The Benefits of an Ashtanga Yoga Practice, Part Two

A childhood friend who once peed on my play dough recently took up Ashtanga Yoga. In his wave of newly born enthusiasm he googled, “The Benefits of an Ashtanga Yoga Practice.” Curiously enough, the first result was an article I wrote for Elephant Journal by the same name. I wrote it when I was twenty-five, about four years into my daily Mysore practice. What a darling I was. Let’s see how much has changed.

25-year-old Erica. The Darling.

Twenty-five year old Erica says,

“It’s easy to doubt your efforts when onlookers may see your practice as a self-indulgent, masochistic, tripped out version of aerobics. In order to relieve your doubts, I believe that it is extremely important to regularly evaluate the intention behind your hard work.”

Twenty-nine year old Erica: Indeed. Where does this wisdom and coherence come from? As fate would have it, twenty-nine year old Erica’s doubts are massive. Since the end of February, she/I have been relentlessly pulling out all kinds of blustering speeches about the Ashtanga Yoga method.  

Speech A: "After being coerced into weird extreme unnatural movement, for example, bending backwards until your hands grab your ankles, and/or your calves, and/or your knees as often as possible for five to ten to twenty-five years, it’s just not that surprising if some part of your body starts to feel terrible."

Speech B: “If I’m really honest, I feel like at least one of my vertebrae has slipped out of place and left all the joints from the left hip down grinding together at least once a week, and probably way more often than that. When did this start, you ask? I think somewhere between learning kapotasana and putting my legs behind my head every day.”


Kino's Spiritual Spine in Kapotasana

Speech C: “I just don’t think that very many senior teachers are being honest about what hurts, how much and for how long. There’s too much at stake for them. I can’t trust anybody.”

Speech D: “I mean, all my love to Sharath. Mysore was a delightful time. But, ‘don’t walk too much?’ Walking is not optional! Walking is a biological imperative. Sticking your face between your knees is not!”

Speech E: Something about rampant sanctioned eating disorders, social alienation, adrenal fatigue, Daddy Issues, superiority complexes and paralyzing neuroses. And how Kino MacGregor’s injured S.I. joint meant that she was a nun in her past life, but my clicky crooked eighty-year old spine is almost certainly not so spiritual.

And what would twenty-five year old Erica say to all this?

Your reasons for practising yoga will evolve over time. Everyone comes to yoga for different reasons and during different circumstances. The first time I did yoga was from a video by Ali McGraw that my mother had given me. At the time, I was a chronic exercise addict and I couldn’t get through the day without physically torturing myself as much as possible. My mother really wanted me to relax, but she knew that I wouldn’t be able to stop moving. The yoga movie was set in a bright white desert, where clouds hung low to the ground. In a flattering white leotard, Ali McGraw demonstrated sun salutations and some basic sequences of yoga postures as a man with a soothing voice talked me through it. When I got to the end, the man told me to lie down and let go of everything I didn’t need until all that was left was love. This seemed like a pleasant concept, but a little hokey and not very realistic. I quickly returned to my extensive and neurotic cardiovascular routine

Ali MacGraw, Yoga Mind & Body

Teehee. I was fifteen when my mom bought me that video. These were the days of the Stairmaster and running with ankle weights. No wonder leg-behind-the-head has been a washout. In fact, the first time I ever did yoga was in a psychiatric ward where I was admitted after an ex-lax overdose. The teacher was a tiny blonde woman who wore high heels and business suits. Besides yoga, she wanted to teach us coping strategies besides cutting ourselves or taking laxatives. On large chart paper at the front of the room, she drew diagrams about the cycle of anxiety. She highly recommended gardening.

During the yoga class, we mostly just breathed and lay down. While we were lying down, the teacher stayed sitting up, and I remember this made me feel safe. I was extremely tired from screaming and crying and begging them to let me out of the psych ward. Most of the time, I just fell asleep.

Rodney

Yoga Video #2 was Rodney Yee. Like Oprah, I felt that Rodney had a beautiful body. And he could go upside down, which was compelling and exciting. By then I had switched from Ex-lax to vomit. The ankle weights were still a thing. By the time I was seventeen, I was hospitalized again. For four months, I attended a Day Treatment program for teenagers with eating disorders. We got to do yoga on Mondays. The teacher’s name was Martha and she was very adamant that whilst menstruating, a woman should not tilt her pelvis. Barely any of us got our periods, so this was a moot point. Many of the other patients vibrated their legs compulsively as we sat cross-legged in some empty carpeted conference room.

