The Merits of a Little Instability

See Om Boston for my newest post!
http://omboston.com/blog/2014/10/14/the-merits-of-a-little-instability

Why You Can't Reach Me

            My phone is generally within easy reach and I am often not very good at ignoring its seemingly constant buzzing.  If you text me, I generally will get back to you fairly quickly.  It’s the culture we have created with our technology and our need for instant gratification, and it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.  That leaves me trying to mitigate it so that I’m not spending the entirety of my days interacting via a small screen and an even smaller keyboard.  I am always working on being less technology-dependent.  When I’m spending time with friends I do make a conscious effort not to answer messages and open emails, but my phone is still nearby and I am still aware of its presence.  If a text comes in that seems really important, I will probably still open it even if I am trying my very best to be present without my technology.  Constant phone monitoring has become the norm when hanging out in a casual setting.  Phones are in laps, in pockets, clutched for dear life at all moments and we are all guilty of it. 

That being said, there are certain parts of my day during which you will be absolutely unable to reach me.  Some of these are not done on purpose, such as the fact that I am not going to answer my phone when I am in the shower.  However, when I am exercising I purposely disconnect from my phone, from email, from social networking, from any sort of digital communication.  At the gym my phone is in an armband and is only there because I use my phone for music during my workouts.  I am vaguely aware that it might be lighting up and buzzing but I will not check it.  Lately I have even been using the Do Not Disturb setting.  Whatever it is can wait.  I will not answer texts until I am done working out, and I certainly will not answer a phone call.  I am completely checked out from anything that is not the physical exercise task at hand.  Gym time is also no phone time.  When it comes to yoga, I am even stricter with myself about my phone.  During class, my phone is in my bag in a locker in a completely separate room.  While I’m on my mat, I forget that my phone exists.  I forget that most things exist besides my flow of poses and my breath.  I am not even a little bit aware of whether my phone is dinging or vibrating or spontaneously doing a funny dance in the locker.  The room in which I am practicing yoga is a sacred space, free from communication with anyone outside that space.

As I increase the amount of time I spend consciously disconnecting for the purpose of yoga or gym time, I find myself less attached to my phone throughout the rest of my day.  Spending time unplugged and focused on my body does wonders for clearing my mind of all the clutter.  On my mat, I can visualize outside thoughts as little bubbles that I can just pop to make them disappear.  My vinyasa is my number one priority whether it is for those 90 minutes of class or for five minutes of sun salutations in the morning.  Exercise is what keeps me physically healthy but it is also what keeps me mentally sane.  Disconnecting is an important part of that, and so is prioritizing my gym and yoga time for the sake of the benefits it provides me.  You can’t reach me while I’m practicing yoga because nothing is more important in that moment than what I am doing on that mat.

Start Each Day With an Intention, Not an Expectation

           Sometimes a yoga teacher will have us start class with an intention for our practice.  It could be an intention to really push yourself to your limits during this class, or an intention to listen to your body and respect what it needs, or an intention to focus on your breath and on clearing your mind of outside thoughts.  In the same breath, yoga teachers often remind us to enter into the practice without any expectations for ourselves or for the outcome.  This can seem like a contradiction.  At first glance it is, but upon closer examination it makes a lot of sense.

There is a difference between having an intention and having an expectation.  An intention is a hope and a focus for your practice, kind of like a drishti (visual focal point used in various poses) but for the mind.  You have succeeded with your intention if you can honestly say that you worked on it by the end of the class.  It is not a specific goal that you should feel badly about not attaining if you do not succeed.  In fact, it is not even something that you can check off that you absolutely completed because the whole point is to work on living this intention, not to approach it like a work task.  It is something to be mindful of during your practice without allowing it to distract you from the practice itself.  It integrates into the flow of your poses and can be applied as broadly as you need it to be.  It is your ruling philosophy for the course of the class and you can form it based on how you are feeling mentally or physically to begin with, or based on how you anticipate you might feel during the particular sequences you will be practicing during that class.

