From Oscillations… Brooklyn to The Burgh

Last week I toted my mat around Manhattan and Brooklyn to teachers and classes I’d never taken before. I was like a yoga kid all over again, a brand spanking new student, where class is overwhelming and the teacher digs up your vulnerabilities. Three out of last week’s six classes made me cry. No, not sobbing. Just a tear or two, easily camouflaged by sweat. It was all part of my game plan—to wean myself off of Mala.

I have to. I’m headed to Pittsburgh in just under two months. New life. New people. New yoga. A whole lotta new, so I thought I’d practice what it feels like to not know my teachers.

Class number one: an hour of power, which encouraged four different arm balances in a blasting 90 degree studio. No tears, just sore deltoids.

Class number two: some hot, hot Bikram with a friend in Williamsburg, because every month or two I’m up for the crazy cleanse. There were tears, but I think my eyes were just watering from not enough sleep and a bit too much of last night’s wine.

Class number three: a very quiet Dharma class where the energetic shifts were so subtle and so potent that I was overwhelmed with how much I love the practice of yoga. How much I needed a quiet class in a sunlit studio. No talking. No words. One tear.

Class number four: A Prana Flow class at my old teacher training studio. Zero tears, just happy and familiar.

Class number five: I was back to the power studio for a teacher that came recommended. Pittsburgh is going to be a lot of power, so I’m practicing some power.

I arrived early. I left my cell phone at home, which left me sitting silently on a couch waiting for that moment where people start coming in and rolling out their mats. Without a friend or an iPhone, I must have looked lost. The teacher said something to me about “needing some yoga.” I nodded. I smiled.

When it was time, I stripped down to booty shorts and a tank and walked into the studio with my mat. The air inside felt like hot, hot sunshine and stunk like other people’s bodies. Hot, hot studios can’t help it. I no longer fault them. We started with sun salutes and familiar asanas. I got assists and smiles from a teacher who said things like: “I really, really enjoy proving other people wrong. In fact, it’s my favorite thing to do.” She made me think things like: I am really, really going to miss Mala. What the hell am I gonna do?

And then came the kicker. We were asked to open up into side plank—fine. Drop our lower knee to the mat—this feels weird. Keep our toes tucked and bend our top leg—I’m losing balance here. Now grab for our top ankle—thud. I tried and tried, but I could not do that pose, balance on a knee and a hand, whatever that pose was. I could feel my ego suffocating the practice. I was angry, feeling stupid. I was ready to quit, and then the teacher came over and held me into that pose—all wobbling, sweating, fuming side plank of me—no f*#king way. I do not like this. 

“I’ve got you,” said the teacher who proves people wrong. “It’s okay. I think yoga is good for you.” I wanted to say, “no shit,” but instead I blinked away sweaty frustration tears, smiled, and tried to breathe.

Finally, Savasana, with a towel on my face and the air still sizzling, brought on more tears. Sad tears. Can-I-do-this tears. I’m leaving tears. I’m leaving my yoga, my studio and my teachers who know me and really, really know how to align me—on and off the mat. I’m leaving, and I’m walking right into a sea of teachers and studios who don’t know me at all.

Class number six: I was early and eager for Steph’s Friday evening class. I soaked up her cues and her hilarious and exquisitely accurate usage of words. And in headstand, withmy teacher’s thumb and index finger gently dragging the energy up through my heels I found myself crying again. Laughing and crying. Sad and happy. Upside down and right side up.

I have to believe there will be more Mala-like yogis out there, in The ‘Burgh, more students I can take care of, more teachers who can take care of me. More people I can get to know. More yoga.

And always more reasons to visit this crazy, beautiful city I’ve called home for almost a decade.

From Oscillations… Hyperextension

A few months ago I hyperextended the ring finger of my left hand. I was warned about this—hyperextending my fingers. Did I listen to my teacher? Apparently not. Who actually hyperextends their finger? Those wide-spread fingers were strong, holding me up in balances and inversions, so I just plowed through my practice. Then came the day it hurt like hell to type. Something in my hand felt crooked. The typing was doable, yet painful.

