Yogadventures: Check Your Self Before You Wreck Yourself

Yoga is now popular enough that there's a backlash. Hooray! (Remember how fun that was with agave nectar two summers ago?). The New York Times Magazine, home of such hits as: "Do Female Comedians Mean The End Of Manners?" and "You're Still Single Because You Aren't Worried Enough About Falling Down," is terrified that The Yoga Will Kill You. You will die in downward dog!

A recent article, "How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body" focuses on the risks of bending and twisting, and injuries that can come from yoga. Hip replacements! Fractured ribs! Strokes! And, yes, it is all very scary. Even I clicked on it because obviously if I'm doing something that's going to kill me, I want to know about it. I might decide to go ahead and roll the dice on it, but hey, informed consent and all that.

Scary headline aside, the gist of the article is that doing yoga WRONG can harm you:

In one case, a male college student, after more than a year of doing yoga, decided to intensify his practice. He would sit upright on his heels in a kneeling position known as vajrasana for hours a day, chanting for world peace. Soon he was experiencing difficulty walking, running and climbing stairs. 

Hours! Of course he hurt himself. There are also examples of people straining necks and backs by "throwing themselves into twists." What!

Yogadventures: It's Your First Time!

A friend from work was asking me about trying out yoga, and my first thought after "Yes! Definitely do that!" was, "you should read my blog, I write about yoga all the time!" And then I remembered that most of my posts about yoga involve failure and existential woe. Not a great way to convince someone how awesome it can be, is it? You know me, though, always looking on the bright side and all that. So, for her, for anyone thinking of trying yoga on for size who hasn't been sacred away by all my talk of handstands and circus freaks, behold: Your Yoga Virgin Pep Talk.


My first yoga experience was a "Yoga for Dummies" DVD the summer after my freshman year of college (I know, I KNOW but it helped me lose my freshman 15...and also the other 15). You can definitely pregame with the Exercise OnDemand videos your cable offers; there's bound to be a beginner yoga video in there somewhere. You'll get to know what the poses are called, but no one is there to check your form, so really the best way is to go to a class. Classes can be intimidating! There might be chanting that you may or may not know how to feel about! But there are four things you can keep in mind to help you feel more at ease your first time.

Yogadventures: The Sick Girl and the Sadist

So, this one time I was sick and I went to hot yoga just for the humidifier. And it went exactly as well as you would expect.

Now, I usually don't work out when I'm sick. Because seriously when you've got a built-in excuse, you use it. And also, your white blood cells are working overtime to fight off the germs and that has to be calories, right? I can't even remember the saying--I feed a fever and a cold, and I don't work out.

But I had to go to LA in a week and a half for a press junket. And I really didn't want to sit in a room full of movie stars not having invested every possible second in Looking As Good As Possible. I know one day or another of working out or not working out isn't going to make a 10-pound difference, but welcome to modern-lady insecurity central. I wasn't about to pound out a kickboxing class, but maybe I should go to yoga?

Day 11: How To Pick Up Hot (as in attractive) Girls Who Do Yoga

Day 11 of The 30-Day Yoga Challenge

OHM here often?

1. Go to a yoga class.

Day 9: Forgiveness Blows

If you can't forgive yourself, you can't forgive others. Which is probably why after a truly deep, cleansing, powerfully challenging practice (With tears! Yes, more tears--hip openers are Pandora's Box?-- awesome) I was the girl screaming out her car window that "you have a stop sign you jagwad!!"

And Saturday I was all Compassion, etc.  Dang.

What's the Sanskrit for "may all beings be happy and free and also obey traffic laws?"


Further misadventures at the 30 Day Yoga Challenge page.

Day 7: The One Where There Was Disco!

Hadji had me at "my San Fransisco yogi friends call this The Jane Fonda."  But then everything had jazz hands and I was so happy I could Just Die. "This flow is gonna be like a dance, okay? And also do it like you're an animal!" And did I mention he has the greatest taste in yoga music ever:

Day 5: A Tyranny of Handstands

Day 5 of The 30-Day Yoga Challenge

My arms don't straighten. The left WAY more so than the right. I know you're thinking to yourself, yeah, I'll bet they actually do and she just has them twisted around or something. But indeed they do not! I've never had an injury that I can recall, and I do remember getting all kinds of x-rays and the doctor finally concluding something like "golly that's odd." It just decided to grow crooked. Thank you to whichever ancestor gave me THAT latent gene. In the course of living life, this is not a problem.  Most people don't even know it, because you can't really tell unless I'm doing cheerleading moves (and BOY did my coaches have a grand time with me--fantastic jumps, arms for shit).

