You are currently browsing the monthly archive for April 2011.
What every spring Saturday should be like:
Window displays like this:
Little kids who make art out of trash and recyclable materials and set up shop on the street:
Buying said kids’ artwork, because it reminds me of when I made pins and magnets out of old puzzle pieces decorated with puffy paints and fingernail polish and tried to sell them at my parents’ yard sale:
Stores that sell nothing but flavored popcorn (I bought a bag of root beer):
Bakeries that sell THESE:
(and also peanut butter and raspberry jelly cupcakes, which is what I bought).
Being naked in my bedroom is a big deal.
You’d think nudity is a given in a bedroom, but not so much in our house. Our bedroom is located in the “attic” of our bungalow, which means despite our best efforts to heat it, the room is significantly chillier than the rest of the house most of the year. From around October through May, and especially during the dead of winter, disrobing in the bedroom is a grand effort involving a separate space heater, a microwavable neck/shoulder pillow that improvises as a bed warmer, flannel sheets, and about six blankets. Changing from my work clothes into my pajamas is done in about 1.7 seconds to minimize any bare skin-cold air contact. The bedroom is similar to a biohazard zone, in that I need absolute protection: knee-high wool socks, slippers, fleece pajama pants, long-sleeved shirt, a hoodie on top, and sometimes even a scarf.
It takes a significant climb in outside temperature for the upstairs and downstairs climates to switch. That “switch”–when I ascend the stairs and feel the air getting warmer and warmer–brings about a giddiness akin to what winter aficionados must feel during the first snowfall of the season. The switch is a sign of freedom: liberation from clingy, heavy clothes; socks that suffocate my toes; and heavy blankets that weigh me down through the night.
The higher the stair, the warmer the air??
It’s been in the upper 60s for the past few days, and the bedroom has been growing more tolerable (lighter socks, flannel PJs rather than fleece). Today we had a high of 80-something. Would this one-shot spike in temperature be enough to bring on the switch?
Ladies and gentlemen, this evening I stood stark naked in my bedroom.
I came home from the gym, peeled off my bathing suit upstairs, and stood with ZERO CLOTHES in the middle of the room. I actually did a victory cheer, raising my arms overhead and woo-hoo’ing. Then I plopped my naked self on our mattress, lying in ecstasy as the light breeze from the *open window* whispered over my skin. No purple fingers. No goosebumps. No mad dash to hide under the covers. Just me, my curves, birds chirping outside, the sound of neighbors putting out recycle buckets, the gently flowing curtains.
Our plush pug re-enacts my naked lounging.
I never allow myself time to relax like that after coming home because I am always in a rush to bundle up and move as much as possible to keep warm. Winter–cold in general–is so restricting to me. I feel like a prisoner, waiting (im)patiently for my parole, the day I can walk without shackles.
Today was just a brief preview of the parole that is to come. Tomorrow it will be back in the 60s, the windows will close, the socks will go back on my feet. It was a bittersweet moment lying there naked in my bedroom, like an inmate being allowed outside the gray prison walls to clean the highway on a sunny spring day–sensing freedom but not being quite there yet.
The day I’m able to be with nothing is the day I’ll have everything I need.
I just can’t help it. As much as I love drumming, it’s no secret that I love dancing to drums even more.
I love making music:
…but once everyone’s songs mesh into that one perfect percussive orchestra, my body can’t sit still any longer.
Yesterday’s drum circle was not so much about the technical aspects of drum playing but rather the healing qualities that these wonderful instruments have, especially when played as part of a group. The workshop was led by a duo of women: Marcy, a no-nonsense percussion phenom who taught the basics of each instruments:
Marcy (front left) explaining how to use a djembe
…and Jan, a “Mother Earth,” grandmotherly figure who preached about the importance of self-healing, connection to spirit, and being in tune with the universe. She was a vibrant being from head to toe, beyond the colorful ensemble she was wearing. She spoke like a pastor at an AME church: poised, passionate, and provocative, calling for us to find connection with the world beyond our physical bodies, but reminding us to take care of ourselves as well, through yoga, reiki, and massage. I adored Jan: Her spirit was infectious, and I couldn’t help smiling every time she spoke.
Jan and her shekere.
The event attracted a decent crowd for it being held in a small-town yoga studio, where, across the street, high school hipsters in aviator shades and skinny jeans sat outside a pizza shop. Inside, about 15 people of all ages and races collected to shake, rattle, and roll. One woman brought her young son (maybe 10 years old?) who was amazingly well-behaved and engaged in the program (at the end, when we went around the room describing how we were feeling, he responded with “EXHAUSTED! And healed.” <—LOVE!)