An intention is not an expectation that today you will finally come up into headstand.  It is not an expectation that you will take the most advanced modifications of every pose offered, and conversely it is not an expectation that you will have to take the easiest modifications offered for the poses.  These are far too specific to be in keeping with the spirit of having an intention in the first place because at the end of the class you will definitively have either done or not done these things.  While this can be exciting if you do accomplish what you expect to, it can leave you feeling like you failed if you do not reach these expectations you have set of yourself and that is not the point of a yoga practice.  Yoga is meant to uplift you regardless of the outcome of the practice.

            If you apply the concept of starting with an intention to the start of your day, then each day can be uplifting regardless of the outcome.  You can base your intention for the day off of how you feel when you wake up, or you can base it off of the tasks you know you will be facing during your day.  If you wake up feeling sad, anxious, or just generally negative about the day then a helpful intention might be to acknowledge and honor your emotions.  You can use this intention to focus on allowing yourself to feel various emotions, even the negative ones, without allowing them to take over your day and prevent you from being productive and functional.  You can’t just delete or ignore negative emotions, but you choose how much you let them affect you.  Of course, you can be mindful of your emotions on any day but you can make it your intention if you feel that you will need to pay extra attention to them on this particular day.  If you know you have a jam-packed day of places to be and things to do, then a good intention might be to focus on being aware of your breath throughout the day.  Keeping your breath in mind will allow you to manage the amount of stress that a non-stop day can cause.

            An intention for your day can serve as a backdrop to everything that happens, as it does during a yoga class.  At the end of the day you can return to your intention, as you do at the end of a yoga class, to reflect on the role it played in your day.  It won’t be a matter of having completed something, but rather a matter of having actively worked on taking care of yourself.  An intention is an acknowledgement of what you will need mentally and physically during a practice or during your day, and you can always check in with yourself and come back to that place where you started.

Work in Progress

            Your physical body and your self are always going to be a work in progress.  As someone who is not exactly thrilled by uncertainty, this is not an easy fact to accept.  Building muscle definition takes a lot of dedication and hard work and it is not something that will show up overnight.  But, if you actively work at it over an extended period of time you will be wonderfully rewarded with results.  Each goal, however, has to be another step on your fitness journey, and you can’t head down this path with any sort of end goal or picture in your mind.  I kept thinking there would be a point at which I would say, “Yes.  This is good.  I just want to stay exactly like this for the rest of my life and all I have to do now is maintain it.”  That point is never going to come, and I don’t think I want it to.  It’s not that I’m hypercritical of my body or that I am always looking for flaws and nitpicking at things I want to “fix”.  It’s not that at all. 

It’s that life is a work in progress and you have to keep moving.  I will set strength goals or target certain groups of muscles that I want to tone, or gradually work on a specific yoga pose.  All of these are gradual goals that I will have to build up to over time, and once I reach them I will find new goals.  I saw a great quote today that said, “It’s your life, your big yoga class.”  I started thinking about how I could apply that to my entire life.  How can I scale today’s vinyasa flow class, for example, to the timeline of my life?  Today’s class was full of layered poses, meaning that each step in the pose was a pose in itself and you could stop at any layer along the way.  The last layer was extremely difficult and everyone was encouraged to move as deep into the layers as possible, but you could stop wherever you needed to along the way.  I went as far as I could; I pushed myself, but it came from within and not from comparing myself to the person on the mat next to me.  I moved at my own pace and took pride in my own small victories.  I also surprised myself, going deeper than I thought I could in many of the poses.  The moment was right, the environment was right, and the teacher guided me further than I would have gotten on my own.

Many of the poses looked absolutely impossible when she demonstrated them, but there was no judgment and I just went for it, just to see how far I could go.  Most of the poses looked like I wouldn’t make it past the first or second layer, but I was able to go pretty far on all of them except the last one.  The last pose, I did indeed only get to the second layer, and I didn’t beat myself up over it.  I pushed as far as I could go without pushing myself over the edge into an injury or snapping something out of a socket.  I acknowledged my own personal boundary and respected that line and my own body.