That same evening, two breaths into Eka Pada Koundiyanasana (this crazy thing), my body decided to call the shots. Clunk. My left hand gave out and I face-planted on my mat in Jen Whitney’s Thursday flow class. Embarrassing… yeah, kind of. But that was that. My body was telling the super-duper, overachieving brain of mine to back off. The next few weeks became a practice of learning to strengthen my wrists, staying out of my arm balances and giving handstands a rest. I grumbled about it at first, but I had no choice. Pain or yoga? I utilized different muscles. I discovered a little bit more of how my hands work—on my keyboard, in life, in yoga. By the time the tension had healed, I’d forgotten I cared so much about what I was missing, those poses I wasn’t practicing.

Today the left hand is back to good and my brain is much more in tune with how hands support a practice and how fingers don’t. Curiously enough, after that four-week break, my handstand has advanced out of nowhere. That hyperextended finger was exactly what I needed. Now, the poses I’d been striving for come with more ease, yet I’m less addicted to them. I quit being—as my mother puts it best—pushy with my practice.

Best-seller!

And here we have yoga serving as my metaphor for life—again. In the last two months, I’ve marketed, pitched, spread the word, and pushed my book. It was as if some measure of book success had become the equivalent to nailing a peak pose. I could feel a crash coming. It was time to quit hyperextending before the face-plant.

Last week I took a break. After all, I did enjoy one heck of a book party (thank you, Book Court!), so a break was warranted. I wrote less. I pitched less. I emailed less. I quit monitoring and quit checking up on all things book-related. Last week it was my dad that did the writing and the reaching out.

So, what the heck, why not share his words? Below is a grant letter he wrote. This is his straight-from-the-horse’s-mouth words on his yoga practice, a practice I learn so very much from.

I would like to offer my support for your proposal for your grant for the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute entitled “The Application of Yoga for Individuals with TBI”.

I suffered a severe traumatic brain injury in 1996. My injuries are to the frontal lobe, which makes it difficult for me to make good decisions and interact appropriately. I also have trouble with self-awareness. I think part of having a brain injury is your mind disconnecting from your body, but that is hard to figure out how to fix. I would like to participate in this research because yoga has made positive changes in my life.

I recently started a basic routine yoga practice with my daughter. I do things haphazardly because of my brain injury, and I learned that you cannot do yoga that way. It’s a discipline. You have to do the poses a certain way, and what you are doing is tying your mind to your body. They really start to interconnect, whereas on a treadmill you can turn off your brain and watch the news or listen to music. Or if you do a puzzle, you are just sitting in a chair. Yoga is physical, but it makes me think constantly. 

My wife says that yoga gets me to focus and to pay more attention to my surroundings. She says that I am less impulsive, which is a good thing. For me, it is hard to explain how yoga makes me feel better, but it just does. Physically it makes me walk better and have good posture, but it also helps me be normal. I got away from being normal, way off track. The yoga gets my mind and body to talk back and forth. It helps me exercise my brain, and I think that’s a good thing.

Yoga can help other people with injuries like mine, but it is hard to go to a yoga class if you have a brain injury. I think that if yoga became recognized as a treatment or a therapy then more people with brain injuries could participate. I hope we can make that happen. 

Sincerely,

John Leyde

If we’re being entirely honest, I did do the typing for him.

Tunes, anyone?

I  love songs, music, lyrics. They are perfect Proustian moments (the scientific definition, if you’re curious) that snap me back to an emotion, a memory. Songs are really good for getting in a good mood, getting inspired, getting over shit. At least for me. And holy cats, does that come out in my book–the things you realize after several other people have now read your life story. My parents love music, too. And my dad loves talking about it, for years having  yapped to me about lead singers, guitar riffs, and quizzing me on who used to be in what band when. It’s the same with one of my very best friends. While Adam and my dad have their magnitude of musical knowledge, I’m still the one who can’t remember how the words in the song go. And I’m known to sing the wrong ones anyway.

 

I know that song is not for everyone, but for those of you that enjoy the idea, if He Never Liked Cake had a soundtrack, you can listen to it here.

If He Never Liked Cake had a soundtrack, this would be it.

