Blue Sky Thinking

I have officially descended into summer slug mode. Part of me prefers to think of this as ascension because, really, this is the the first quarter of the only 4 months of the year during which I'm in a good mood.

I'm sure I've said this every summer (once the weather gets good) for the almost-9 years I've been blogging, but I am inexorably affected by climate, and only moreso as I get older and wiser. It's really too bad that I live in a place with horrid weather much of the year because, honestly, I wake up every blue-skied, sunny, cloudless, warm/hot/humid day feeling so content.

Look, I'm pretty well allergic to full sun. I get welts and itchy and the direct heat gives me headaches. I'm also one of the more light-sensitive people you'll meet. I've been known to wear my sunglasses inside for days at a time.

But put me in the shade, meditating on a cotton-ball cloud that ambles by, and I am nothing short of transfixed. Add a great glass of wine, some olives and cheese and it makes me want to cry at the joy of being alive and truly relaxed. It's taken me many years to understand that I am most happy when I walk from beautiful locale and restorative meal to meal but I can finally own it. If you include friends and thoughtful conversation, all's right in the world for me.

You know I'm participating in this Conscious Cleanse right now - it lasts till the end of Monday - so I've been experiencing the world through a new prism. The food's been rather clean (though I haven't given up a fraction of what the cleanse directs). I have fallen off the booze-free wagon over the past couple of days because I've had occasion to dine with friends in town for a short while and to go to an amazing cocktail party wherein this was one of the treats:

I've seen many a phenomenal raspberry tart in my day, but this was the most beautiful ever. No, I didn't taste it. It contained gluten. (I would have happily forgotten about my commitment to eschew white sugar but I'm going hardcore with the gluten cuz, really, it's an easy cut in the scheme of things.) I preferred to drink some wine, which lasts longer. And I enjoyed the gleeful expressions of those who partook of its deliciousness. There were also macarons from Nadege, pretty hard to resist. And some gorgeous savoury things - a perfectly cooked steak which I tried a slice of, colourful salads, great cheese...

I have in no way been self-sacrificing while participating in this cleanse. I've had wine, meat, dairy. Mind you, knowing myself, I didn't commit to giving them up - only to eating them with consciousness. The things I've given up full-scale are gluten and processed food. And I've persisted with those commitments. I've also been very successful (if we can even refer to this as success) when it comes to drinking 70 oz of water per day, eating many more fruits and vegetables than usual, drinking a green smoothie daily and doing a daily, pre-determined yoga practice.

I've been SO impressed with the format of this cleanse - the way it's conceptualized and organized to be gradual and thoughtful. I will definitely do it again (even as I'm totally ready for it to be done), and I may well do it differently (more strictly) next time. I want to gradually come to understand my limitations. I feel that doing this 3 times per year would be really helpful and pretty workable. And I've decided to come out of it as I went in - gradually over 2 weeks. So I'll take 3 months of the year to eat notably cleanly. And then I can eat - should I choose to go in this direction - with conscious abandonment the rest of the time :-)

One of the more interesting elements - though really, this cleanse has been awareness-motivating in small but meaningful ways on many fronts - has been the yoga. It's been a long time since I've done 12 days in a row of "full" yoga practice (not merely poses here and there on some of those days) - never mind via classes which are not devised by me to meet my self-determined needs. I'm a yoga loner, seriously self-directed, so doing 14 classes devised by someone else, to suit the aims of a cleanse, is very strange.

For starters, I can't see what's going on without my glasses no matter what time of day (so usually I just practice while listening to the teacher). Then there's the fact that I've had to do some of these practices first thing in the am, due to scheduling conflicts. I am NOT a morning yogi, morning being when my brain is most disengaged and my body at its least accommodating. So I've had to really hone my inner-focus because these practices are cross-methodological (many different styles are employed, some of which I am less familiar with than others i.e. Kundalini) and my regular resources - vision, flexibility, wakefulness, knowledge of variations - have been removed. This is to say nothing of my connectedness to the teaching style of some of the teachers who've led these classes.

For all of this, the yoga has been the easiest part for me, in that it's been the most knowable. I'm sure that's because I've had many years to acclimate to "yoga challenges", for example Sadhana (a 40 day, daily practice I've undertaken a couple of times). Sadhana was horrid for me, fwiw, because I had to travel each morning to a 6 am hour-long practice (took me 30 minutes to get there) and one of these sadhanas was during the late fall. It was like waking up to do yoga in the middle of the night. Talk about self-awareness building. Furthermore, I've had a long time to adapt to what "daily-practice-as-cleanse" means. In these instances, it really is NOT about the poses, but about the intention, the breath (tremendously) and the kriya.

I most definitely subscribe to the perspective that regular practice is devised to develop, in addition to spiritual awareness, physical skill and precision through asana. But that's not the gist of a cleanse practice. Cleanse yoga is when you call on the skills you've developed to test your limits on all the levels.