Life can, indeed, be like one giant yoga class.  You can start your days with an intention just like a yoga class.  You can learn to compete only with yourself and to respect your limits, while challenging them at the same time.  You can surprise yourself.  You can always take life’s equivalent of savasana if you need it, be it a half hour break to watch a television show, having a scoop of ice cream for dessert, or just going to bed early one night because you need it.  And finally, if you dedicate yourself to working on something you really want, eventually you will be able to contort yourself into that final, impossible-looking layer of that pose.

It Was Bound to Happen

            My body finally got mad at me for the crazy workouts.  It was bound to happen eventually.  A little less than a month ago I felt like I was hitting a plateau and decided that the solution was to increase the length and intensity of my workouts.  I started doing an hour and a half a day at the gym instead of an hour.  This put my cardio workouts at close to 1,000 calories and I added in extra circuits to bring my strength training days to at least an hour and a half, sometimes longer.  I had been going to yoga once a week but insisted on also doing an hour and a half at the gym on those days.  Rest days were absolutely not a part of my vocabulary.  I started out without any real exit strategy, no plan for when to come back down. 

It certainly brought me out of my plateau; my weight stabilized and my muscles tightened and it did great things for a couple weeks.  I also didn't have to worry about self control in the kitchen quite as much because when you're burning close to a thousand calories doing cardio, a big bowl of pasta is necessary fuel rather than a special treat.  But then I started to wonder if this wasn’t a little overkill.  If this level of working out was what I had to do just to maintain my body, not even lose weight but maintain things the way they are, then perhaps I was doing something wrong.  This thought popped up a couple times but I continued anyway.  I’m not so good with moderation sometimes.  I was going hard and I loved it. 

Fortunately, my body knew best and my body did not love it so much after a month.  I started taking one rest day a week just because I was mentally and physically exhausted by the end of the week.  This went well and I could feel how much stronger and healthier my muscles were when I returned to the gym.  However, I still did not come down from the super-intense, hour and a half workouts.  Finally, my body snapped.  You name it, it was bothering me or not working right.  Everything from my wrist to various organ systems were causing me trouble.  It was nothing serious or life threatening by any means, but everything was just a little off.  My body was mad at me and was expressing it by refusing to run smoothly.

Yesterday was Wednesday, and I had just taken a rest day on Friday but my body was absolutely not having anything to do with working out yesterday and I stayed home from the gym.  Today was yoga day, and I decided that perhaps the 90 minute vinyasa flow class would be enough of a workout on its own without also going to the gym.  Tomorrow will be a cardio day, but I’ll only be doing an hour.  It’s time to come back to reality and to an actually sustainable exercise plan.  Yoga was amazing.  It cleansed my body and cleared my head and re-grounded me.  It was exactly what I needed. 

Moral of the story: in working out and in life, you can go really hard for a short period of time if you need to, but it’s called going hard for a reason.  It’s not sustainable in the long term.  When something is too intense, it is not sustainable in the long term.  Work, relationships, your own body and mind, all of these things can only sustain so much.  When they start to break down, you’ve gone too far.  The goal is to avoid reaching that point in the first place, but if things are already breaking down then it’s time to make a change.  I let myself wallow in the lack of functioning for a couple days and now I’m ready to pick myself back up and keep moving forward.

My Relationship with Yoga (and the Gym)

When I was in middle school and early high school I had a regular yoga practice at a studio in Miami.  I started going to Basic level classes and gradually worked my way up to Intermediate/Advanced, meeting a few really inspiring yoga teachers along the way.  I felt like I was getting serious about yoga and even toyed with the idea of working for my teaching certification.  My grandparents bought me a really nice yoga mat as a Chanukah gift one year and I still have it.  As high school pressed on, I got busier and 90 minute yoga classes plus travel time each way just did not fit into my packed schedule (read: four year plan to go Ivy if it killed me).  I stopped going to yoga but I kept in touch with the receptionist, who I had become friends with, and a couple of the teachers.  One of them, notable for his use of reverberating sound bowls during his classes, went on to start a yoga and wellness movement on South Beach and I still receive his email updates.  Another teacher was my absolute favorite because I loved that at the ends of her classes she would give each student a mini forehead massage with chakra oil during savasana.  I still have a little bottle of that oil and it still has a certain comfort to it.  She moved to Puerto Rico where she is happily married with an adorable son and we keep in touch on Facebook. 

