that’s all there is, there ain’t no more

My job ended yesterday.

I explained my job and office to OG, and she kept saying things like “that makes sense” and “that’s a really good system.” Proof that she had no idea what my job actually is or whether I was doing it well.

EP stopped by and tried to talk to me about my prospects – “So, are you going to take some time off, or get another job?” Time off? Seriously? How much do you think I make? – and if she had been anything except a cold and/or nasty bitch for the vast majority of my employment there I would have bothered to try and have a conversation with her. But she hasn’t. So I didn’t. I just gave her short answers and she walked away.

OG gave me a little parting gift, Bath & Body Works stuff, but I didn’t get any kind of severance anything, nor did anyone else give me so much as a card. This really bugged me, and hurt my feelings, respectively. I guess it’s true that I haven’t tried to reach out to these folks (except MFA, who didn’t get me anything either) as more than just a neutral employee – at least not since my first few months on the job, when I tried to be friendly and involved and kept getting rejected – but it bothers me that I made so little an impact in two years.

I was thinking of more poetic things to say about this on the way home – I have treasures, here inside my heart and mind, and no one seems to notice, or care – but I’ve lost them. I am highly confused about how I feel about my last day at work, and instead of trying to sort out all my emotions I’m drinking wine and trying not to think about what I have to do to prepare for my trip tomorrow. (I write this on Thursday evening, to post on Friday morning.) Logan’s Run is helping. Incidentally, I read a bit more about the book source and the remake that’s been in development hell for some years now, and I take back my prior trepidation about the remake.

Oh, and I didn’t get the Owings Mills job. The guy called me at 6:30 while I was making dinner and already a little tipsy, which was awesome. Thanks in advance for your condolences.

I’ve scheduled a post for tomorrow about yoga and humility that’s been in the can for a while. Hope you like it. I’ll probably get home in late evening on Sunday, and at that time I doubt I’ll have the capacity for anything except “I got home fine and the weekend was mind-blowing and I’ll write about it another time.” So I’ll schedule a meme for that day.

Wish me luck in not embarrassing myself in front of Jennifer all weekend. I’m very afraid of a whole weekend in her company and all the chewing of my foot I can potentially do.

carrousel…begins.

Turned into the parking lot. Last time I’ll have to worry about parking in this miserable lot with an overabundance of both cars and politics.

Struggled with the incredibly bad lock on the back door. Last time I’ll have to be exasperated with this dumb lock.

Waited for my computer to log me in. Last day of this horrible, horrible, inexcusably horrible computer. Maybe I’ll throw a party just for that.

Watched MD walk into my office and ask me for something I couldn’t give him. Last day of dealing with his capriciousness. Thank God.

No matter how it actually goes, and no matter what happens on Monday, today is full of win.

—

Last night, in between chores, I watched The Wiz. I’d seen it when I was much younger – as I told BF, it was before DVDs were invented, which at this point seems like a long-ass time ago. From here it was a little different, because I knew the social context of 1978 and more about Michael Jackson at this time in his career and so on. I read about it on Wikipedia and the IMDB and no one mentioned the stuff I found most interesting about the movie: the transpositions of the situations in Baum’s book with situations that are more socially associated with city living and, more to the point, African-Americans. I mentioned this to BF and he said that he guessed you’d have to be black to talk about it without sounding racist, and I believe he’s right, which is why I won’t say anything else about it here. I hope someone has done a thesis on it, though, because I think it’s interesting. I personally find “Brand New Day”, which is the last big cast number, to be a celebration of the success of the civil rights movement so thinly veiled as not to be veiled at all. And now I’ll have that song in my head for the next few hours. Oh well.

I haven’t done yoga for a week. I’ve just been too busy and too exhausted. I know that when you’re stressed out is when you need exercise (and particularly this kind of exercise) the most, I know that, but too much has been crowded into my personal space for me to find room for yoga. Makes me sad.

I’m struggling for other things to say. I could talk about MM’s email to me a couple of days ago, which made it seem as if me leaving this job was all by choice and oh how sorry she was to see me go and what are you planning to do other than teacher training? and the whole thing seemed to be, if not actually rubbing salt in the wound, certainly throwing salt in my general direction, but BF rightly reminded me that his parents probably have no concept of what our finances are actually like and the fact that we are SUNK without me working and that $2000 is a vast, enormous sum of money for me that I can’t just pick up out of my bank account so that I can do teacher training.

