yoga

Way far behind on my daily NaNoWriMo output, so just a link to share with you.

Yoga in Female Sexual Functions

Anecdotally, I have to say that yoga has made a huge difference in my own sex life. I put that down to a few things:

• I am far more conscious of how my body works and which muscles are doing what and how better to move them to possibly produce different sensations.
• I (often) like my body better because it feels solid and capable and mine, which means I'm more inclined to enjoy it freely.
• I am far better now at letting go of mental shit and focussing on sensations. Which is most of the point.
• Stamina and increased flexibility (though let's not kid ourselves, I'm a long way from flexible) certainly don't hurt the sexing.

Tonight, it would be so easy not to go to yoga. To make some tea, reheat some soup, download some top chef, and start in on my current editing and writing projects.

I am out of the habit of exercise, and this is the worst part. Where you know you need to, you know it makes you feel better. Yet you have to make yourself do it, dragging your leaden feet all the way to the studio, the garage, the trail the gym the weights.

You do. And you feel better. And then you drag yourself again. And again. Until you can lay off and stop thinking, just follow your feet to the good feeling.

Looking at my house this morning, one could only assume that I'd had a very busy and very good weekend.

My favourite pair of heels had been abandonded in front of the closet, one of them tipped over after I tripped on it rushing out the next morning. The bed was pushed over about 6 inches and there was a pile of [redacted] that had ended up on top of my dressing table after being moved around in a clump from flat surface to flat surface. There were clothes hanging to dry in the spare room, there were piles of dirty clothes on the floor in every room. There were clothes hanging on the doorknob in the bathroom.

The main floor fared no better. A big pile of dishes, pepitas left in the oven after roasting. Clean clothes hanging in the bathroom. Dirty yoga clothes in a pile on the stairs. Bulk food still sitting in bags on the counter after being bought Saturday morning.

One would be right.

It was a very busy and very good, and in some ways very hard, weekend. The very good included a Sunday night friendly friend potluck, a Friday night puttering by myself (2 loads of laundry! 2 episodes of Top Chef! 1 giant bowl of soup! 2 beers!), a shit hot Saturday night with D.Jack, which can be further subdivided into three categories of overlapping fun, including live music at Raw Sugar and nice drinks and food at the Moon Room and a whole pile of [redacted] at my house.

The bulk of my days, however, was taken up with hours worth of yoga anatomy instruction. It was crazy useful (who knew the foot has three arches!) but fucking hard. It's hard for me to sit for 5 hours straight, no matter where I am or what I'm doing. Add a second-day bleeding backache to that, add a few hours in stilettos to that, add some brutally hard concentrated yoga to that, and by Sunday at 2 pm I was severely uncomfortable.

And then we started on the shoulder work.

It's hard for me to do shoulder work no matter, since my shoulders are square but not strong. But add to that a possibly sadistic teacher who had us do said shoulder work with the soles of our feet pressed together and brought as close to our crotches as we could and by about 8 minutes in I was crying, because that is what happens when I spread my legs and externally rotate my femurs.

I'm pretty down with that. I've been therapized up the yin-yang, and I'm not so sure I've got much else to say to a kind person who is listening without stake to my babbles. At some point you need to just let the fuck go of what you learned to hold onto. What I am holding onto, I am holding somewhere in my hips and hamstrings.

I'm good with doing that in yoga, I'm good at managing its public manifestations. But add to that a sore back, add to that various floods of cyclical hormones, add to that sore legs, add to that the swirls of nausea that sometimes accompany the leak of tears, add to that a room full of strangers who didn't want to partner with the weird tattooed girl with the hairy armpits and oh, oh, I was hollowed out, leaving the potluck in the first wave, crawling into sheets that still smelled like d.jack and falling hard enough asleep that the firecrackers didn't wake me up.

By the time Mike finished his pre-class spiel, almost everyone in the room had sniffled or wiped away a tear or blinked their eyes at the ceiling. He talked about how Santosha Centretown started, how he'd started in yoga, what practising has done for him, how wonderful the current space was. The peacefulness particularly of the room we were in. How nice it was. How sad it was the space was closing.*

My very first class at Santosha was with Mike on November 27, 2007. I'd been doing yoga for about a year and a half (starting at Rama Lotus with the awesome Jamine), but Ashtanga was a new kind of yoga for me, which was the main reason for switching. I also wanted to do lunchtime classes in the hopes that they'd be smaller and that the before and after would be less stressful than it had been at Rama Lotus.

