Roxtar Yoga

funky wild thang January 7, 2010

Have you ever done funky wild thing in yoga class? Maybe on the dance floor? What’s that you wonder? Why it’s Parsva Vasisthasana! It’s what you’ve been missing in your life and yoga practice, I swear! I can’t really find an English translation of this pose so I am calling it funky wild thing. I will try to include a photo of it later, this photo is the traditional “Non-Shivafied” version, but the funky wild thing version is so much sweeter. This week I decided to bust out of my yoga teacher rut and taught and practiced a sequence which featured this pose from Shiva Rea’s Fluid Power DVD. My yoga teacher toolbox has some good sequences, but sometimes we all have to be pushed outside of our routines to experience something new. I love most styles of yoga, but Vinyasa yoga still has me by the heart strings. Each time I get on the mat and start flowing, the world around me drops, I smile, breathe, and enjoy feeling my muscles and body move in a way it should be (or so it feels at least). After the standard holiday excesses I am happy to find my way back to yoga this week. I think most people enjoy practicing yoga in a classroom format, but I really enjoy Shiva Rea’s DVDs and I highly recommend Fluid Power for anyone who is looking for a way to get into practicing at home or for new, fun, flowy vinyasa sequences.  When writing this I also noticed she has a new DVD out, Daily Energy.  I will be sure to check it out soon and let you know how it is.

This week I have meditated and practiced yoga asana every morning, eaten vegan, and ridden my bike every day. It’s been a great week. No matter how far I find myself from my nourishing routines at times, they always feel really good to come back to. It makes me wonder why I insist on veering so far off track, yet I know that is just the way it is and hopefully it is getting better with time. If you haven’t meditated, practiced yoga at home, eaten tons of fruits and veggies, or enjoyed some fresh air lately, I urge you to do so. These practices make me sparkle in so many ways.

I have a healthy little competition going with my man friend to see who can lose the most percentage of body weight within the next month or two (we haven’t decided how long this competition will last yet). It has been really fun! I am typically not a very competitive person, but I am enjoying this. It’s been interesting to notice peoples reactions to our competition. It often seems like many of the women I tell this to immediately internalize it and think it implies something about their own health or weight. “But you don’t need to lose weight!” I hear often. We decided to do this because we had both gained a little weight recently and although we are technically still a healthy weight by the books, we felt unhealthy and were heavier than we have been for most of our recent adult lives. A little pro activity now to prevent dramatic changes needed later in life. I plan on living until I’m 100 years old (at which point I’ll probably laugh at this blog) and I don’t want to do so miserably riddled with every degenerative disease in the book. I want to be vital, smiling, and kicking asana. I have learned that we can’t exactly question each other and our intentions and motivations when it comes to healthy living, but at least we can get a little inspiration from each other, if we want it. Compare not my friends.

I have no idea how old Dharma Mittra is, but wow.

2010 January 3, 2010

A new year just demands inventory, adjustments, changes, and reflection, doesn’t it? No matter how silly I think New Years resolutions are, I still find this a great time of year to reset and reboot. What kind of changes would you like to see in the new year?

I’ve been keeping this blog for about 18 months and you may have noticed that there is a lot going on here. I have recently started writing more often and since doing so I have realized that I mostly post my thoughts on life, through the eyes of a Detroit raised California yogini whose looking to live life right. Yoga happens to be the one practice that has made the largest impact on this quest, and I love teaching yoga and sharing it with whomever I can. So, I shall update my mission statement on this blog accordingly and just thought I’d share that with you. I want this to be a forum for sharing thoughts on life and yoga and everything in between.

So what’s my vision for life in 2010? I want to live a little more simply, making as much of my own food as I can, maybe making Sunday a food prep day. I want to continue to make my home more “homey”. No, I don’t mean to make my home like a hip-hop superstar. I mean a place that I feel at home in, that I enjoy existing in, and that I can practice yoga in. I want to spend less money, especially on food and fun. Their are lots of things to enjoy on this bountiful planet, I feel like I’ve blessed to live where I live and do the work I do, yet I think I’ve been a bit liberal in my enjoyment of the good stuff. Hence the few extra pounds of holiday joy that are lingering around my waistline.

I’ve also been feeling such gratitude. I’m really thankful for my job today, the people in my life, and my life in SLO. I want to continue to appreciate all of this and give it my best.