“Inhale,” said Martha, and we followed her as she raised her hands above her head. “Exhale, shower yourself with love and compassion.” To this day, this remains one of my  favourite facetious catch-phrases. Another day, Martha had us take a long savasana. Over and over again, some new age skylark sang

"I will be gentle with myself,

I will love myself,

I am a child, of the universe,

Being born each moment."

I remember lying there, tears streaming down my face. It all seemed way too far-fetched. Once I was medically stable, my mother looked for other yoga classes I could attend. Somehow, she came upon an Ashtanga Yoga school in Ottawa. She called the instructor ahead of time, explaining that I needed something that would allow me to sweat, work hard and not get bored. The instructor told her that there would be lots of sweat and no boredom. He was right.

Twenty-five-year old Erica:  There’s only one way for me to summarize this experience: I really just couldn’t believe it.

This seems to be a motif in people’s Ashtanga Yoga Memoirs. In our first class, amid puddles of sweat, there’s this recognition that we have tapped into something unbelievable, indescribable, beyond words. What is it?

After that first class, it would be another four years or so before I committed to a daily practice. During this time, the mere thought of yoga was consoling, and the idea of going upside down seemed highly redeeming. I continued to dabble in led classes and videos, with the dream that one day I would learn enough about yoga that I could go upside down, and practice every day.

Twenty-five year old Erica:   Finally, at age 21, I found myself at Sattva Yoga Shala in Montréal, where Pattabhi Jois’ students Darby and Joanne run their studio. The shala was just down the street from my university. It became possible for me to go to yoga every morning before class. My previous tendency to obsessively overtrain no longer seemed to make any sense. Ashtanga yoga is definitely vigorous, and it provides undeniable physical benefits including strength, flexibility and the release of toxins. However, Pattabhi Jois was as correct as he was adamant when he said, “This yoga is not for exercise. Yoga is showing where to look for the soul – that is all” (Sri K. Pattabhi Jois, Puck Building, NYC 2001).

This is all very nice. I wonder where my soul is now. The thing is, under the disguise of very beautiful Ashtanga Yoga practice, it is entirely possible to go bonkers and back. My twenty-five year old self sort of agrees.

Certainly, yoga has not provided me with an unfailing cure for shit times, but perhaps yoga can show us where to look. For the soul, for God, for whatever is that is left “when you let go of everything you don’t need.” Whereas my former fitness endeavours served as an attempt to escape from my problems, yoga has given me the opportunity to meet with every single aspect of myself every single morning. Every day when I unroll my mat, whether or not I feel like merging with God, I face myself, breath after breath, posture after posture. 

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I am so earnest, so sincere and so convincing.

I believe that in simply showing up no matter what, I begin to rise above these insecurities. I stand on my head. My life is a mess. I breathe anyways. A really huge mess. Too bad, life. I’m still here. Maybe tomorrow, the mess will be a little less huge and when more mess comes, I will remember that no mess is forever. 

Very true; however, broken cartilage and ligaments, these take a rather long time to heal. The journey back from emaciation post misguided raw food fungus cleanse? Also quite extensive. Sorting out the Daddy Issues you projected onto your teacher? Lifetimes.

The remainder of “The Benefits of an Ashtanga Yoga Practice” is there for you on Elephant Journal. I ended with another feel-good quote from Pattabhi Jois, who I never met, and with something about unshakeable peace. Unshakeable peace is worthwhile endeavour, though it hasn’t always proved to be available.

Bonkers and back. 29-year-old Erica likes this. Maybe I was more coherent when I did second series.

My childhood friend who peed on my playdough has already been immersed in a different yoga and meditation cult. He is not interested in surrendering to a Guru or in becoming consumed with a bunch of rules and rituals. He does his practice in the afternoons. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, he follows along with some nice lady who does half primary on a video. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, he does kettle bells. It all sounds so balanced and civilized.

I think that people do themselves a disservice when they say, “If I didn’t practice, I’d be a total mess.” As though without practice, your whole life would crumble into a series of enormous mistakes. It will be you, vodka, Netflix and one inappropriate source of sexual gratification after another. All this, in addition to extreme and unmanageable obesity.