The first few ashtanga classes kicked my ass. But I loved them and knew I was hooked in pretty short order. I bought a cheapie unlimited pass and started going pretty regularly.

Three weeks after my first class, Eric dumped me.

I wasn't sure I was going to survive how much that break up hurt. It wasn't a wail of "I'll never be happy again!" It was wondering whether that much pain might physically stop my heart.

How did I survive? By going slightly off the rails and doing yoga 5 or 6 times a week most weeks.

At Santosha. In the small room full of light and green plants and kindness.

Where either people did not notice, or were kind enough to pretend not to notice, that I was crying through many of my postures, that I sometimes left class for several minutes, coming back from the bathroom with bloodshot eyes.

Dayby day, month by month, I got better. Physically, yes, more able to follow my breath, more of my hand on the floor each time I bent over. But mostly in my head and my heart. I breathed and I healed with the unknowing support of the teachers and the students. And the space. That room itself came to be a place where I could pay attention and soothe what needed soothing. To learn when to push myself and when to be kind.

I went often enough for enough months that people started to talk to me. Joke me up a little. I stopped taking my membership card because all the teachers and staff came to know me by name and would have me down before I could hand it over. I got to know people's names. Everyone seemed really nice.

There's more lead up than this, more politics, but I don't know them and I don't want to. All I know is that a few weeks ago, Elena mentioned that the studio would be moving, they had a new place on Elgin. And then two weeks ago, the notice went up. Closed August 1st. Reopening sometime in the fall.

It's like someone cut my mooring rope. I know it's just a place and that there are lots of nice places. And that there are lots of nice people. And that wherever I end up, I'll probably see lots of them again. And that whatever happens, it will be what it will be, and that will be okay.

After class today, I sat on the toilet, put my face in my hands and silently sobbed again. For the last time. And that made me cry harder.

I am one of those vascular white people who cannot hide their feelings. When I get angry, the blood blossoms in jagged petals over my chest and neck. When I cry even a little, the tears scrawl themselves in hot rough patches over my face. My nose swells and turns bright red. The rims of my eyes turn puffy pink.

When I came out of the bathroom, lots of people patted my arm and told me it was okay. I hung around a bit more, not wanting to leave, for it to be really over. E. said she'd see me at the store. Scott said that we'd all pop up in each other's lives again. Adele gave me a hug and said that now she'd have to have another party.

I know this community is contingent, that we will move into and out of each other's lives. Aside from yoga, I actually can't tell you how much we have in common, because I don't know: it's almost all we talk about. But they have helped me shape who I am becoming. Have helped me start healing old wounds just by breathing beside me. Have told me that I actually can do what I think I cannot.

Too, I know that a room is, in the end, just 6 flat surfaces and air. But oh. Losing a place you feel safe and a group of people who support you, it is a hard thing.

Is worth mourning.

*Moving apparently, and re-opening, though we don't know to where or when.

I did a handstand today.

You may remember that the last time I tried to do a handstand in yoga, it ended in terror and sobbing.

I firmly believe that your body holds memories, it stores feelings.

So when I did an assisted handstand, and it was using all the same muscles that get pulled when you fall down the stairs, and when you half suspect that you didn't used to fall down the stairs so much as you were so fucking miserable you wanted to hurt yourself but you didn't do that any more so instead you stopped eating and being careful on staircases, well. It was upsetting. To say the least.

Apparently those muscles, the ones that had worked so hard to keep me from going arse over teakettle and breaking something, I guess they'd collected a lot of sludge.

It was the same with Friday night. Watching my ex, my heart was getting pulled in the same way it had when I'd first seen him play, or the times when watching him as his purest, best self was what kept me in love through some pretty deep bullshit.

The sludge came flowing out pretty quickly. There was more sitting on the toilet fully clothed and dry sobbing. There was a stumbling walk home with my arms wrapped around my waist and not caring if anyone heard or saw. There was falling: into bed, into blogging. There was CT, three hours in the past, his gmail button still green, to soothe me and send virtual hugs.

