Spring Cleaning - Day 1

Success.
I hestitate to say that getting up to teach today at 5:15 doesn't count. Having to be at the studio, fold all of the clean towels, and get the room warm is not quite the same as crawling out of bed voluntarily and practicing your yoga for yourself. But, the Tuesday morning teaching gig is going to anchor my resolve to do this every day. So it counts, and I feel good. My lord, I've been up for 4 hours already! Actually, I had the strangest sleep pattern last night too. Maybe that big super moon is still affecting my circadian rhythm, but I slept deeply last night and woke up almost every hour feeling completely rested and agog that I had so much more time left to sleep. Strange how the mind starts playing tricks on you. My head feels clear and refreshed, though. I made some nummy chai last night to siphon out of the thermos after class. Finding true grit ... and self-bribery.

Spring Cleaning

I was talking to a yoga student yesterday. She's having trouble finishing up her master's thesis. In fact, she has no motivation to finish whatsoever after having "downgraded" from the Ph.D. program.

My thoughts were that she's got to do something to shift her paradigm. I'm in some of the same places professionally; I work as a scientist for the state but want to own my yoga/wellness studio. It's always complicated. I have family to consider and therefore feel a bit like I'm in professional purgatory; I can't leave my job, because my husband is still working toward his dream ... and I'm the stable force financially. But, when you make small changes to your goals, big things open up for you. That's just physics.

So, I suggested that my student start taking a regular 6 a.m. yoga class. I found that when I was exclusively an Ashtanga practioner, which requires 6 days a week of regular 6 a.m. mysore (self-led) classes, I was much more productive. When vinyasa and family came into my life ... that discipline fell apart. Strangely, that's when professional inertia set in. Coincidence? I think not.

I'm going to challenge myself to the same goal that I challenged her to achieve. Sure, I teach a 6 a.m. class once a week, but the other days I sleep in a couple of hours. My spring cleaning challenge to myself is to charge it Ashtanga style. Six days a week, I'll get up early and do my yoga. I'll take Saturdays or moon days off. I'm still planning on doing my group practice in the afternoons with my favorite master teachers. We'll just see what happens.

I thought this HuffPo article had some neat commentary on the subject of goal-setting.

Imbalance

"The most effective way to discover imbalances in ourselves: observe the way everyone around us is acting them out." - Elena Brower, Anusara teacher

This is a tough piece to contemplate for so many reasons.

Many of us (I know I do) pass a lot of judgment on ourselves. It's easy to overthink and overanalyze, especially for this left-brained yogi. I want to come up with a hypothesis and an explanation. Observation is key, but what if the filters we have prevent us from truly understanding how those around us act out our imbalances? It's easy to assume that someone is being reticent toward you because you're too frank. But maybe that's not it, maybe it's because they're jealous of your hair. Though I guess good hair could be an imbalance.

I remember in high school, I was told I was considered stuck up because I had good posture. Thus started the season of slumped shoulders. But what was really going on? My self-confidence shrank as soon as I started shuffling around the school. I became worried about what people thought about me. Self-confidence and strength, even if it only manifests itself through good posture, can be a threatening thing for people who have little of it. That manipura chakra of self-esteem will make itself known and may be construed as egotism as well. But with whom does the imbalance lie? I leave that question open for now.

The word "observe" is actually key. If I let myself interpret, that's where I personally get in trouble. My intuition is just not honed enough yet not to take it personally. I guess that's the first - and longest - step, learning to look and listen. As a yoga teacher, scientist, mom, I feel like I should be better at this skill. I'm not getting good at it fast enough, and that makes me feel like a failure.

My yoga studio just changed hands ... essentially it went into the hands of the teachers. So we've all submitted bios according to a prearranged list of questions about ourselves. I love the fact that we are supposed to discuss what scares us the most. Me: sharks and failure. I lived in Maui, Hawaii for a year in my 20s, and the Tiger sharks were brutal; they would go after any meat, dead or alive. I had a hard time going into the water on the surf board. Soon thereafter, I got certified to scuba dive in order to work through that fear. It's still there, but not as much.

Failure, however. I'm really scared to fail! I want to be good at the things I attempt. I want enough money to put my child through good schools. I want to make a difference in the world. I want people to remember me as someone who brought about deep changes. I work as a civil servant in public health, which means no real changes will happen for years ... if at all with the "starve the beast" mentality toward health and education that seems to making the rounds through various legislatures. I see little changes every day when I teach yoga - smiles on faces, a thanks for something I said. Every once in awhile it's big: when I was a new teacher over a decade ago, a student told me he quit smoking, because he couldn't get through my yoga class. It's amazing to make those little - and more tangible - changes in people's lives. Because the thing is, I'm still learning and trying to balance my chakras and practice forgiveness and gratitude. Many times, I think I'm no better at it than any of my students.

Up above my desk at work, I have a phrase from the Upanishads posted, something to help me with my fear of failure.