But I don’t think that talking about that would make me feel very positive. And I’m in a pretty good mood today, since despite absolutely everything else, it’s my last day having to sit here and complain about this job.

or a clone, maybe? are clones cheap?

All I see, everywhere, are undone tasks. Laundry that needs to be done. Papers that need sorting and filing. Items that need instructions in the explanatory paper I’m leaving behind. Emails that need followup. Stuff in my office that I need to take home. A fridge that needs filling; an itemized grocery list that needs making so I can ask BF to go while I’m gone this weekend. Trash that needs taking out. Shelves that need organizing. The pile that passes for my inbox, which I’ve tried going through eight times and which still needs to be reduced to nothing. Personal emails that need answering. Family shit that needs sorting out. Panic that needs reduction. A suitcase that needs packing. Yoga that needs practicing. Clients that need calling. And all this must be done before I put my head to my pillow tomorrow night.

I usually plan ahead so well. But I also never travel so often, trips so close to one another, and it’s all falling apart.

But I remembered to soak the beans.

—

I completely lost my cool yesterday afternoon during a somewhat mundane work-related task. Our of-counsel attorney gave me some extremely upsetting photos (an infant born badly deformed who later died) that needed color scanning so that we could send them to our bankers. I took them to our usual business for this task, but they were busy, so I went to a small business I’d never been to before.

If you have a handheld scanner, you know that it doesn’t take very long to scan something into a computer to email to yourself. If you have used a copier/scanner, you know that that’s even quicker. I expected this task to be done and paid for in about ten minutes. Instead, I was there for almost an hour. And while usually in this situation I’d be glad to be away from the office, at that time I had approximately 20 hours of viable work time remaining at this job and needed every minute of it, and I also could not imagine at all what could be taking them so long to scan eight fucking pages and email them to me.

The kicker was that this task cost $85. $9.95 per page plus tax. And guess who was paying for it out of pocket? I’d thought it would be about the cost of color copying, you know, $1.00 per page maximum. The other businesses in the area I’d worked with charged about that much for similar jobs. I was thoroughly shocked.

Thank goodness OG was willing to reimburse me right then and there for this cost. But I was even mad that the firm had to pay for such highway robbery. $10 a page is what our normal copying outsource folks charge us for scanning X-rays, which are, you know, a little larger than 8 1/2 x 11 and require much more specialized equipment.

When I got back to the office I called BF and BITCHED for about 10 minutes, and then immediately felt bad and called him back to apologize. I had zero inner calmness about this whole thing: no ability to sit and enjoy the present when I had clients coming to see me and work to do back at the office, and no idea what could be taking so long; no capacity to understand how they could see fit to charge so much for such a simple task (if we’d had a color copier/scanner, it would have taken me 30 seconds and $0.02 cents of electricity to do this task); any ability I have to overcome the petty idiocies of life was totally lost to me yesterday.

All this is by way of saying that I do not recommend Free State Press, on West Street in Annapolis, Maryland, for any of your scanning needs. While I was waiting, several customers came in with small copying jobs, and the owner (?) saw fit to do those with speed and even not to charge one lady who appeared to be locked in a custody battle. So if you have copying, feel free to go there. But color scanning, not so much.

—

Last night I got California Tortilla (which has redeemed itself after a very rocky start) for dinner and sat in front of the TV and watched TNG for the whole evening. BF got home at nearly 10:00. I should have been doing some of those undone home tasks I mentioned above, but I am so burned out from work and travel and my mother and being laid off and everything else that I thought I needed the evening to rest. I think this was a bad decision, thinking about everything I have to finish in the next 48 hours, but hey, I can sleep when I’m dead, right?

BF getting home at 10:00 is troubling, as well. If I explained what they’re doing with him at work I would get all balled up in that, so suffice it to say that I am extremely concerned that he’s going to start working the kind of hours he was working for about half of last year. That got old real quick, and I did my share of hurting out loud about it here on this blog before he started reading it. I’m concerned because I see the chores in the house starting to slide already – although a lot of that’s my fault for being out of town and out of my mind lately – and I don’t want another period of that whole burden on me again. Also we have to start looking for a new place to live in the next month or so, and that tires me just to think about it, especially if BF will be working 16-hour days again and I’ll (hopefully) be at a job where my commuting time is ramped up significantly.

