Run like the wind

On Friday, my daughter's school did their annual walkathon. It's the school's biggest fundraiser and kids spend the first month of school getting amped up to run the most laps to raise money. Each grade has 30 minutes to walk. Parent volunteers man check points so that kids can tally their laps as they run. In the center of the big track there is an MC with a bullhorn who keeps the kids motivated and organized. Walkathon day is my favorite day at school and I always volunteer.

With every grade, Kindergarten through fifth, as soon as the music started to signal the kids to walk, 90% of them took off in a run. Not a jog, but a full on RUN. These kids had no concept of losing steam or running out of energy by the end of the half-hour period. They just went for it. As I watched group after group do the same thing, I thought how liberated they all were, how in-the-moment they were all living. Yes, they almost all lost steam by the end. Sweaty, red cheeked 9-year-olds raced by me, shedding clothes, begging for water, with humungous smiles on their faces. They were having a ball!

When I run, the first thing on my mind is pacing. "How am going to get through this whole 4 mile loop?" Sometimes when I teach yoga, students tell me that they want to pace themselves so they can get through the whole class. "Don't worry about pacing'" I tell them "you will get more energy as you go."

As a beginner, this is a hard concept to get-- the idea that, in the process of expending energy, you can also generate energy. Trust the process. You work hard to get into a posture and then hold the posture, and then you rest. You repeat this cycle over and over again. Some days you will need more breaks than the designated resting periods. That's normal. Just like the kids racing around the track needed to slow down or drink water or peel off clothes, so do we need to take breaks during our yoga practice.

As grown-ups, we spend (most of us) the majority of our time being measured, planful, organized. Yoga is a chance to let some of that go. When you come into the practice room, try to shed some of your grown-up skin. Be open to going for it in ever posture. Find the joy in taking that leap, running like the wind. You might be red-cheeked and sweaty by the end, but I bet you'll have a big old smile on your face too.

What do you think you can't do?

On Sunday, I ran 4.8 miles straight, no stopping. When we started our run, my friend Kate said, "I mapped this. I know we only usually run three miles, but today it should be closer to four miles." Oh shit, I thought. I'm not a four-miler. It was hard at first. In the erratic global warming weather that has overtaken the Northwest, I had overdressed in anticipation of torrential rain. Now it was sunny and I was too hot. Eventually, as we ran, the cloud cover returned and we ran in a comfortable cool drizzle. At one point Kate said, "let's do these stairs!" with an excitement I could not in that moment understand or get behind. Then, "You want to do one last loop around the park?!" The run seemed to go on and on. When I finished, my hips were so tight I couldn't fully extend my right leg. As I climbed my front stairs and looked at my iPhone mileage tracker, I was shocked to see my distance amounted 4.8 miles. I smiled in spite of my aches.

I got in the warm bath right away and relished in my pride at having done something that I had simply decided wasn't in the cards for me. I've always strongly identified as a recreational runner. It's fun. It's efficient exercise when it's all you've got, and during family vacations, it is a catharsis from the drama like nothing else. Three miles has always been enough for me.

But now I feel like a whole new world has opened up. If I can run five miles, what else can I do? Can I run six? Probably not if I only run once a week, but someday..... The best part about this recent running coup for me was the afterglow. That evening after the run, I went to a cocktail party and drank a delicious Manhattan. Freshly bathed, dressed in clean clothes, I sipped my cocktail reveling in the ache in my quads and all the delicious sensations that follow great exercise.

The next morning at work I had a student who was at the studio practicing her second time of Bikram Yoga. The first time she said had been "grueling." Why, she wondered couldn't she simply stop practicing for the day when she didn't want to do it anymore. "It's psychological" I told her. "When you finish this 'grueling' 90-minute practice, you will feel so good about yourself, not just physically, but mentally." I proceeded to share the experience of my run the day before. I told her how I was sure I couldn't run four miles, and that I had run almost five. I told her how the doors of potential opened up for me once I got through something I thought I couldn't get through.

At the end of class (which, but the way she completed like a champ), the student came out of the studio smiling ear to ear. "How was it?" I asked as she slumped red-faced on the bench mustering the energy to tie her shoes. "Hard." she said. "But I did it!"

Getting older, wiser, and more crazy

The other day a good friend of mine on the heels of turning 45 told me that, in a heat of inexplicable fury, she came close to abandoning her beloved husband and children while vacationing in Sweden. Then she realized she just had PMS. I too am about to turn 45 and suddenly the PMS among my women friends of the same age is off the charts-- emotional, irrational, inconsolable, kind of crazy. My "crazy" related to PMS has always come in the form of severe body dysmorphia. Just prior to my period, I suddenly hate, not just my body, but all of my clothes, my hair, my face. And, of course, like my friends, this affliction seems to be getting worse rather than better as I climb the age ladder.

One thing I always tell my students in yoga is that, if they are filled with criticisms, complaints, distracted self-talk during their yoga practice, they should work harder, push themselves more in the physical realm so their mental Jabberwocky will start to shut off. For me, physical exertion, whether yoga, running, biking, or moving all of my furniture around the house three times, is the only remedy for my destructive PMS mental tirades. It makes sense that when I feel worst about my body, using it is what helps to take my mind off of it. My body has a purpose-- to move.