The "exhausted and healed" kid
Even more amazing, a woman I traveled to Egypt with in 2005 was there; I haven’t seen here since then! My sidekick for the day was Carrol, my former coworker. I call her my Fake Mom, and we do artsy stuff together.
Coming "om" with Carrol
Although several of us brought our own drums, Marcy and Jan toted along a whole mini-van of assorted instruments: djembes, shekeres, bells, a snare drum, and frame drums.
Shekere your booty!
Carrol tries out the djun djun
They also brought gourds, which reminded me of my hula days and playing the ipu. However, these gourds were painted to represent the colors of the chakras, and we “tuned in” to each chakra by chanting its specific sound.
One of my favorite take-home quotes of the day was when Jan described the ajna chakra. “They say it’s your third eye,” she said. “But let’s call it the first eye,” meaning that both eyes really become one during meditation.
It could have been the beautiful spring weather helping, but I left the studio feeling revived! I’ve been to an assortment of drum circles/events, but this one infused me with vitality. Jim Donovan‘s workshops have helped me with the technical aspect of drumming, but this one incorporated the spiritual elements of using instruments made from Mother Nature to connect with the rest of the world around us. Two hours of drumming, breathing, chanting, call-and-response, and, most important, the freedom to DANCE!
Tomorrow afternoon I’m attending a “Healing and Feeling” drum circle at a local yoga studio, so in honor of the event, today’s flashback will rewind to my very first drum circle in June 2007.
I fell in love with the sound of African drums back at Kripalu, when every Saturday the in-house ensemble KDZ would play live for the noon-time YogaDance class. There’s something about a drumbeat that is so human and primal, and my body reacts to the sound the way a moth does to light: It’s just mesmerized, completely sucked into the beauty. Other than a brief violin stint in 4th grade, two years of clarinet practice in elementary school, and a year or so learning how to play Hawaiian percussion instruments while trying to hula at the same time (“I Was a Hula Dancer,” coming soon to Flashback Friday), I do not have any musical training, but that didn’t stop me from buying an African djembe and bongo. I had been eyeing the instruments at Target’s Global Marketplace (man, I miss that!), and every week I’d hem and haw over whether to buy them. Then they went on clearance, and so they were mine. I’ve since upgraded to a better-sounding djembe with a fancy silver finish, and although I don’t get to drum circles as often as I’d like, I do bust out my djem-baby every so often to play along with an Alanis song or just take out my frustrations on a giant metallic goblet.
"Rock-a-bye djembaby..."
The following is an account of my very first drum circle, taken from my old journal:
Back in February, I bought my first set of djembes, and last night was my first opportunity to bust them out of the house and jam with others.
My yoga studio hosted a drum circle to celebrate the summer solstice, and I even got my Old Job friend, Carrol, to come with me. There were a few guys with drumming/percussion backgrounds who kicked off the music and helped sustain the rhythm, and they were wild to watch. Carrol and I dubbed the one guy “the Flatley of fingers,” because his hands were slapping off that drum as rapidly as Michael Flatley’s Irish feet flap on the stage. Everyone had a djembe or bongos, but there were also cowbells, wooden blocks, chimes, maracas, and foot bells to go around. We spread out all over the floor, left the front and back doors wide open, and let loose.
It was mad fun, and our music attracted curious stares and smiles from dozens of passersby strolling along the main road after their fancy dinners. One guy with his family stepped in, sat on the floor for a few minutes and his baby daughter bounced in the doorway, and then just got up and left. People stopped at the red light on the corner rolled down their windows and craned their necks to see what kind of craziness was brewing inside. For once, we were making the noise. At the yoga studio, there’s always some kind of “distracting” noises around us–the open mic night at the coffee shop next door, car horns, idling Wawa delivery trucks, gunning motorcycles, people who stand right outside the studio doors and have a 10-minute long cell phone conversation–so it felt awesome to be the “distractors” last night and make so much commotion that all of those things above could have been going on, and we would have never even realized it.
Halfway through, I felt compelled to get up and dance (of course), and I did my thing, getting lost in the music, stamping, rocking, swaying, spinning. Before they guys started the next jam, I suggested that we sit in silence for a minute, just to appreciate the sound by sitting without it for a while. It was a different kind of silence, because our ears were still buzzing from the last song. Our feet were still bouncing, our hands still moving as though there was still music. At my request, the guys started the next song r-e-a-l-l-y slowly, first just one guy playing a heartbeat rhythm, and then, one-by-one everyone delicately chiming in, bit by bit, until the fire began to grow, and an explosion of sound eventually shot out.
