The Gurly Life

A yoga class

On Friday, since I was playing hookie, I went to a yoga class in the morning at the Iyengar Yoga Institute of Los Angeles (with the absurd acronym of IYILA - I mean, who can say that, let alone remember it? but I digress). The Institute is more or less in West LA, so it is not convenient for me to go during the week because of my normal work schedule and traffic, so I only go occasionally for the odd weekend class and when they have special workshops.

Back to the yoga class. The lull between Christmas and New Year is usually a good time to rest up and gather my strength for the upcoming madness that will be another year of work. Incidentally, is anyone else simply shocked at how much we are all working and how bone-tired we all are? Or maybe it's just me?

Anyway. I took a yoga class with a teacher with whom I was not familiar, Lisa Walford. You can see a brief profile on this page (scroll down to the bottom). It was a GREAT class. You know how there are some people who, just by who they are, change you just be being in the same room? Lisa is one of those people.

As soon as class began, my mind calmed down. I felt like I was in the right place at the right time, doing the right thing. What I love about yoga, and what is also a challenge, is that it is an exercise in being present, and in being in my body rather than chasing all my thoughts around my big empty head. Yoga is designed (for lack of a better word) to quiet the fluctuations of the mind (enlightenment) through the asanas, the physical practice. More or less. The point is, a good yoga class is also a meditation, and it gives me access to compassion, peace, patience, and all kinds of other goodies.

The class was just that for me: a meditation, where I was welcome and unjudged, and present. I didn't even notice what anyone else was doing because I was everyone else. This sometimes happens in yoga, though not often and certainly not when I decide it will happen. This can be one of my new year's resolutions, to deepen the spiritual aspect of my yoga practice. Of course, that's easy to commit to when I'm rested and not feeling like I'm on my last nerve because of work, so ask me again in a week or two.

That's crazy ... crazy awesome!

This past weekend I attended an Iyengar Yoga workshop. It was led by one of the only two advanced senior Iyengar yoga teachers in the world, Manouso Manos. It takes FOREVER to advance as an Iyengar yoga instructor, and the more I practice this type of yoga, the more clear become the reasons for this. There is a lot going on, and the more advanced you are the more complex the poses become. I"m not talking about crazy contortions, though some are; what I mean is that even the most basic poses, the ones that people do in their first yoga classes, become increasingly challenging as you advance.

On the plus side, the more advanced the level of yoga, the more strength and flexibility you gain, and it becomes increasingly therapeutic. How do you think I got rid of my SI joint pain, and finally healed my left hip after the surgery? Yes, raw food helped a great deal with the inflammation, but the underlying problem was solved by yoga.

Manouso said something very interesting during one of the sessions: he has bone spurs on his hips. If you recall, this is the issue I had with my left hip (I'm oversimplifying, but that's the gist of the problem), and the same problem the physical therapist suspected I have in my right hip, even though it's 90% under control. Manouso talked about this with Iyengar (he's a real guy, who's 93 and still doing yoga like he's 30), who told him that if he makes space in the hips, the spurs will get reabsorbed by the body. Iyengar yoga is all about making space where there is none, hence the increased flexibility and the healing properties of this type of yoga.

I like this idea very much. If this is in fact the case, it might be possible for me to heal the impingement on the right side without ever having surgery. I'm going to go for that.

[title credit: Dmitri Martin]

Yoga comes through for me. Again. And the f- word.

Last week I went for a bike ride on the beach. I'll be honest, it was a fucking slog to end all slogs. I mean, sweet Jiminy Cricket, the muscles around my knees were screaming, I was breathing hard the whole way, and it just felt like the entire 8 mile bike ride was up a steep, relentless hill.

