New Car Smell
Any other yoga mat hoarders out there?
I won a yoga mat yesterday. I won it in a raffle to benefit the Africa Yoga Project. It’s very exciting: a Jade mat, so it’s way better (and about 5 times more expensive!) than the Gaiam-from-Target one I’ve been using. Grippy, plush, all natural materials–the bells and whistles of the yoga mat world, such as there are. So I can just heave my old cheap one into the trash!
Except I kind of can’t? Read More…
4 Recipies on Pinterest that I Can Personally Vouch For
I am no cook. My meals consisted of Lean Cuisines until an ex who was a chef bought me The Joy of Cooking, which is great if you want to cook a new kind of protein without dying of a bacterial disease, but doesn’t really give you new and exciting ways to feed yourself. Enter Pinterest, glorious land-of-milk-and-honey for food pornographers, and milk- and honey-pornographers, too. But every so often you find a pin of something that seems doable for a single lady not-cook who doesn’t have tons of time after she gets home from yoga, and cannot honestly be bothered to give a crap about making things days ahead of time. It’s not all designer cupcakes, not that there’s anything wrong with designer cupcakes. If only I could fit an entire cupcake tray in my tiny-house oven…
I usually only pin things it looks like I can actually make, with the exception of the buffalo-chicken-and-waffles sandwich, but only because that is the nexus of all things holy.
Almost every one of these pins uses a blender, so I busted out trusty old Mr Blendy.
Hi!
He was not happy with being put to so much use after 8 years and one smoothie one time. Only one of these things is a meal, two of them are hummuses, but baby steps.
…OR, What if it Isn’t Up to The Boners After All?
Photos like this one wander around the internet, especially Facebook and Pinterest, and we all repost the hell out of them because the message is empowering. Right? Because our standards of beauty are disgusting and real women have curves, etc. And on the surface, yes. But I’d really like us to look a little more closely at what images like this one actually say.
This one says, “Bones are for the dog. Meat is for the man.” Or, rather, in ten words, this image says:
-Skinny girls (I’m assuming “bones” means skinny girls) are not “for men.” Meaning undeserving of the love and attention of men.
-If the use of “dog” isn’t just a throwaway metaphor–I’ll bet it isn’t–then skinny girls are only deserving of the kind of attention given by “dogs,” i.e., liars, cheaters, not great men.
-Women with larger bodies are objects deserving of consumption by men (because meat!).
-This being deserving of consumption is implied to make larger women worth more than their thinner counterparts. Because you throw scraps to the dogs.
-Every woman’s goal is to be deemed fit to be “consumed” by (be “for) men, because this consumption is an achievement and means she has avoided being “thrown to the dogs.”
By men, of course, we’re talking heterosexual men, because if women’s value was left up to which gay guys would have sex with then no one would have any value at all you guys amiriiiite?
And we’re assuming none of those girls in the photo is a lesbian, and even if they were, we’re assuming their goal would still be the approval of straight men.
Wow that’s saying alot!
Sometimes I Think Yoga Teachers Can Read Minds
Remember yesterday when I was so upset about feeling angry in pincha and I didn’t know whether to do something to “fix” that, or bow out until my life settled down, or just ride it out until things cooled off a little bit? Today, one of my favorite yoga teachers had a post on Elephant Journal called “Trust the Practice“: Read More…
My Pincha, Myself: When The World and the Mat Collide
“And it’s hard to dance with a devil on your back so shake him off.”–Florence and the Machine
I’m sitting in my house frustratedly typing right now and am not in my favorite yoga class because I forgot to pack a very important piece of workout gear and I can’t take class without it. It’s either a dumb mistake I can’t believe I made OR my subconscious sabotaged me because this class usually includes practicing pincha mayurasana, and lately that’s been making me really angry.
Pincha used to be one of my favorite poses to work on–it was my new year’s resolution. And I had been getting pretty close to it, too–catching a split second of air and alllllmost hanging the balance. But now I can barely get my feet off the ground because working on the pose brings up feelings of such intense, boiling, white-hot primal rage that I have to back off.
