As a follow up to Ebb and Flow, here are ten lessons learned from my personally imposed and much enjoyed 30 Day Yoga Challenge:
1. After many repetitions of chataranga, my arms became a lot stronger!
2. Though previously quite difficult to maintain on a regular basis, my yoga practice at home was relatively successful - special thanks to Reagan for some excellent videos!
3. In addition to those, I found some challenging YouTube videos here and here. If you search YouTube for others, beware - there are many yoga informercial results! (But let me know if you find any good ones.)
4. Throughout the thirty days, I missed two days entirely and did not practice for at least thirty minutes on three days... instead of allowing it to induce self-loathing, I tried to extend my mindset during yoga, that is being patient with myself, to my life.
5. Ben has an intense ujjayi breath. Some might say "distracting" but I call it "inspiring"; that's love.
6. Being a runner, my hamstrings are notoriously stubbornly inflexible, but daily yoga leads me to believe that they are actually more flexible than I thought.
7. Doing yoga with a classmate of the canine variety humbles you in your upward and downward dog poses and makes it quite obvious where the poses got their names.
8. Learning to, as one of the instructors would say frequently, "relax within your efforts" is an incredible life lesson. There are many realms in which we all need to work hard; being able to do so calmly and without stress is extremely beneficial.
9. At the end of a long day, there are very few substitutes for uninterrupted deep breathing and a hot shower.
10. A whole new yoga vocabulary. That's a lie... I am definitely still learning these.
Sunday, February 24, 2013
Monday, February 11, 2013
Who are the people in your neighborhood?
It's like Mr. Rogers sang -
They're the people that you meet
When you're walking down the street
They're the people that you meet
Every day.
Before this past weekend, I could not tell you what many of mine looked like, what their names were, what they did for work or hobbies or any other number of basic identifying features. But while we were shoveling and snowblowing and commiserating about our lost power and the dropping temperatures in our homes, we became neighbors, and not just strangers living next door to each other.
Praising gas stoves for working without electricity, we ate pasta and meatballs together after a morning of shoveling and marveling that yes, the snow was still falling. We advised people trying to get up the small hill at the intersection to "keep going!" "don't stop!" so they would make it up and over... and when they didn't listen, we pushed their cars or shoveled out their tires. We started calling ourselves the West Street Avengers, helping a half dozen cars or more.
It was like this article says - you bond in the work needed for survival (a relative term, of course, since our physical labor only resulted in freeing our cars and avoiding fines for not clearing the sidewalk unlike our ancestors).
And of course, since this sense of community, however intangible, has real and lasting impacts on a neighborhood's health outcomes, it's in all of our best interest to more frequently pretend that the power is out, there are many feet of snow on the ground, and we're all in this together.
They're the people that you meet
When you're walking down the street
They're the people that you meet
Every day.
Before this past weekend, I could not tell you what many of mine looked like, what their names were, what they did for work or hobbies or any other number of basic identifying features. But while we were shoveling and snowblowing and commiserating about our lost power and the dropping temperatures in our homes, we became neighbors, and not just strangers living next door to each other.
Praising gas stoves for working without electricity, we ate pasta and meatballs together after a morning of shoveling and marveling that yes, the snow was still falling. We advised people trying to get up the small hill at the intersection to "keep going!" "don't stop!" so they would make it up and over... and when they didn't listen, we pushed their cars or shoveled out their tires. We started calling ourselves the West Street Avengers, helping a half dozen cars or more.
It was like this article says - you bond in the work needed for survival (a relative term, of course, since our physical labor only resulted in freeing our cars and avoiding fines for not clearing the sidewalk unlike our ancestors).
And of course, since this sense of community, however intangible, has real and lasting impacts on a neighborhood's health outcomes, it's in all of our best interest to more frequently pretend that the power is out, there are many feet of snow on the ground, and we're all in this together.
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