My Brain on Yoga

So I have written a couple of stories over the past few months regarding my newest obsession – yoga. What I have found out is there are a number of misconceptions about it, the first of which is that it’s some kind of incense-burning, chanting, group meditation communal get in touch with your inner child lovefest.

Uh, no.

It’s exercise. Somewhat strenuous exercise at that. No, it doesn’t involve bench-pressing compact vehicles or swimming across large bodies of water, but make no mistake. It is exercise. You will discover muscles and tendons you did not know you had. And once you discover them, you will rue their very existence as they are contorted in ways you thought were only the purview of ladies who make their living spinning on vertical poles with dollar bills jammed in their G-strings.

Then again, I bet they do yoga.

Anyway. I now do yoga twice a week, Monday and Thursday nights, the 5:30pm ‘Hatha All Levels’ class led by my Yoga Hero, Lee. She’s beautiful…

ANYway, for those that have not experienced what a typical yoga class is like, I am going to walk you through one from the point of view of my mind:

5:15pm: I arrive at the yoga studio with my mat, towel and bottled water. I am excited for the upcoming hour, as the stress of work has manifested itself usually in my neck and shoulders. I walk into the studio, shuck my shoes, roll out the mat, silence the phone, and get into some semblance of a lotus position on the mat.

5:20pm: Others arrive, mostly women. I am usually the only guy in the class. And I’m good with that.

5:25pm: In comes Lee. She’s beautiful…ANYway, she greets everyone with her empathic, warm, gentle soul greeting. It’s all a mirage. She’s about to go Drill Sergeant on our asses.

5:30pm: Class starts. Lee takes us through a few minutes of breathing in order to attune our mind and body. We are usually in Child’s pose or some other restful position. I call this my last respite before hell.

5:35pm: Into our first Downward Dog of the night. DD is a staple yoga move, where you basically shape yourself like an upside-down letter V. I’ve gotten better at DD & can hold it for upwards of ten seconds now.

5:40pm: First Vinyasa. A Vinyasa is a movement through various yoga poses, usually from a low lunge position, to a plank (think push-ups) position, to body on floor to raise your front torso up (Cobra), to plank to Downward Dog. “Meditatively move” is Lee’s entreat to us. “Don’t pass out” is how I translate this instruction.

5:45pm: Time for twists! With one knee on the mat & the other bent (picture Tebowing), Lee instructs us to place our hands in Namaste (picture praying hands), and then to take the left elbow and place it on the outside of the right knee. It hurts to even type this, let alone to do it. I get there, and my spine is now wondering what it did to get punished. This gets repeated for the other side (right arm over left knee), but not before another…you guessed it…Downward Dog.

5:50pm: I am now cursing myself for showing up. The thought enters my mind to ditch class early, feigning some kind of lame injury. All it takes to snap me out of this is to look around the room & see all the women gracefully moving through the poses. The Alpha Male in me kicks in. I stay.

5:55pm: I am hyperventilating

6:00pm: I am hyperventilating.

6:05pm. Still hyperventilating.

6:10pm: Time for inversions! When I was a kid we called this standing on your head. And when I was a kid I could do it instinctively. At 53, it requires an act of Congress. I place my head on the mat with my hands, palms down, on either side for support. Every brain cell is screaming ‘Do this and you will be in traction the rest of your life’. Alpha Male says ‘Don’t be a wuss, you…wuss.’ I inch my feet towards my hands, raising my torso in the process. Body weight shifts from my hands to the crown of my head. I am picturing my neck snapping like a dried out twig. Lee is imploring, “Keep the weight balanced between the head and the hands, lift up!” For a nanosecond my feet actually leave the floor. Two seconds later my brain realizes this and defense mechanisms kick in, which means I fall over like a Jenga tower.

6:20pm: More Downward Dogs.

6:25pm: More hyperventilating. But the end is now in sight, as the best part of the practice is only five minutes away. It’s called Savasina, and I probably misspelled that. What it means is, rest.

6:30pm: Rest begins. I am prostrate on my mat, arms and legs splayed out like someone who just landed on the pavement after dropping from the twentieth floor. Just draw a chalk line around me.

6:35pm: Lee comes by and places a peppermint-scented cold washcloth over my eyes. It is at this point I want to marry her.

6:40pm: Rest ends by Lee slowly bringing us out of our reclined positions and up into a seated position. A couple of light stretches of the arms, and then we put our hands together at our chest, turn to one another, bow, and say Namaste. We are done.