How weird, huh? Read More…
Special Yoga Relativity
“An accurate clock at rest with respect to one observer may be measured to tick at a different rate when compared to a second observer’s own equally accurate clocks. This effect arises neither from technical aspects of the clocks nor from the fact that signals need time to propagate, but from the nature of space-time itself. [wikipedia]“
Time dilation in Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, as demonstrated by the relative velocity (“duration”) of a yoga pose: Read More…
Triggerasana
Get your foot out of my face.
I always interpret “be aware of your body…” to tacitly go on to say “…and its location in space relative to everyone else.” I figure “be mindful” means to be aware that another human being is next to you, who may not be all ‘namaste’ about personal space. Guess that makes me crazy.
You’ve got your entire mat length, adjust your standing split.
You don’t need your arms all the way out in supine twist, not today.
Your happy baby will be just as happy on your own mat.
Flip your dog somewhere else.
This mat is mine.
This body is mine. Read More…
Lay Your Hand(stand)s on Me
“So I stood up and did a handstand on my Guru’s roof, to celebrate the notion of liberation. I felt the dusty tiles under my hands. I felt my own strength and balance. I felt the easy night breeze on the palms of my bare feet. This kind of thing –a spontaneous handstand–isn’t something a disembodied cool blue soul can do, but a human being can do it. We have hands; we can stand on them if we want to. That’s our privilege. That’s the joy of a mortal body. And that’s why God needs us. Because God loves to feel things through our hands.” ~ Eat. Pray. Love.
Elizabeth Gilbert can do handstands on roofs? Gah, I knew I hated her.
I just got back from a “Handstands and Hanumanasana” workshop at my favorite yoga studio. God bless the yoga teacher who convinced me to sign up for my first workshop (so patiently, too, as I would NOT stop worrying aloud whether I should be in an arm-balance class when I couldn’t do a single arm balance at the time). From that first one I learned that workshops are good to refine your skills if you can already do the poses they’re covering, but they’re an even better way to learn how to work on some of the more challenging poses, and really get to spend a ton of time working on them with a teacher present: something you don’t normally get to do in power vinyasa classes. I’ve done arm balancing, backbending, and now, handstands and hanumanasana, which means splits.
Handstands, yes, are my Big Bad, as Buffy would say. My arms don’t straighten, especially Mr Bendy on the left side, who really won’t take weight at all. Again, let’s pause to consider me referring to a part of my own body as male, especially in light of the fact that I only do so in the context of it being a support system that crumbles out from under me. Hm. Moving on! Read More…
Yogadventures: Church on Sunday
“Where do you go to church?”
The lovely gentleman I had been chatting with at the laundromat asked, like, obviously, I must go somewhere, like you would ask a person, “which grocery store do you go to?” I had come in to the laundromat only because not-completely-air-dryed yoga pants had forced me to miss my favorite class and I was furiously in search of a place where I could slam all the doors. But something about this guy chattering at me about hockey and wrestling had put me in a glorious, wonderful mood, which I was telling him (hey, I told Twitter) when he asked me about church.
My brain had no trouble saying, “oh, I don’t go to church. I go to yoga on Sundays.” And it seemed like he thought that was a not-ridiculous answer.
Here’s To Falling On Your Ass
To be in the middle of a balance pose is probably to hear your yoga teacher remind you that it’s okay to fall out of it. It’s practically a mantra; funny enough that while we’re all trying to achieve balance, what’s being poured into our brains is an acceptance of imbalance.
I guess people need to be reminded that it’s okay to fall down? I don’t get that. Personally, I love falling on my ass.
Maybe it’s because I’m good at falling down? I took two semesters of stunt training when I was a quasi-theater major in college, so I know how to pratfall like a champ (they tell you it’s a waste of credit hours, but turns out it’s useful on icy sidewalks!). Maybe it’s because I do live radio, so I fall verbally on my face in front of thousands of people all the time and have gotten over messing things up?
All I know is, from the time I did a situp too enthusiastically on a pilates ball and hit the floor with a thud, I’ve never had any vanity about falling down. It is the greatest. Read More…