Lately I also realized that I, like most people, get stuck in the day to day and wasn’t spending enough time thinking about long term goals. In fact, I didn’t have any long term goals after I stopped going to grad school in 2006 and was just living my SLO-life having a good ole time. But somewhere in the back of my mind I did have things I want to do that weren’t getting done. Such as traveling to new cultures for leisure. Continuing education. Owning a mini coup convertible. Becoming a rocking yoga teacher. Living in the present moment. Stuff like that. One goal I set was to save a large amount of money by 2010. It sounded kind of scary, but I felt I was living too ‘paycheck to paycheck’ and wanted to have an emergency fund. You know, one of those things people dream about but never do in reality? I kind of stole this idea from the CEO of MINDBODY. One day he walked in with a sign that said “50,000 clients by 2010″. While the sign almost gave me a heart attack (at the time in 2005 we only had 1500 clients and I was in charge of talking to the angry ones) but I liked the idea of this nice, slogan-ish goal that I could say to myself over and over again and maybe get myself to remember my long term goal.

The outcome of my 2010 savings goal? Well, I didn’t hit my goal, but I did save quite a bit more than previously and I feel good about my effort. Part of the reason I missed it was unplanned, large expenses. I also just spent a lot of money on stuff that wasn’t really necessary. Rather than go without once in a while, I satisfied most of my whim desires, most of which seem fair enough, but add up to a lot at the end of the year. Did I really need to spend so much on books and music?

So I am making a more aggressive plan for 2010 and I hope you’ll do the same. Cheers to a new year and a new decade of juicy goodness!

home base December 27, 2009

After yet another wonderful holiday season I found myself pondering the idea of a home base. I spent the holiday in the Garden State cuddling around a warm fire and playing games with new people. It was everything a holiday should be, spent eating wonderful food and sharing and connecting with loved ones. Being away from my family during this holiday got me thinking though. I wonder how much travel, jobs, and shifting cultural centers have had an effect on our families, and will continue to have an effect. For many it’s difficult to stay in the same towns or communities we were raised in making quality family time a rarity. I wonder what we are losing by leaving our hometowns and living where ever our jobs and lives take us, if anything at all.

Much of my family immigrated from Germany to Detroit, Michigan around the early 1900’s and many of my ancestors are still located there. I often miss knowing neighborhoods well, being so close to my roots and the places my grandmother’s lived and frequented, running into people you know, and feeling connected to those people for so long. Yet, aren’t those just physical places, isn’t the real history in my heart and mind passed down from my rockin’ grandmas and everyone in between? Is it detached to feel like the people who are right here, right now are the ones that are your family? I don’t feel like it is. Not that I don’t love and miss my family! I have found that the physical distance that separates us can effectively be lessened by connecting over the phone, via e-mail, random visits, or by sending a little love via snail mail unexpectedly.

Just a little Christmas food for thought as I lay on the floor in my pajamas doing a little head-to-knee forward bend. I have to say that is my favorite pose to do out of the yoga studio. It feels oh so good. I hope everyone enjoyed some sort of holiday time this season. It seems the cold, shorter days demand it.

passion and work, mutually exclusive? December 14, 2009

How passionate are you in your daily life? I have been thinking lately of what it means to have true passion in life. I’ve always agreed with the yogic philosophy of bringing joy and presence to anything you do. It says it doesn’t exactly matter if you sweep floors or program computers, it’s the attitude and presence that you bring to that activity that counts. Yet, I notice that I have often felt just a little something was missing here and there. My first desk job, my mid-twenties crisis, graduate school. I always start with a whirlwind of passion, activity and joy in my new adventures. Then I inevitably hit a passion wall. I get tired, bored or frustrated and it shows. I’ve often wondered what it would be like if I could hide what I’m thinking, but my face very accurately shows what I’m feeling, whether I want it to or not. I wonder why the passion seems to go. Is it just me and my life cycles? Will I always lose passion every so often? How much passion is normal? I have to admit that there have been activities that seem to keep the passion alive in me. Teaching is one of my passion activities. I have enjoyed teaching math, yoga, business, and technology, although teaching yoga really feels the best.
Maybe it boils down to the potential for growth. One common denominator in my life is that I seem to lose the passion when I feel stagnation. Sometimes it’s appropriate to work through the stagnation and try to freshen existing situations up. Often, I find that it isn’t exactly appropriate. Maybe it’s my age, but it seems that more often than not, once the passion goes, Roxy will have to go too, sooner or later. Somehow, things get better each time I leave those situations too.
A lot of this comes from my history. Many of my family and friends growing up felt work was just that, work, and fun time is separate. I have to say it sure feels a hell of a lot better when you’re doing something you feel passionate about. No matter how hard of a worker I am, I inevitably won’t work as well if I don’t feel passion about it. It doesn’t matter what I tell myself, I just can’t focus on it or enjoy it.
Food for thought.

the 3/50 project December 2, 2009

The idea behind the 3/50 project is for you to spend $50 per month in each of 3 local businesses that you would miss if they disappeared. According to the project, of every $100 spent in locally owned independent stores, $68 returns to the community through taxes, payroll, and other expenditures. If you spend that in a national chain, only $43 stays here. Spend it online and nothing comes home.