That’s what I thought. And yet, after over a month of taking a break, I have continued to exist. So far, I have even avoided devolving into debauchery. Although I did make a few free-spirited moves in Toronto, I feel as though all my choices have been quite reasonable. Plus I got to keep my biceps.

“Your life is not a series of mistakes.” This is from a Michael Stone podcast. I listened to it while I was in Mysore, the day after I realized that I almost totally hated Halifax, and would likely need to move.

“Just when you think your life is over, your heart has more beats.” Sharath said this during conference that week. He was quoting a Bollywood song. Nobody else remembers him saying this. I do. He looked straight at me. I was imagining leaving the Boatman. My Birkenstocks and spiritual pants would go in one suitcase. All the fancy clothes from my fake mother-in-law would go in the trunk. Where would I go?

My life is not a series of mistakes. My heart has more beats.

I hope yours does too.

Whatever your practice is, may it bring you unshakeable peace. May you learn to go upside down, and may this be exciting as you imagined it would be. May you always remain at least as wise as an Elephant Journal article. May your practice inspire you to give up Ex-lax, ankle weights and the stairmaster.  And Elephant Journal. May you travel to India, and meet masses of delightful people who have been to bonkers and back. May you meet as many people like this as possible. May you discover that you were a nun in your past life. May you develop unrelenting reverence for your breath, your spine, and the trillions of cells in your body. At the darkest of times, may someone tell you that your heart has more beats.  May you cease to view your life as a series of mistakes.

May someone watch over you as you lie down. And when you lie down, may you learn to let go of everything you don’t need. Until all that’s left is love, much of it for your mother.

When I wrote unshakeable peace, I couldn’t help but also think, unshakeable peas.

Much of the love is also for my father.

The End.



Me and Sharath, looking less than 25
The Benefits of an Ashtanga Yoga Practice, by Erica Schmidt

Unshakeable Peas
 

Shower Yourself with Love and Compassion
Follow me on Twitter: @mypelvicfloor
Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook 

Ashtanga/Eating Disorder Memoir Type Posts:

You Cling To Things Until They Die 
Are You Strong or Are You Skinny? 
Not Separate From All That Is 
This is the New Story of My Life

Michael Stone Podcast: MU (Your life is not a series of mistakes.) 

Ocean Invertebrate Personality Quiz (I'm a Royal Starfish)

Not Separate From All That Is

Michael Stone translates, Ahimsa, the first yama in Ashtanga Yoga as, “Recognizing that I am not separate from all that is.” Other people translate it as “non-violence.”

On Friday, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the young men responsible for the Boston marathon bombings was sentenced to lethal injections. Dzhokar Tsarnaev, his older brother and accomplice in the crime is already dead. He was shot in the man hunt. At the time of the bombing, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was 19, and his brother was 26.

When I first heard the news, I felt really uncomfortable about it. My second feeling was relief that I’m not American, and so somehow I hold zero responsibility for how the trial turned out. As though all the other Americans are responsible. The logic was ambiguous.

I don’t know how it feels to lose my legs or someone I love because of something someone else did. I have a deep, unyielding fear of losing my legs. In the past, my politics have ended with potty training and pubic hair. But nineteen years old seems really young.

When I was fifteen years old, I spent about a month in an adolescent psych ward. It was run by a monstrous psychiatrist named Dr. Roberts. My mother brought me to Dr. Roberts because I used to eat packages of Ex-lax to complement my extensive exercise routine and other questionable weight-loss strategies. Ex-lax tastes like the most mediocre chocolate bar you have ever consumed. The other down sides to laxatives is that they don’t tend to make you very skinny, and they can really fuck up your electrolytes. Plus shitting your pants on the treadmill kind of disrupts your workout objectives.

Anyways, after checking my blood and heart rate, Dr. Roberts screamed at my mother that laxatives were extremely dangerous. She’d discovered that I had an arrhythmia and she wanted me hospitalized immediately.

At first I wasn’t even allowed out of bed. To this, I did not behave gracefully. I screamed and cried for three days straight, begging them to let me out. The muscles I’d developed from my multiple-hour exercise routine shrank from hysteria, anxiety and bedrest. I was convinced that I didn’t belong in the hospital. I had nothing in common with the other crazy teenagers on the ward. My first roommate was this sickly, yellowy looking 14-year-old girl from Sharbot Lake.