I couldn’t resist dancing again, so up I went. This time it was trance dance, and I allowed the music to do whatever it wanted with my body; I was keeping the mind out of it. I felt like I was a spectator of my own dancing, amazed at how my movements flowed along from one beat to the next, changing patterns and shifting directions without me calling any of the shots. I was integrated, man!
Some guy from the street starting jamming in the doorway. He put down his backpack and then started grooving in the entrance, until he came all the way inside and was dancing with the rest of us. (By now, at least three other people had joined me on the dance floor!) At first I thought Street Guy was a musician or something, because he seemed to be doing these weird moves like he was understanding every iota of sound. But then as he started to dance more, I realized, no, This guy is actually crazy. He started getting really close to me, so one of the yoga teachers, god bless her soul, started dancing like a wild woman between us, her limbs flying all over the place to break us up. He stayed for the remaining 10 minutes, and Carrol and I swear he was on ‘shrooms.
I was a flaming ball of sweat afterwards, and then Carrol, who publishes an art magazine, told me I should do a story about the event. Before I knew it, I had her reporter’s notebook and pen in my hand and was firing questions at the drummers and participants. I know I’m still a journalist at heart when awesome quotes send chills down my spine and get the pen running across the paper at 100 miles per hour.
One of my favorite lines from that article: The sound in a drum circle is never static–it’s more like the ocean: still at times, raging at others. An unseen force of nature quickens the tempo and changes the rhythm, and without thinking too much about it, your hands and fingers follow the flow to keep up.
Bass! Tone! Slap!
Hey, so today it’s 50 degrees outside, cold and rainy, and by Monday it’s supposed to be 84. Springtime in the Northeast is so schizophrenic!
However, whatever the weather, you can probably expect to see me outside, getting my walk on.
I work in an office and spend most of my day in front of a computer or hunched over articles, proofreading. Antsy by nature, this kind of work style kills me. I take a bajillion breaks over the course of 8 hours to stretch, spill granola all over my desk instead of in my yogurt cup, do hand exercises, and even sometimes sneak in some tai chi in the bathroom, but all of those combined do not surpass the stress-busting and muscle-stretching relief that is walking.
I’ve been taking daily walking breaks since my first office job out of college. Fortunately, back then I worked in a super-cutesy small town that boasted a main street lined with a Starbucks, sandwich shops, artsy-fartsy studios, and other fun window-shopping storefronts. I could step out of the office for a 5-minute jaunt around the block and be in the company of dog-walkers, baby stroller-pushers, coffee-chugging executives, and tea-sipping grandmoms. It was a downtown–everyone was walking! During my lunch break, when my other coworkers ordered pizza and stayed inside, I’d take my bag lunch and walk a mile roundtrip to an off-the-beaten-path park I called my “secret garden.” A lot of my old job assignments back then required walking, and I had no problem heading out to the streets to interview community members or scour the local bulletin boards.
My current job doesn’t have that much flexibility, and unfortunately I’m no longer surrounded by cafes and libraries–just a Dunkin Donuts, a church, and a fenced-off field that attracts deer and wild turkeys. With my office only a mile or so off the interstate highway, there is no such thing as “going around the block.”
“WHAT THE HECK DO YOU DO DURING LUNCH?!?!?!” I asked my new coworkers when I first started, panicked. My boss stayed inside and worked during lunch. My other colleague drove home. Everyone else either sat at their desk and played on the computer/read or drove somewhere to pick up a lunch they ate back at their desks. Some people ran their car engines for a whole hour just so they could eat their sandwich and soda while sitting in an air-conditioned Camry.
I tried to be sociable at first, sitting in the cafeteria with colleagues or going out to the diner with some coworkers, but by 3 p.m. I felt like I had ants in my pants. I just wanted to MOVE! It was torture sitting at a desk for 3.5 hours in the morning, then sitting in the lunchroom, and then returning to my desk for another 4 hours of sitting. Some Fridays my mom would invite me out to dinner and a show after work, and that was TORTURE! Sitting at work all day, followed by sitting in a restaurant, followed by another 3 hours of sitting in a cramped theater seat?! I’m not gonna lie, there were times I’d rush to the gym after work so I could fit in a few minutes on the treadmill before having to meet my mom or when I’d pick a restaurant only a few miles from my house so I could walk there instead of driving.