I personally don’t make many purchases online, I do mostly research, but I really appreciate hearing an actual cost of where I’m spending my money. This just reiterated the fact that so much of what we consume, some necessities and some not so, really have bigger costs than we often think about or realize or are told.

I really enjoyed my Buy Nothing Weekend as well, instead of participating in the excesses of Black Friday. I went out to eat at a local restaurant and bought some onions at a local grocery so I could cook for a friend. It really brought some awareness to my spending, it wasn’t really that difficult to minimize spending and to focus on local spending, and I look forward to trying to spend my money locally more in the future.

I also happen to be reading the Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan which I highly recommend to anyone who is interested in the true cost and implications of what they’re eating. I like to spend money on food, a lot of money, and I often wonder how much of the money I spend is necessary and how much of it is just me consuming for the sake of consuming, hoarding, listening to the pretty packages offered by Trader Joe’s pretty shelves.

I’d like to share some interesting tidbits from the book…
“It’s true that cheap industrial food is heavily subsidized in many ways such that it’s price in the supermarket does not reflect it’s real cost. But until the rules that govern our system change, organic or sustainable food is going to cost more at the register, more than some people can afford. Yet, for the great majority of us the story is not quite so simple. As a society we Americans only spend a fraction of our disposable income feeding ourselves – about a tenth, down from a fifth in the 1950s. Americas spend less on food than any other industrialized nation, and probably less than any people in the history of the world. This suggests there are many of us who could afford to spend more on food if we chose to. Aren’t we spending it on cell phones, tv, and other goods?”
“Our food system depends on consumers’ not knowing much about it beyond the price disclosed by the checkout scanner. Cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing.”

buy nothing day November 25, 2009

Could you go without buying anything for a day? This Friday is known as Black Friday in the U.S., one of the biggest shopping days of the year. Isn’t it funny we have a holiday for shopping? One of my favorite magazines, Adbusters, a wonderful little anti-consumerist gem, has proposed that everyone buy nothing for this day of typical over consumption. They say: “You know the saying: a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. You feel that things are falling apart – the temperature rising, the oceans churning, the global economy heaving – why not do something? Take just one small step toward a more just and sustainable future. Make a pact with yourself: go on a consumer fast. Lock up your credit cards, put away your cash and opt out of the capitalist spectacle. You may find that it’s harder than you think, that the impulse to buy is more ingrained in you than you ever realized. But you will persist and you will transcend – perhaps reaching the kind of epiphany that can change the world.”

This week I am winding down after a busy week of working in New York City, helping wellness businesses become more successful, a job I feel blessed to have. My gift to myself this holiday weekend is that I have kept my schedule clear and will be spending the weekend chillaxing in my humble abode in SLO, CA. I have a tendency to do too much and wear myself out so this weekend I decided I wanted to give myself a Roxy Style Staycation Yoga Retreat. This will include home cooked meals, daily yoga and meditation practice, some time enjoying the great outdoors, and I’m not exactly sure what else. Maybe it will also include a day or full weekend of buying nothing, a little technology break, no driving. I was thinking it wouldn’t be that hard to make an efficient compromise to do this more permanently by only supporting local businesses, and once I started thinking of it, I realized how lucky I am to have farmer’s markets everywhere, a locally owned co-op, and local restaurants, movie theaters, everything, all right in my back yard.

I am grateful for everything in my life this Thanksgiving, my loved ones, yoga practice, work, health and more. Yet, I also feel like this is a great opportunity to acknowledge what I don’t like and what I can do to help change it. I think it is possible to enjoy the good part of the holidays, and to find a way to stop making them so much about consuming but about the subtle, yet sweeter things we can give each other.

my lotus is laughing November 16, 2009

My lotus has found itself in the Big Apple once again. This is my 7th trip here and I really enjoyed the city today. I found myself attending a vinyasa flow yoga class at Laughing Lotus Yoga. I loved it. I have tried to document what I remembered from the class for future teaching to my yogi friends. We did lots of sun salutes, I even saw a few drips of sweat on my yoga mat. I loved the inhaling the arms to the sky with wrists touching, palms face out, thumbs forward, looking at your hands, exhaling hands to the heart. I really liked the mandala sequencing, we faced the backs of our mats just the right amount, the balance and the flow felt so good. I also liked the building of the sequence: from warrior ii to peaceful warrior to triangle on the back leg to wide legged forward folds back to the front thank you very much for that runnnnning sentence of sorts.

