bikram yoga, class 5

my fifth class, and i still feel tired. not much like a superhero. the one thing that is getting better is my "bikram-style sit up" -- a straight legged sit up that explodes up from a prone position on the floor with two loud exhales. usually i have to bend my legs to do the sit up. i've been able to use my core strength and belly to come up quickly and cleanly and with strength. that is the one part of my practice that seems to be continually improving. oddly enough because i've never gotten better at it throughout the whole time i've been doing this yoga -- over a year.

i came home agitated again from this class. and not sure why. there was no floppy, annoying person in front of me this time and the teacher did a good job. i just felt agitated.

i was able to focus on my breath a lot more today and used my breath to go a little deeper into some of the postures.

i'm still having a really hard time with balance.

the teachers often say at the end of class. "thank yourselves for coming to class. sometimes the hardest thing is just getting here". this is true. i find myself wanting to run the other way for a moment every day when i arrive. especially as i look in the big floor to ceiling windows of the yoga room and see the class in progress sweating and contorting themselves into ridiculous positions.

but each day at the end of class, if nothing else, i am keeping a promise to myself, working on self-discipline and working towards a goal that is fixed and much bigger than me. these things are as important, if not more important, than anything else i get out of this 2 and half week foray into yoga every day.

Sick

I have been really sick. Coughing and hacking so violently that my stomach and back muscles are remembering times when hard labor was the way I made my money. It has been two weeks and I have finally decided to give in and go to a doctor. I've tried all the herbs, tinctures, steam baths, hot water bottles, vitamins and anything else I could think of to knock this cough out of my body. Nothing has worked.

I'm going to California in a week to take a permaculture design course north of San Francisco, to visit friends and to get a much needed break from Ohio in winter. I'm really looking forward to all three.

Since I last wrote, I have moved into a little apartment in Athens and have been religiously going through all my stuff and getting rid of excess weight -- emotional and physical. it's been really gratifying to see the trash pile growing as I purge my life of the dead weight of so much stuff. Most of my stuff is just ridiculous -- old articles from my college days, 25 copies of all the papers I wrote for my creative writing workshops, old notebooks -- so much paper! In looking through all this stuff again after many years, I realize that the things I know, I already know. I don't have to save all the pieces of the picture that helped me create the person I am today.

Of all the pieces of paper, I am saving only the words I have written -- papers, journals, the stories I have told myself about who I am, what the world means, where I want to go. I imagine my grandchildren's grandchildren discovering the words someday and piecing together the stories of a life lived. I wish I could find some words written by my great-grandmother Carmella who is said to have killed the man who killed her husband -- stabbing him with a kitchen knife in the back as he ran away. There are also stories of her following her husband to work every day dressed as a man, packing a gun, protecting him from some unknown danger sensed in the streets in turn of the century Dayton, Ohio. What I wouldn't give to hear some stories of her life. The love she felt for her first husband Domenico. Supposedly they both worked in the palace of the Italian king until he was overthrown and they had to leave the country.

Anyway, I have decided to let myself sit with my heart for the next 6 months in Athens. Too much of my life for the past several years has been lived in fear and anxiety -- always worrying about each choice, paralyzed by my opportunities, always trying to fulfill someone else's needs while my own wither away and die. This is a pattern I have known for much of my life, that I felt I was really overcoming 3-4 years ago and which I have fallen back into as a result of family trauma and the complete restructuring of my emotional foundation. Sitting with my heart, I can learn to hear it again, to trust it again. I can remember that it is much more frightening to not follow your heart than it ever could be to follow it.

I never thought I would be here now. I thought I would be beyond all this navel-gazing emotional trauma. I'm not. I'm right here. This is my life. I'm living it in the only way I know how.