My, this post has bounced around! I began with the intention of advising you about why there's very little creative activity going on in these parts, due to the excellent weather. I've finished it by wondering if that's true :-)

At any rate, how's it going with your summer? Have you turned off the computer in favour of a patio? Are you all the more structured in your creativity right now? Doing any cleanses while the food is fresh? Let's talk!

Mid-Summer Cleanse

Yesterday I wrote about MyYoga.com and about how it's working for me at this point in my life. In addition to being a useful resource when I'm tired or feeling uncreative, it's also mercifully convenient. I have a yoga room (well, technically it's a sewga room) with all the bells and whistles so it's very easy to grab my laptop, shut the door and practice. I find it difficult to conform to studio class times because they aren't necessarily aligned with my schedule and I hate waiting around for a late class. I'm pretty-well couch-bound by 7:30 pm and I have to eat something before (light) and immediately after I practice, especially if it's moving into the dinner hour. Futhermore, and I can only speak for downtown studios in TO, but I'm fairly horrified by how they consistently overfill classes - with latecomers, no less. I do not like crowds and I particularly hate being shoved into an over-crowded corner because I am respectful enough to arrive at a class before it starts. Finally, as mentioned yesterday, I'm enjoying shorter, frequent practices lately. 90 minutes of hardcore vinyasa, starting at 7 pm, is just not doing it for me.

No doubt there are detractors to online yoga platforms: If you don't know what you're doing, you're not really going to learn the way you would in a class environment. There's not much teaching going on - it's more about class leading. This increases the opportunity for injury. MyYoga, specifically, under-represents certain methodologies (Iyengar), and over-represents others (Ashtanga). The teachers are not exactly relatable. They're generally buff and excessively photogenic - which may inspire or irritate. There's no class-energy to benefit from. It's an isolated medium.

I've been asked how I've continued to practice yoga regularly lo these many years. The answer is that I've adapted it to the life I'm living and I prioritize the activity. Mr. Iyengar used to say that you don't live to do yoga, you do yoga to live. Life comes first and yoga facilitates it. But that doesn't mean that I haven't had to draw some deep lines in the sand. When my kid was young, I'd pick her up from daycare, we'd walk home - I'd change and make her something to eat (or my husband would) and then I'd go straight to my mat. I couldn't wait till 9 pm (at which point I was effectively comatose from fatigue). I'm sure that one of M's enduring memories will be of me saying: Could you turn down that sound?? Mummy's practicing. (She's always listening to something on the computer / radio / TV.) I cannot allow myself to settle in before I do yoga or it doesn't happen. Sure, I've been known to bring my props to the living room, at 9:30 pm, while my husband watches TV - especially if I'm in a pain loop. But I don't really consider that yoga. (Mind you - it's better than nothing and it reinforces my commitment to my practice, even when things conspire to keep me out of the yoga room proper. BTW, there is nothing in my house that I haven't used as a prop :-))

I've also gone through phases when, frankly, yoga has taken a back seat. 25 years is a long time. I've rarely gone more than 2 weeks without it, but there have been times (when my kid was an infant, when I became apathetic in my early 30s) where I'd go through a couple of months without yoga (and even when I did practice, my head wasn't in it). Whatcha gonna do?

Intriguingly, at the moment, MyYoga is conspiring to facilitate a summer goal - and just by dumb luck. See, it semi-regularly hosts these things called "challenges" which are like mini-programs you can sign up for to learn, for example, how to develop elements of your practice. A new one started 3 days ago (though I believe anyone who's a member can start doing it at any time), called "Conscious Cleanse". Two of the MyYoga teachers have written a book by the same name and this challenge is pure cross-promotion. The format and hosts are a definitely plastic but there are very good resource materials and it's organized to bring one gradually into cleanse-mode over 2 weeks. There's nothing abrupt about it and one eats daily. This isn't a juice fast.

Basically, the program indicates that one does a pre-determined, cleanse-oriented yoga class daily, drinks a 32 oz green smoothie (ingredients and recipes suggested) and removes all the processed foods, gluten and refined sugar from the diet. One is also advised to drink water at the number of ounces equivalent to at least half of one's body-weight, daily. There's a heavy emphasis on overcoming functional dehydration which, as I like to harp, has really negative long-term implications.

Natch, I am modifying the rules to suit myself because there's no way I'm living without eggs, meat, dairy and caffeine (in the form of 2 shots of espresso per day). I also reserve the right to drink a glass of wine if I feel like it - but I haven't much felt like it cuz I'm drinking so much freakin' water (and smoothies) that I have no more space left for booze. Plus I eat dark chocolate as often as I like because really, if you don't, you're doing it wrong.