Other things I enjoyed: Walking around a ton, knowing how to get around, the smell of fall in the parks, eating an excessive yet delicious salad from one of those cafes with every topping and dressing you could ever imagine, more walking and checking out hotels and therefore getting to see tons of different people, I like the old people here, delicious dinner with a friend, and seeing a neat little cabaret style show with amazing performers. I also had no internet and lots of technical difficulties today. I was reminded that the nature of event planning is that little things go wrong, and there is no need to let it get me negative. It is now, in the heat of my planned event, more than ever, that I need to stay on the mat before the stress molests me and I let the little unplanned things affect my well-being. I was also reminded today to be my own guardian angel, that there is no one or no thing going to save us. We have to do that. I can’t give my best to anyone if I’m not giving some of it to myself.

I hope others are enjoying the Thanksgiving season as much as me. At a Friendsgiving this weekend I enjoyed my first bites of roasted turkey in a very long time, homemade mashed taters, fun with some up and budding yoginis, and overall good times. Lots to be thankful for this year. Have you taken a second to think about it?

Look at these awesome yoginis!!! What a treat to be reminded that playing on the yoga mat is ok.

how green are you? November 11, 2009

Yesterday I attended the SLO Green Awards where MINDBODY was one of six organizations recognized for efforts in making voluntary environmental contribution by SLO Commerce. The MINDBODY offices use 1/4 the electricity of our former space and our new office was built with LEED certification practices including carpet, flooring, counter tops, and other recycled materials, motion sensors for our lights, and without sacrificing a beautiful space to work in. During the meeting we heard speeches from the other award winners and also Hewlett Packard which is one of the largest green companies around.

One of the recurring themes of the luncheon was that consumer practices drive the market more than anything. In the last few years I’ve become more and more aware of my impact on the environment around me. From food choices, to lifestyle and transportation, we all interact with our environment differently. I like the idea of efficient compromises. I’m not going to live in seclusion off the grid and eat only homegrown food every day. Yet, getting my vegetables from a local farm isn’t so difficult, and it supports my community and tastes good, rather than only buying my veggies when I go to the grocery store. That’s a good compromise to me.

This year I continued my personal commute challenge which started in May 2008 and rode my bike to commute to work and around town as much as I could (I used mycyclinglog.com). When it rains, I drive, but how often does it rain in SLO? Every other week I do a driving grocery run as well. I have commuted 1213 miles on my bike this year, which has saved .5 tons of CO2 (or 1000 lbs). This was about 50,000 calories burned, which translates to 11 pounds of fat not gained in 2009. I also calculated my overall footprint with an online calculator (epa.gov and terra pass have great tools). My home usage was about 2800 lbs per year, transportation was about 3000 lbs driving and 8500 lbs flying (gulp).  My electricity usage was 1/7 the average single person household, and my total carbon footprint minus flights for work was 30% of the average American household.  Yes, I love numbers and spreadsheets. I think it’s all interesting to say the least. I found I could decrease my footprint further by washing my clothes in cold water (1 load per week saves 49 lbs per year), line drying my clothes (330 lbs per year), replacing light bulbs in my house (70 lbs per lightbulb per year), and composting (I just like the feeling of that one, not sure how much it really saves). I already minimize travel, commute by bike, recycle, and have a energy saving refrigerator and washer in my apartment (among other things). How green are you? Have you ever thought about this? Are there any efficient compromises you can make that wouldn’t terribly impact your life? Do you think making a green effort is worth it?