            When I started college I sought out a yoga studio to try here in Boston.  I knew I did not like gym yoga because it felt too exercise-y and not spiritual enough.  I liked starting class chanting Om’s and feeling that my practice had a meaning to it beyond exercise.  I went to one class at the studio I found but I quickly became wrapped up in classes and extracurriculars and adjusting to the fact that the weather outside was very, very different from what I was used to in sunny South Florida.  I went to the gym sometimes but it wasn’t really a big part of my life.  I had brought the nice yoga mat with me and it sat in the corner of my tiny dorm room the entire year except for the one excursion to a class.  Yoga was one of those things I always really earnestly meant to do, but it somehow always fell by the wayside.

            Part way through this past summer at home in Miami, I started working out a lot and lifting weights.  It was mostly as a healthy outlet to combat stress.  In the fall I came back to Boston for classes and at that point I was going to the gym nearly every day.  I was benching and I could lift more than my body weight with my quads.  I was really, really excited about that.  I also did not quite understand two things that tie together: slowly lifting heavy weights does not actually burn that many calories, and it will make you bulk up even if you’re eating healthy.  Which I was not exactly doing, because in my mind I was going to the gym every day and that easily justified eating whatever I pleased.  Certain articles of clothing stopped fitting me and I started bringing cardio days back into the mix but it didn’t quite work.

            At home in Miami again for a few weeks for Winter Break, I worked with a trainer who taught me some important fundamentals.  The biggest thing was that our bodies do not know that we live in modern times, and will interpret anything we do physically in evolutionary terms.  If you lift heavy weights slowly, your body will think you need to move boulders on a daily basis in order to survive and it will store extra body fat to make sure you will have the bulk and strength to do that.  If, on the other hand, you exhaust your muscles by lifting lighter weights more quickly and with more repetition, your body will think you need to run away from predators to survive and it will get more lean.  The food component is based on the same primal responses: if you eat every three hours you are telling your body that there is an abundance of food and it does not need to store any extra body fat, but wait four hours between meals and your body will think you are having trouble finding food and will store fat to make sure you don’t die.  It’s quite considerate of it, really, but if you don’t understand these mechanisms it can be very easy to accidentally put on weight.  When you’re only five foot two like me, extra weight is very noticeable.  And it’s not about being skinny, it’s about being healthy (looking and feeling).

            My trainer started me on a circuit training regimen with weights and sent me back to Boston for the spring semester with exercise routines in hand.  I alternate strength training circuit days with cardio days, as the cardio is just as important for your heart and for fat burning.  It’s been a few months of this now and it’s been going really, really well.  I feel healthy and strong.  A few weeks ago while doing a drop set on the shoulder press machine, I felt something hurt in the back of my right shoulder.  It seemed to be one of those tiny muscles really deep in there that I couldn’t reach to stretch.  I wouldn’t call it an injury but it was certainly a strain, and moving my arm the wrong way was painful.  A (knowledgeable) friend took a look at it for me and recommended that I go easy on my shoulder for a while and avoid moving my arm above my horizontal shoulder line.

           I adapted my workouts to make sure I wasn’t neglecting my upper body but was still taking care of my shoulder so as not to turn a twinge into a full on injury.  It was then, as I added in a lot more stretching post-workouts, that yoga popped into my mind.  It’s funny but a lot of people turn to yoga as a result of an injury and I gravitated to it as well.  I went back to the studio I had tried freshman year; it had changed locations to a beautiful, new space and I went on a Sunday night to try it.  I brought the yoga mat with me; it had been sitting in the corner of my dorm room yet again.  The studio had that familiar yoga studio feel and smell to it.  It felt like home.  Most yoga studios do, I have found.  The teacher and the class were great and I really stretched into my shoulder.