“I see dead people,” she told me.  One of my first out-of-bed privileges was going to school with the other patients. (I almost said inmates.) School was the kitchen table, about 100 metres down the hall from my room. Mary, the cheerful nurse with long horse-like hair, flowy skirts and bright red lipstick pushed my wheelchair into the kitchen. Altogether there were five of us. Me, Jenn, Curtis, Nathalie, and Steve. My roommate who saw dead people didn’t come.  Everyone was supposed to try and get caught up on the homework they’d missed while they were in the psych ward. We opened our books and pretended to concentrate. Besides being paralyzed with anxiety, depression or lethargy, I think we were also terrified that our psychiatrist would come charging down the hall on her two-inch heels.

Almost everyone had scars running up and down their arms. I did too. Most people used razors. My scars came from scratching my forearms over and over again until the skin broke. While I was scratching, I would repeat the ABC’s. Usually I would stop after five rounds.

“My God,” Dr. Roberts had told me. “It looks like you’ve dragged cigarette butts up and down your arms.” Her voice was filled with horror and disgust.

My school courses were gym, chemistry and grade 12 English. I feel like there should have been one more course, but I can’t remember. I spent most of the school hour alternating between writing in my journal and staring at everyone else. Nathalie quietly read The Hobbit. Jenn cut out photos for a scrapbook she was making. With neon markers, she drew cloud shapes around the inspirational quotes she’d transcribed. “Happiness does not depend upon who you are and what you have. It depends solely upon what you think.” She’d written this beside a photo of herself and her dog, now dead.  Steve didn’t have any books to open. He just stared into space, nodding his head back and forth.  Curt shook his legs vigorously until the table vibrated. He was scribbling something in his notebook.

“How are you doing, Curtis?” Mary asked in her happy sing-song voice. Curtis had written poem. “Why are we here?” it was called.

“Well, Curtis, that’s an excellent question,” said Mary. “Artists, scientists, writers have been pondering over that very question for centuries.” I had huge purple bruises in the crease of my right elbow from when Mary had tried to take my blood. Otherwise, she was a rather lovely woman.

“I hate this place so much,” Curtis told me after our school session was finished. He had recently been on a two-day pass. “It was such a relief to get out of here. I’ll never be suicidal again.” I hope that worked out for him.

When Dr. Roberts finally set me free, I too promised that I would refrain from purging and obsessing about my weight forever more.  This sort of worked for almost a week.

Being a teenager takes a long time. Everyone always says that time flies. I don’t feel like time flies. Even when there is too much to do, time doesn’t fly. I am twenty-nine years old and still there are many days when I think, “I am going to be myself forever. It is going to be a long life.”

While I was in the psych ward, I got to go home for a weekend. My parents and I watched the movie, “Ordinary People.” It is about a formerly suicidal young man who spent a long time in the psych ward. He was really sad because his brother died in a boating accident and he felt guilty he survived. It is quite a sad movie and an odd choice for the time. Watching it with my parents was awkward. I wanted to tell them I wasn’t as sad or as crazy as the guy in the movie. In fact, he did not seem that crazy. Just sad. Over the weekend, all I wanted to do was lie in bed and read The Diviners by Margaret Lawrence. My parents were worried about me. I seemed way more down than before I went to the psych ward. And all my muscles had shrunk so I looked sort of sick.

What does all this have to do with the Boston bombings? With lethal injections, or life sentences?

Lucky for me, I have made no commitment to coherence.

Ahimsa means recognizing that I am not separate from all that is. We may as well end with sex.

Last summer, the Boatman and I enjoyed a period of particularly impeccable sex. Some people write excellent poems about sex. Other poems are not so excellent. During the season of impeccable sex, I remember getting to the part that people always put in poems. And I felt like finally I’d arrived at something so precious and universal.  I cried, maybe because all this time, I never believed I was worthy of this level of joy. But that’s not true.

These were the words in my head: “This joy, this ecstasy, this isn’t just for everybody else. It’s also for me.” At the same time, this joy, this ecstasy, it’s not just for me. It’s also for everybody else.

Not just for me. Also for everybody else.

The End.


Michael Stone
michaelstoneteaching.com

Twitter: @mypelvicfloor
Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook
I Let Go 

Are you strong or are you skinny?
You Cling To Things Until They Die
21st Century Yoga and an End to Self-Care
What the fuck should I do with my life?