Panic first. Breathe later.

It's ten degrees hotter right now in Portland than it is in Seattle. Isn't that weird? I always imagine that Seattle and Portland have the same weather. When I was driving down here yesterday, I watched the outside temperature gauge on my car go from 85 to 93 to 97.  When I stopped for gas in Chehalis, I noticed that there was something dripping from the engine. A natural born panicker, I immediately popped the hood and poked around to find the radiator. Having no idea what I was looking for, I went around to my passenger door to dig out the manual from my glove box.

As I pulled out emergency energy bars and spare tampons from the glove compartment to dig out the instructions, a nice woman from Chehalis peeked her face around and kindly asked, "Something dripping?"

"Do you know anything about cars?" I whined.  Visions of being stranded with a broken car had already started infiltrating my headspace.

"It's the air conditioning," she said frankly. "I freaked out the first time I saw this too. It's just condensation."

"You saved me!" I smiled at her, thanking her profusely for taking me off the cliff with her mechanical expertise. I felt my heart rate slow down and my breathing return to normal.

That's when I realized that I have, in my four years of owning this car, never used my air conditioning for any sustained period of time. Now I know that there will be condensation under my engine when I use the air conditioning and I won't panic in the future. Why do I always go to panic first, before gathering full information? I think it is partly nature and partly nurture, and at this point, being almost fifty years old, I don't really care why, I just want to alter my future path so my heart doesn't do somersaults with every unknown that crosses my path.

I've been teaching Bikram Yoga for close to fifteen years, practicing for over twenty. I love teaching. I love my students. I love practicing. And, I want to keep growing. So, over the last several months, in an effort to improve my own teaching and practicing, I have been on an expedition to take many different kinds of Yoga classes with teachers I've never had.  I recognize, before every new class, every new teacher, that I get that panicky feeling of entering into the unknown. I feel my heart rate speed up, my breath get a little shallow.  Then, after class, I am pleasantly rewarded with the feeling of having successfully traversed my resistant path. I am breathing again and can experience that good feeling that comes after a Yoga class.

I could write twenty pages about this. My "panic first, breathe later" approach to life is exhausting and demoralizing at times; I feel like I've been trying to "solve" this problem for my whole adult life. But, as much as I hate the fact that panic takes up so much of my energy, I can appreciate that it is the entranceway to another really important road that I must travel. It is from the point of panic that I find my way to calm. And there's no better feeling than that.

Car sick

Probably the most frequently uttered words from my mouth over the last 15 years have been, Inhale, let your belly rise. Exhale, let your belly fall.  I speak those words multiple times daily when I teach Yoga, and for the last ten years, I have used them in a bedtime ritual for my daughter Lucia.

Last week my family went to New Orleans for my partner Nancy's father's 75th birthday celebration. Their big Sicilan family had multiple parties including an all-day craw fish boil, a wine soaked, rich, meaty meal at an Argentinian steak house, and a 30 person celebration for St. Joseph's Day where we all ate way too much Pasta con le Sarde.

Usually we stay in New Orleans, in the French Quarter or the Garden District, but this  time we stayed at Nancy's brother's new house in Mandeville which is on the North Shore. For those of you who've never been to New Orleans, The North and South Shores are separated by Lake Pontchartrain. The way to get from one shore to the other is via the Causeway Bridge, which is 25 miles long.

On our fourth day in New Orleans, after four days of too much rich food and drink, we headed back over the Causeway to the south shore for one last party before our evening flight back to Seattle. Nancy drove and her brother Billy sat in front. I hunkered down in the back seat with the ten year olds--Lucia and her cousin Kaye.

From a young age, I have always been prone to motion sickness-- cars, boats, planes-- I don't do well, and back seats are never a great idea for me, but there was no way I was going to squeeze Big Billy into the back seat of our mid-sized rental. I'm really used to getting car sick. Nancy and Lucia have a hilarious imitation of my deep breathing, eyes closed technique that I regularly employ on turbulent take-offs and landings.

The Causeway is one straight line with ritual bumping for 25 straight miles. By the time we reached land, my head was hanging out of the back seat window like a hound dog, eyes closed, hair blowing. While Nancy and Billy chuckled good-naturedly in the front seat about my sorry situation, Lucia took matters into her own hands.

On this last stretch of the drive, I felt Lucia patting my back, "Inhale, let your belly rise. Exhale, let your belly fall", she said over and over as she patted my back. She spoke very softly and it was hard at first with the wind blowing in my ears to hear what she was saying, but then I heard her clearly. Oh yeah!!! My breath. I can use my breath to get through this drive. And so I did. As we drove those last few miles, I listened to Lucia's voice, felt her little hand patting my back, and focused on those two things. Before I knew it, we'd arrived at Nancy's parents' house on the South Shore, ready for one more party!

Root canal

On Monday I had my very first root canal. The path to this procedure was not a pretty one. After a palliative treatment in Brookings, Oregon by a dentist with ridiculously poor bedside manner, I went to a proper endodontist and had the whole procedure done properly. She had great bedside manner-- she shook my hand, explained every aspect of what was going on, showed me the x-rays. But still, two full hours with your mouth pried open to its maximum, a dental dam strapped on your face and mini pick axes, mile-long needles, and burning tools passing in and out of ones mouth is traumatic.