            The next week I felt like I was ready to get back on my shoulder and I slowly eased back into my exercises.  Thankfully all went well and my shoulder seems to be fine.  I still pay a little extra attention to it.  As for yoga, I have continued to practice.  A friend introduced me to a different studio here that offers $5 community classes on weekday afternoons.  At that price (as opposed to the usual $15 a pop) going once a week is no problem.  The Thursday afternoon class is taught by one of the best teachers in Boston and I have gone twice so far.  This studio too feels like home and I feel at home on my mat.  I’ve come full circle and feel much more balanced now that I have reincorporated yoga in my fitness routine.  I’ve added some yoga into my post-workout stretches and I’ll even flow through a vinyasa or two in the morning or at night before I go to sleep.  I’m learning to use the physiological effects of specific poses to my advantage and also deepen into my muscles.  Yoga is also a much different experience now that I have muscle strength from working out, as opposed to six years ago when yoga was the only athletic activity I did at all.  I’m glad that I have found a place for it in my life again.

Finding Strength in Child's Pose

I was in quite possibly the most intense yoga class I have ever taken.  It was an arm balancing class and I don’t have much experience with those types of poses in the first place.  At one point in the class, the teacher gave us the option to stay in downward dog or take child’s pose.  When she noticed that most of the class had stayed in downward facing dog she said, “And for those of you not taking child’s pose right now because you want to look or feel strong, remember that child’s pose is a strong pose.” 

This can be explored in two different directions- not taking child’s pose in order to look strong, and not taking child’s pose in order to feel strong.  They aren’t two mutually exclusive directions, as the line between the two is admittedly blurry.  The part about trying to look strong resonated a little.  When I’m in a yoga class I tell myself I’m practicing for no one but myself but I inevitably slip into trying to take the hardest variations; it’s mostly to challenge myself and feel strong but sometimes it’s a little bit motivated by trying not to look like the weak one in the class.  We all know that feeling.  However, the direction of trying to feel strong really hit the nail on the head for me.  I was still in downward dog because taking child’s pose felt like I would be giving up, unable to hold my pose any longer, and sinking to the floor.  When she pointed out that child’s pose is a strong pose, I started to see it that way for the first time.  I started to bring strength into my practice of child’s pose, feeling the stretch in my back and the strength in my arms.  Since I returned to practicing yoga (more on that soon) I also have incorporated it into my stretching after my daily workouts at the gym. 

Coming out of an invigoratingly strong child’s pose at the gym a couple days later I began to think about how to apply lessons learned on the mat to life off the mat, a principle that a past yoga teacher in Miami had always emphasized.  I realized that you have to find your own source of strength from somewhere inside you, your source of strength to restore your own balance.  Because you can’t be breaking down all the time.  I can’t be breaking down all the time.  I have things to do, goals to accomplish, and work to do to get me there in every aspect of my life.  So when I start to spiral into a bad mood that is going to ruin the rest of my day, it is my responsibility to catch myself and stop it.  It is no one else’s job to do that.  It is mine and mine alone to be attentive to and aware of my physical and mental state.  If I start to spiral, I need to identify the root cause immediately and address it.  If I can’t identify it, then I must proceed straight to catching myself before I spiral to the point of no return.  I need to find my internal strength and restore my own balance. 

For me, my internal mental strength comes from physiological strength.  If I take a minute in child’s pose, or hero’s pose, or just do a couple of vinyasas and completely focus on the pose or the flow, I can restore my balance all by myself.  Not in a place that I can drop to the floor and do yoga?  No problem.  That’s why yoga is valuable on and off the mat- if I mimic the focus, calmness, and feeling of strength that I find in the poses just in my mind, I can use that to restore my balance and find my stability.  I used to dislike stability because I found it boring.  But I’ve learned that stability is a good thing, a state to relish.  It reminds you that at the end of the day you are in control of yourself and that feels good.  There will be moments of the day that you are purely, uninhibitedly enjoying what you’re doing.  Strive to have as many of those moments as possible.  There will be moments that you don’t enjoy quite as much.  But try not to let yourself stray too far from the middle because that will throw you off balance.