I think it is the great reminder. The space where we begin a relationship with space. A space to release ourselves not to become more absorbed with ourselves, a place to remember our gifts and cultivate them, not toss them aside like an outdated magazine at a medical office. A space to see our gifts with tender eyes and tolerance. With patience, with belief, with wonder. Where do these opportunities go during the cycle of a day when we leave our mat and tread out into the world? Where does the opportunity go when we seal ourselves in our cars and drive our children around town, where the stamina becomes not at all about holding the weight of our own bodies in downward dog but becomes about the ability for us to hold on long enough to the knowing and feeling and believing in our own miraculous gifts. Where does the extraordinary go?