"You are what your deep, driving desire is. As your desire is, so is your will. As your will is, so is your deed. As your deed is, so is your destiny."

bFree bio

My name is: Brienne Brown
I'm from: Austin, Texas
My sun sign is: Aquarius
My nicknames are: Brie, Breezy
My favorite word is: brachiate
I wish for: A wellness/yoga studio/B&B in my backyard treehouse ... and a 4x4, hybrid, VW van with a ragtop.
I am thankful for my fabulous husband who gives me the time to be a yoga junkie.
What gives me peace: writing, reading and brachiating.
Three words that describe me are: intellectual, convivial, headstrong
though my husband has sweeter words for me: vivacious, persistent and stalwart
Why I chose yoga: It helps smooth out some of the extremes that come from being stubborn, skeptical and scientific. Yoga helps me listen to myself and others more carefully ... which is key to everything.
What inspires me most is: people who walk the walk.
Three words to describe my teaching style are: detail-oriented, challenging, forgiving.
I just can't live without: a library of books
My favorite food is: spicy, hot curry of every ethnic iteration
For fun I: practice yoga, read, rockclimb, travel, knit, look at bugs with my toddler ... preferably all at the same time
I'm most scared of: sharks & failure

The Yoga of Being a Badass Mom

It comes up again and again, the physical practice of asana sometimes deteriorates when you become a parent. There is so much personal time that one gives up as the journey of understanding another human being begins. It took two whole years to get my mula bandha back after giving birth to MoJo.

So last night after a yoga teacher meeting, my feathers were a little ruffled by hearsay. Some young, male teacher at some workshop somewhere apparently espoused the view that mothers could not truly practice yoga thoroughly because the responsibilities of parenthood would not allow them to go to their "man-cave" and meditate on the nature of being ... much less get their physical practice in.

First of all, whatever form the comment took, it reinforces gender stereotypes. My family works hard not to do that. My husband is an absolute angel for giving me plenty of time to work two jobs and follow my yoga passion. He cooks dinner most of the time, takes our little girl to school, and many times puts her to bed. He even scrubs the tub and toilet every once in awhile. In many ways - though he doesn't practice asana - he is a better yogi than I for taking up much of the parenting duty. I actually get my me-time to contemplate the world and my role in it.

Second, parenting is the ultimate yoga. It is uncomfortable and scary, and you must confront it head on. You must always be in the moment, expecially because that is where your toddler is. You must work hard to apply ahimsa (non-violence in action and thought), satya (truth), asteya (non-covetousness), aparigraha (non-possessiveness), saucha (cleanliness), santosha (satisfaction with what one has), tapas (inner fire and discipline), pranayama (breath control), dharana (concentration on one object), dhyana (steadfast medication or undisturbed flow of thought), and samadhi (oneness with that object). That last one is the hardest, especially when you're trying to reach through a temper tantrum. I could go on, but I think it's clear that these are not only ways to maintain a healthy connection with one's child but also life skills that the child will pick up with observation.

Third, my daughter and I have been practicing asana together since she was in the womb. We did urdhva dhanurasana and hanumanasana together. We survived labor. We did postnatal yoga together, and I would practice pranayama to get her to fall asleep to my deep breaths when she was cranky. We play airplane together now and practice walking up the wall into handstands and headstands. The little two-and-a-half-year-old did her first bow yesterday! And she loves practicing ujayi breathing ... though she loves devolving into pretending that she is snoring. I'd still call that pranayama, though.

It all boils down to new teachers vs. old teachers; we all know that we know nothing ... But, unless you're an old soul, that fact just seems like theory at the beginning. Sometimes we think we've touched enlightenment, because we've worked so hard to practice and learn. I was - and probably still am - guilty of pronouncing things as truth, when I may not know all there is to know about the subject. And, if I'm completely honest with myself, I should wonder why people come to me to learn what they already know deep down. What makes me an authority? Possibly, I'm a teacher not because I know more about the things we all know intrinsically, but because I have devoted time to the practice.

"The Electric Church" by Jeff Somers

I just finished "The Electric Church." It's one of those dystopias that can easily be turned into an action/adventure film. There are some good ideas in there. The System is in charge after the riots and Unification and more riots. The System Police are the ultimate overpaid, gun-wielding, bureaucratic bad guys. The Monks are the lobotomized proselytizers on the street who have a habit of "converting" those with no means, i.e. the seething masses who have few morals because they're just trying to make it to tomorrow, much less their 20th birthdays. Enter our narrator, the rare man who lives by a code.
It's good. It's fast. It's not brilliant or unique in toto, but it had some good ideas.
Picky point, but I wish Somers could have come up with more than one way to explain the taste of blood in the mouth of the narrator. He gets beaten up too much for the taste of blood to be described as "coppery" over and over again. I know this is the digital age, but pick up a thesaurus.

Now on to Midaq Alley, written by Egyptian Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz.

"Trying to Grow" by Firdaus Kanga

This is a gem of a book. It's about a Parsi (Persian) family living in India after partition in 1947. It's a semi-autobiographical account of a boy with osteo imperfecta (brittle bone disease) who not only has to deal with being different because he's severely handicapped, but also because he's an ethnic minority in a country that is struggling with it's post British identity. The characters in this book are so alive! Each one sparkles with his/her quirks and failings. It's hard to dislike even the most unlikeable characters, because each is so bizarre and human. Brit, the boy with OI and narrator, is so wry, witty, sassy, and thoughtful that he makes his family and friends look like a bunch of loving and doting clowns smashing themselves in and out of the clown car of his life. Everyone in this novel is "trying to grow" and almost all of them do, little by little.

One of the women in my bookclub is writing her dissertation on the diaspora that occurred after partition, so we had a unique look at the culture. Though the Parsis are not her specialty, she brought up some things she did know about this community. They're small and insular - obvious from the book. Also, they're Zoroastrian, which means that their god is the god of light or fire, and that they have fire temples and their dead are left on a hill to be picked clean by vultures. So little things that slipped by like Brit's mother being horrified by smoking cigarettes, start making more subtle sense. The funerals that occur start making more sense as well.

Beautiful read. So glad Penguin decided to pick it up and publish it again.

My birthday

One more revolution around the sun!