Eventually I discovered that my office was only a 2-mile drive from a municipal park with not just a walking path but a wooded trail and one of those fitness circuits. And thus began my new lunch break routine. I was amazed that of my office of almost 200 people, I rarely saw any other coworkers in the park! Nowadays, due to high gas prices and the time to travel to and from the park, I spend my lunch breaks across the street from my office, walking “the loop” around a housing community for seniors 55+. It’s definitely not as stimulating as the park, but the entire development, including all of its cul-de-sacs, is a little over a mile and takes exactly a half hour to walk. Even better, you can still walk the loop the day after a snowstorm because the management hires a grounds crew that shovels and salts the sidewalks!
Taking a walking break during Snowpocalypse 2010
And yeah, I DO walk the loop the day after a snowstorm because once you start a streak it’s hard to break it, especially when your body becomes dependent on 12:30 p.m. walking breaks the same way my brain requires 8 a.m. coffee.
I’m not quite up to mailman-level with my walking (the whole 6 days per week, rain-sleet-snow) thing, but I do try to get outside daily and usually only break the streak for downpours, extreme wind, temperatures below 20 or above 90, icy sidewalks, and on really, really bad hip days. Coworkers come out of the woodwork on suddenly-sunny 65-degree days in March to walk the loop, but only three of us (myself, my cubicle crony Amanda, and some guy we know works at our company but we’re not sure who he is or what he does) swap our work shoes for sneakers winter, spring, summer, and fall. On bad weather days, I’ll try to escape to a meeting room during lunch and do laps around the conference table, push-ups, jumping jacks…anything to get the blood flowing. I have noticed that on days I skip out on either outside walks or conference table laps, my legs feel bloated and achy, and my whole body down to the core feels cold–not even a mug of hot tea will warm me up.
I’m so fanatical about my walks that if a coworker wants to go out to lunch, I’ll check Accuweather beforehand and schedule our lunch date on the day with the worst weather forecast just so I won’t feel bad about skipping “the loop.” And even if I really, really, really like a fellow coworker, I will dreaddddd going to her baby/wedding shower if it is scheduled during my beloved walking time.
However, there may be someone even more fanatical than me–my husband. His new employer, realizing the benefits of exercise, provides a walking initiative that rewards employees for achieving so many steps per day, measured via pedometer. Bryan wears the company-issued pedometer like its his job from morning (yes, he clips it onto his pajama pants) through night, trying to attain the recommended 7,000 steps per day. He uploads the data every few days and gets perks like discounts in return. This guy is so dedicated that on days he is short of missing the mark, he’ll loop around the mall for some extra mileage or pace around the house at 11 at night…at which point I tell him to either grab a dust rag or the vacuum and kill two birds with one stone.
Because my bum hip prevents me from doing things like using the elliptical or running, I depend on walking a lot as my main form of exercise. I took a personal day today and had a hair appointment at 10, but I woke up early enough so I could fit in a 4-mile walk before breakfast (and before the rain came our way). On days that I know are going to be heavy on the sitting (e.g., Thanksgiving, Christmas), I’ll be sure to get in a long walk before driving over the river and through the woods.
Walking isn’t always easy, especially if you’re aiming for more than 5 miles and don’t have the luxury of walking along the shoreline, through exciting areas like Manhattan, or through a scenic wooded trail. Sometimes walking around my neighborhood is just plain boring, no matter how many times I tell myself to breathe deeply, live in the moment, and soak in the wonderment of everything around me. I live in the suburbs–it’s bungalow after bungalow after bungalow. Chain-link fences, vinyl siding, crooked sidewalks, shady houses with Christmas decorations still up in April. Sometimes I’ll try to go where there is more nature, but most of time all that means is more geese poo on my sneakers when I come home.
My question for you, then, is what are some tips to making the most out of walking? How do you turn a ho-hum activity into something enjoyable, especially on those 40-degree days with a 30-degree wind chill? What I’ve found works for me is walking with friends (provided we match pace), listening to NPR podcasts on my iPod Nano (Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me is my favorite), reading a magazine simultaneously (provided the path is relatively flat and obstacle free), and using Nordic walking poles (or as my husband calls them, my invisible skis). I used to carry handweights but found out that throws off your center of gravity, and I’ve stopped wearing ankle weights too, since that was NOT helping my hip situation. I’ve read that weighted vests are the “weigh” to go since they don’t alter your form; I’m very curious about them, but they’re kind of pricey and I want to be sure they’re worth it.