I thought, ok, this is it. I may have to actually say it: I'm getting old. The words I absolutely refuse to consider because once you say these words, the prophecy fulfills itself. Word creates world. Koinkidinkally, Willow and I had a conversation earlier that morning about loss of muscle as we age, and how weight training helps to undo some of the damage. I was all, oh god, do I now need to do weight training? I HATE weight training. And don't try to tell me there's a fun way to do it, it sucks, and I will do it when, and only when, my life depends on it. But after that bike ride, I thought, my life might just depend on it. I imagined what I looked like on the bike from behind, with ass flaps folding over the seat. Every tiny uphill (we were on the beach, the hills are pretty insignificant) was like climbing K2 without oxygen; each mild uphill I thought, ohgod I won't make it this time, I'll have to walk my bike up this tiny, teeny, almost flat hill and then I might as well just die, ass flaps and all. It wasn't pretty inside my head. Willow assures me that my butt did not wrap itself grossly around the seat. She better not be lying.

I was a little surprised, to tell you the truth. I have found that yoga keeps me in better cardio shape than I would think. Plus I walk/hike once or twice a week, too.

I did not panic and give up on life, the universe and everything (not until I'm 43!) because I thought there was an outside chance I might not be falling apart just yet, and that maybe, just maybe, the front brake dragging on the wheel might actually be having an effect. It turned out that it was. I was able to get it fixed, for free no less.

Hypnotized and exhilerated by the spinning of my front wheel, I tried again this Sunday. Oh, what a difference not having my brakes on every inch of the way makes. By the way, I dare you: bike 8 miles with your brakes on. No, seriously, I dare you. I will give you a banana if you do it. Ok, fine, two bananas. You know what? Fuck it. I'll give you as many bananas as you can eat.

I hopped on the bike and decided to go a little ways and if I got tired again, I'd go home. I didn't ask Willow to join me because honestly, I kept falling so far behind last week that I didn't have the heart to drag her out with me again. It must have been like going biking with her grandmother -- her wheezy, weak, ass-flappy grandmother.

Well, as it turns out, I'm not on my way to the old people's home just yet. Not only was it easier to bike today, but I used mostly the third from the highest gear. Last week I couldn't get past the mid-range. I think I have 24 gears. Or maybe 18? Whatever. It felt like flying, effortless flying, like when someone else is doing the flapping of the wings. I felt it on the way back, but I was also biking into the wind. By "I felt it" I mean I felt it, not, I am going to fucking die on the beach in El Segundo, an ignominious death no matter how you slice it.

Now that I've been youthified, I will be going on a lot more bike rides. Ass flaps be damned.

Caturday

Saturday began lazily, as Saturdays usually do for me. No matter what else I have planned for the weekend, I reserve the few hours before yoga, which begins at 11:30, to just being lazy. I usually wake up early-ish, have breakfast in bed, and either read or watch a movie on DVD. Yes, I still have DVD, I have not made the move to Blu Ray yet. And I have resolved not to buy any more movies ever because I'm sure that as soon as I decide to buy even one movie on Blu Ray, they will come out with some new technology, and Blu Ray will be phased out. Screw that, I'm done. Until the next Kevin James movie. What? I love him.

Yoga was awesome, as usual. Sometimes I'll do a yoga class and I will be sore in places I find surprising. Yesterday I was sore in my shoulder blades. I guess I finally worked those bad boys. Maybe one day I can try a level 2-3 class.

After yoga I drove to Whittier to hang out with my friend Blythe. Blythe and I have been friends since we met in federal district court. During my 3L, I spent one semester externing for a federal district court judge, the Honorable Ronald S.W. Lew, and Blythe was one of his law clerks. The other law clerk was Melanie, and Joe was the second extern. We had a great time working together, and laughed a lot. We are all still friends, even though Melanie and Joe have moved away. The Judge does a law clerk/extern reunion dinner every year, and this year will also be his 70th birthday. A video is being edited together, and Blythe and I couldn't make it to the official taping, so we did a little video together to send in to the videographer, who will no doubt cry from the lameness and maybe use 5-10 seconds of what we send in.

We made several attempts, 3 of which we're sending in and 1 of which we're not. Blythe and I are not exactly movie star materials, and we entertained ourselves by our own lameness. Here's some of the lameness.

In the evening I went to my friend Francesca's 40th birthday gathering. I joined her and a few other great people at La Cachette in Santa Monica. Proceeds from a small silent auction and from bar sales went to the Talbert Family Foundation. This nonprofit's mission is to assist families with children who have cancer and other serious illnesses. Please consider making a donation to this worthy cause. And yes, I donate to about 17 different charities, not including all the friends and co-workers miscellaneous foundations.  And yes, I am asking you to donate to this one, too.

