InnerTeub

My good friend from high school is a yoga instructor in the most badass sense of the word, which is to say she studies in India and then comes back to the US and very politely bends your body into ways that are slightly incomprehensible and yet totally awesome, and then you can’t walk the next day.

I’m in town and she mentioned she was teaching a 12pm class, and it seemed like a good way to catch up – take her yoga class, grab lunch after. I mean, hell, I’ve been doing yoga on and off for over seven years, I’ve done two Ironmen races, I workout frequently – it’s not like I can’t drop into a yoga class and figure it out, right? It’s yoga.  Not rocket science. Right?

Obviously from the arrogance in that last paragraph you can guess that she killed me dead. Like, there were points during that hour and half class that I noticed my leg muscles just weren’t … functioning. As in, they had stopped reacting to the neurological signals to move, simply because they were too tired. I felt the intense urge to curl up on my yoga mat and suck my thumb, or at least apologize for the river of sweat streaming down my boobs. It’s not that the yoga itself was outside of the vocabulary of the yoga I’ve done before – I can sun salutation with the best of them – but the pacing and the continued routine of the poses and the incrementally levels of badassary that started piling up…man, you guys, man.

What I’m telling you is that there is yoga, and then there is Ashtanga yoga, and you’d be well served to adjust your ego accordingly if you’re wandering into an Ashtanga class with nothing but your lulu’s and an attitude.

After class, we did indeed grab lunch, and we had an interesting discussion about the merits of daily practice. The type of yoga that Ellie practices is Mysore yoga (and if you think I’m having a hard time restraining myself from a “no, YOURsore” joke, you are quite correct), and one of the tenets is that this is a daily practice. To the best of my understanding (which is shaky, at best), Mysore is a self-led practice of Ashtanga yoga, wherein the practitioner follows the Ashtanga sequence of poses at their own pace. The idea is that you do this, the same sequence of poses, a routine that takes about an hour and half, everyday.

As Ellie described the  me the elements involved in that kind of daily practice – the mental fortitude it takes to move yourself through what must become occasionally a boring routine (Same thing. Everyday.) and the discipline it takes to push yourself through the poses you know you don’t like, and not to only focus on the ones you know you can do and do well – it reminded me of Crossfit, a bit. To be sure: the two disciplines in spirit could not be more dissimilar, but the idea of going daily and doing whatever that day dishes at you – are right in line.

I think a lot of the benefit of Crossfit is doing the WOD that you are inclined to hate, and not skipping those days (remind me of this the next time I see an erg workout for the day, mmkay?) It’s the discipline of teaching your body to adapt, over and over, to things outside it’s comfort zone. In Mysore, you don’t pick and chose the poses in the sequence you do – you do them all, and you do them everyday. The poses you hate or are uncomfortable with cannot possibly stay your weakest if you confront them daily, right? (See also: Triathlon, and Why So Many People I Know Swim Even Though They Hate It)

I doubt I’ll ever get fully into a Mysore practice – though I’m humbled and impressed by Ashtanga and can see how you could fall down a rabbit hole there – but the process of daily practice is something I can relate to and think is important.

In other news: my hamstrings  currently don’t work, and it’s all Ellie’s fault.