365 Days of Yoga - Days 21-31

10 Days. An overview...

1/20/09 - Hooray! Hooray! Tears...laughing...calls home...much text-messaging. Hooray! Slight sinking feeling that either I am not doing enough, or I really ought to quit what I AM doing and go save the world in some small (or preferably LARGE way). Early AM yoga class.

1/21/09 - This is the first day of the rest of my life. I am accessing my Inner Obama and I am going to make. Things. Happen. (Translation: finally dropped in to see my commercial agents after putting it off for months). Nighttime yoga, followed by a healthy cleaning of the studio bathrooms.

1/22/09 - Barely slept. Cancelled an appointment I should have kept. Did about 5 minutes of yoga and spent the rest of my time trying to overcome the fact that I have NOTHING to wear. Certainly not to LA. Where I would be departing that evening. For which trip I had the worst 2 hour trip to the airport of my life. I hate the stress of being late...even if you're not actually late but think you're going to be. Especially for a plane. Which I ended up on with no food, no water, no headphones, and a seat that wouldn't recline.

1/23/09-1/26/09 - I LOVE LOS ANGELES. (Except for the part where my beloved had the stomach flu and we had to stay in a hotel for a day so he could sleep and not contaminate anyone. Poor baby. But I didn't catch it! So I was still having a grand old time...). Did yoga in our tiny hotel rooms and on the floors of friends places...10 minutes at a time. Every day, folks. Every day.

1/27/09 - Back to reality. Which includes the revisions of my play that need to be done for tomorrows rehearsal and which, I have not finished. I spend 5 hours straight this morning pounding away at the script, sneak in a half-hour home practice, and then off to work. Whereat...I notice that my tummy feels a little...bit...funny.

Uh-oh.

1/27-1/28/09 - Hard Core Puking.*

1/29/09 - Recovering from above.*

*Addendum to 365 Day Plan: On days where one's insides are struggling to come outside, yoga practice for these days is excused.

1/30/09 - Totally frazzled crazed finishing of rewrites...a rehearsal wherein I don't know if the play has gotten better or worse, and my first day back among the living. So glad to be eating again.

1/31/09 - My first class back at the Lotus. Hallelujah! Did I mention that I started my period the DAY after I got over the flu? Oh yeeah, that's sweet. It seems that since I didn't get a chance to experience a real bout of PMS (which, seriously folks, I get like nobody's business) I have decided to cram all of my grumpiness into the past two days so a hard-core 2 hour yoga class was a sweet sweet relief. I felt like I was flying through the whole thing...only problem was that my mind kept wandering into the same fantasy of me auditioning for a certain reality television show that I will not mention but to which I am heartily addicted, however, am a bit too short and a lot too...healthy...to ever be competitive on. You know what show I'm talking about? It's fiiiiiiierce. Let's just say that in the fantasies, while the judges don't really know what to do with me, they do LOVE me, and I take the fashion world by storm! Namaste.

It's a Brand New Day...

GOODBYE!

(And thank you for doing exactly what needed to be done in order to get us to this moment, where we are, right now. May you see the difference in the hope and pallor of the country, and may you note it, and reference it, and become it. For your future.)

HELLO!
(You are the change we have been waiting for. And you would not have been possible, without all of us. So thank you, America. Thank you my fellow and loved and inextribly linked citizens. We have come a long way, baby.)

Thank You.

Thank you, Dr. King. Thank you for every seed you planted. For speaking from the depths of that which is greatest and clearest and most potent in you, which is that which is greatest and clearest and most potent in all of us. Thank you being a voice of hope, of inspiration, of non-violence, of patience, of courage, of fortitude, of integrity, of love and love and love. Which is what we are all striving to be, to do, and to speak--thank you. Thank you for stepping into the right storm at the right moment and pulling others into the eye of it with you. Thank you for not shying away from your own human power, which is, I will say again, what we are all each of us every one, hoping for--thank you. Thank you for being so big. Thank you for planting a tree so as to plant it--knowing you might not see it sprout, flower, provide shade, bear fruit--but planting it anyways. Because it seems--even though there have been 1,000 or more dark nights in the interim--it seems that that seed has turned into a giant steady oak. Did you imagine that it would be this tall? With this many branches? Did you know that it would cover us all in shade exactly when the sun had gotten just a bit too hot? Thank you. Thank you.

365 Days of Yoga - Day 18

Late night childs pose, some spine rolling, a little alternate nostril breathing, and we'll call it a day...

365 Days of Yoga - Day 17

Home practice.

A little hard-core.

A little "taking all my career angst out on my practice" hard-core.

Nuff said.