Last Tuesday I had the unfortunate experience of setting up my yoga mat next to the Incredible Hulk’s cousin.
The vinyasa class I attend is composed of primarily female students, but it’s not uncommon for a guy, two, or three to drop in. I’m always impressed to see a fellow in the room, and I silently commended the linebacker-ish dude as I set up camp next to him. (Totally random side note: Seriously, sometimes I feel like I’m going camping with all the junk I haul into a yoga studio: mat, two blocks, hand towel, mat towel, water bottle, sweatshirt for post-savasana…just put a tent around me, already).
Everything started off OK, but shortly after our opening pranayama and warm-ups, I began noticing that the sounds of my ujjayi breath were being drowned out by my neighbor’s grunts and exasperated exhalations. The noises were primal and angry. If I had been blindfolded and questioned about my surroundings, I would have guessed that I was on the weight floor at the gym, and that a some big beefy guy with a ripped tank top and a crew cut was doing dead lifts or hammer curls with 550-pound dumbbells.
We were doing a sequence of standard vinyasas, warriors, and triangles, not even close to, say, an ashtanga class with those handstand-to-chaturanga drops or 20 wheels or something. His noises were exaggerated and unnecessary, almost as if he believed that making bodybuilder huffs and grunts validated his yoga workout. Even more disturbing than the noises, however, was his composure: In each pose, his entire body shook with violent determination. I believe one of the biggest challenges of yoga is to remain light and fluid even during the most grueling of poses (Sthira sukham asanam: the posture is steady and comfortable), but my neighbor had the opposite approach: My veins must bulge and my muscles must quiver!
Even on our bellies for backbends, the aggressiveness continued, and I feared my neighbor was actually aiming to be a real cobra. He bore his teeth, biting viciously onto his lower lip, his beet-red head looking ready to strike. I tried hard to concentrate on my own practice, but his presence was so intimidating I couldn’t help but feel a bit violated. He was an energy vampire, sucking the lifeforce out of everyone around him.
Perhaps the scariest part, though, was during inversions. We placed our mats against the wall, and as the teacher moved around the room to help others with their headstands, forearm balances, etc, Incredible Hulk starting slamming out handstands boot-camp style, throwing his massive body up against the wall, feet crashing so hard I thought for sure he was going to bust a hole through the drywall. He’d hit the wall and fall down, and then go right back up again, boom.boom.boom. I was trying to do forearm balance next to him, but my concentration was mediocre at best. I feared for my safety, especially after he went up into one particularly forceful handstand, hit the wall, and crashed down hard, his head rolling to the side and his neck precariously rolling along with it and the rest of his body weight. Luckily I was out of my own inversion at that point, and another woman and I looked on in horror as he fell to the side; we were certain it was going to end badly for him. He survived, but the teacher was quick to initiate savasana after that, even though I never felt particularly relaxed.
You know, I’ve always been very sensitive to the sounds of a yoga class–his Omm’ing is out of key, that Sanskrit music is a bit too woo-woo, her blissful sighs sound too much like orgasms–but I think I’d take any of those over the grunts, snarls, and body slams of the anything-but-incredible Hulk.
In the summer of 2006, my husband Bryan and I went on a nearly 3-week trip to China and Tibet with a group led by a geography professor from our alma mater. As I mentioned in this post, the trip was certainly life changing, and coming home introduced a whole new set of feelings about my lifestyle, along with a very deep appreciation for my yoga practice. Below is a journal entry I wrote shortly after returning to the States.
Achingly hollow. That’s how I feel right now.
For the past three weeks, I’ve woken up to a day full of new experiences: visual, emotional, and spiritual. Even though some mornings we had to be up at 4:30 or some nights we slept on a 1.5-inch mattress over plywood over eight stools, the days never failed to stimulate, amaze, and captivate my mind, body, and spirit.
For 19 days, we stuck together in our group of 15, becoming closer each day, despite our differences. By the final day, we felt like family. But last night at 8:30 as our families arrived, picked us up, and drove us away in separate vehicles, it felt like everything had dissolved. My family treated Bryan and me to a late-night meal at the diner and we ate like beasts; at home, Bryan and I melted into our uber-soft mattress and slept for 14 hours; this morning, I was able to shower without flip-flops for the first time since June 20th, but none of these coming-home experiences compare to the dirty, grueling, tiring, sweaty, wonderful, enlightening moments I had in China.
