Yoga and Progress

Chaturanga. Googled pic from fitsugar.com

Today we had the last yoga class of the year. I've been practicing yoga nor for about a year and a half, with six months in there practicing by myself - a.k.a. slacking a lot and doing the things I kind of do best. Truth to be told, I was better at yoga before I went to Hungary than now, as back then I was kind of able to do the chaturanga, and now I simply flap stomach down on the floor when we do it. It's amazong how many positions in yoga look so simple and yet they are so hard to accomplish, while others that look like you are going to twist your body out of its axis are actually quite simple and fun. ^_^ you learn a lot of your body, and while you perform the different asanas, you start noticing by yourself your own progress. I still can do the plow and the karnapidasana, which is quite an accomplishment, for when I started I could do neither.

Karnapidasana. Googled. solhume.se

Plow. Googled. wellandgoodnyc.com

Today, however, I found out that I could reach easier the floor with my fingers in ... I forgot the name, but that postion where you are standing, legs straight and you let your chest and head hang. So here I was thinking that my yoga had gotten stuck, I was getting frustrated because I went every week and I felt myself reverse in progress and here today my body surprises me with fingers touching the ground!

You know, life is just like that. Take this year and think for a moment about what have you accomplished. Sure there are a lot of good and awesome things: got a promotion, got a new job, or just got a job! Maybe 2012 was the year where you said: "Fuck it all, I won't stress myself anymore at a job, I'll leave as God intended men to live: freely!" And now you enjoy a much simpler life free from all the material shackles the rest of us carry around. If so, let me congratulate you, because I wish I could do that too. Maybe you lost weight, you've got fit, you finally have a special someone in your life or you just managed to fix a relationship that was going all wrong. Or maybe this year you finally broke away from the shackles of relationships and you are living every juicy second of your existence in absolute, unquestionable freedom, and everything you do and decide in your life depends only on you.

Let's concentrate there, let's take a moment to savour or successes!

But maybe when we take review of 2012 the first thing we see are the bad things. Lost our job, are stuck with a terrible job, are stuck in our studies, our lovelife is less than satisfying to our personal standards, we are not happy with ourselves, had no time for us or to enjoy life, have no friends or the "friends" we have can't be really be called so... If that's the case, it's okay. Normally you think first about whatever is more recent or holding your attention right now, and that's okay, as long as we know that our success isn't for us to live of it forever, and our fails are simply red flags about where should we be working.

However, as we reach the end of the year, let take notice of our own changes. Just like the body gets more flexible with yoga over time without you noticing, your life is also molding you. Are you now more resistant to bad critics? Have you learned how to do your job better? Have you learned new ways to get what you want? Have you learned to make a difference between what you want and what you need? Have you met new people? Have you manage to identify people who isn't good for you? Have you broke up your contact with them?

Surprise yourself, check what have you learned, and you will find a much better prepared, a much more experienced You facing this new year and ready to make it count.

Love you, People! ^_^

Yoga Fair

One of the tasks in my List of 13 was to attend a cultural activity, and for it I choose the Yoga Fair. My friend Lau and I went after our regular Sunday yoga class along with out yoga instructor and her sister. The Fair has been held for three days at a cultural center known as FANAL, which used to be the national alcohol factory, but now is leased out (I believe for pretty much free) for any group with a cultural or artistic interest. In this fair you could enjoy music, and different dance and exercise presentations, as well as different posts with all sorts of information and products.

We had a smaller fair at our gym last year, where I bought the last day a green yoga mat, which I left it Hungary. My blue yoga mat - my first one - has sand on it since I took it once to the beach, and it kinda stuck on it, so I was thinking about getting myself a new mat, and today being the last day at the fair, I thought I'd get a good price on them. Nope. I can get a yoga mat on Amazon.com at $19, spend $63 on a whole set of mat, bag and water bottle. At the Fair the cheapest mats were on $50, but there were many that started on $100 and ran up to $135. On the last day.

So, no new yoga mat for me, and since we have other things to concentrate on, the new mat will be relegated for the future.

With the mat out of the picture, I concentrated on simply enjoying what the Fair had to offer. We had food - spicy and delicious - and wandered around the stands where we got information about an International Meditation Day for the World, a yoga and meditation retirement called Pachamama, other yoga centers, health and yoga magazines and a bunch of natural, artisanal products. Lau and I got matching stickers for our cars (it's fun, but we both wanted the same sticker, so we ended up with the same meditating stick figure). I also got a small towel with the same figure embroided on it, but most of it was about brochures and getting to know about the wider world who's interested in yoga not only as a hobby or a way to do something to balance your daily life, but as a way of life and a way of thinking where they actually live their entire lives.