Of course I had a local anesthetic-- I'm no James Frey (oh yeah, he lied about that didn't he?)--so I couldn't feel the pain, but the amount of emotional anxiety I had going into the procedure combined with the technical aspects of any root canal, rendered me close to psychotically anxious. From the beginning of the drilling to the final moments when the dentist replaced the filling on top of my now dead tooth, I had to summon all of my yoga strength. I had to figure out how to breathe with the rubber dam and my jaw aching from being open. I had to virtually dissociate from the sounds and smells created by the drilling, sterilizing and filling of my roots. I had to tell myself 407 times, "This too shall pass."

This morning when I was teaching a hot-ass class, I watched the hard-working 6AM students do Standing Separate Leg Head to Knee pose. I could see the sweat dripping into their eyes, their noses; I could see them struggling to get or to keep their foreheads to their sweaty knees. As they struggled, I reminded them to try to breathe normally. I remember when a teacher first said that to me during that pose. I thought, "Yeah right, asshole." It's hard to breathe normally in that pose. But today, I said, "Breathe normally like you do when you're getting a root canal." I had a wholly different perspective. It is possible. It's hard, but it's possible. The root canal sucked, but the moments of intense gratitude I found from my yoga in the process was the silver lining.

Your breath is your metronome

Last year, I took piano lessons for a few months. I loved it but I just couldn't find the time to keep it up. The phrase I heard most often from my piano teacher Gretta, was, "SLOW DOWN." "Laura," she'd say gently, "you are going too fast for your brain. If you go too fast, you won't learn it." Slowing down is the single hardest thing for me to do. I am known in my family as "Clumsy Culberg." I scrape, break, cut, and dent body parts, dishware, household furnishings and cars. I just go too fast. One of the two songs I learned with Gretta was "Across the Universe" by The Beatles. It's a pretty mellow song, but you wouldn't know it hearing me race through the notes. Gretta's instruction to me was to play so slowly that my brain and my fingers were able to sync up.

When I was a kid we had my great-grandmother Laura's grand piano in our living room. We had an old fashioned metronome placed on top that my mom sometimes used when she played. Now I have a metronome, the same old fashioned kind sitting on my piano at home. Lucia uses it frequently in her piano practice, but I have a hard time using it when I practice. The times when I have used the metronome for piano practice, I find myself a bit stressed out. Who's keeping pace with whom? There's a power struggle--me versus the metronome. I expect the ticker to follow me! "Hurry up!" I want to shout at the little wooden trapezoid. It has gotten easier to follow the pacing every time I practice-- the more slowly I play, the easier it is to follow the rhythm of the metronome.

When I teach yoga, there is almost always someone in class who speeds through the postures. Maybe it's because they dislike a particular posture or they have pain or they are just tired of hearing my voice. Yoga is like music. You have to learn the notes to play a the song. Sure, you could walk into a room, look at a photo of someone doing Eagle Pose and just do it. But the point of Yoga is to get into the poses by learning how to get into the poses, observing what your body parts are doing, noticing how your mind is reacting, following your breath and keeping yourself calm as you do the poses. Doing yoga without the process would be like sitting down at the piano, looking at the notes and then pressing play your iPod to hear the song.

When you start to hurry too much in Yoga, when you notice that you're skipping to the end, missing the steps, try to slow down. In Yoga, your breath is your metronome. At first it might be hard to slow down but you'll get there. Take your time and enjoy the process of learning the postures. You'll be really glad you did.

It's a hard habit to break.

One of my favorite things Frani says when she teaches is, "Breathe well." My interpretation of those two words is to breathe. Simple, remember to breathe-- through the easy postures, through the hard ones, through the stillness, through life. It's such good advice. We grow up hearing, "Eat well", "Sleep well", but "Breathe well" is one that we rarely hear. Breathing well in yoga can make or break your practice. Good breathing promotes a state of calm, as well as an efficient, energized practice.

I recently bought a new car. It's a hybrid, my first one. On my dashboard is a little monitor that tells me how many miles to the gallon I am getting as well as what my average mileage per gallon is. Having a hybrid has made me keenly aware of how I am driving. Pre-hybrid, I was a spaz. I paid zero attention to my speed or how my driving patterns affected my frequency at the gas pump. Now I "drive well." When I'm going an even 63 miles per hour on the freeway, getting 42 miles to the gallon, I think to myself, "why couldn't I do this when I had my non-hybrid car?" I knew then that going at a more regulated speed would offer better fuel economy, but I wasn't alerted visually the impact, so I just ignored it.

In yoga, when Frani says, "breathe well", it's usually a reminder for me, not a direction that changes what I'm doing already. I've been practicing long enough to have a habit of breathing well, but her gentle prompt helps me tap into the importance of good breathing. When I'm driving in my responsible new hybrid car, having big brother remind me how my heavy foot affects my mileage bottom line, I drive better.

Habits can be good and bad. Good habits are harder to form. Why?! I think because they are less fun, less indulgent. It's more fun to speed and whip in and out of the lanes to get to your destination quickly. It's more fun to eat bacon on your salad than just have salad. And once we start on these bad habits, they stick. Breaking the bad habits to create good ones in their place takes commitment and discipline. Having support-- gentle, loving reminders, makes changing these habits from bad to good more palatable.

When my little hybrid monitor shows 99.9 miles to the gallon as I cruise down the hill to my house, I feel like I'm getting an A+ in driving. And I want to have a 4.0 average. I really really do, so I am going to keep driving like that. Eventually it will be my good habit just like breathing well in yoga.