Bikram, Days 8-9
Nothing surprising again. It’s mainly just doing the class.
The stuff that happens in class is all just instantaneous, as tehre are no real big revelations happening. Mostly it is just picking up on a little new bit of the instruction, pulling back a shoulder, lifting up a chin, flexing deeper into a pose. When I do Triangle Pose now, my fingertips touch the floor, but it’s hard to say if that is new flexibility, or just improving my stance and other elements of the pose that lead to my fingertips finding the floor.
It’s really about letting go. Unlike cardio at the gym, which seems to require distraction in the form of music or podcasts or hot guys working out, yoga requires me to be in that moment. The entire class is done facing a mirror and, whenever possible, I get in the front row, so it is just me right in front of the mirror.
But, as for the sweat, it is amazing. I didn’t know I had so many sweat glands before this class. In the one pose, my head is hanging low, giving me a close-up view of my feet for the duration of that pose, and I can literally see droplets of sweat coming up out of the tops of my feet.
The sweat is the craziest part of the practice, especially now, as my body still requires a lot of coaching and holding to get things in place. To have a sweaty, slippery hand grabbing onto a sweaty, slippery foot, and hold it in place against my sweaty, slippery thigh, while standing on one foot, with the other hand up in prayer position, well… that’s a whole lot of lubrication working against me.
It also grounds the eating habits for the day. It is really hard to binge after yoga, not that I’ve tried. Today was the closest I’ve come to binging, but it’s nothing emotional at all. I just have roasted acorn squash with cinnamon in the refrigerator and, well, that’s like having dessert and calling it a meal. In fact, my lunch today was a big bowl of roasted acorn squash, roasted butternut squash, and roasted apple, and that was it. I did two acorn squash, one small butternut squash, and one apple, altogether late this morning, as I made it to 9 a.m. yoga.
I really like 9 a.m. yoga. The hard part of it is that you can’t eat two hours before doing the class, and the class is about a 25 minute walk. So, if I get up at 8 a.m., my options are: have breakfast and catch the noon class, or not have any breakfast until around 11 a.m. and, well… people don’t get this fat by putting off many meals. And, when there isn’t roast acorn squash prepared, I tend to not eat much after dinner, so I’m usually hungry when i wake up.
Today was absolutely perfect, though. I rolled out of bed (euphemism, of course, as rolling out would lead to injury) at 6:50 a.m. I ate breakfast, set my alarm for 8:20 a.m. and went back to bed. Perfect! That’s not a system that will work on a regular basis, though.
Oh, and I heard back from the guy about the office, and he’s a little miffed that I bailed, mainly from a rent perspective. He said he thinks it would be fair for me to pay for the entire month of March, since he isn’t able to rent it because I took it, but then adds that if I had a problem with that, I could just send him the $75 and that’s it. So, as you might guess, he’s getting $75. If i thought I really screwed him over, I’d pay up, but by my math, he showed me the apartment late afternoon the day before he was headed out of town. So, from the time I moved in until the time I left, he was out of town. And, according to his e-mail, he will be out of town for the rest of the month, and therefore unable to show the place to any other prospective tenants, which is his reasoning why I should pay.
My take on it is that, unless there was some other interested party coming in later the same day I took it, he would have been out rent for the whole month, since he’s been out of town since then. So, he’s actually $75 to the good on rent. And, it also seems strange that I have to pay for all of March, when we’re only halfway into it, and the office being vacant for the rest of March is sort of because he’s not there to show it to anyone else.
So, yeah, call it a $75 lesson. Nothing earth-shaking.
Returning to yoga talk, it’s sort of strange how yoga seems to work into my compartmentalized, scheduling mind so well. Between the class times, the no-eating for two hours thing, and my desire to not go for the 6:15p or 8:15p classes, it’s very much decided for me when to go. The noon class seems to be happening most often, because I want breakfast when i wake up, and it’s not an issue stopping to eat at 10 a.m.
As for the working at home thing, I’m trying to roll back and piece together how I was able to write 760+ pages of a draft here, and while some of it was my “write 2000 words a day” thing giving me a metric, I think the other part was not having cable TV (see aforementioned knowledge of American Idol, a few posts down). To be fair, I tried to be good a while back. I canceled the cable. They just never showed up and yanked the wire, so I don’t have a bill, but I still have cable.
So, I think the plan here, and this is so stupid, but i recently went in and cleaned out my TIVO, freed up as much space as I possibly can. Then I went and whittled down my season passes, and made them all the lowest possible quality. And, I’m just going to yank the wires going into the TV, save for the DVD input.
I never waste time by randomly watching a full-length movie, and I have a lot of stuff to review for Oasis, too. So, DVDs are fine. Actually, for lunch and dinner today, I watched one segment each of Wayne Dyer’s Inspiration PBS special on DVD, so I’m doing one segment of that at a time. So, I’ll probably do that instead of seeing Rosie do Hot Topics or whatever else.
Now, you might be thinking, wouldn’t you just have to reach around and push the cables back into the TV to be right where you are now? Yes, but I won’t. The TIVO right now can chug away for 5-6 weeks, recording my must-see shows without a problem. So, that’s resolved.
That’s about it for now, though. Time for bed.
All these Wayne Dyer lectures mention his getting up between 3 and 4 a.m. to work on his books, based on the Rumi quote: “The morning breeze has secrets to tell you, do not go back to sleep.” He feels that is the houer when you are most quiet, the surroundings are most still, and you’re able to best tap into your source/God. but, if you’re going to bed at 1… not likely to happen. When I used to wake up at 4 to work on my book, I was crashing around 10, so still some work to do.
Sorry, Rumi. Not going to happen tonight.
