Dizzy Girl

I had a slight tumble yesterday and I still feel slightly cuncussed, that along with the amazing heat from the last few week's classes, and some realizations about those I love, is frankly, making me kind of dizzy in general.

The blow to the head was for all intensive purposes,self inflicted, and feels better.
The heat this past couple of weeks has been brutal during class, but I think I am starting to get used to it.
The loved ones, well, I am coming to accept the complicated lives they make for themselves, at a price. The more I accept, and the more I become OK with, the more I realize, I no longer feel as close to them. Loving someone and not getting emotionally bound by what they do, brings a kind of peaceful detachment to the relationship, and the detachment is textural. Like laying next to someone who is wrapped in a down comforter. Its soft and flexible and warm, but it takes up space and creates a distance. My life has just gotten really simple, while theirs have stayed the same. Its a comforting, peaceful loss, but a loss all the same.

Simplicity is something many avoid at all costs, we must stay busy, keep moving, keep talking, keep looking, keep thinking, keep wasting energy. You see, when there are a million things or people or situations to consider, then you don't have to focus. During class focus and stillness are the hardest parts to get. Inside class everything around you is a potential distraction that, if you react to, will drain energy from you and destroy your balance. Outside class they pertain to your mind and the decisions you make in your life, the more distractions you surround yourself with, the more is taken away from you and the less of you is left.

When you spend hours every day in a room with 20 other people, just breathing,just focusing, just pushing yourself, you learn how totally unnecessary all your distractions are.

Familia

Tonight as I muddled through the 6pm class I thought about how the 6pm regulars are kind of like a strange surrogate family:

The Businessman is the friendly stoic father figure
Mr Profanity is the eternal frat boy uncle who rides a Harley
The Gourmet Queen is the older sister who you cant wait to see and talk to
Aunt Dorothy is um, just like my Aunt Dorothy
The Seashell Man is the uncle who occasionally lifts his nose from a philosophy book to smirk at you
And Gumby, Gumby is the uncle who used to torment you till you cried
Also I realized even in a class of three hundred people, and even our every day environments, if you think of each person as an individual and as someone who is part of your life (because everyone, like or not is) they become like family, people you love for who they are, and just accept because its what you're supposed to do. You may find things that drive you crazy about any one, but in the end "WE... ARE... FAM-I-L-E". This realization is a bit farther into the whole dirty hippy, peace, love, bla bla gig than I ever thought I would ever buy into, but as the Metal Yogi said this morning "I am drinking the Kool Aid".

Since I royally screwed up my challenge, I have to figure out what to do next, and refocus. The advanced class is now the one big thing I look forward to every week, and now there is Triple Tuesday AND Triple Friday. I was joking with aunt Dorothy tonight that I need to get a life, so I wont be at Bikram so much, but I really cant imagine a better life than the one I have found the center of inside that hot little room.

For Julia (This is my new motivation for finger stands)

The Smelly Girl

I understand other people have pictures or visuals of some type in their head that correspond to memories, I however have smells. Out of the clear blue sky I will smell a smell that I have not smelled in years, and has no chance of belonging to anything in my area, but does belong exclusively to a person, place, or thing in my past. The thing I always remember most about people or places or things is their smell. For example I still remember vividly how my best friend from 7th grade smelled. Rebecca Willis, she smelled like a warm cotton blanket that just came out of the dryer. I even remember how friends and relatives who have passed away smelled, hows that for strange? When I have memories of them, I smell dead people...

Today in class I smelled Sysco brand cracked black pepper that has sat in a hot kitchen above a stove and has started to funkify, and I thought of my beloved family deli in Queens town Maryland. This place, was for all intensive purposes, hell on earth. Then I smelled Hebrew National brand kosher hot dogs and thought of my little Brian who I made work the hot dog cart all summer long, and I remembered how much he hated me for it.

Thankfully the next thing I smelled was not a memory of corned beef or evil stepsisters or hot dogs, it was the slight ammonia smell coming from my sweat soaked towel telling me I need to increase my carb intake.

People always ask me if Bikram smells bad from all the people sweating, and to be honest it is rather organic and wet smelling, like warm moist moss you would find in a cypress dome in August.

The main thing I think of is that the humidity in the room is made up in part by the sweat particles evaporating into the air from everyone around you, which means you are actually breathing in tiny pieces of everyone in class. That could be rather disturbing or endearing depending on how you think about it and the people in your immediate vicinity.

Today after three days since my last double, when I walked by the front door on my way into class and smelled the warm wet air wafting out of it, it smelled like heaven.

Lance, Church, The Euro Warrior, and Wimpy Yoga

This afternoon as I looked around on the porn box while waiting for it to be time to go to Bikram, I decided to see what Lance and the boys had been tweeting from the tour the past few days. They are surprisingly boring tweeters, but I read a quote that said "Cycling is like church, many attend, but few get it". It stuck with me as I felt the people around me in class tonight. Yogis are the ones who "get" Bikram, and they are kind of like habitual Catholics or rabid Pentecostals, in the devotion aspect (we don't spend near as much time kneeling and I haven't seen anyone speaking in tongues during class yet).
The funny thing is all the different types of people who do "get it", and lately I have been looking for a common thread of what makes people Yogis. During class tonight there was the Seashell Man, Mr. Nasal, The Gourmet Queen, Pippi Shortstocking, Gumby, the Businessman, and the Pink Pirate, who all have nothing noticeable in common, but they all "get it".
Oh, I forgot my new favorite, the Euro Warrior-
I have decided she is some kind of Slavic athlete, maybe tennis. While she practices with great determination and focus, I envision a coach of some kind standing over her ranting in a very mean sounding language. She also has a rather nasty surgical scar on her knee, and I do truly love to be near people with scars, they make me feel less alone. I have developed an entire bio for her in my head (I have no idea if any of this is remotely accurate, but, I am an only child, and we make up vivid stories to populate the world in our heads, to survive the silence of our childhoods. Some people say we have a well developed sense of imagination. I just say we make shit up, that's what we do). Anyway, the Euro Warrior's power feels like a freight train behind me in class, and she, like all the rest, "gets it" and has nothing else noticeable in common with the other Yogis in the room.

We were also talking about different types of Yoga today before class and I had to explain that Ive never tried any other types of yoga besides Bikram, because really I don't like yoga other than Bikram. America's version of yoga is pansy, weak, crap, made up so people can (with out sweat, pain, or much effort) feel like they are doing something good for themselves. I even hate telling people that Bikram is yoga, because I think they will never understand that it is actually hard and challenging and rewarding and that we don't sit around and hum and sip green tea...There. I said it. I am a Bikram snob, and I am tired of people thinking what I do everyday is like an activity someone's grandmother does with her knitting club on the beach on Sundays.