Beauty’s the Thing, or, Flexible Schmexible
Once again, for maybe the millionth time, I heard: “Oh, I’d love to go to a yoga class, but it’s so intimidating, all those flexible people.” With yogic calm, I reply, “Yoga increases your flexibility; that’s why you go.” One teacher quips when people admire her postures: “It took me forty years to be able to do that.”
But it’s so obvious—practice makes perfect, experience and patience yield progress, blah, blah, blah. Every person on the planet knows that. So being intimidated can’t possibly be the real problem. No one is intimidated by the person running faster than her on the treadmill, pumping a larger weight in a body-sculpting regimen, moving more gracefully through a Zumba routine, or doing more sit-ups.
Why are people afraid of comparison in a yoga class? The yoga is not about the posture; it is about stretching the body and bringing health the joints, length to ligaments, air to lungs, not about what we look like in the mirror.
My current theory is that yoga is intimidating because the postures are beautiful. Standing bow comes to mind, as do cobra and camel. Some postures are mysterious, like balancing stick and toe stand. Some are diabolical, like standing-head-to-knee and triangle. Look at the poses and every one has its own beauty of form or mechanics. Anything beautiful is fascinating and intimidating.
Yoga is beautiful. The other day I practiced next to a teacher, one of those gorgeous yoga teachers. This one is the kind who grew up distrustful of people, never knowing if they were interested in looks or soul.
During practice, I peeked (a crime, yes, but I plead journalist’s license) at my neighbor, who added grace to the postures, flourishes almost, with a momentum of love. Clearly, the gorgeous creature took joy in creating beauty, in doing or making beauty rather than just free riding on being born beautiful. It was an earned beauty, enacted beauty.
The yoga is the beautiful thing, not the postures, not the body.
Namaste,
Yoga Lily
In Which I Confess Concern With Calories
I read somewhere that you burn between 600 and 1200 calories per class in our dear hot box. Now, as I’ve blogged about recently, 10 or 15 extra pounds have glommed on to this bit of mortal flesh, and they like me, they won’t leave. So I am exploring the practice for the utterly crass purpose of banishing fat.
Each pose has become a treasure hunt, as I seek the kinesthetic sweet spot where I can turn up the burn. And I’ve found that amid the flood of instructions is one phrase, a nugget of advice, that guides you into working much, much harder.
I first investigated the quads, as a bicyclist once told me these are the largest muscles. I found that in awkward chair,; curving the spine back increases the load on the thighs, which become a platform for the torso. And pointing the toe— in balancing stick and cobra and half-locust—is a chance to tauten the thigh and get more burn for the buck.
My next discovery was the sit-up. Probably irrationally, I think that since most of the fat has settled in my abs, I should work them more. So now tensed abs pull my top half up, not momentum. It’s harder and gives the added benefit of easing forehead to knee — flab is sucked in, out of the way. I am starting to press in the abs during half-tortoise and the first breathing exercise.
In eagle, maximum exertion is in wrapping the legs: not only twisting the top one around the bottom but squeezing the bottom around the top. This uses more energy, requires the thigh to work, and adds stability to the pose. Half-moon is a chance to burn major fat by reaching for the ceiling and maintaining that stretch throughout the pretty curve.
Attending to one detail yields a quantum jump in exertion, and perhaps not surprisingly, improves the posture. In yoga, even the crass comes out right in the end.
Namaste,
Yoga Lily
Shine. Give. Hope. Resolve.
Echoing in my mind are the wise words offered by teacher Kathryn Leary at the class honoring Winter Solstice. Listening to them was transcendent; her words pale on the page. But just as even an echo has the force of an acoustic wave, so too her view of life has a moral, or maybe spiritual, heft when pondered in any circumstances, such as musings about New Year’s resolutions in random blogs.
“Allow your inner light to radiate. Remember, the winter solstice is a celebration of the return of the light. A renewal. So allow your light to be renewed, to shine as brightly as you possibly can, in each and every posture,” Ms. Leary exhorted us. A good resolution based on that would be to shine in each and every effort you make. Indeed, she added, shine in your life. “Celebrate your own inner light. “
She pointed out that any light inside you is a gift, and gifts are to be shared, not hoarded or ignored or seen as a personal possession. Gifts are lights that exist to light others’ lives. Toward that end, we have to be paradoxically selfish: Heed our gifts in order to share them. Share our light. Leary quoted Henry David Thoreau,”Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.” I love this advice and its logic.
Leary noted too that the solstice is a time of hope, of a sense of warmth coming—particularly true in our neck of the woods in Manhattan, where the cold deepens in December and we wake up to dark skies and a glowing moon for a few topsy turvy days. The thought that the days are lengthening, that the summer will come and that’s a promise, makes the cold dark easier to endure. So hope is good resolution.
“No matter how ‘dark’ one’s life seems to be, the return of the light is guaranteed and ever-present,” Ms. Leary pointed out, extrapolating from nature for us. And we are, after all, natural creatures, subject to the laws of nature, even unto our emotions. It seems as if the solstice gave birth to the tradition of resolutions for a new year.
Shine. Give. Hope. Resolutions, wishes, imperatives, or just ideas, they are a lovely list of wise ways to live.
Namaste,
Yoga Lily
A Quiet New Year’s Eve
Quiet must be the rarest luxury in the city, if not on the entire planet. The silent class on New Year’s Eve was an island of a kind-of quiet on our noisy island of Manhattan.
The teacher offered the quiet of the class as a chance to focus on breathing, when you can hear it and not be distracted by words.
On the six or seventh breath, a unity emerged among us. We were all internally counting the six counts in sync as well as moving all our arms as one. All us individuals with our own selves and mischegoss merged into one large organism, doing one simple thing– breathing.
This unity, the large inhale exhale, became relaxing, melodic, like waves arriving at and leaving a beach. Teachers often say the breath is a wave, and I felt it. They will also say “The breath is all you have in life. So breathe, and be grateful for each breath.” That’s a change of pace, being grateful for the simplest fact of a free and functioning body, instead of wishing and yearning and suffering for the lack of fame, fortune, or the ideal life companion.
Like the ocean too, the group breathing was buoyant, lifting me and carrying me to nowhere in particular. It was a strange pleasure, being carried to nowhere in particular.
We did not have an acoustic silence of course, but a relative one. The hullaballou of Broadway below vibrated the windows. But even this irrelevant noise intensified the concentration on listening only to breathing.
The breathing was, then a silence of sorts. During blizzards, I often take walks with my dog. I love the quiet inside a storm, when the only relevant noise is of wind pushing snow. All other noises are distant, irrelevant. Like the blizzard, the silent class, had a simple all-encompassing noise, silencing other noises, silencing thoughts of self, quieting the Sturm und Drang of living.
Really, all silence is relative. Atop a deserted mountain, one can hear wind. In the deepest cavern, one hears echos and the small movements of animals and stone. But noises are drastically simplified in those places, and drastic simplicity is a refreshing change, a chance, in fact, to breathe.
Namaste,
Yoga Lily
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