Yoga is more, can be more. It can be the weekend program, the hour or hour and a half you take to unload the pressure out of you and recharge you for the new week, but it does have the potential to be more too. Then again, just as yoga, many things we put in our lives can become a lifestyle, the frame in which we find ourselves and where we live our lives. It's not like you have to choose one thing and live inside of it, but we do tend to pick one thing and make it central. A job, a hobby, family... whatever you pick, make sure it really makes you happy and it gives you enough room to grow, that it helps you be better and bring you closer to who you are.

I like yoga, and I like what it has to offer, but I don't think I'll take it as a way of life, but the pieces I take from it I cherish, and I set them in the frame of my life. Namaste.

A Moment to Look Inside

10 pm. It's finally dark outside, but that doesn't make the temperature drop. It's freaking hot. It's White Day, but that seems to mean nothing. Is it me, or white clothes for the heat and the summer are the biggest lie ever? If the black is supposed to suck in the heat (with it doesn't), the white certainly reflects it and makes it ten time worse. It's like wearing a nuclear reactor! It generates more light and more heat! Muted colors! Cotton clothes! Long, flowy dresses!

My folks came to visit, and I was pleased to note how much they liked our place. Our white, crisp, well illuminated place. This is my home - even though I'm flying back to Costa Rica - and they took it as such with natural fluency. The cat, the plants and the soft scent of oil remains in the burner, from last night's yoga time.

And now, at night, with the scent of the oil, the soft music of the bugs outside the window, I'm thinking again about yoga. Like my teacher in Costa Rica says, "once the body gets used to yoga, it starts demanding it". I might have fallen back, the chaturanga is again imperfect - more than before - and other difficulties seem to come up, I feel it in my bones, as the night walks in, that I want my Full Lotus Kirtan yoga music, that I want to turn the lights off, light some candles, burn some oil and fuse into the beauty of yoga, meditate, find the peace inside me and do those asanas, try to rebuild from memory a sequence, the moves, and flow.

These moments, following the ritual stated by my teacher, start with meditation, a little introspection of what I want to achieve, and feeling the energy in me. Unlike in dry videos or books, through this moment of meditation you can find that thing you wish to work with, you wish to learn, you wish to improve, and as you flow through the asanas, the directions, the answers and the realization come to you, so as you wake from the shavasana, and sit, the final Namaste comes in gratitude for the lesson learned from the patient teaching of your Inner Teacher.

Maybe it's precisely that what makes your body, soul and mind reach out for yoga, when you have sharted with it.

Namaste.

Fit

Some time ago I bought for myself a fitbit ultra, which is this thingie that counts your steps, and how many calories have you burned and stuff like that. Since my friend Dragonfly-cr started running and wearing one of these to measure her performance, I was pondering getting myself one of those, basically to start running too. I wasn't planning on running here, though, as if I do I would mainly be running away from robbers and kidnappers (my neighbourhood has proved that safe...), but I do was planning on starting to run in Hungary, preferable at the Margit Island, which has a lovely running path made of something that's soft and feels cool. This things are called "pedometers" or something like that. Checking them on the Internet wasn't all that easy, mind you, as there were features I didn't get, and none of the mentioned things were clear about whether you need something else to go with them. Also, with prices running from $20 to $200 there was no way I could pick safely something that was really good and what I needed.

Luckily when boyfriend and I were flying back from Dominican Republic, I read on the plane's magazine - Destinos - (we went on Taca) about the fitbit. A page in two languages dedicated to explaining shortly this device made me decide that this is the one I'll get, and so I did (specially because I could get it in plum, not necesarity in blueberry, as you know that blue and I don't get along very well). The fitbit came with an internet page where you can track your progress and keep your statistics. Calories consumed, calories burned, activity, mood, and so on. A real delight for someone so into keeping track and tabs like me (who have been keeping tabs on my weight, not like it changes and not like I would do a thing to change it!), however... my Hyne if this is a hard thing to get by! The fitbit is all nice and cute, but it doesn't seem to be accurate. I climb 15 flight everyday to get to the office, and it says I climb 22. I end up climbing from 29 to 44 and the counter says 75 to 88. I walk distance of five meters and it claims I've taken 500 steps. What am I? A geisha??

The page also gives you an account on the calories you have eaten, for which you log every single food you eat. It's nice and cool, and rolls out a list from where you pick what did you have, and that's okay, and all, but it gets me thinking, that getting fit isn't as easy as one would think. With a thingie like this, it's not only a matter of will, it's a matter of patience. Does this really motivate? And in general, if you have a sendentary life like mine, how further do you get with a program that keeps you in front of your computer logging in your weight and every single snack bar you chew?