6:45pm: I leave, but on the way out I tell Lee I cannot wait until the next session and to keep up the peppermint-scented cold washcloths.

I love yoga. But not before I go through hating it each time I am there.

I Love My Yoga (Instructor)

It’s Monday night and I am unwinding after my now-standard activity of Monday and Thursday nights. Yoga.

Yep. That Eastern-mysticism adopted by the leftist freeks in Cali in the 60s but now a mainstreamed exercise of health, wellness and funny poses. Downward dog, cobra, cat/cow, warrior…and funny Indian words that I still cannot pronounce.

But I love how Lee pronounces them.

Lee is my instructor. And I love her as much as I do the yoga. Maybe more so. She is the most positive, gentle, empathetic person I have ever met. Never a negative word from her lips. She is beauty and beautiful in one. I love her.

In fact I told her so tonight, after we finished and she was talking to some of the other students in class, I walked behind her, kissed her ear & whispered ‘I love you’ in that lovely ear of hers.

But back to the yoga for a minute. I have been doing it for about four months now, and have finally gotten to the point where I can do most of the poses. And the ones I can’t? Well, that’s okay, and that brings up one of the things I love about yoga. There is no right or wrong. It is all about you and what want to get out of the practice. Nobody is an ‘expert’ at yoga. We are all just yogis coming to our mats as an affirmation of being kind to ourselves. To give ourselves honor. To treat ourselves to a wonderful amalgam of gentle exercise, meditation and blessings.

This is why, at the end of each practice, we honor each other with hands pressed together against the forehead, a bow of the head, and the word Namaste, which means, the light in me honors the light in you.

Mutual beauty and respect. How awesome.

I am now feeling the tangible effects of practice. I am wonderfully loose now, and it shows in my golf game as I have added about 20 yards to my drives. That was one of the main things I was hoping for from this, but to limit the positives to how far I can hit a golf ball is doing yoga a great disservice. It has taught me patience, empathy, soundness of mind and body…not to mention unbinding my 53-year-old body of years of institutionalized stress.

Lee is a taskmaster. Not in the drill sergeant sense, but in the sense of, she can do poses I can only dream of doing, and she makes sure we all get a good workout. At the beginning of class she asks what we want to work on; for example, the back, shoulders, legs, whatever. She then tailors the practice that evening to those areas. She is so giving and obviously loves what she does. I get the sense that it’s not ‘a job’ to her but something she relishes as much as we all do.

I now have a nickname. Being the only regular-attending male in the classes, the other ladies now call me Token Yoga Dude. I love that. Not to mention sharing classes with 10 or so women. Someone name me a better way to spend a Monday night than watching a dozen women twisting and contorting without going to a strip club.

I recently added Thursday nights to my practice, at Lee’s insistence. About a month back she felt I was ready for a second session each week. And I will tell you this – I will do anything she tells me to do.

The only other woman in my life that shares that honor is my mother.

So, this is a love story. I love yoga.

And I love you, Lee.

YoGolf

So it’s Christmas Day in Orlando. With no family in the area and no significant other to spend time with, I was faced with a dilemma – what do I do with myself all day?

This is what golf was made for.

I just got back from walking 11 holes at Winter Park Country Club, a delightful little track that is very walker-friendly. The course was technically closed and none of the pins were in, but that didn’t stop me – or the other two dozen or so players I saw out there.

Free golf! Merry Christmas to me.

Anyway. I hadn’t touched a club in about a month and hadn’t played in almost two months. This usually means a sloppy round where I swing too hard, and am too stiff to really play well. It would usually take 5 or 6 holes just to loosen up, let alone commanding my body to execute the shot my mind has envisioned.

Ah, but there has been something I’ve been doing for the past couple of months that I was curious in seeing if it would help my game. Yoga.

I have done about eight sessions of yoga, every Monday night, and I love it. Aside from the obvious benefits of stretching and gentle exercise, it has taught me some things I did not expect. Things like breathing. Don’t laugh. Many of us do not control our breathing very well, or underestimate the power contained in that seemingly automatic physical function. Slowing your breath down, feeling it, listening to it, can greatly affect your mental state.

Yoga also teaches you how to slow down, how to move gracefully, balance, discipline, and self-love. Get your mind out of the gutter. I mean self appreciation for finding time to take care of yourself.

So today was the first time I played golf as a practicing yogi and was anxious to see if there was an effect.

There was. Quite a profound one.