Maybe I need an assistant. A cheap assistant, of course. Do hobos make good assistants?

—

Wow, this is a fun post! And I haven’t even gotten around to the email MM sent me yesterday that made me feel angry and frustrated and totally batshit about this job loss all over again. TB had to talk me down from that one, because I actually started to think my mother’s conspiracy theory could be true. Thank goodness TB is eminently logical.

LYL!

sell the goat

Dear Brain,

When I leave a bag of beans on the counter, in plain sight, so that I can remember in the morning that I need to soak them during the workday, the thing to do is NOTICE THEM so that the soaking can take place, instead of just making breakfast and lunch obliviously as if they do not exist. Please make a note of it.

Love,
Crisitunity

—

BF and I had a very stupid tiff last night, and while the issue we actually had trouble over was indeed stupid, the issues behind it were not. I am trying to plan for eventualities that it’s near-impossible to plan for, and the timing of what I need to do in the next few weeks is either going to work beautifully or it’s going to just fall apart and everything will have to be pushed back until the fall. I can’t bear this. I also keep seeing pieces of my mother in half of every interaction I have – I see myself, questioning, criticizing, pushing, laughing, covering. I can’t bear that, either. But the universe does not seem to have much of an interest in what I can bear and what I can’t lately. Maybe the whole point of this rotten month was to push me out of my comfort zone, help me to remember when I was on the verge of forgetting that not only do things not have to be perfect, but they don’t even have to be fun or easy, for the sun to keep rising every day.

I finished reading Judith Lasater‘s book Living Your Yoga last week. Despite the title, this book is not too much about yoga and a great deal about how to live. I highly recommend it to anybody who’s looking for a little more peace, even if you’ve never heard of yoga. I left it with my mother, because Lasater puts things so plainly that I thought she could meditate well on this book. She was reading it a little bit while I was still there, and she came across a story that I thought was wonderful. I am retelling the parable as I remember it here because I don’t have the book with me.

A man who owned a farm with a dozen chickens, a cow, two dogs, and three cats, who was married with four daughters and two sons, came to a rabbi one day. “My house is in chaos,” he said to the rabbi. “I’m going crazy with all the noise of these animals and my children. I can’t think straight and my health is beginning to suffer.”

“Buy a goat,” the rabbi advised him.

“A goat?”

“Yes. Buy a goat and add it to your household.”

The man thought this was pretty strange advice, but he did as the rabbi advised. Two weeks later he came back.

“I did as you told me and bought a goat,” said the man. “Now the noise of the goat, and its tendency to eat my daughters’ clothes, has my house in a huge uproar. What should I do?”

“Sell the goat,” said the rabbi.

The man did as the rabbi advised, and sold the goat. When he went home, his daughters were sewing and singing happily, his sons were doing chores, and the household seemed quieter and calmer. His wife, relieved at the goat being gone, smiled and greeted him with a kiss. The man was content and pleased with his situation.

My mother read this and said “What?? This story is just about listening to bad advice! And being deluded that you’ve made your situation better when it’s actually the same!”

I tried to tell her that the story was about how further stress on a somewhat stressful situation can help you appreciate what blessings you actually have, and how just eliminating a small piece of unnecessary baggage can help you live a more content life. She squinted at me and I’m not sure if she thought this was the moral of the story really at all.  But I’m pretty sure it was.

I greatly look forward to the time when the current goats in my life are sold and gone, and I can go back to enjoying the normal stressors of my situation – the bad debt, the lack of friends, the lack of success of my writing, the clutter of my possessions, and all the other small things that keep my life from being nirvana. I’m sure that after July is over I will find it positively beatific.

I had a craving for a grace-coated Snickers, but oh well

The amount of work I have to do between now and COB Thursday is really not unmanageable. (And it better fucking stay that way.) It’s just going to keep me pretty busy. No one piled insane amounts of stuff on my desk while I was gone, only a few things. EP sent me an email asking me to give her an update on all the things I’m working on for her before I leave, which is pretty much laughable, as the update would be for virtually my whole job and 98% of the updates would be “Have requested, have not been contacted.” My plan is just to send her the same document I’m sending to everybody, the “this is what I do that nobody else seems to know about and here’s where I am with it all.”

