Good morning Amanda,
My knee is telling me to stay away, but my hamstring told me the same thing a few weeks back and still I went. Other parts of my body have been rumbling, but not as loud, and I chose not to listen. I just packed my bag, like I am off to yoga. I woke this morning without the alarm, like it was time for yoga. Am I a sucker for punishment, like that is what yoga has become?
A few weeks back I thought I was going to challenge myself to 30 days. I'd started reading Bikram's book seriously and was having problems with his suggestion where everybody should do 60 days straight. However 30 days seemed possible, especially after four or five days where my mood was still buoyant. I told myself I'd try, sometime. Then this challenge came up . . . how hard could 21 days be?
Turns out it was damn hard. Not a week, but maybe like eight days in, it got harder. But I was committed, so nine, 10, 11 days I pushed through the pain and kept on. My body protested, but I recoiled. Some of my postures got better, my balance, though still inconsistent, allowed me to believe there was progress. A few good days, a few bad, but still consecutive days. Day 17 killed me (well, day 16 of the challenge, but I started a day earlier, and there was no way I was giving that up). I could not give in. My body seemed to be rejecting certain elements. You told me my body was changing. I thought it was a reaction to the dietary suggestions; my yearning for yogurt or my craving for a steak (yes, for the most part, I gave up dairy and red meat).
I finished Bikram's book last night - coincidentally after I'd completed the challenge - and after reading the final pages, and the explanation of how the body changes on both the inside and the outside, it finally made some sense on how each posture built upon the last, how all of them in proper order, completed as best you could (while always striving for better), would turn your body inside out and push you forward.
So maybe it makes sense that I go back today to the torture chamber. I have told myself a couple of times over the past weeks that I could pull off 30. I even have said that aloud to others. Even yesterday, as a fellow challenger was putting up her sticker, I told her I was doing 30.
I can't tell you how many times I have gone back and forth on that decision over the past 24 hours. I keep telling myself it would be good for me, and good for my knee. My knee keeps telling me a few days off would be even better, that a few days off would allow myself to heal.
But Bikram, in that darn book, says to push through the pain, that the yoga will give the muscles oxygen, that I will be a better person for going. So how can I argue with Bikram? Has anything he has said in the book, or anything any of his disciples have said, been wrong?
I'd have to say /No/.
So my bag is packed. It's time for yoga. It might even be time to turn this into a 30-day challenge. What's another eight days?
Day 26 killed me. My knee organized a militant protest with fellow joints and vital organs, and I hobbled home, popped a few Ibuprofen, elevated my leg and spent the remainder of the day in bed.
I couldn't make it to class the next morning, and felt somewhat dejected that I wouldn't get my 30 days. Somehow I couldn't find the excitement in making 123% of the 21-Day goal, and instead I focused on giving up at the 86% mark of the 30-Day plan. I was thinking of the failure of a self-imposed goal, instead of celebrating the success I had achieved.
I returned to the room after a four-day break (ironically, it was to be my 30th day; the date circled in my agenda), my knee still a little sore, my ego a little bruised. It's going to take a week or so of a few days on and a day or two off, to get me back. That is my intention, to be gentle on myself. I pushed myself a bit too hard.
It was during the four-day break I realized how much the regular practice had become part of me; It's not that I had to get back to the hot room, I needed to do it.
I needed to hear the dialogue.
Most days we hear one instructor or another tell us to 'Set your intentions'. Unlike words guiding you through postures, the intentions you have to set for yourself. Yoga doesn't do it for you. Yoga has no expectations, really, other than breathing and trying. We put the expectations on our self. The one thing I have recently figured out is that if you fill your head with expectations, you leave little room for anything else.
Intentions is a softer word than expectations; it's not as lofty, nor as demanding, and it leaves room for you to step away, or take a knee. Intentions change, and are allowed to change, from posture to posture, or day to day. So I've giving up counting days, and now just try to make the days count. This is my intention.
See you in the hot room.
-jeffrey-