My goal isn't to lose weight - what for? I'm fine the way I am - but to keep myself healthy, move and keep my body well. That's why I go to yoga classes too, so is a dashboard to work with keeping me from effectively be more active or is really helping me, thoughI don't know that yet?

Another Hectic Sunday

Something must be definitively out of order whrn you wake up on a Sunday at 6:45 am all by yourself. No alarm, no plans, no trip to the beach only a disjunctive: join my usual yoga class at 10:30 am or join my friends for breakfast at this awesome location some miles away driving, with the opportunity to meet new people, update on information and plunge into the most recent topics of conversation hot on the cyberuniverse - which I may or may not know of. This was a Twitter Breakfast, a uniquete kind of meeting where you can synch with the rest of the community, or at least be updated on the latest trends without having to sacrifice your own usual search. (For instance, I'm quite disconnected of the local gossip and national actuality, as I'm more stuck in telecommunications, Amazon.com, books and American Politics.)

As I was starting my Sunday as any other Sunday, I realized that I still had to wash Sookie. But not only that. Kari and I had decided to take my older nephew for shopping to get him scubba diving equipment (he's birthday is close and his aunt - me - thinks that a T-shirt and a Chinese Chess game ins't nearly enough). Then I realized that I had to get going with Lau's scrapbook project, so either I worked on it now or I would never be ready. As result Sookie got washed and waxed, but neither the yoga class not the Twitter Breakfast were doable under my current situation.

It's kinda sad that two things that are important to me, that could be among the last one I can attend in my life, are moved for something one could say I can do any other time. Well, no. Yes, say, but I had to cancel on both for the reason that though I could do scrapbooking any other time  - pictures are not going anywere - scrapbooking is a very time consuming thing and either you get doing it on schedule, or you end up with no margins of time left, holding into any available, free minute to work on them.

It reminded me of studying and even working. Sure, you can think you can study any time, you can work anytime, but exactly that sort of thinking is what pushes you later to be unable to do it anytime, because either you do it now or you'll never get done with it, and you'll fail or lose what you where aiming for with the project. I didn't plan my time well with this project and I ended up running out of time, and as result now I have to give up things I would love to do, in order to catch up on the project and get it by the last available time possible for me.

From this I leave you a question: Are you looking forward for Hectic Sundays? Is your schedule really as flexible as you pretend it is, or are you working yourself a whole lot of rushing and trouble? Pressure isn't fun and it can end up being really expensive.

Organize your time well. Plan your activities.

Sightings

Today was the first yoga class of the year. Woohoo!! I was missing it! The energy, the meditation, the scent of burning ylang-ylang or peppermint oils or sandalwood inciense, the mats, the soft words and the waking up after shavasana that makes you feel like a goddess freshly come to Earth. Didn't miss the freaking chaturanga, the warrior in No.X position and all the freaking "stand on the ball of your foot and turn upwards stretching all of your limbs..." and other Plastic Man like positions.

I went as usual with Laura, and without Alix and MJ. Then again these two are long lost for yoga, for they haven't been skipping classes for many months now. The yoga class was easy, relaxed, though that didn't keep the instructor from twisting us into all sorts of half moons and grab-your-leg-behind-you in positions that made us look like a birdcage on a stick. Except me, who can hardly reach my leg or keep myself in that position. I'm really not flexible.

There was this time a newbie, an old university classmate of ours. Laura had ran into her some time ago and invited her to the class. It was cool seeing her again, and as usual, after the class we stayed behind talking and catching up. How much time has been passed, how we doing... and then came the time of talking about the "sightings". Who from the group have we seen and how they are. Baby-face boys gone fat and looking aged - or down right worn down by life - who has gotten married, who had children, and then the horrors: which of us  - who were always crappy students - became profesors at our university. From the gossips to the realities filtering through them, it was sad to realize we studied in better times, when the focus was more on the quality of the education, on the connection between the academical knowledge and the applying to the real life, rather than what goes on now.

Mediocre students are now heads of Masters' Departments and get scholarships abroad, while the best students get fired because they dare to expand their horizonts by working at other enterprises, and that, inflaming the anger of the Director and his jealousy for having underlings making more money, cut them out of the payroll.

Who remained the same, who got fat, who went thin... why have we all stranded so far away from each other? I guess life has the tendency of changing completely your environment, wiping away friends and camarades, team mates and partners in crime if you don't hold into them with all you have. But from time to time, like the UFO sightings, a wave of time washes ashore an old friend, and thus you keep the fragile web alive.