PMS creates irritability, fatigue, bloating, depression, and a thousand other things depending on who you are. Exercise produces endorphins-- elevated mood, increased energy, even euphoria. It is hard sometimes to exercise when one is in a state of PMS. Who wants to put on teeny tiny clothes and practice yoga in a hot room with a bunch of people who all look great? I do! Amazingly, even when I am feeling at my worst about my body, I want to do yoga. Hormones can be rotten, but they can be really good too. You just have to work the system.

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.

You're hearing it wrong it you're head.

Three months ago I started taking piano lessons. I took lessons briefly as a child, but never got very far. My first song as an adult practitioner was "Across The Universe" by the Beatles. It was a song my piano teacher selected just to get me started. My second song I got to choose. I chose, "I Dreamed a Dream" from Les Miserables.

I love musicals, and I especially love Les Miserables. Fantine, the character who sings "I Dreamed a Dream", is a sad, desperate, sick, single-mother forced into prostitution after being fired from her job as a factory worker. When I play the song on the piano, I can hear Fantine singing. I get emotional and lose my focus on the music. Instead of reading the music, following the proper timing, I find myself swaying, imagining Fantine in all her grief. When I am at home practicing this works fine, but when I am at my lesson, my teacher Gretta consistently stops me to point out that I'm short-changing a half-note, holding a quarter note too long.

Recently, I took the liberty of adding lyrics to my piano practice. As a beginner, I really have no business doing this, but I want it. I want to be Fantine in all her misery when I am playing the music to "I Dreamed a Dream." Needless to say, singing while playing has only increased the drama and my timing is way off.

At my most recent piano lesson, after repeated stops and starts to correct my timing, Gretta said, "Laura, you are hearing it wrong in your head." All of my home practice had ingrained into my head a more dramatic, less precise rendition of the song I was learning. I had to learn it all over again, this time following the music, learning the notes and the timing first, before adding my drama.

In learning piano, if I can focus on what there is to learn, the details, the important eighth notes and sharps and flats and rests, then I can go deeper when I play pretending to be Fantine in all her sorrow. Of course there's a correlation here with learning piano and learning yoga. I have been practicing yoga for over 20 years. love it. I am committed to it.  Lately, during my yoga practice, I have been trying practice differently, to receive the postures differently. It's hard. I know these postures. I can feel these postures deep in my bones. Yet there is always more to learn. Yoga is a lifetime process and there is always a further place to grow, a nuance of a pose to understand, a deeper point of focus to achieve.

Humming

For mother's day this year, my stepmother Carol sent me a stack of photos from my childhood. They had been given to my father (now deceased for many years) at some point by his parents, Eve and Jack, (known to me as Nana and Papa). Carol came upon them while cleaning the basement and shared the bounty with us kids. The photos reminded me how much time I spent at Nana and Papa's apartment. My parents divorced when I was pretty young and my sisters and I spent a lot of time at our paternal grandparents who lived on Chicago's North Side. We learned to take the bus, the Jeffery Express from Hyde Park (the South Side) where we lived. We'd transfer to the Sheridan 151 on Michigan Avenue which dropped us right in front of Nana and Papa's forty-story building on Lake Shore Drive.

Most of the photos were when I was very little, maybe 3 or 4 years old. There were photos of Nana in her trademark turtleneck sweater smoking a True cigarette, laughing at something, photos of Papa in his signature Ray Bans getting me into my jammies, looking surprisingly comfortable in the role. When my sisters and I visited our grandparents, we'd enter the modern glass lobby through the revolving door where we'd greet one of the doormen who knew us well. As the doorman buzzed us into the elevator room, we'd hear him calling Nana and Papa over the intercom, "Mr. Culberg, the girls are on their way up."

What I remember most is Nana standing in her front door as the elevator doors opened. She'd hold out her arms to us and smile. Then, whoever reached her first would be wrapped up in a hug at her bosom where she'd gently sway and hum. Nana always hummed. After Nana died my mom said that she probably hummed to help her manage her chronic back pain. It made sense. Nana hummed when she hugged us, but she hummed other times too-- watching TV, cutting carrots, shopping for clothes.

The other day in my yoga class the teacher talked about a really tough class she'd recently had as a student. She said she was really struggling, lying out in Savasana to get herself together when she realized she was humming. She shared that experience with us in class, "Notice how you manage your discomfort," she said. "For me, I was managing my discomfort by humming."

I've been thinking about this a lot since class that day. We all have tools that we don't even know we have. I wonder if Nana ever knew she hummed all the time.  My back was hurting and I was stressing about it. It hurt to forward bend. It hurt to backward bend. But mostly, I was mentally struggling, trying to manage the idea that I too was being struck down with the dreaded Culberg Back Pain Affliction, that I'd struggle with it for the rest of my days, humming through life.

But I didn't hum like Nana. I'm surprised at my response to this struggle. I talked to myself as I rested out more postures than I completed. "This will pass Laura," I told myself. "This is a moment in time, and this too shall pass." I know I do this in other areas of my life too. My back feels good right now, but I know realistically that my back will hurt again at some point. Today I got through my mental anguish and fear in class and my body and mind are in a whole new place. If humming works, that's great. If creating your own mantra works, that's awesome. Everyone is different. Everyone's path to self-comfort is their own. The next time you practice yoga, see if you can notice what yours is.

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.