1. Black Cow – Steely Dan
2. For What It’s Worth – Buffalo Springfield
3. Tin Cup Chalice – Jimmy Buffett
4. Apartment Song – The Clarks
5. Ants Marching – Dave Matthews Band
6. Farmhouse – Phish
7. Life Is A Highway – Tom Cochrane
8. Beast Of Burden – The Rolling Stones
9. White Table – Delta Spirit
10. Streetcorner Symphony – Rob Thomas
11. Firecracker – Ryan Adams
12. The General Specific – Band of Horses
13. Seven Nation Army – The White Stripes
14. Devil Town – Bright Eyes
15. Hey Jealousy – Gin Blossoms
16. Broken Open – Cold War Kids
17. Landslide – Fleetwood Mac
18. Unknown Legend – Neil Young

And for all you Parrotheads out there, let’s make some sense of those chapter titles here. Obviously, all Jimmy Buffett tunes.

For you Parrotheads out there. Making sense of chapters.

1. Defying Gravity
2. Pacing The Cage
3. Changing Channels
4. Domino College
5. Mental Floss
6. The Good Fight
7. Love And Luck
8. Why Don’t We
9. Little Miss Magic
10. You’ll Never Work In Dis Bidness Again
11. If I Could Just Get It On Paper
12. Woman Goin’ Crazy On Caroline Street
13. Boomerang Love
14. Stranded On A Sandbar
15. The Wino And I Know
16. If It All Falls Down
17. The Weather Is Here, Wish You Were Beautiful
18. Delaney Talks To Statues

From Oscillations… Hands Up. Now What?

 

All through my travels and book launches and holidays I’ve had Oscillations on my mind. I feel as though I’ve left everyone standing in Tadasana—and that was weeks ago. I abandoned the column for a week, and then another week. It wasn’t the plan. I suppose I needed my world—even if it was only the one part of my world that is yogis and readers and this blog—to stand still. Then again, standing in Mountain Pose is not so bad a place to be.

Now I’m back, so let’s move. Hands up. Fingers high to the sky. Urdhva Hastasana.

hands up in the park

I used to think that yoga had some throw-away poses. Upward Hands Pose, seriously? Tadasana with hands in the air—it bored me. It’s just that transition pose that gets you from A to B, Mountain Pose to Forward Fold. As soon as my arms went up, I wanted to bring them down. As I teach this pose to my father, I see the familiar mental turn-off. His expression says: Are you kidding me? We just did this without my hands up.

It took a Basics class at Mala to teach me what this Urdhva Hastasana is all about.  (That’s the thing about basics classes at Mala, somehow they manage to kick both my ass and my brain in the most unexpected ways.) I was holding a block—palming that block—in Steph’s Basics class. All I wanted to do was give up, quit breathing, just put my arms down. Going on five breaths … I was hardly bored. My brain was on overload keeping track of the alignment cues from Tadasana (its predecessor) and adding on the intention of knowing where my body was in space when I moved one (okay, two) appendages. Arms up. Game changer: ribs popped, shoulders hugged the ears too close, and that super-C curve snuck into my lower lumbar. All that thinking, and I still had no idea if my thumbs were facing the back of the room, which would keep the external rotation and allow my collarbones to spread wide. I wanted to look up them, to check, but that was what the block was for, so I looked straight ahead. Maybe finding a Drishti would make it easier. It did. Still, three… more… breaths…

“It’s a discipline,” my dad tells me on the phone the other day. We’re talking about yoga. “I do things haphazardly because of my brain injury, and I learned that you cannot do yoga that way. You have to do the poses a certain way, and what you are doing is tying your mind to your body. Yoga is physical, but it makes you think constantly.”

He’s right. Holding Urdva Hastansana makes your brain work. And it activates more muscles than you thought mattered. Try it. It takes discipline. And keep in mind, it’s not the discipline of shoulds, but rather what you can allow to happen when you give yourself time and space to organize your body through your brain.

Urdhva Hastansa (Upward Hands Pose):

 Basics:

Feet: Stand with your big toes touching and your heels slightly apart (or keep your feet parallel and as wide as your hips). Feel the weight in the heel and ball of each foot.

Legs: Activate your quadriceps (thigh muscles). Think about lifting your kneecaps.

Arms: Bend at your elbows and bring your palms together in front of your sternum. Press all ten fingers and the heel of your palms together as elbows point out. Feel your shoulder blades come together, your collarbone spread, and your chest lift.

Head: Move your ears over your shoulders. Allow your chin to come parallel to the floor.