We all got dressed up for this one, and looked lovely. I took pictures with my new iPhone 4. They're not nearly the quality I like, but the phone fit in my tiny purse so that's what worked. Here are some of the pics.

Francesca, the birthday girl, and me.

Dave, Francesca's husband, toasting Francesca's birthday.

With Natalie.

With Fatima.

Meaghan and Adam. You can see part of the baby carriage behind them. They showed up with their 5 week old daughter, who slept through the whole thing.

My good friend Ian.

Francesca and Meaghan.

I drove home after 11pm, SO LATE!, so I turned up the music. At one point I noticed that I had Lady Gaga going so loud that my car was doing the bass vibration thing - an incredibly nerdy thing, as I drive a Prius. But then, I was out till practically dawn, so I thought the hell with it, I'm going to be an obnoxious Prius driver. Until, of course, I got to my neighborhood, when I turned down the music because disturbing people at night is rude, thus fizzling out my bad girl streak.

Yoga!

You know what's really awesome about yoga? That you practice and practice and practice and you can't do something and you can't do it and you can't do it, and then one day you can do it. And then you're all, wha--?? There are definitely tiny incremental improvements, but often there comes a point where you leap forward. This has happened to me a couple of times with headstand. Really, I can't get over the fact that I can even stand on my head at all, nevermind being there for 5 minutes.

The first breakthrough was being able to stay up for 5 minutes straight. I did it once, without much difficulty, and the time before I had needed to come down at least twice during the 5 minutes. Now I can do it pretty consistently. The next breakthrough happened not too long after that: managing to get up without tipping over backwards -- this means I'm almost ready to not use the wall -- and going up and down with straight legs with control. I don't have this last part down yet, but I've gotten much closer. It's now a real possibility, rather than one of those pipe dreams. Frankly, until about a month ago, it was a pipe dream. I just did it because what the heck, I could be wrong, right?

It is almost not worth saying, because it's so obvious, but I'll say it anyway: practice practice practice. I know perfectly well that everything in life requires practice. Everything. Yet in some areas of life I am quite comfortable having no ability and just chugging along till I get the ability, but in other areas of life I chug along and then make myself wrong for not having the skills yet. In certain areas of life, I'm not willing to just be practicing, I just want the result that I want, and that's that, and if I don't get it, there's clearly something wrong.

I think there may be a lesson in here somewhere...

The cuteness continues

Today I had a lovely day. I spent a couple of hours doing Iyengar yoga at the Iyengar Yoga Institute Los Angeles (awesome yoga studio in a crappy and weird building). One of my teachers is taking a harrowing exam next weekend to move up a level, and she and a fellow teacher each had a mock session with a few of us as willing guinea pigs. We got two hours of free yoga, which included a bunch of difficult poses and we were upside down quite a bit. I had a great time, and will probably have sore muscles tomorrow. Yay.

Then I met my friends Katie and Greg, and their new baby Madeline, who is about 2 months old and a totally laid back awesome baby. I got to hold her and she didn't scream or poop or vomit or anything.

For the record, the hairy arms are not mine, they're Greg's. I'm the one taking the picture.

We could not for the life of us get Madeline to look at the camera. Notice how chilled out I look, it's because I had just spent a bunch of time upside down. I have noticed that back bends increase happiness, but inversions tend to dump out a lot of negative thoughts. It's hard to focus on my chickenshit problems when I'm trying not to fall down and break my neck in 10 places, I've noticed. Not that I'm likely to, at this point, but you know what I mean.

You might also notice the interesting hair, a direct result of being upside down a lot.

Madeline was all dressed up in her cute little Christmas outfit because she went to see Santa before I got to see her. Check out the awesome shoes! Don't you wish you had shoes like that?

I'll think about that tomorrow

The Italian Divorce

has stalled. As you might remember, about 2 years ago I finally decided to move forward with getting this registered with the Italian government. I've been divorced from Mario since 1998, so really, it's about time. I am almost there. I got all the certified court documents, all the translations, and then I just got so bored of the whole damn thing that I forgot about it for a month (or two). I still need one more document from the Italian Consulate, and then I can send it all in and that should be that. Tomorrow I finish this thing. What. A. Hassle.

