Forty Days of Yoga: ¼ of the Way Through!

I totally look like this during yoga. Always.

“Exercises are like prose, whereas yoga is the poetry of movements.” –Amit Ray

Day 10:

I hurt.  Everywhere pretty much, but especially in my arms.   I’ve taken nine Baptiste yoga classes in ten days and I feel stronger and cleansed in a I’m-drinking-a-gallon-of-water-a-day-sweating-a-lot kind of way.   And I love it.

I sort of fell in love with Dancing Mind Yoga, the only Baptiste yoga studio in the Metro area (okay, the only one I’ve ever heard of ever) a little over a year ago, but I couldn’t afford to do more than the Groupon deal for a month and they don’t let returning students take advantage of Groupons after that first time.   But I didn’t forget about the studio either.

Baptiste Yoga is regular yoga, in a pretty hot room (95 degrees or so), on speed.  It’s not the traditional hot Bikram yoga which is 104ish degrees and involves standing in the same (generally sort of crazy) positions for long breaths.  It’s a flow class that involves most of the popular yoga poses like Chair Pose, Warrior 1, and High-to-Low Plank.  Low Plank, also known as Chaturanga Dandasana, is the pose that’s causing my arms to become stronger, but also to hurt like crazy.  If you don’t believe me, you try hovering just off the floor in plank, with your elbows close to your side.   Just hang out there for awhile.  Do it two dozen or so times in the next hour.  You’ll be sore too.   But this sort of yoga doesn’t just encourage these normal poses, it also goes all crazy and has people doing headstands and side-crow and splits frequently.  And most of the class is done at an extremely rapid pace.   Until that moment when you’re in Chair pose, just squatting deeper and you realize everything has slowed down.  And at that moment I always want the rapid-fire instructions back.   It kicks my ass every time.  I totally love it. 

So it’s not that Dancing Mind has suddenly become more affordable to me.  It’s a treat I gave myself, sort of a I have a real job now and can take part in a special offer they’re running.  It’s 40 Days to Personal Revolution.  Honestly, I’m not sure how much of a revolution I need in my life right now, but 40 days of unlimited yoga was the selling point for me.  It’s a 40 day challenge I want to take, and I wanted to see if I would get stronger as a result of yoga every day.  No cardio or weights or P90X, just damn warm yoga. 

I love it enough that after every class I wonder if I can afford to continue to have a membership there.  At $99 a month for unlimited classes, it’s not a small financial commitment, certainly more than any other gym that offers a much wider variety of options for classes and equipment. (If anyone would like to privately fund my continued classes at Dancing Mind and end my internal after-class struggle, just let me know J.)  But it’s the best full body workout I’ve ever gotten, it’s so much fun, and I feel so accomplished when I leave, having almost done a headstand, or doing Bird of Paradise for the first time.  And so I go back and forth every time.

The other part of the personal revolution—the coaching on Wednesday nights is actually a lot harder for me to deal with than I thought.  Most of the time whenever we’ve done meditation or deep relaxation, it’s a time of prayer for me.  So even though I know some people who are anti-yoga because it is part of an eastern religious way of life (love you Ben!), I’ve never felt like there was anything wrong with it.  My sister called me a post-modernist recently, which I’ve never thought was true about me (and by most people’s standards, I’m not at all).  I believe in absolutes too much.  But I do think that the command to “Be still and know that I am God,” can be achieved, even in a sweaty studio, lying on a yoga mat. 

So I didn’t expect to struggle with the other parts of the 40 Days program.  But as we sat there on our mats in a studio that was slightly cooler than normal, our coach, the owner of the studio, was encouraging us to realize that though things “seem” difficult in your life, they only seem that way and all the power to fix those problems is already within us.  We can fix any problem by believing in ourselves. 

I’ve heard this sort of thinking before, but for some reason I really struggled with hearing it now.  Maybe it was because of all these people, who truly want something to change in their life putting their faith in themselves.  I know there are people who’ve had some sort of success with this way of thinking, but I am not one of those people.  If it was up to me, if I had everything within me for strength and understanding and power I would be more terrified than anything else.   It’s liberating to know that it’s not all up to me.  That I can just be the clay rather than being the potter.  It’s a freedom that takes some getting used to and there are a ton of days where I’m determined to be the potter.  But I’m not supposed to be and honestly, when I try, I fail.  Utterly. 

I knew I probably wouldn’t agree with everything that they said in this 40 Day journey.  I just didn’t really expect to want stand up and say, “With Jesus,” after almost everything that our leader said was possible for us.  I didn’t say it, but the fact that I wanted to, sort of intensely, was pretty weird for me.  And maybe that’s an unexpected road for me in this journey.  Which I suppose is sort of the point—trying new things, seeking stillness, and desiring God in that stillness.

 I think I’m going to go back to the coaching session tonight.  Not necessarily because I think I’ll get anything life changing out of it, but because I think it’s worth trying things more than just once.  Also, because I somehow made a friend last week and I want to try to honor that friendship and get to know her more.  But after tonight, we’ll see.  Between getting there, practicing yoga, a short break, the coaching session, and driving home, it’s a four hour weeknight commitment.  So it may not be a thing I do for the next five weeks, but as I remember my almost headstand, I realize there are a lot of things that have been unexpected in the first ten days of the forty, and there might be many more to come.