EXTRA: Think about reaching your tailbone toward the mat and the crown of your head toward the sky. Maybe you lift an inch taller.

PROP: Place a block between your palms squeeze the block.

 

Benefits:

Cognitive:

• develops concentration
• calms the mind

Emotional:

• relieves mild anxiety
• improves self-confidence

Behavioral:

• improves self-awareness

Physical:

• reduces fatigue
• improves digestion
• opens shoulders and lengthens spine
• stretches and tones belly

 

 

 

From Oscillations… Yoga and Writing. Writing and Yoga.

Yoga marries with just about anything quite nicely—running marathons, strength training, traveling, physical or mental therapies, the 9-5 work week, parenting, embracing life. So when I want to make something a little better, to take it to that 150%, I add some yoga.

The brain, the books, the asasna practice.

In grad school, my life was long hours of laborious journalism assignments paired with late nights out with friends. I was flailing myself at life, telling myself it was exhilarating and fun, the way you are supposed to live your twenties in New York City. I had zero balance, which is exactly what my mother will tell you, and she’s so infrequently wrong. So I hit the mat, sweating and stretching my ass off daily at a second story Bikram studio in SoHo. Yes Bikram, because that was who I was in my early twenties—intense. And it worked, because slowly the practice began to pull all the elements of my life back to the midline. I was sleeping harder and thinking clearer, and for the first time in a very long time I was able to exist at a slower pace. A few years later, in the aftermath of what felt like a debilitating relationship, my yoga practice saved me again.

“My craving had morphed from time spent on the mat to lose weight into time on my mat to gain sanity. My practice had moved from the physical body to the mental realm, but I didn’t care. I just needed.”

Yes, that was a few sentences from He Never Liked Cake, an unabashed book plug. And yes, there is a party happening!

Book Court Book Party!

I started said book just days after finishing my teacher training. Four weeks of yoga morning, noon and night, and my body and brain felt … clean. Now it was time to write, write, write, write… No more snippets of stories and files and folders, but time for chapters and structure. Write your book: that was the only assignment I’d given myself for the next six months. At first, the writing came—dare I say it—easy. A few weeks in, the write, write, writing got harder. A month in, and I was creating pages of senseless, directionless story. I heard the wee e-crunch of the desktop trashcan more times than I wanted to. Garbage, figuratively and literally.

One day, I just gave up. Nothing was coming up. It was all stuck in my brain, the words I needed, the story I wanted to share. Rather than chucking my shiny new MacBook Air out the fourth floor window, I pushed the couch over, rolled up the carpet, and did at least two hours worth of impromptu asana on my bare living room floor—sans mat. I sweat, swore, panted, and cried. I chugged a glass of water. I took a shower. I made dinner out of avocados and tomatoes and dessert out of a mango, watched a terrible rom-com, and admitted to myself (the newly minted yoga teacher) that not practicing yoga for two weeks was a not a good idea. That night I slept happy as a kitten. The next day I wrote four chapters, good ones as far as rough draft chapters go.

Lesson had been learned: Getting stuck? Do yoga. The creativity-yoga marriage was not initially intuitive, but writing is what I do, and the practice serves to enhance just that—all the things that I do: walk, think, breathe, eat, love, play, write. This year I flipped the pair on its head. I got stuck with my practice, so I started writing about yoga, and the new discoveries poured forth on my mat like fresh sentences.

It only makes sense that each takes turns supporting the other. Isn’t that what a relationship is supposed be like anyway? Sometimes I get stuck on a sentence, so I do a headstand or a fold over my legs. Other times, I can’t figure out my feelings for a pose, so I write about it. Turns out I heart camel.

Given that I’ve discovered a thing or two about the relationship between yoga and writing, I’m inviting anyone who is the market for creating (whether it’s for fun or for your job—or both) to join me at Mala (Saturday, April 13th^, from 4-6pm). I’ll share more of what I’ve experienced. We’ll chat. We’ll do some asana (nothing too crazy) to clear your brain and let the creativity flow. Then we’ll have free (and silent) time to write, compose, draw, anything you do directly after practicing. Then we’ll chat some more. So bring your creativity tools. My tool is that MacBook Air, but you can bring notebooks, pencils, computers, iPads, knitting needles… just don’t use the internet, because it’s not a time to communicate or connect externally. That being said, if your job is social networking, you might even play around with the clarity and wit you can come up in the tweets and posts composed post yoga. I have, and you will be surprised how easy it becomes to squeeze a thought into 140 characters!

