Discovering what gradualness means...

Sometimes it scares me how much I am like of Veruca Salt of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory fame.


Most of the time, what I want is neither a party, nor a goose that lays golden eggs. No, what I want now are the more elusive things: enlightenment, flexibility, 100% health, financial security, a soul mate. Like Veruca, I'm quite impatient and I shudder at the idea that I might have to wait for any of these things to be present in my life. I just never wear smart little red frocks like she does.


Learning to teach yoga has really shined a light on my inner brat. Each weekend for nearly two months now I've experienced disappointment on Sunday night that I'm still not "there" yet. Fortunately, being here is baked into the practice at yoga, so I've recently come to see the futility of my tantrums. Like it or not, Veruca, you are where you are. And, chances are, where you are (Ahem, a Chocolate FACTORY) is much better than you even know...

Elise Lorimer has been teaching us Alignment 6 hours a weekend for the past six weeks. She's a fantastic, graceful and terribly athletically built instructor who can articulate with her body better than anyone I've ever seen. That is to say, when she shows us how to align our bodies in certain poses, her performance is like that of a Shakespearean actor who breathes life into and teases nuance out of even the Bard's most complicated prose. What's more, Elise has taught us with an incredible amount of humility and with a great sense of (surprisingly geeky) humor! Of course, the downside to seeing her perfectly execute these poses is that I want to be like Elise - now.

Perhaps to counteract the effect she may have on students like me, Elise repeated a phrase to us early and often that I only really understood this last weekend with her: "Try to discover what gradualness means." I didn't even think gradualness was a real word until I looked it up. Sure enough, there is a noun form to the word gradual. Things don't naturally happen all at once, they take time.
I'm learning that through my shoulder. A few weeks ago I wrote a post about my right shoulder being in pain. It is still bothering me and, gradually, I'm noticing that its going to take much more of my attention than I've been giving it. I keep pulling a Veruca Salt and wanting it to just magically stop hurting at the stomp of my feet. But each time I try to override my body, it gets strained and it starts to hurt again. I'm gradually (but stubbornly) learning to listen to it. Its kind of impossible these days, anyway, because I am doing about 10 hours of yoga a week. It is really impossible when my shoulder is screaming at me - "get off of me". Now, I know a lot of you are thinking "Duh! 10 Hours of yoga is going to hurt your shoulder" but this pain has been there long before the training started. Its been building for many years now and the good news is, I'm currently in a training where I can not only learn to modify my practice but also learn how to modify my behavior off the mat that has been causing this for so long. I think what Elise (and my screaming shoulder) are trying to tell me is that this problem, which came to me gradually, does have a solution - but it, too, takes gradualness.
Yesterday in class we learned how to come into a pose called Sirsasana - Headstand. The pose begins by resting on your forearms with your feet on the ground about two feet away from your arms. You then gradually engage your core muscles and draw your shoulder blades closer to the hips to move your hips over your torso and the legs follow. With your legs tucked into your body, its a straight shot to send them up and over your head, resulting in a headstand. Voila! Or maybe not.
I could not do Sirsasana because the forearms on the ground part was just too painful on my shoulder. It sucked and I was pissed. Ellie, Elise's assistant who helped me with this problem before, came over and talked me out of just pushing myself into the pose despite the pain. Instead, she suggested, I should just practice being in downward facing dog with my forearms down on the ground. This is called Dolphin pose. For about an hour, as everyone else did Headstand and variations thereof, I went up and down and up and down into and out of dolphin. Each time I looked up at the 39 other students doing headstand I got even more frustrated by my situation and my energy plummeted.
What I didn't realize until this morning is how much of an effect those dolphins had on me. When I woke up my abs and back muscles were really sore! These are the actual muscles that need to be strong to come into a headstand correctly. Like it or not, my body wasn't ready for headstands but it was ready to do other things that I need to build my base for EVENTUALLY doing a headstand.
As I thanked Elise for her teaching after a beautiful class in Dolores Park today, I told her about my frustration at not being able to do Headstand. She gracefully told me I was in exactly the right spot. "You're discovering what gradualness is," she reminded me. "Its great you did dolphin yesterday," she said, "right now, that is your headstand."

That's yoga, y'all. She could have told my that I should probably quit now, that I wasn't cut out to be an instructor or that I was doomed to never, ever, stand on my head. But she didn't. Instead, she reminded me where I was and placed it in the context that where I want to go is still attainable...somewhere down the road. I'm in a pretty good place right now, too. I'm learning how to come into poses with a lot of physical integrity and I'm learning how to prevent myself from being injured. I'm also strengthening my core muscles, which will help me in every pose I do. Yoga means union and I'm learning how to move my body so that all its parts are in union and none of them are screaming out at me. This is great, because I don't like finding similarities between myself and Veruca Salt. I hope I'm gradually becoming less like her and I can continue to discover what gradualness means for me.