The second interview with the Owings Mills guy was this morning. I really liked it, again. I hope they liked me enough to choose me over whoever else is in the running, but they were playing it too close to the chest for me to really know where I was at. I keep trying to remind myself that it’s too perfect, because the lady they’re replacing ends her tenure with them on Friday and I could just start right up on Monday, and that’s irresistible. I could so easily just lose my mind being frustrated and anxious and terrified for my ability to eat and live indoors, so I’m trying hard not to think about it too much.

In that vein, I’m only about halfway still on the fence about whether I should stay on into next week here. While I was away I gave it some thought and realized that what I ought to do, if I’m not offered any other jobs, is just stay. I have managed to stay at this job for quite a lot longer than I wanted to, and another week won’t kill me. No, I really can’t stand this idea – in part because the file room is starting to be in serious condition and I can guess who’s going to be asked to fix it up once it’s noticed, which should be just about next Monday – but if Owings Mills doesn’t offer me the job, and I don’t hear back about either of the other jobs that are on my radar, I feel like it’s put on a fresh face and head down to Starbucks or just stay here. And the summer’s not over yet, so all those high school and college kids will still be available for coffee-shop jobs.

Although, OG hasn’t mentioned whether or not we got the funding that the banking guys came to talk to them all about last week, so I don’t know if that offer is even open. So maybe it’s better if I just plan for not. I DON’T KNOW. This is fucking crazy. Trying to explain to the interviewing people about this situation has gotten me some funky looks, and some totally sensible questions: “If they’re letting go all the admin staff, who’s going to do all the admin work? Why haven’t they allowed you to tell your clients that you won’t be there anymore?” Because this whole thing is going down very shittily, is the only answer I can think of. Because there is no grace whatsoever in this situation, no redemption available. Sorry, machine empty. Please call maintenance.

—

Last night BF and I watched Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. It was better than I’d thought it would be, especially during the first half-hour or so, and the fake music was quite decent, and a bunch of extremely interesting little cameos showed up. I laughed a lot, while I was trying to do my nails (let us just pass over the result). We also watched Iron Man on Blu-Ray (a gift from MB for BF’s birthday), and it was good. I thought it was absolutely terrific in the theater, and while some of the edges started to show their slips, I still thought it was a great movie. I’m not sure where The Fav learned to direct, but I hugely underestimated him.

—

OK, I’m getting tugs on my sleeve for lame work to do. I’ll have to get back to you about whatever else is going on in my head. No closure on my mom, but I think a giant crying fit is ahead of me somewhere soon.

salads and falsehoods and goats, oh my

The petty stupidities of spending time with my mother are neverending, but the biggest problem I’m having this time around is that our authenticities clash.

If the life that I’m leading now has a key, it’s authenticity. The notion that everything that comes out of my mouth is mostly true, and if not true, a lie that is utterly required by the situation (i.e. when my boss tells me to tell her callers she’s not there). This matters to me deeply, and I think that part of the reason is that my mother lives a life so inauthentic it may as well be made of styrofoam.

She lies all the time. She withholds the truth constantly, in so many small and unassuming ways that it is impossible to tell when she’s being straight with you. An example, you say? Yesterday a neighbor dropped off some cupcakes – apparently the woman is always baking things and sharing them with Mom (Florida, you know) – and when she left I asked Mom why she’d accepted them when her doctor has her on a gluten-free, dairy-free, wheat-free diet, and these cupcakes probably had at least two of those ingredients. She said that first, the whole world didn’t need to know about the diet, and second, she didn’t want to be rude to the neighbor, and she put on a kvetching voice to say “I can’t eat these because of my diet”.

To me, refusing the cupcakes would have been not only the self-respectful thing to do, because if you actually care about the medically-mandated diet the thing to do is tend it, but also the kind thing for the neighbor, because the neighbor took the time to bake the cupcakes and bring some over, and if she continues to do this for my mom she will waste a hell of a lot of time. Saying no thanks might even lead to an interesting discussion about gluten.