To begin with, that anticipated stiffness and swinging too hard? Didn’t happen. I felt quite loose actually and I didn’t seem to have that ‘kill the ball’ mentality that accompanies the first round in a month. On the first tee I hit a nice solid 3-wood down the left side about 225 yards – a shot I would have taken in the middle of the summer let alone for the first swing in a month.

I walked, which offered a great time to work on breathing. In and out through the nose, deep, full breaths. Leisurely steps. Just be. Enjoying the moment.

My golf swings felt very flowing. Sure, I hit a couple of meh shots, but they weren’t from trying to kill the ball, but instead they were just from, well being human. That’s another thing yoga has taught me – there is no right or wrong. Just do what you can and accept. No judging. I really needed this kind of attitude instilled, since I get way too critical of myself. Not in yoga – each week I stare in amazement of my beautiful instructor, Lee, as she is able to execute positions I can only dream about accomplishing, but never once have I felt pressure to emulate. Be happy with being me, and love myself for making time for me.

By the middle of the round I noticed something else. I had gained distance. On the last hole, a 260-yard slight dogleg left, I hit a perfect cut-driver that settled five yards short of the green – that’s a 255-yard CUT driver. That was Jerry from 30 years ago right there.

This is going to be a wonderful marriage of two activities. Golf and yoga. For golfers like me that are starting to age, and you are finding that the body just doesn’t respond like it did when you were 25, try yoga. I think you will be very satisfied with what it does for your game, your attitude, and your frame of mind.

Merry Christmas. Namaste.

Namaste

A while back I signed up for this Groupon thing, which I highly recommend (www.groupon.com). Each day some kind of deal comes to my inbox for food deals, entertainment, whatever. I especially like the golf deals.

Anyway, a couple of weeks back I got a Groupon deal for yoga classes. Now, six months ago that would have been an instant banishment to the trash folder. But this time it was different. I clicked on the deal and saw it was ten yoga sessions for $29. I was intrigued. I pondered it then thought what the hell. Let’s give it a try. It had been years since I tried anything new, and part of my latest life journey is to meditate more, slow down, and just be happy in being me.

I clicked, submitted my card number and presto – new yoga student.

Last Monday was my first session – ‘Gentle Beginner Yoga’ it was titled. The instructor, Lee, was fantastic. So upbeat, so positive. My classmates were equally ebullient. They had, as I was to find out, strong auras. The whole place has a serene feel to it – soft, warm colors, soothing music, calm, inviting.

So I grabbed my mat, shucked my shoes, and waited for the session to start. Lee comes in and in her always-positive way, got us loosened up. Here was the first indicator that this was going to be tougher than I thought – I was as tight as a banjo string. Then she started to guide us through the various classic yoga poses – downward dog, table top, cobra, cat. She emphasized the breathing – in and out through the nose. Feel your center. Open your heart. Hands to the sky.

Next came positions for balance. Stand on one leg. Simple, right? Uh, no. I was a quaking, quivering bag of unbalanced nerves and institutionalized stress and tightness. Lee was flowing through the motions with swan-like grace. I looked like an old woman trying to beat a mugger off with a purse.

Thirty minutes into this ‘Gentle Beginner’ session and I was sweating like a whore in church. If this was ‘Gentle Beginner’ I shuddered to think what ‘Rigorous Advanced’ would consist of. I was hyperventilating and shaking.

A couple of the moves I simply could not do. My body was just not ready for that type of movement. I looked at Lee and mouthed an ‘I’m sorry’ and she just smiled, then said to the class in her calming way, ‘Yoga is about you. You decide what you can do and what you can’t. You are not judged here.’

That made me smile. And relaxed.

The session ended with 15 minutes of lying on the mat while soft, chakra-tinged music played and the lights off. I smelled incense. It was lovely. About ten minutes in and I felt someone massaging my lower legs. It was Lee. It felt wonderful.

We then got up and did a final shake-off of our muscles. Lee then said that, whenever yoga masters end their sessions they put their hands together and, as an acknowledgement of the inner spirit in me honoring the inner spirit in you, we turn, bow and say, ‘Namaste’.

When it was over, Lee could not wait to ask what I thought. I said it was very positive and that I would be back. She said wonderful, and to not give up. I went back last Thursday for my second session. This one was titled ‘Hot Vinyasa Yoga’ – which was similar to Monday’s session, but with space heaters. I lasted a half hour. I could not finish the session, but I am taking Lee’s advice. I’m not quitting. I just registered for Monday night’s class. I am motivated and inspired.

My flagging but growing spirit in me is in awe of the strength of yours, Lee.

Namaste.

http://serenitynowyogacorp.com/