For me this is more of a state of mind than a hard reboot. And, because the challenge is heavily yoga-oriented, of course it's big on "intention setting". Gist is that participants are urged to determine their conscious or unconscious motivations before they undertake the cleanse. I can do that.

For what it's worth, my intention is two-fold: Improvement of my health to continue to reduce pain (my omnipresent goal, which is going pretty well, btw) and using optimal health as a means by which I can reframe my current body-image. I will not continue to reinforce body-criticism simply because I don't look as I did 2 years ago. That's such a waste of time and energy - not to mention that I have a very palatable figure, even if it isn't the one of my youth. One of my biggest struggles for the past year has been with bloating (nature's perfect way to make you feel fat!), partly because my digestive system is in a really strange place, partly because of overindulgence in sugar and salt and partly because of stress (predominantly of the work variety but life's thrown some curveballs).

The best way to feel good about how I look is to know that it's the product of my healthiest, sustainable lifestyle. This cleanse lasts only 2 weeks but that's long enough to modify some deleterious habits. Most certainly, part of my best lifestyle is indulging my well-developed hedonism so I won't be fucking with that. But it's once again time to refine things (ain't it always?), and I'm hopeful that this challenge will motivate moderate change.

Today's questions: What are your thoughts on fitness challenges or cleanses? Have you done an online challenge such as this or something similar? What were your intentions in taking it on? Let's talk!

Resource Management

I woke up this morning with a puffy throat feeling miserable. Tomorrow I have a big meeting so I have to find some way to keep it together. My intention was to do a good practice today. I haven't had a chance to do yoga in three days and, y'all know, the essence of commitment is commitment. I sense there's a bolster with my name on it, but that's not exactly promoting my improved strength.

Here's the thing - and I'm sure I don't need to tell you this - as much as you are truly invested in whatever path you're on (just pick one) - the regular world is going to step in semi-regularly to fuck with the plan.

I can handle my current derailment in a variety of ways. I can decide to ignore how I feel and practice hard. That would be foolhardy as years of past experience have taught me. I can feel sorry for myself (actually, this is part of the plan regardless) and do nothing at all.

Did I mention that it's pouring misery outside?

I'm aiming for the middle ground: some knitting, the requisite cooking (Bolognese cuz it's comfort food) and these gluten-free brownies. (I haven't forgotten to tell you about my gluten-free experiment. I'm just choosing not to dwell on it. Thank God for the new GF bakery on my route to work because baking without flour is a whole new frontier...)

I'll practice some kind of yoga. It won't be intense. It may be fairly static. Mind you, as I start to move I may feel better. As with all things (impending but distant home reno), it's best to take the long view. I'm stronger than I was 2 months ago. Hopefully I'll be stronger (and less inclined to colds) in another 2 months.

But enough wallowing. Here are a couple of yoga resources I've been meaning to tell you about...

Yoga By Candace: I read very few yoga blogs. Actually, there are very few yoga blogs that are more than 5 posts deep or that talk about the topic in a way I can get with. Candace manages to be very engaging on a variety of peripheral topics, particularly yoga "style" (aka clothing and accessories). She's peripatetic. She stays in awesome hotels. She's not hard to look at (and there are many opps to do so). And she's struggled with a serious illness in the past 4 years, which makes her practice and lifestyle all the more impressive. This is an interesting blog for those of you who want to see yoga through the lens of a real person who happens to be a teacher. It's not granola in the slightest, but if you have hotel envy, trigger alert. BTW, while I'm interested in Candace's tutorials (as a fellow teacher), I don't look to her practice posts as a learning vehicle - so I can't recommend her on that basis.

My Yoga Online: Recently this site (one of which I've had longstanding experience) merged with Gaiam TV. I have to say, the merger has made a formerly good site 100 times better - in as much as the content had doubled and broadened. Worry not however, if you care nothing of any element of Gaiam TV's "channels" except for the yoga one. The inventory of classes taught by numerous teachers has doubled. Needless to say, I would never recommend a website over a studio with a good teacher who can observe your body and alter your practice in accordance with your needs. But as a supplement or if you live in an isolated place (or work odd hours), it's a really good addition to a home practice. There's not much Iyengar instruction, alas... Most of it is pan-yogic, which is not optimal, IMO. I haven't spent a lot of time looking at the volume of beginner classes so I don't know how useful they are, but I can tell you there are numerous very challenging classes of all lengths. My fave teachers currently are Kreg Weiss (Cdn) and Rodney Yee (Iyengar expat). Kreg's got many more offerings than Rodney - to suit me, however. There are also "yoga challenges" (sign-up events of a variety of lengths to assist in developing practice), articles, guides and tons of resources on anatomy.

Hopefully these sites may be of some use to you.

Today's questions: Which yoga blogs to do read? Have you tried My Yoga Online? If yes, what do you think of the revamp? Do you use another online platform to supplement your practice? Let's talk.