The Right Hip

is no worse, but not really much better. I've been going to my chiro (gentle chiro, not one of those cracky crazy guys that snap your spine), and I'm trying to schedule PT but I'm just so not thrilled about having to make up the time that I will lose by going to PT. But, it has to be done. I'll call tomorrow.

Calling In The One

I'm still working through that. I'm sort of stuck because I'm at a point in the course where I have to pull together a bunch of stuff that I've been scribbling in my journal for a symbolic ritual. I had to go through the journal and highlight all the beliefs and crap that is disempowering, and when I looked at the whole thing together, there was A LOT of nonsense. It took a while to get through it. Now I have to transcribe it on a separate piece of paper. Oh god. If for no other reason, the ritual will work because by then I will be so sick of all my whiney disempowering beliefs that it won't take much to let them go. I will not be done by tomorrow. This weekend, though.

The Vision Board

has also stalled, somewhat. It should pick up again soon. So I'm at a loss for video blog topics, though I am considering something like singing happy birthday for friends and family or something equally awful. For you, that is. But fear not, I don't intend to subject you to videos of me screeching The Sound Of Music or anything like that. The vision board will be back soon.

Yoga

is going well. The ideal yoga schedule for me is a 90 minute class every other day. Easier said than done. I am still struggling with headstand. I can stay up for about 3 minutes, but my balance is not good and I still can't go up and down with straight legs. Lotus is still a ways away. However, my spine is getting much more flexible, and my lower back stronger so that when I do back bends, the bend is not in my lower back but in my thoracic spine, which is where you want the back bend to go. By the way, backbends put me in a good mood -- must be all that opening of the heart.

Random Stuff

I saw this license plate yesterday. If you don't get it, don't worry about it. But if you do - squeee!

What the office is ACTUALLY for

On a Saturday, that is. [Photo credit: TravelVixen]

Boringinteresting

But maybe mostly boring.

I take pictures of fire hydrants. I don't walk around taking pictures of every fire hydrant I pass, like some obsessive compulsive head case, but when I see a hydrant that is different from the ones I've seen before, I take a picture. Individually, hydrants are not that fascinating, but when you look at all the photos together, you really see the range in shapes and sizes and colors. Then it is mildly interesting. I call it boringinteresting.

One of my yoga instructors is going to San Francisco for the weekend, and I told her to pay attention to the fire hydrants, because apparently they are color coded or some such thing. This is the little information I found about them. I would have thought there would be more, but then again, this is possibly more boringboringinteresting than boringinterestinginteresting. Anyway, when I explained that they are all different shapes etc., she looked at me like I was some nutter who was going on about how I saw the Virgin Mary in my toast this morning, and then I ATE HER.

Realizing I was not selling her on the fun of fire hydrant color coding, I veered sharply away by mumbling something about no worries if you don't notice it and then I squawked "WELL GOSH THAT SOUNDS LIKE GREAT WEEKEND PLANS HAVE A GREAT TIME!!" thusly cementing my reputation as the class krazy. Yay, me!

It's not perfect, but it will do

I recently have added a 10 minute meditation to my daily routine. It's a two-birds-with-one-stone kinda deal because I meditate in Virasana (aka Hero's Pose), which helps with my right knee and ankle, which are stiff and don't like to bend this way.

I close my eyes or pick a spot to focus my gaze. Within seconds, Maliboo Kitty comes along, chirping and purring. She rubs her face and head against my knees, and plops her head in my hands. I give her a little skritch, hoping it will satisfy her. She throws herself on the ground, rolls around for a bit, purrs, then comes back, meowing. If I ignore her, which I try to do, she will stand up on her hind legs, lean on my arm with a front paw, and pat me on the face with her other paw. Meowing and chirping and purring.

Finally, I pick her up, put her on my lap, to her utter joy, and continue my meditation while scratching her chin, with the occasional chirp and meow.

On second thought, maybe it is perfect after all.