I cried more after that. It felt like I'd left a trail from the dance floor to the bathroom to my house to my bedroom, pooled in the middle of the bed; shining in the bar light and streetlamp and moonlight.

It was quite something.

++

Paul joined me at yoga tonight, and on the way home, I was burbling a little about having done handstand. I told him about the crying on my previous attempt.

"Not that it was that unusual," I said. "I cry in yoga all the time."

He laughed, gave me a playful push into the former Metropolitan Bible Church. "You don't mind looking stupid in yoga then!" *

"God, no. I love looking stupid in yoga. Really, though, I've just done it so much I stopped caring." I paused. "Yoga is my therapy."

++

I groaned inwardly when the teacher announced we were going to work on handstand. This was the first yoga class in a long time I'd done with a friend, and the first class that Paul and I had been to together. At that point, he didn't know I was likely to start leaking saltwater at any moment, and it didn't really seem the time to give him the heads up.

One of the ways in which yoga has been therapeutic is that I've stopped pushing myself so hard all the time; have learned to be more forgiving of my foibles and limitations. When to push those limits; when to be kind.

If I were not up to handstand, I promised myself, I would work on another arm balancing pose. I gave myself a white permission slip.

And hoped that the teacher would change his mind.

He didn't. I pulled my mat over to the wall. I put my hands on the ground. I looked at them. Leaned back, leaned forward. Listened.

The lizard voice was quiet.

There was another voice, its words little susurrations falling between my outspread fingers: sokay, sokay, sokay, sokay.

I kicked up. My foot hit the wall. My left shoulder almost gave out. I swore. Straightened it. Kept my foot on the wall. Kept my gaze down.

Breathed. Calmly. Deeply. Listened.

sokay sokay

No more sludge. I don't have to hold on so tight to keep myself upright any more. After Friday night, those muscles have been washed clean.

*Okay, so when I write it like that, it comes off sounding really harsh. In person, it was jokey teasing.

One of the things I love about yoga is that it's pretty easy to do anywhere. A non-slip surface, enough space, you're ready to go. You can get some decent exercise in without leaving your hotel room.

Unless your hotel room is laid out so that there isn't 7 straight feet of space anywhere at all.

On the 27th floor, there's a pool and fitness room, quite a nice one actually. If you're on the treadmills or bikes, you're looking out over the city, the lake, the CN Tower within spitting distance past the glass, or so it seems.

There's one spot for stretching, which I just took over for yoga. I felt weird and show offy at first. It is impossible to to do yoga in a gym setting without being noticed. Particularly if you thought you'd be doing yoga in your room, so you only brought your wee shorts and deeply-v cut shirt that shows every single one of the tattoos on your torso.

I almost let that stop me, because while I certainly have an exhibitionist streak in me, I tend to keep it for select - queer - audiences.

In case you were wondering, the gym on the 27th floor of the Delta Chelsea is not queer space.

But I really wanted to breathe deeply, do sun salutations to scrape away the conference haze, twist the stiffness out of my mid back and shoulder.

It was a surprising pleasure to do yoga in a non-yoga spot. I wasn't comparing myself to the yoga stars with whom I usually do yoga, which surprisingly, allowed me to try going deeper into poses than I might otherwise.

There was a lot of outside noise: tvs, machine beeping, conversations poolside. It smoothed out into waves of white noise as I pulled myself into myself, the sharp chlorinated air into my lungs.

This fact has come up a few times in the past few weeks: I used to fall down the stairs a lot.

I think it's kind of funny, but I'm going to stop saying it. It makes people uncomfortable, like I just told them the black eye is from walking into a door.

Part of it is that I'm clumsy and I used to take the stairs too fast for my feet.

I've never broken anything during these falls, though of course, that's what I'm thinking when my feet first start to slip. I see myself clearly, a heap of fucked up angles at the bottom of the stairs.

My arms shoot out, grab the banister on one side, press hard into the wall on the other. This is enough to keep me mostly upright, landing hard, sliding just 4 or 5 stairs, it grinds me to a shuddering halt, to catch my breath with my head between my legs.