But no. To Mom, the point is to smooth the way, no matter what it costs her and her authenticity. And I really have no idea how much of what she’s said to me this week is true and how much is not. Whether she even wanted to do any of the activities we did. Whether she enjoyed any of the food I made for her. Whether she liked the gifts I brought her. Anything. It hurts me very badly not to be able to tell truth from lies when it comes to her, at last, after years of feeling able to interpret her falsehoods, but it hurts me worse that she is living this way. Wrapping oneself up in that kind of web cannot be good for the soul, and I believe it probably carries over into her physical health.

This has been the largest part of why I haven’t enjoyed this week. But she really set the tone on the first day when she cried and cried on the phone to her friend and would not allow me to comfort her. I don’t know if I should have gone over to her and tried (she seemed to want to talk to him and not me, otherwise I believe she would have talked to me (in the room) instead of calling him (in California)), but from then on she had her conversations upstairs out of my hearing, so maybe I should have. Maybe that was my mistake. But it made me feel completely in the way, completely unnecessary, and as if she didn’t care enough about me to let me help her. She hasn’t told me much more about what went on between her and her boyfriend since the first night when we sat up and talked about it – and there have been plenty of calls to the friend since then.

As the days have gone on, I’ve felt more and more that her house was pushing me out the door. I’ve felt less and less welcome, more and more as if I was intruding on private space. The bathroom was rank with my things, the fridge stuffed with food she cared not for. I am not at all surprised that her boyfriend has mentioned feeling uncomfortable here – this is so clearly her space and none of us belong.

There are hundreds of other things that I found to bother me. The way she didn’t listen to what I was actually saying about her working while I was here, instead of just assuming I was trying to sabotage her as she thinks the boyfriend does. The pushing soda on me that I stopped drinking months ago. The always, always offering something three times despite hearing no thank you. The unbelievably poisonous attitude against religion. The I was just trying to fucking help, please don’t say things like that to me. The forgetting, and the bitterness (the denied bitterness, ah foolish), the unsatisfied-with-everything-ness, the total incongruity with Buddhism evidenced here, the fact that she really, really hasn’t accepted that all things pass and maybe it doesn’t actually matter if the sink gets scratched or my manicure which I didn’t want gets damaged.

I don’t know whether I am just bitching out here, too hurt by her rejections to move on and be patient and try to enjoy the week and instead focusing on all the bad, but I really feel like I tried, a little, and she has gotten a hundred times worse at all this stuff since last we met. Probably she’s under a great deal of stress, and I need to presume that she’s at her very worst instead of presuming that this is the next step into her transformation into a crazy old lady. And that my own feelings had a lot to do with how I perceived her this whole time.

It’s after 11 when I’m writing this and long past time for bed. I am still hurting a lot, too, and hopefully when I get home and see my darling BF a lot of this will pass like a cloud moving on overhead. I was going to tell you about the salad thing, which finally tipped me over into tears, but instead I’ll just tell you about the fucking weird thing she did at the dairy and call it a night.

We went to a dairy. I was hoping I’d be able to try raw milk, on the sly (it’s illegal to sell it in most states), but this dairy stopped selling it a while back. Instead I bought some treats for me and BF, and we went out to the farm to see the goats.

Mom apparently had a goat when she was a child. I have never heard word one of this in my entire life, and have no possible idea how it can be true, but she sure convinced me when we got to the goat pasture. She saw the first few goats off to our right and slowed the car. “I’m going to baa at them,” she said. She rolled down my window.

“Me-e-e-e-e-e-e-eh,“ she bleated, loudly enough to startle me.

And then a second time. And then a third. Then she rolled up the window and drove on, as if this was something done every day.

Later we got out and petted the goats and I got a really painful ant bite (although I was accidentally standing on their hill, so I’m not annoyed about it), and Mom just went nuts lovin’ the goats. They were nice enough, but they were, you know, just goats. To Mom it was like they were the daughters she never had.

“Yes, yes,” she cooed. “You are just so sweet.”

wheezing to the finish

Rushed through my breakfast after she made her own with beeps and banging but seeming tiptoeing through the kitchen. “The sun just gets so intense.” So why didn’t you wake me up earlier? If the noisy breakfast-making was meant to wake me up, why didn’t you just come in and tell me to get up?