yoga for fitness November 6, 2009

Many of the best conversations happen in the most random places.  This is especially true at the MINDBODY offices where we are lucky to share a full service kitchen where I often connect with many of my peeps.  Today my friend Stephanie who is a fitness instructor, oops, Group Ex instructor at Equilibrium Fitness for Women in SLO town mentioned that she took at Bikram yoga class last night and wore her heart rate monitor out of curiosity. Her monitor reported some crazy results.  She burned a total of 826 calories in one 90 minute class (max heart rate 170, low 130)!  When she teaches the Body Attack class and Equilibrium she burns 726 calories in 60 minutes (max heart rate 195, low 156).  When teaching she is doing the activity while talking into a microphone so it is likely she would burn closer to 600 while taking the class.  If you do the math the amount of calories burned in a Bikram class is about the same as the Body Attack class. The Body Attack class is cardio and strength oriented.  Her stats are similar for the Body Jam class which is all cardio, except she burns a few more calories. I don’t practice yoga to burn calories so to speak, but I do enjoy the way Vinyasa yoga gets my heart rate up, working a sweat, and feeling challenged and pushed to my edge. I am going to borrow her monitor and see how a Roxtar Vinyasa class measures up. I don’t expect the same caloric burn, but I feel like that’s a good thing.

This got me thinking. I wonder what the biggest reasons people practice yoga are?  I think many of us are drawn to yoga for the physical benefits we feel in our body, and we stay around because we like the message of the practice and get continually challenged.  According to the Yoga In America Study published by Yoga Journal and MINDBODY in 2008, fitness is definitely part of what draws us to yoga, along with flexibility, stress reduction, overall health, and even weight loss.  For me,  I tried it because a friend recommended it and I was into being physically active. Living in Michigan my activities were mostly gym oriented, group ex classes, kickboxing, step aerobics, aerobics, spinning, stairmasters, ellipticals, weights, riding my bike outside when I could, jogging, and the list goes on.  The funny thing is that I got sick of all those activities eventually, some quicker than others.  I also ended up with injuries.  Yoga and riding my bike outside or hiking have been the only “activities” I’ve stuck with.  Why do I continue to practice?  I would have to agree with the survey, “yea, what you said.” My body is more flexible and I feel more comfortable in my own skin, yoga definitely relieves my stressed out feelings, improves my overall health and strength (yea chaturanga!). Bikram’s Yoga was good for me for a period of time, but it eventually just didn’t feel good. I think once in a while the detoxification by sweating feels really good, and maybe I was really toxic before and needed to sweat out a few years of build up.  It’s good for us all to remember that different activities and passions resonate with each of us at different moments in our lives. Just think of how healthy we would be as a planet if we all listened to our bodies and found the practices or activities that really nourished us, yet challenged us, the right balance of both. And we actually stuck with those practices. Wow, a girl can dream can’t she?

Unhappy Hour October 15, 2009

You’re invited to celebrate Unhappy Hour. It’s a ceremony that gives you a poetic license to rant and whine and howl about everything that hurts you and makes you feel bad.

During this perverse grace period, there’s no need for you to be inhibited as you unleash your tortured squalls. You don’t have to tone down the extremity of your desolate clamors. Unhappy Hour is a ritually consecrated excursion devoted to the full disclosure of your primal clash and jangle.

Here’s the catch: It’s brief. It’s concise. It’s crisp. You dive into your darkness for no more than 60 minutes, then climb back out, free and clear. It’s called Unhappy Hour, not Unhappy Day or Unhappy Week or Unhappy Year.  Do you have the cheeky temerity to drench yourself in your paroxysmal alienation from life? Unhappy Hour invites you to plunge in and surrender. It dares you to scurry and squirm all the way down to the bottom of your pain, break through the bottom of your pain, and fall down flailing in the soggy, searing abyss, yelping and cringing and wallowing.  That’s where you let your pain tell you every story it has to tell you. You let your pain teach you every lesson it has to teach you.

But then it’s over. The ritual ordeal is complete. And your pain has to take a vacation until the next Unhappy Hour, which isn’t until next week sometime, or maybe next month.

You see the way the game works? Between this Unhappy Hour and the next one, your pain has to shut up. It’s not allowed to creep and seep all over everything, staining the flow of your daily life. It doesn’t have free reign to infect you whenever it’s itching for more power.

Your pain gets its succinct blast of glory, its resplendent climax, but leaves you alone the rest of the time.

If performed regularly, Unhappy Hour serves as an exorcism that empties you of psychic toxins, while at the same time — miracle of miracles — it helps you squeeze every last drop of blessed catharsis out of those psychic toxins.

Pronoia will then be able to flourish as you luxuriate more frequently in rosy moods and broad-minded visions. You’ll develop a knack for cultivating smart joy and cagey optimism as your normal states of mind.

READ THE REST OF “UNHAPPY HOUR” HERE.

From Rob Brezsny, author of Free Will Astrology and Pronoia, the Antidote to Paranoia.  Both his astrology and book take you outside of your box and allow you to feel a little internal smile outside of the box of common culture.