Really, I exaggerate - I haven't fallen down the stairs in a few years now. In fact, there were only two points in my life where I was falling with alarming regularity. The first time I lived with a partner. The second time I lived with a partner.

Two days after you fall down the stairs, it hurts like a motherfucker, your whole body, like somebody beat the shit out of you.

++

The first time handstand came up in one of my yoga classes, I thought, "Hey, no problem, I rocked the handstand in Grade 9."

I put my hands cavalierly on the floor and my lizard brain said "No." Not loud, but certainly assured.

You have to know when the lizard brain knows what it's about, and when it's just flapping its gums.

This, I thought, was mere flapping.

So. Shoulders above elbows above wrists? Check. Gaze between my hands? Check. Hips up as high and as close to over my shoulders as they'll go? Neither high nor far, but check. Pick a leg to kick up with? Check.

"No," the lizard said again. "No no no no no no. No."

Flapping flapping. I kicked and I kicked, but, it must be said, in a pretty perfunctory matter. Turns out I was with the lizard on this one.

It's not even an upside down thing. I'm getting much better at standing on my head and have come to really enjoy doing so. The lizard has never said no to that.

For some reason, this week was the week I decided to actually try handstand. I really kicked, and at one point, my foot touched the wall. A first. I got really excited and thought "There, that's what it feels like. I just need to do that again."

But I couldn't - my body wouldn't. I felt like I kicked just as hard, but I could tell my leg was only going up about 65% of what it had just done.

No instructor has ever tried to help me in handstand before. It's certainly not because I didn't need the help. Rather, I suspect that, perhaps unconsciously, they could tell I wasn't actually trying to do it.

This week was the week that the instructor came over to help me.

He told me he was going to assist, I kicked up, he grabbed my ankle, I tried to come leadenly down, he held me up. I got both legs up, staring at the floor. Trying to breathe.

It was hard and I could barely manage; my chest cavity had filled with viscous terror. I knew that after I came down I'd be heading right to the bathroom, where I would sit fully clothed on the toilet, shaking, dry sobbing.

While I was up there, my arms, sure, were shaky, and my core was wonking all over the place. I didn't realize that until the next day, when my entire body ached, the way it aches after you fall down the stairs.

Man oh man, I am glad this week is over. It's been stressful. So stressful I had a really hard time calming down in yoga, and actually muttered "shut up" under my breath towards the woman two over who kept lasciviously sighing and didn't do half the postures. Not that any of that really matters, because it's her practice and not my problem. But I feel like if I can keep my farts in, you can keep your moans in, so shut it already.

Whew, a little yoga angst there. Deep blue ocean, deep blue ocean.

I also realized this week that I've lost 5 lbs. It started with the stomach flu, which is how it started the last time I lost weight. So all that writing I've been doing about having gained weight and not being able to fit into my clothes, faugh. Well, since I've gone and fucking lost weight and I'm not interested in eating much anymore, and the only food I can think of that I would like to eat is seaweed salad, and nothing else is very tempting and I still get nauseous after I eat sometimes, I am worried that I just spent scads of money on pants that fit and now maybe they won't fit in two months. Bah. BAH.

I think I need to eat some real food even if I don't feel like it, and go to bed early. Maybe that will stave off the giant crank I can feel breathing down my neck. Or through my fingers.

Although I always appreciate salacious comments and looks from my friends, I must rush to assure you, Steve and Charles, that hot yoga is not sexy. Cause I'm sure what some people were picturing was a light sheen, with maybe a small rivulet of sweat down the runnel of my spine. Nuh-uh. My clothes - running shorts and a sports bra - were soaked.

In fact, when I did the Standing Separate Leg Head to Knee pose, which involves putting your forehead on your knee, with your eyes open, I noticed that my shins were sweating. Profusely. When I wasn't busy trying to figure out how to follow the instructions or whether I was about to pass out from the heat, I was pretty grossed out by myself.

And I think that I grossed someone else out. This woman came in and put her mat beside mine. I was doing some warm ups and stretches. I raised my arms above my heads and interlaced my fingers. I noticed her noticing my hairy pits. She moved. Good lord, I thought, that's some delicate sensibilities.