Slow down, Veruca!

Nanny Yoga

For nearly three months now, I've been spending two days a week with Mira - a new found guru of mine. Most days Mira and I take long walks together and sit on the mat in her living room, laughing and pondering the meaning of life. I've learned from her how to take delight in the simple things and approach life as if every experience was a new one. Mira's way of moving through the world is steady and profound. Its clear that she's an experienced yogini. After all, she's been practicing for more than 10 months now.

Mira was born last May and I'm her nanny.

Mira's dad, Parin and I used to work together at Green For All. When I ran into him in January and mentioned that I was wanting to pick up some babysitting gigs to support me while I was doing yoga training, he was thrilled. He and Alison, Mira's mom, had just started thinking they wanted some help a couple of days a week. The timing was perfect. Every Monday and Friday I travel across the San Francisco Bay to her house in Oakland. All jokes aside, its been a pretty magical experience spending time with a person who is so new to this world and I do believe have grown almost as much as she has since we started.

Here are some of the most important lessons my mini-yoda has passed along:


No more multitasking.
Its impossible to do 15 things at once when you're responsible for an infant. Its impossible to do two things at once when you're responsible for an infant. When I'm watching her, I have to give Mira my full attention, in the same way that being on the yoga mat demands that I focus on my body and my breath. After all, she is a tiny baby who is depending on me for both survival and entertainment. My only downtime is when she's napping. And she decides when that is over, interrupting whatever I've decided to do with a cry that I can't ignore. The "poses" of nanny yoga that I focus on range from the basics (watching her to make sure she doesn't put foreign objects into her mouth) to the more advanced (keeping her entertained with toys, songs, and bubbles - oh my!). At times I'm really challenged to not do something else like read a magazine, do my homework or text a friend. I've also struggled internally with the fact that as a college graduate I should be doing something more stimulating. The truth of the matter is, focusing on one thing is proving to be much harder than the multitasking I'm used to - it is also more rewarding. I always have to come back to focusing on Mira because she needs me to and that's my job. There is one time she and I are both content to let me put my focus somewhere else - when I have to pee. Its very considerate of her to not make a fuss when I sit her down in front of the open bathroom door. She must know this is a serious business matter that has to be handled when it has to be handled...

Shake what your mama gave ya!
When Mira hears music, she just has to dance! Her little torso bobs up and down and she bends her knees and lets out a huge grin. Its pretty adorable. Sometimes I marvel at how new she is to moving through the world and I'm constantly amazed at the pace with which her body is growing and learning to do new things. I've seen her go from sitting to crawling to pulling herself up to nearly walking and its truly a miraculous process. What's more, perhaps because she doesn't have solidified kneecaps yet, she's super flexible and will just naturally put herself in very yoga-like positions. If she only knew the poses, she'd be better than I am!

Silence is golden.
When I started taking care of the baby, her grandparents, who are living with the family for a year, were around all the time. I'd come on board because I was more able to take her on outings and run after her as she began to crawl but it was definitely challenging to hold the baby's attention while her grandmother was in the next room. No matter what calming words I said to her, she'd cry (in my ear as I held her) until her "Amma" appeared again. There were a couple of nights when I'd hear her phantom cries as my body unwound when I was falling asleep and I swore that this just wasn't going to work. But as I kept going back, I got lots of reassurance from Aruna that Mira had been just like this when she and her husband first arrived from India and Alison went back to work. The trick, she told me, was to take Mira to the window and stand there silently with her until she calmed down. A little meditation time, if you will. It worked!

Now Aruna and her husband spend long weekends with other family members who live in the Bay Area so I am alone with the baby and our paths rarely cross. Still, Mira and I have spent many hours at the back window, staring at the yard, breathing quietly and just admiring the simple beauty of things. We have a lot of fun now, too, of course, playing and laughing and talking (babbling in her case) but the back window and silence continues to be a golden ticket when times are tough and she, well, lets face it, when we both need to catch our breath.

Just Play.
This is what we do all day. I recently read about the idea of Lila or Divine Play that is a Hindu concept describing the sum of the actions of humans as a play in which we are all actors. Yes, just like the Shakespeare quote. My first read of it, however, I thought they were talking about play the verb, not the noun. This is how I think of Mira's playtime. Totally important and divine, yet play nonetheless. It has been a divine pleasure to be paid to play with her.


Parin and Alison have reconsidered their need for a nanny because its an expense they can't afford at the moment. So, I'm moving on to work for another family and Friday is my last day with Mira (aka "Mira Al-Jazeera" or "Mirabean" as I prefer to call her). I'm going to miss spending time with her. She's taught me a lot about life on her play mat and as cheesy as it sounds, I think I needed her to remind me how simple and miraculous the world can be.