 

He Never Liked Cake

He Never Liked Cake chillin with my other books

Many of you know that I wrote a book. It just launched today. As a first-time author, a girl who used to only ruminate on this crazy dream, I am now sitting cross-legged on my bed looking at my author copy, as it sits stacked on my night stand with other books, and trying to keep up with my hot coffee and the flurry of tweets and posts that come with book launch day and my release party at dream-come-true Book Court.

The book is a memoir, He Never Liked Cake (Balboa Press a Division of Hay House 2013), the story of a father and a daughter and a family who learned to live with traumatic brain injury.

The brain injury is my father’s. It happened the summer I turned fourteen, an unfortunate and unplanned consequence of a car accident on a rain-slicked highway. The days following after unfolded into a life I hadn’t planned on, one that—to this day—continues to surprise and challenge me.

 

It took me a while, about fifteen odd years, to get down to really writing it. I had notes and folders and documents and journals, but I didn’t know where to start. Three days after I’d finished yoga teacher training (yes, I’m a yoga teacher, too), I sat down with Chapter One. Millions of themes and leitmotifs swimming around in my head, but I couldn’t seem to fit them into my story, much less the neat and tidy pages of a book proposal. Yoga had become my fulcrum for life, my discipline, my motivation, yet my writing was all over the map.

ओम् तत् सत्

the book cover

Om tat sat It wasn’t even a pretty mantra, not at all aesthetically flowing like so many others we’d been taught; however, when I saw it in writing, tacked onto the bottom of some yoga teacher’s email (whoever you are, wherever you are… thank you for including that in your email), pure curiosity compelled me to Google. The most widely recognized meaning is “Supreme Absolute Truth.” Or there is the more literal “all that is.” And if that’s still hard to wrap your brain around, then think of it as all that happens—circumstances, relationships, tragedies, hardships, love, hate, loss, birth, death—is meant to happen.

 Om tat sat fast became my mantra for the book, and truth became the fulcrum of my narrative. I’d spent too many years of my life asking why, living in the anger of a situation gone wrong, stuck wallowing in what I thought it was supposed to be like, but, yoga and its infinite wisdom opened me up to seeing a bigger truth: you are exactly where you are meant to be, doing whatever it is your are meant to be doing. I was able to accept. I was able to embrace. Soon people (friends and family and my amazing editor) and gurus (like Gabby Bernstein) and teachers (the Mala ladies) began to flood into my life offering to help support the beginnings of this book.

author photo

There is an awesome comfort in knowing that I can look backward and forward as much as I want to, but my father will have always gotten into that car accident, and his brain injury will have always made life a hell of lot more challenging for my mother (and for me and for our family) than any of us had planned on. We can fight it, yet the truth remains. There was simply no way that accident was not going to happen in this lifetime. It will build us and shape us. Its effects probably have tentacles that reach out to the far corners of the world, to places we may never know. And sure, the acceptance is hard. Emotions are tricky.

The week I finished the book, I went with one of my best friends to East Side Ink and had a teddy bear of a bald man tattoo sat (truth in Sanskrit) sat on my wrist. Because I am who I am, doing what I’m meant to be doing. I am making mistakes, taking leaps and traveling on this journey. I am all that is. We are all that is. All that is truth.

 

If you’d like to read my story, please visit Amazon, B&N or Balboa Press and pick up a copy of He Never Liked Cake.  And if you love what you find, tell your friends, write a review, post, tweet, share, instragram! For those of you in the NYC neighborhood, do come join the festivities at Book Court on April 22. 

From Oscillations: Tadasana and Trauma

We walk, scurry, plan, type, talk, run, perform, execute, and breathe through our days. We move fast, and rarely do we pause and think about how these actions define us, how we define ourselves. We move through time and space with little to stop us.

“Stand at the top of your mat with big toes touching, heels slightly apart—or whatever your Tadasana (Mountain Pose) is today.” I’m a yoga teacher and I give those instructions to my students almost every class. “Close your eyes. Press your palms together at your heart. Feel the weight in your…” Stopped in this stillness, the awareness of the body in space begins to take shape.