It goes in cycles: I get enraged and frustrated with some habit of hers or some way she puts something to me that’s hurtful, and then I get over it and we talk like normal people for an hour, and then she says or does something else that’s insane or mean or inauthentic and I’m wrecked for another hour.

Less than 24 hours remain. I may get to try raw milk today, about which I’m really inproportionately excited thanks to Alton Brown. I have no idea how to get through the afternoon other than recommending that she work while I read Farewell, My Lovely. FYI, if you ever need a book to get instantly involved in, pick up a Raymond Chandler.

I am never visiting her like this again. If she weren’t so far away, it wouldn’t really be a problem…but I can’t fly to stay here just for two days. Now I know I can’t stay for longer than a couple of days without some other person here as a buffer. So hopefully she’ll just stop asking me to visit. Because it must be as obvious to her as it is to me that this does not work.

asana: Ardha Chandrasana (Half-Moon Pose)

This is one of those poses that means something totally different in Bikram yoga than it does in all other traditions. In non-Bikram yoga, this is ardha chandrasana:

You’ll notice this lady is using a block for stability, and her form is altogether terrific. Her leg could be a weeeeee bit higher and her hips just a tad more open, but I certainly wouldn’t correct her.

This guy is more advanced. Note that the leg is just a long extension of the same line as the torso. His standing knee is locked, which is not so good.

In Bikram, this is half-moon pose:

I do not know why it is this way.

I also don’t really know why ardha chandrasana is half-moon pose, because I don’t think this resembles a half moon, and if it’s just a partial version of moon pose (as in half lord of the fishes pose) I wonder what moon pose would look like. Below is a backbending variation, and I suppose that if you kicked your leg out really far, you would make a circular shape with your leg and arm. But I’ve always been taught that this is a variation, and not, you know, chandrasana:

In my searchings, I discovered that this variation is named ardha chandrasana chapasana. Most commonly you will see this variation done with the leg kicking upwards (like this), which my teacher Paul has told me is incorrect. The idea is to square your heel directly behind your hip and kick backwards, which I suspect is safer for the knee. This lady is doing it pretty well. But since Paul is the only one who’s told me that, it may just be true in the Anusara tradition.

There are many different starting points for ardha chandrasana, but the way I’ve found it most commonly taught in classes is to start in warrior II or triangle. In the former, you lean your side ribs towards your front leg and put your weight on that leg, and just ease up into a straight standing leg, a straight back leg, and a flat torso rotated to the front. In the latter, you bend the front knee and stabilize, and then come up the same way.

I once found this pose far more challenging than most other balancing poses. Garudasana? No problem, as long as my thighs were up to it. Tree? Don’t make me laugh. But half-moon was a real bear for me.

There are a few things that I think make this pose tricky – the amount of weight you shouldn’t put on your hand, rationing how much your torso is tipping towards the ground instead of being parallel to the wall, a lack of opennness in the hips leading to more difficulty balancing (and most Westerners do not have open hips), and the fact that if you angle your leg too far to the front or the back, it’ll screw up your balance further and you’ll fall. In my home practice I generally spend almost ten minutes getting into and staying in half-moon and its variation above, because I’ve found that doing the pose gradually builds a lot of strength, and I feel incredibly solid once I’m in it if I spend a good amount of time getting there. If I do it too quickly, my lifted leg feels really heavy and I feel like a bent reed, rather than a solid branch.

This is one of the poses that taught me how to stop disliking poses that I’m not particularly good at. Jennifer would tell me that not being good at poses is not remotely the point, but I’m sticking with that notion just for the time being, because the plain fact is that I have strong poses and weak poses. Half-moon was always weak, and I’d dread it when the teacher would tell us to go up into it. Part of it was that I didn’t want to fall out and look bad in front of the other students, but as time went on that got less and less important and it was more about me. I couldn’t get the hang of it, and I was tired of that feeling.

Of course, it along with a plethora of other poses taught me that not being able to get the hang of a pose goes away with lots and lots of frustrating practice in that pose. The more often I did half-moon, the more the feeling of despair whenever I hu-UPped into it evaporated. It grew familiar. Even the wavering leg and the bent-reed feeling were familiar, and at some point they grew almost pleasant.

