Long time no see...

See this was what I was saying about commitment... there's this thing I want to do (blog/journal my feelings/experiences) and it feels important to me, but the more weight I give it the more impossible it seems and the more I avoid it.

The past few months have not gone at all the way I thought they would, not that I'm complaining-life has been very good to me.  But I started avoiding writing when I realized how much time away from my yoga mat I was spending. I still had plenty of ideas to write about yogic lifestyle but I felt like a fraud because I was not keeping up my asana practice the way I thought I should be.

The new year started out exciting for my husband at work, and saw him putting in long hours which meant he didn't have the opportunity to watch our son while I went out to the yoga studio.  As a compromise I attended few classes but started a home diet and exercise with some popular video programs.  I also bought a stack of DVDs from Gaiam.com to expand my knowledge of different modes of yoga practice.

At the same time I was inspired to begin studying with Childbirth International to be a birth doula.  In my spare time (mainly evenings when my son is in bed and my husband at work) I have been reading, studying and reflecting on all aspects of my own birth and what child birth experiences mean for all new mothers.  While my main aim with this is to help other women have positive and empowering birth experiences as I had, I am hoping to turn this into a stream of income when our family returns to Canada.

Occupying a large percentage of my thoughts over the past few months has been the likelihood and expectation that upon returning to Canada I will be the sole breadwinner for our little family of three.  Unless my husband is offered a job-plus-work visa in Canada sometime very soon he I will be sponsoring his immigration, which means he will not be legally entitled to work for minimum six months, more likely up to a year.  Starting up a doula practice is one of my career goals for 2012, but realistically it won't generate enough income to support three of us, so I'll have to take another job also. As I have been out of the work force for some time, this is an intimidating prospect, but a challenge I am meeting head on.  When I was last gainfully employed I was working in retail, and that is where I will look to work again, with one difference: I will need to make 50% more this time around.  This means I'll be applying for positions higher than the one I left.  While I loved the company culture and organizational structure of Starbucks and have the utmost respect for Howard Schultz and everything he built there, I think that with my renewed focus on living a yogic lifestyle a better fit culture-wise will be at lululemon.  So I've made it my mission to get a position as an assistant manager within one of their GTA stores upon returning to Canada in August.

In recognition of all the mental and physical work I've been putting in, my husband decided to support me by arranging his work so I could attend the Evolution: Asia Yoga Conference in Hong Kong, June 7-10.  This was a huge blessing to my spirit and my practice and there is so much to say about it that I will devote my next several posts to describing all the amazing things I experienced and learned while I was there. I will be ever grateful for that opportunity that he helped to create for me.  It was also wonderful that he and our son came along to Hong Kong and got to spend a heap of daddy-son time exploring that beautiful city.

Unexpectedly, after returning from that amazing event in Hong Kong, A.'s work circumstances re-arranged themselves to make it possible for me to cross another 2012 goal off my list early: attending a RYT 200 hour teacher training program.  From 7th-29th July I will be in Taipei, Taiwan studying the Vision of Yoga: Art of Teaching with the incomparable Yogachrya Sudhakar Dheenan.  This truly is a dream realized, and a life-path-altering opportunity to be able to study under such an esteemed master.  I am beyond grateful for this blessing, for which I owe a debt of gratitude to my wonderfully supportive spouse, and to my mother for good-naturedly going along with last minute, fairly drastic changes in plans and coming with me to take care of my son while I study in the three week intensive.

So that's what's up with me.

More to follow on the AYC and all the inspiring teachers and fellow students I encountered there.

No longer Nameless

I've been ruminating over what to name my blog, as I can only squeeze so much charm out of "As-Yet Unnamed."  I've been trying to figure out how to incorporate my identity and current occupation as a mother into my yoga journey, which is primarily what I'm trying to capture, but the whole idea of yoga for me is to incorporate it into all aspects of my life.  This blog won't just be about asana, I can see that now.  As I thought about all this, the word "joymaking" came to mind--which of course is not a real word.  I'm not sure  how it came to be in the dark recesses of my mind, but I wanted to avoid unwittingly associating myself and my blog with something I don't align with so I googled it and came up with the wikipedia entry for an album called Anything Nameless and Joymaking by the quirky bluegrass band Paper Bird.  As far as I can remember, I've never heard of them, and I'd definitely never heard the album, so I looked it up on Rhapsody.com and was delighted.  I'm a sucker for bluegrass or anything banjo-y.  The song titles and lyrics on this album immediately resonated with me so I took this as a sign that Joymaking is a word I can, and should associate myself with.