There is a big gender difference in terms of what's acceptable to show. For all my "hot yoga girls wear thongs" yesterday, there were a lot of women there wearing pants. It was 32 fucking degrees in that room before we started. PANTS?! Let the sweat go free, my friends.

The three men in the class were wearing shorts - one man was nearly wearing a thong - and were shirtless. Technically, I suppose I could go shirtless too, but that seems unlikely to happen.

Anyway, I really liked it, as it turns out. It didn't flare my rosacea up. Quite the opposite, in fact. My skin feels super soft today. I'm a little sore, but not too bad. It left me really tired. At 11 pm, I was really ready for the sleep portion of the day. Fuck me, at 9 pm, I was really ready for the sleep portion of the day. But there was soup to be et and pants to remove.

Eric showed up at my house freshly shaven. What I like to do is kiss a freshly shaven face.

The weekend is shaping up to be a busy one. Off to Algonquin today for a lab for my computer course, and I'm going to bike out and back, and skip the running this weekend.

Tomorrow is Canada Day. I don't really like Canada Day. I don't like the wooting that goes on all over the place. I don't like face painting. I do like a moderate amount of public drunkenness. It's pretty entertaining to see the city loosen up a bit. I don't like puke on the sidewalks.

I'm starting tomorrow with brunch at the lovely David Scrimshaw's house. I am only going because David invited Eric. Ooooh, I was miffed.

"Did you get your invitation to David Scrimshaw's brunch?"
"What? No! When did he send it?"
"Earlier today."
"What? I checked my email not very long ago. Wait a sec. Let me check again. Nope. He probably used my yahoo account. Maybe my yahoo account isn't working. Can you send me an email there?"
"You have a yahoo account as well as a hotmail and a gmail?"
"Yeah, my asteroidea one."
"Oh, right." Tappity tap tap tappity. "Okay, sent it."
"Huh. There it is. It's working. What is he doing inviting you and not me! Does he like you better than me? Where's my invitation!"

Apparently, my invitation emails (I got two, to two different accounts) got lost in the ether. Lucky for me I have a charming paramour whose coattails I can ride.

Mmmm. Riding.

Then there are three other parties/barbeques we've been invited to that all start mid-afternoon and go late. I think that might count as overwhelming for me, which means that I will not be able to decide where to go at all and so might just sit on my porch and drink beer and call back to the wooters when they call their wild call.

Or, if we decide to go to all three, you better hope that your party isn't the last party we show up at. Woot.

When you're in the changeroom at the yoga studio, it's generally pretty easy to tell the hot yoga girls from the hatha yoga girls. The hot yoga girls, well, they're much shinier, what with all all the perspiring, and they tend to be wearing thongs and that's it. Us hatha yoga girls tend to be matte, we tend to put our shorts on under our skirts, and we wear bigger underwear.

Against my better judgement, I am trying hot yoga this afternoon. Better judgement is perhaps too harsh. I just have some reservations. Heat makes me frustrated. Not being able to do things well can make me frustrated. So we'll see.

It's labour intensive too. Last night, I got packed for today. Eric was over, watching me from bed as I puttered around. "Towel. I need to pack a towel. Hot yoga is hot." He's been telling me stories involving pools of sweat and dripping. I pulled my linen bin out from under the bed. Grabbed a towel and tossed it on the bed.

"You'll need three towels," Eric said.

Because there's apparently more sweating than I was imagining. So the fact that I've got tiny scraps of fabric standing in for clothing is somehow balanced by the fact that I have yards of terry cloth.

And I forgot my water bottle, because I have never *needed* a water bottle for yoga before.

Of course, no one is making me do this. I decided that I wanted to try something new, that I wanted to push myself a little more. I love Jamine's classes, but I've gotten used to the routine, and find that I disengage without realizing it. I also spent the first half of the last class either crying or trying not to cry because I missed Shelley. Now, if I were a more disciplined person, or maybe differently disciplined, I could still be pushing myself in the beginner classes and I could maybe stop attaching to the feeling that Shelley is supposed to be there. But I'm not that person, so instead I'm gonna drag my ass to a hot room and sweat it up with the hot yoga girls.

I'll let you know if my underwear shrinks.