In addition, I learned somewhere in there that just because a pose is weak for me doesn’t mean that I have to dread it. The sensation of the pose is no less interesting, no less valuable, just because I can’t stay in it for very long or can’t quite get the hang of it. It’s still an experience, one that I have as I am moving through life, and worrying over whether or not it’s right and correct is missing the experience.

Although the variation, when I do it, feels very strong (one day I got into it and stayed in it long after the teacher said to come down and go to the other side, because I felt I could have stayed in it all afternoon, and the solidity was a marvelous feeling), the actual half-moon still feels pretty weak to me, and that’s okay. I might not ever feel like my leg is completely straight. It’s a pose that went from dislike to trepidation to neutrality to enjoyment, all because I started appreciating the pose for what it was to me.

(they’d kind of have to be)

Things are much better now. Mom is no longer a total mess and we even had a nice talk last night. I tried to explain to her that she and her boyfriend are separate human beings with separate perspectives, and that he does not see life and situations in the same way that she does. While I know she was considering this idea for probably the first time, she still seemed to actually understand, and I’m glad. (No, I’m not kidding. In the nicest possible way, girl cannot see past the end of her nose.)

Today she’s taking me to a yoga class at noon and we’re having massages in the evening. In between, no idea.

I’ll be putting up an asana post in a few minutes. I was going to save it for a day when I don’t have the time or the content to post, but it turned out well so I want to share it with you. Hope you enjoy.

I taught my mom, and my mom won

I mentioned by way of a ridiculously negative post that I taught a yoga class I created to my mom. This is the first teaching I have ever done, and while I don’t think it will be at all typical to how teaching regular classes will be for me, it still gave me a nice taste of what I’m aiming for.

I was surprised to find that my pattern of speech didn’t resemble that of any of my teachers. I’ve taken a lot of classes with some of my teachers and I expected to be influenced by their styles, but what came out of my mouth seemed to be my own. (Aside from “enjoy your breath”, a wry statement of Paul’s which I knew I was going to co-opt from the third or fourth time he said it.) I hung on to my sense of humor (yoga should be fun!) and did not refrain from onomatopoeically stretching or mispronouncing words in order to demonstrate what the pose was going to do. (Is that okay to bring into the classroom? I kind of hope so.) I also was just sort of guessing at how long I thought was appropriate for her to hold the pose before I told her to ease out of it, and I wasn’t sure if there was a more scientific way to do it. At first I found myself saying “okay, now” before I gave each new instruction, which I think I have to break myself of RIGHT NOW before I teach anyone else.

The rhythm of the poses did not work at all, because Mom kept stopping either to talk to me, or to tell me she couldn’t do a pose, or something. Towards the middle she somewhat gave up on her preconceptions and started actually doing the poses, and this lack of rhythm ended, and I felt like I was really getting into the groove of what I was doing (and of course what she was doing). I gave her some good instruction and I think (I hope) some good adjustments, and in the end I think it went okay.

Mom breathes incredibly shallowly. I had never noticed this until she got into viparita karani as the end restorative, and I told her the thing the Hindus say about lifespan and breath* which I think is incredibly profound, and what appeared to be the deepest breath she could take after I shared that with her was half the length of one of my normal breaths. I’m not saying I’m a breathing genius – very far from it, in fact, which is why this amazed me so much. When I come to think of it, the fact that her breathing is restricted really fits the rest of her personality and health profile, but at that moment I was quite surprised.

*The Hindus say that a person’s lifespan is granted to them in the form of breaths – that humans have a certain number of breaths to live – so making every breath as long as possible allows you to live as long as possible.

Also, she thought the twists were terrific. She didn’t enjoy sun salutations except for the forward-bending part, she could not do downward dog for medical reasons, and she clung to her old exercise habit of “I can’t” when I could see from the way she moved her body that she easily could and was choosing not to (more on this another time, perhaps), but every time she got into a twist she went “Mmmmm…that feels so good.” I thought that twists would be good for her and I’m glad I was right. What she actually needs is heart openers, because she’s so closed (she demonstrated eagle in the most tight, coiled-up way, and it was so representative of her that I didn’t know what to say), but I know I would get a lot of “I can’t”s if I tried to teach that kind of practice for her.

I can’t WAIT to teach more, and to teach to people who are cooperative and not interrupt-y. I had lots of fun even as it was and I really want to explore it again as soon as possible.