Trauma, on the other hand, is the involuntary, unwanted, stop. Sometimes the stop lasts a day, a week, an afternoon. The bigger the trauma, the longer the stop lasts. Sometimes the stops morphs into a big ol’ gap where the mind and the body have seemingly agreed to disconnect, because how else could our little human existence handle the events?

Tadasana, sort of…

It makes perfect sense that my father remembers nothing about his car accident. He can’t. We’ve tried. He’s tried, a little. It’s like your first birthday party—do you really remember it? Most likely not, you just know it happened, because people have told you or there are pictures; however, these are not memories you can truly claim as your own. Ah, the powerful and protective power of the mind.

My dad’s traumatic brain injury has left him with a ginormous gap—months and months gone with holes left in so many of his years. One minute, his life was waterskiing and racquetball buddies and selling cars and a lovely life shared with his wife and daughter. The next it was his wife and daughter begging him to be the man he used to be as they wheeled him around in a wheelchair with everyone in sight reminding him how badly his brain was broken. My father didn’t have a clue what man we were talking out. As far as he was concerned, he was here and now. He was him.

Loss of identity is one very severe and certain symptom of a trauma the size of a traumatic brain injury. Forget where or how you got hit on the head, anyone that survives that kind of trauma is bound to struggle with who you are now. Others can explain—family members, doctors, therapists, specialists—and you can guess you had a brain injury, if that’s what all this fuss is about. It becomes an identity conundrum: you think and feel you are one person, yet the world sees you as another.

So how do we reconnect the mind and body? How do we find ourselves in the now?

Tadasana is a good start. No matter what person you are, no matter what your trouble or your trauma, you can come to stand on your mat in Mountain Pose. This pose has an illusive discipline that comes easy to some, and for others it’s a challenge. All the chakra centers [http://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-91/The-7-Chakras-for-Beginners.html] have the chance to align, from the heels to the crown of the head. Inhales and exhales string together and the body becomes aware of the breath, the balance. Eyes close and the body might sway, maybe even topple, or perhaps you stand as strong as an oak. Tadasana is a good place to notice who you are and where things might just feel off.

We identify (or re-identify) through points of awareness. My dad’s first Tadasana was a hot mess. He and I both became supremely aware that the man on the mat in the summer of 2012 was not the man either one of us thought he’d be. He came ready to conquer this, get it over with, as yoga was just the next, newest element to the TBI routine of his life. And I came ready to resist his apathy, to work through things like we always do, to make sure he does them right.

But this man became vulnerable. Standing in stillness was astoundingly laborious, yet he was aware of this and receptive to the discomfort. Unlike so many of his routines and treatments—those designed to identify the deficits of his brain, those designed to help him manage them—this first yoga pose was finally able to show his brain how his body was different.

Tadasana was the first step for father and daughter to begin to peel back the layers and identify the man after the accident.

The pose begs the question: how easy is it to stand when we can’t identify with who we are?

 

So you want to try Tadasana:

Basics:

chakras

Feet: Stand with your big toes touching and your heels slightly apart (or keep your feet parallel and as wide as your hips). Feel the weight in the

heel and ball of each foot.

Legs: Lift your inner ankles. Activate your quadriceps (thigh muscles). Think about lifting your knee caps.

Arms: Bend at your elbows and bring your palms together in front of your sternum. Press all ten fingers and the heel of your palms together as elbows point out. Feel your shoulder blades come together, your collarbone spread, and your chest lift.

Head: Move your ears over your shoulders. Allow your chin to come parallel to the floor.

EXTRA: Think about reaching your tailbone toward the mat and the crown of your head toward the sky. Maybe you lift an inch taller.

PROP: Place a block between the inner, upper thighs.

 

Here are the benefits:

Cognitive:

• develops concentration
• increases awareness (on both physical and psychological levels)
• improves impulse control

Emotional:

• improves self-confidence
• centers / grounds

Behavioral:

• increases mindfulness
• improves self-awareness
• invites receptivity

Physical:

• relieves Sciatica
• tones ankles, thighs, abdomen and buttocks
• reduces flat feet
• improves posture