Technically speaking

I want to organize my thoughts and goals about my physical body, so here goes:

Pregnancy and childbirth changed my body in ways I both anticipated and didn't. I figured I'd be a little wider in the hips, that happens, I thought it might be tough to shed the extra weight, it wasn't. What I didn't expect was to have a very different body shape despite having lost all my pregnancy weight and then some. My butt actually disappeared and my tummy looks flat sometimes and totally hangs out like I'm 6 months preggo at other times. What I figured out after a while about my butt was that my pelvis flattened out at the back and my lower back lost some of its natural curve. Because of my pre-existing scoliosis, pregnancy did a number on my left sacroiliac joint because of the combined effect of relaxin loosening up all my hard-fought muscle strength in my back that helped to correct my curves and the extra weight that went all to the left as a result of my wavy spine returning. A rather tough delivery where Caleb's precious head presented in the Left Occiput Posterior position probably didn't help my poor suffering pelvis either. For a long time after delivery my pelvis and lower back felt very fluid, ie. wobbly and unstable. My left sacroiliac joint constantly sounded like Rice Crispies: snap, crackle and pop.

Another unanticipated physical challenge that came with motherhood was breast feeding. Breast feeding in and of itself wasn't terribly difficult for me, of course I was constantly hungry and thirsty for the first few months, and now that Caleb is bigger and partially weaned my metabolism feels quite normal again. The challenge was in the positions I had to take to feed him. We've found it's most convenient to feed laying down, and with a network of strategically placed pillows I can do this reasonably comfortably, but no matter how comfortable I can get, I still get a lot of tension in my shoulders, upper back and neck.

The first few weeks of yoga have confirmed these weaknesses and revealed that I need extra work in shoulder-opening, arm strength (and I thought carrying a baby around would give me big arm muscles-nope!), glutes, quads and hamstring strength and particularly strengthening and stabilizing my core. I still have two-finger gap along my linea alba (between the two halves of my non-existant six pack), which I believe is particularly responsible for my very evident "food baby" every time I eat a large meal. My first class back on the mat I barely made it through a warrior sequence with quivering legs, but my glutes cried out with glee with every leg lift and back bend.

My current bliss poses are Urdhva Prasarita Eka Padasana, Camatkarasana and Virabhadrasana III. My challenges are Utkatasana and anything involving bearing my weight with bent legs, including all lunges, warrior variations and extended side-angle poses. My pelvis truly appreciates my effort, however, when I shake my way through them :-)

As far as goals are concerned: six months down the road I am considering taking a teacher training course. Whether I do it or not will depend mainly on logistics, as I'd need someone to care for my son as it would mean a six 12-hour days per week for three weeks commitment. However, I'm holding this as a goal date for getting my body in the best shape it has been in in years. To me this will mean, a firm and toned core, strong but flexible legs and arm and shoulder strength enough to hold myself in some arm balances. While I mentally try not to attain asana for the accomplishment, I do enjoy inversions and balances, and many of these are out of range for me because of my limited arm and core strength. A long-term goal would be Pincha Mayurasana (the name totally makes me snicker :-D pinch-a my-ass-ana).

I'm thinking of using a few poses as bench marks to show my progress, and taking photos of myself and posting them perhaps once a month. I will have to consider which poses will best showcase improvement and then enlist the help of my loving husband to snap the pictures. Stay tuned :-)

Journal Day 1

This isn't really my first day, but the first day it occurred to me that I might benefit from recording some of my thoughts/insights/milestones in my yoga journey.

Although I took my first yoga class in 2003, my relationship with my mat has been on-again-off-again. Despite having a distinct sense of joyful anticipation mixed with relief every time I bring myself back, for some reason I've always had trouble remaining committed. Yoga makes me feel good, mentally and physically. It should be a no-brainer, right?

One thing I've picked up along the way is the concept of dedicating my practice. I pick something or someone or a concept or a body part even, and dedicate the energy I expend in its honour. I'm not sure why this works for me, perhaps it is simply the systematic stripping of all my thoughts and worries that I carry with me in my mind down to one thought to hold my focus.

Today I was having a lot of trouble focussing as even before I reached my mat I encountered two women in the change room who I've known in the past to be rather chatty in the studio. Now, maybe I'm a hardass, or a purist, but I believe that the yoga studio is a sacred space, and I shouldn't hear anything in there from my classmates aside from their breath and maybe some of their joints popping :-) Certainly I always attempt to refrain from distracting my classmates and I definitely do not chat. So with my already declining expectations I was rather resentful as these women plopped down on their mats, did a couple stretches and resumed their gossipy, animated, albeit whispered conversation. I stared daggers at them in the mirror and for several minutes fantasized about ways to shame them into silence, for the good of our mutual classmates, I told myself. How was I possibly supposed to think of my yoga dedication with their rude behavior distracting me? At that moment, I felt a strong spiritual nudge to FOCUS INWARD. I almost giggled at the realization that these ladies had actually delivered me the circumstance by which I was able to make my dedication.

It's always a good idea to keep your eyes on your own mat, proverbially speaking, as yoga is fundamentally a self-improvement, self-actualizing activity, not a competition or opportunity to show off or pass judgement. With my nudge towards inner focus I realized exactly how much lately I've been indulging in judgement of others, and the flip side of that, craving others' approval. It feels like a sickness to me, an addiction. It is with joy in my heart that I am able to release that to some degree, for some amount of time during (and often lasting for a while after) my yoga practice. My deep gratitude goes out to the other yogis and yoginis that help me along this path of practice.