365 Days of Yoga - Day 16

First class back at the Lotus. Hooray! I have to say, as lovely as the Kripalu experience was, I have missed me some flow! It has become very clear to me now that I have Vinyasa in my blood and bones, and that though I'd like to learn some other styles so that I can get some more in-depth alignment instruction, the flow, for me, is the way to go.

(I'm a poet, and I don't even know it.) Or, wait...I guess I do...

However, there were some things which I took away from my few days of practice at Kripalu that I am going to continue to integrate into my practice in New York: 1. pranayama. Way more of it. Especially Breath of Fire and Alternate Nostril Breathing. We do both of these at the Lotus, but I'm now going to try to do at least a little bit, every day. As many times as I hear about how vitally important the breath is--the breath is your life, the breath is your practice, the breath is your presence, etc. etc.--I keep having to discover it for myself, little by little. I think a lot of times when I hear that I think, of course of course...I know, I knooooooow. The breath. The breath the breaththebreaththebreaththebreath. Get it. Got it. Wooopdee frickin' doo. But then...then I do something as simple as starting my day with some truly deep breathing and I feel like I've discovered fire. Hey! Hey you people, get a load of this: if you BREATHE (a lot and often) you feel GOOD. Amazing, actually. You feel connected to your body. Your mind clears. You feel alive. You feel present. You feel calm.

I have just figured this out. And it has only taken me 6,000,000 yoga classes to start to learn it. And it only takes me about two stressful hours in a day to forget it all over again.

So, the pranayama. That's one. The other is...well, there were just some images that were given during classes that really resonated with me, which I will continue to try to incorporate, in particular this one regarding savasana:

Now, for those of you who don't know, Savasana is the pose at the end of every yoga class. Corpse pose. And you...well, you just kind of...lay on the ground with your eyes closed. (Actors do this pose all the time in acting classes. A castmate from my last show said once while we were warming up, "there are people who never lie down on the ground! I feel like all I'm ever doing is rolling around on the ground!") This pose might sound really easy, and the form of it is, but the actual execution is extremely difficult. Because, if you're like me, as soon as you lay down with your eyes closed, your mind thinks it's been invited to a thinking party, of which you are the willing host. So, I'm always interested in canny advice about how to release deeper into savasana, and the following is my best reiteration of what one of the Kripalu teachers said.

The best image for me, he said, is this: Imagine you have a little one in your arms--maybe 3 or 4 years old. You're reading to her in your lap, and at a certain point, she falls asleep. And you know the EXACT moment when she has fallen asleep because you feel her body weight release into you. You feel her let go, into sleep. That is the goal of this pose, he said, to release into the ground in that same way. To let go, in that same way.

Now, this may not sound like much, but I nearly started bawling when he said it. (Maybe it had something to do with it being 6:30 in the morning, but I don't think so.) And the reason is--I had never heard the idea of "letting go" explained so potently, and in that moment I could picture it all--how much we are all walking around holding on; to our consciousness, to ourselves, to our lives, to our activities--and how when we do things like fall asleep it is as if our consciousness is a balloon we've been holding on to all day and in that moment of sleep we just let it slip, gently, from our fingers. And I thought about the ground I was laying on as my mother and I as the child in that story, and I thought of the kind of trust it would require to release into her in that way, and how contained in that is a sense of security in the earth as something that holds you up, that sustains you, that comforts you in sleep. And in my bones and my muscles and my blood I could feel this longing to let go in that way. I could feel that balloon straining at my fingers, let go let go let go...

Which I did.

Just a tiny tiny bit. Just a tiny tiny bit more than I usually do, but still, it was enough. I felt a little softer, a little more open, and I could feel, really feel the ground beneath me. And I could feel the strength of it and the enormous size of it. And I understood for a second how much I usually ignore its presence there, beneath my feet, beneath my body. So. Yeah. I will be keeping that image...

365 Days of Yoga - Day 15

My first day back at home and, that's right people, I woke up at 6AM to do yoga and eat a real breakfast, as per the instructions of my Ayurvedic advisor. Yes sirree, I am going to balance my Vata-ness and get this routine going!

I'll tell you what, the actual GETTING UP out of the warm bed is hard, but then after that...it's not so bad at all. Waking up early and not having to be somewhere right away is so much better than waking up early and running out the door. 6AM then becomes this haven, instead of a sentence of sleeplessness.

So, I did it. Got up. Rolled out my mat. Pulled up a cushion to sit on. And I took a bunch of deep breaths. And got into some poses. And breathed some more. And watched the daylight come out over the Brooklyn Bridge. And it was good.

Welcome Home.