In yoga, it's pretty much everything.  It makes my down dog go a little itsy tiny bit to the right side. It means my right shoulder usually hits the ground first at the bottom of my pushup. It means that both halves of my body are so uneven that my ability to do the same pose on both sides can vary from Killed It to Almost Got Killed. And it has created for me an arch-nemesis: Handstand.

Day 4: Can't Stop the Signal

Day 4 of The 30-Day Yoga Challenge

Today I did something I do maybe twice a year, tops.  I left work to go to the gym on my lunch break.  Actually, you could take out the "to the gym" part and be just as correct. It's true, I'm a shameful lunch-at-one's-desk-eater.  For some reason I always felt like telling us we have an hour where we can stop working and do whatever we want is a trap they set so they can see who's not busy enough to merit their position being eliminated. But not today! Today I encountered a rare moment where I had not a stitch to do, and also the person who writes up the orders was leaving at the same time so there would be nothing more until he came back anyway. Goodbye desk! Goodbye studio! Wave to the Western Culture of Workaholism on your way out! Oh no, did it see us leaving?

Day 3: I Strap On Some Cojones and Find Out If I'm "Intermediate"

Day 3 of the 30-Day Yoga Challenge

boom.

Even after Sunday's Adventures In Feeling Inadequate, I was surprised at how much I really wanted to go to yoga again. I was actually bummed about "having to" go to kickboxing instead. Is my spirit animal changing already? But, bummer: the only class I could make was a level 2:

Intense & renewing flow practice to enliven the body and balance the mind. Int/Adv. Heated.

And girl, you are not intermediate-slash-advanced! Remember the shame spiral! The falling! Your arms don't straighten! Your biceps are apparently fake! I told all this to my Favorite Boss Rodney, who is my favorite because he lets me talk crazy nonsense and then tells me exactly what I need to hear (he once threatened to turn off the internet in my studio after: "she weighs that? but HOW TALL IS SHE and does that mean I'm fat!?!?!" People, the Internet is a terrible place). And the best part is, he's always, always right: "well, you already cried once, what else worse could happen to you?" Every living creature needs its own Rodney.

Day 2: I Throw Some Money At The Situation

Day 2 of the 30-Day Yoga Challenge

Salvation?

Had to do the laundry today--it takes me about three hours to do since I hate the laundromat and leave it for the last possible day, so I couldn't make the 6p "Realign to Refine" class at my gym:

Focus on your breath while flowing through postures. Develop awareness of your mind, body & spirit. Be adjusted by an additional Jivala teacher during this class to help refine your flow. All levels Heated.

Constant adjustment! Which would have been buckets of fun, right? To have the very thing that was spazzing me on Sunday be happening all the damn time? I guess the point of the class is that the other instructor is nit-picky so maybe I wouldn't have felt bad about it.  Things to be found-out-about next week.

Day 1: In Which I Am Shamed By Hot Yoga

Girl you do not need those legwarmers

Day 1 of the 30-Day Yoga Challenge

After reading Anne Helen Peterson's love letter to hot yoga over at The Hairpin, I became obsessed with trying it out.  Maybe it's a Saturn-return thing, but starting on New Year's Day I've had the nagging desire to just blow everything up and make my life look different, so I was eager to try anything that would "change my life, body, and spirit animal." I've been doing yoga on and off for over ten years, so I know my way around a tadasana like nobody's business. Or I thought I did!

Romeo and Juliet and Kettlebells

I'm currently involved in a love affair with gym equipment.  If you remember my earlier post, you're already aware that I use inanimate objects to fill emotional voids that would otherwise be filled by stable adult relationships.  Oh well, a girl's gotta survive somehow.  So, if Google is my mother, and GMail is my father, then the kettlebell is my boyfriend.