I think back to the day we landed in Beijing and, on our measly 3 hours of sleep, were suddenly thrown into a cramped bus decorated with hanging plastic fruit, flew around the crowded roads, and were greeted with steaming pots of beef, lamb, chicken, tofu, and cabbage in a tiny, smoky restaurant where no one spoke English. I struggled with my chopsticks, could hardly get anything into my mouth, and wanted to cry.
Why did I come here? I thought. Why did I leave behind my perfect daily routine of healthy food, the gym, smoke-free buildings, and a normal sleep schedule for this? Why did I have to come all the way to China for a wordly experience? Why not England? Or even Canada, for crying out loud? I’ve never been to Canada, a mere day’s drive from New Jersey, and yet I leave all the comforts of home behind for a weird country all the way around the world?!?!?!
But yesterday, as our plane landed on the Newark runway, Bryan jokingly said, “And now it’s going to turn around and take off again for China.” And I said, “That’s fine with me.” I’m back in my so-called “comfort zone” — a soft bed, clean shower, organic foods, my gym bag, the internet, the daily newspaper on our doorstep — but none of it feels right. My house feels like a movie set, a perfect little playworld where nothing is real and it’s all just for show.
What I do know is this: Yoga helped me greatly through this trip. I didn’t touch a yoga mat for 3 weeks and never once had the floor space to even get into Down dog, but the emotional aspect of yoga, pranayama, and lovingkindness meditation completely enriched the adventure. There were so many times I could’ve gone ape shit, cried hysterically, or lost it completely, but I’m certain that the mental clarity and focus I have cultivated from my last 2 years of asana yoga practice got me through it all and let me go with the flow. Even our 3 days on the pirate ship.
Yes, a pirate ship. OK, it was actually a garbage barge with stowaways sleeping in the hallways, a cockroach infestation, dirty communal squat toilets with no toilet paper, inedible food, minimal air conditioning, half-naked Chinese men who spat on the cigarette-butt littered carpets, and meat locker showers, but we lived like filthy pirates for 3 days, so, therefore, we call it a pirate ship. Yar.
What doesn’t kill you will only make you stronger. I had to repeat that several times throughout this trip, but yeah, it’s true. And Starbucks always helps.
So, I broke up with a yoga class.
I’m not sure of the proper protocol to follow (I never really made the split official with the teacher), but I do feel bad. But the fact of the matter is, every time I was with Kundalini I was daydreaming of Hot Vinyasa, and I hated not being able to devote my full attention to the one I was with.
Here’s the quick rundown: I take an awesome hot vinyasa class on Tuesday. Then a new yoga studio opened offering a kundalini class only on Thursday. I was all for it…until my hot vinyasa teacher began offering her class on Thursday nights as well. At first I was thrilled—I had the ability to take my two favorite classes each week! Vinyasa Tuesday, kundalini Thursday. The best of both worlds! That’s how it went. But the more and more I did hot vinyasa Tuesday, the more I wished I was there again on Thursday. Especially on colllllllld nights, when I’d go to the kundalini studio and the teacher would be arriving the same time as the students, so the heat wouldn’t officially kick in until the last 15 minutes of class. I’d sit there in sweatpants and a fleece jacket, thinking longingly of the hot yoga studio and its interminable tropical climate. And although I really dig the meditative quality of kundalini, some of the kriyas were just too hard on my hip and weren’t the most adaptable moves. Modifying poses in a hatha yoga class isn’t too difficult, but when you’re told to do 6 minutes of squats during kundalini, there’s really no easy alternative.
I felt so selfish for even considering breaking up with kundalini just to spend more time with vinyasa, but I just really like the way I feel after a hot yoga class. It’s one of the few forms of exercises I can do without hurting my hip; the heat is wonderful; and the class is 90 minutes long, as opposed to the 75-minute-really-60-minute-because-the-teacher-talks-for-the-first-15-minutes kundalini class. Back in the day, I used to take formal classes up to 5 times per week, so finally getting back into 2 solid days of studio vinyasa is an overdue accomplishment.
Next dilemma I foresee on the horizon: Being OK taking non-heated hatha classes. I’m afraid my body won’t know how to adjust when I step into a studio that doesn’t feel like Thailand in July. Perhaps my Under Armour Coldgear–once used for running outdoors in the winter–will have a second life as yoga attire for 72-degree studios.
Is this the intermediate vinyasa class?
Flowtation Devices 