worky / yoga-y

So there are services that actually do my job for me. Services that not only order medical records and bills and films, but that index them for you, copy them, put them in digital form, and call and fax incessantly to get the records as quickly as possible. We have a contract with one of these services, which shall remain nameless (because I don’t want hits on my blog for them, and for other more obvious reasons), and since I started using it I have been totally unimpressed. For one thing, they are appallingly expensive - each request will run you about $50 for basic service, and if you have a client with 25 providers (and we have many such clients), it adds up quickly. Also, there are a dozen little irritating reasons why it’s easier to do the requests myself: we need a separate authorization from the client for the third party, which can be troublesome; they get us to pay the provider and then fax proof that we paid them, which is an extra step I don’t have to do on my own; they write us every week with all our outstanding invoices (which is a lot, with the budget crunch); their requesting system is really tiresome to use; apparently their people are extremely rude to the providers in order to get results; and for the longest time, the system didn’t work at all for getting electronic records to me. By which I mean I received NO records at all, even when I was getting notification that the records were online. Etc etc etc.

Today the company gave us, me and OG, a presentation of their “new” system. Which I’ve already used and don’t need to be shown how to use again. But it was still an hour of my time with two salesmen and a custserv rep (who’s a human being, but who’s still a little smooth for my taste) trying to sell me a product that I am inclined to reject completely. This is another situation at work that I’m not sure what to do with, because my manager-instinct self is saying NO, this is a product that we do not need and cannot afford and it’s stupid to even consider it, but my employee-instinct self (which is where I live now, after all) says that whatever OG wants me to do is what I should do. I told her today after the guys left that I have some opinions but mainly I want to know what she wants me to do, and she said we’d talk about it on Monday. I feel it would be a bad mistake to keep using them (I haven’t used them in about three months, and I STILL have work left over from when I was using them!), but I’m not the office manager.

I read through an interesting series on yoga.com yesterday about 30 days of Bikram, and I found that the person who wrote this was still keeping a blog, and I looked at it for a while yesterday. I admit it was mostly browsing rather than a lot of real reading (I did really read some things), but I was very interested in what she had to say about yoga and her own journey. My psychological and emotional confusion about my yoga journey has died down substantially since I gained a greater understanding of my chakra system, but a lot of what she says is familiar and has led me to ruminate a little bit. Thus:

My home practice. I sometimes get a lot more out of my home practice than I get out of classes. I think it’s because I can hold the pose for as long (or as short) as I want, because I can focus a lot better on the pose since I don’t have to listen for what’s coming next, and because I can sort of do whatever I want to do. I know it also has a lot to do with not having anyone else around to look at and be looked at. Yet I know that my home practice is undisciplined and kind of soggy. I don’t put together sequences, usually; I start in down dog and do one leg of standing poses and then the other, but this is the end of anything that resembles a sequence. After that I just think “how about…this one?” and go on to gate, or some standing balances, or struggling into crow, or one of the poses I’m trying very hard to get into, like headstand or pigeon or standing split. I close with head-to-knee, as long as I can stand the pain, and then sitting meditation. Usually I remember one or two poses that I wanted to do during meditation (because that’s the purpose of meditation, after all, to think about whatever you’ve forgotten) (grr) so I do those, and then namaste and my thank-you prayer and then I’m done. Nothing can replace a class for learning and growing and moving forward in yoga, but my little home practice that I try to do every day is often the yoga I like most all week. Is this bad?

Journey. I still haven’t learned my lesson about this. I think I am hearing but not comprehending. In the last few days I’ve tried to do some form of pigeon every day, and I am amazed that the pose is actually getting less awkward. Amazed. I mean, my shoulders will never really stretch out, right? My back is as flexible as it ever will be? No. Not at all. My hamstrings might have plateaued for the moment, but most of my body is changing a little bit every day. I was actually able to lift my legs up with core strength up into handstand yesterday. (Once, and for about .02 of a second, but I still yelled “Hey!” in amazement, because I really did it without bouncing my feet off the floor.) I thought maybe I was missing an abdominal muscle until I did that.

So it’s changing, slowly, steadily, and this should remind me that it doesn’t have an end point. That no matter how flexible I am, my muscles will always be able to stretch longer, and that the journey will not end until I roll up my mat for the last time (never!) or until I take my last breath. I can’t keep this in mind when all I want is to be able to round my body out in king dancer pose, or reach my foot with my arm up and over.

Of course, “higher” yoga isn’t about this journey at all, but about other things; yet I keep getting drawn back to the body’s journey from inflexible to bendy-stretchy. Is it a metaphor for what my brain and spirit are supposed to do eventually, or am I still too fixated on perfectionism? I think what’s keeping me stuck in my body is that I can glimpse what it will be like when I’m stretched out – when forward bends are actually relaxing instead of painful, when the nagging pain in my quads doesn’t keep me from touching the sky in warrior 1, when poses aren’t distracted or painful or difficult due to the inadequacy of my muscles. Tree, for example: I’ve nailed the balance in that pose so well that I can lift my arms and exhale and grow into my branches, and then my hands fall like leaves. Such a difference from crescent lunge.

Teaching. I still think I want to do this, but I’m still pretty afraid of it, whether I can do it, whether I should do it, so on. It’s also at least a year away; Jeannine told me that I might want to look elsewhere than the local studio I went to for the chakra workshop, and I found another local one, but it requires Fri-Sat-Sun attendance. I couldn’t possibly do this and school too. When I think about starting teacher training, all I can think about is how much my body will have changed by then, and getting excited about it.

Office is closing early, so I’m going to stop. It’s a long enough post by now, anyway, and I said most of what I had to say.