Pen Pal

Hop scotch is making a comeback, and I have a new pen pal.
 
Writing to pen pals is better than writing in my journal. I am not so self-centred or whiney.
 
My new pen pal just started practicing Ashtanga Yoga. Before that, she was practicing a style of yoga that didn’t make her body sexy enough. Although she has only been doing Ashtanga for two weeks, she says that her butt has already began to disappear. She worries that soon her rear end will be completely flat. And her arms are so “stupidly weak” that chaturanga is impossible. Well, she is quite a hoot. 

Me in Chaturanga, some time ago...

I miss Ashtanga. On Monday night, I skyped with Nobel, the Ashtanga blogger at Yoga in the Dragon’s Den. He wanted to hear about going to Mysore. We gabbed and gabbed about all the latest Ashtanga gossip, and I told him all about my trip. The exciting anticipation at the gate, Sharath’s gaze, the focus, the breathing, the sweat, the friends. It was such a wonderful and delightful time. And the Ashtanga sequence is so organized and beautiful. Nobel talked a bit about his practice and it made me miss jumpbacks and backbends. What a joy. I wished I could wake up the next day and just bust out the primary series. If only I could figure out my spine, my pelvis.

The next morning, instead of my usual geriatric routine, I did an incredibly slow version of serene and receptive Sun Salutations. Just the first kind, Surya Namaskar A. No pain. Perhaps that is my limit because yesterday, I tried Surya Namaskar B. Even with modifications, my hip got all clicky, as though it was jammed in the wrong place. As I have done so many times over the last few years, I pressed my hand against the outer edge of my left knee. The horrendous and upsetting noise erupted. Gross.

  

  Kino in Surya Namaskar A

I just don’t think this will go so well when I’m eighty. Or thirty-two. Oh well. Surely the path doesn’t stop here. People go on and on about the importance of committing to one system, one form. Keep dabbling and you’ll dig a lot of holes, but you’ll never hit water. Maybe we just need to make our holes a little wider.

My pen pal wanted to hear all about my spiritual achievements from last week’s three-day stint at vipassana. Something relatively sincere came out of me:

“Well, I don't know about spiritual achievements. It sounds trite and cheesy, but I think that the best thing we can hope for is radical self-love and acceptance, flat ass, stupid chaturanga and all. These practices are hard. The perfect form is deep inside you. If this perfection remains forever deep, so be it. Lift the corners of your mouth, and try to have a nice time.”

My ex-ex boyfriend Simon who jumped off a building used to say: “Deep down we’re all good people. But very very deep. On the surface, Assholes.”

These days, I am not so filled with jokes. My heart feels heavy. But love is somewhere. One of my dearest friends has a very new baby. Earlier this week I figured out how to bounce and squat him to sleep. Then I lay on my friend’s bed and he slept on my chest for twenty minutes. When I got up, my face glowed and my heart felt warm. My friend said the baby can do this because his heart has never been broken.

There are a lot of broken hearts out there. Broken hearts, missing limbs, and airplanes.

There are also a lot of babies.

The End. 

Baby Naptime Dream Adventures

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Twitter: @mypelvicfloor
I Let Go, by Erica J. Schmidt

The Benefits of an Ashtanga Yoga Practice, Part Two
You Cling To Things Until They Die
Lying Down Club
Yours Til Ekam Inhales



 

You cling to things until they die

“You cling to things until they die.”

A yoga teacher from Halifax said this to me once. I don’t think he meant for his words to haunt me as I meditated on the breath below my nostrils for three and a half days, but they did. Other catch phrases from this same yoga teacher.

“You have a hard practice.”

“Your practice is violent, harmful.”

I’d seen this teacher order a ham wrap for breakfast. What could he tell me about violence?

Arriving in Halifax three years ago, my Ashtanga attachment issues were pretty extreme. I was four years into doing a solid “traditional” Mysore practice at Darby’s. Taking up practice six days a week had coincided with a rush of creative energy, sexual gratification, body acceptance and an eight-month hiatus from puking in my mouth

Puking in my mouth was this weird rare eating disorder symptom that I hated myself for but could never get rid of. After every meal and snack I would regurgitate food into my mouth and then reswallow it, over and over again. It was like clinging to food until it died and/or became so acidic and disgusting that it felt like my teeth would disintegrate and fall out.

Then came Ashtanga, and suddenly with almost no effort, the puke in my mouth stopped. A million things in my life that used to be so hard were now so easy. My whole world seemed to click.

Now comes a long story about the vegan life coach, prozaac, coffee, toenails and raw food cleanses. This is to say that among other things, I did start puking in my mouth again. But I kept practicing through it all and eventually my eating disorder more or less stopped completely. And this was all because of practice. My practice wasn’t violent, it was magical. If ever I ever stopped, me and my life would go back to being a horrible catastrophe.

In Montreal, it was perfectly reasonable and common to give up everything for your yoga practice. The die-hards made up a whole club. Maybe you worked four to six hours a day for 40 to 60 dollars. But it was considered rather unreasonable for work to start before 10 a.m. And the best was if you practiced and then had enough time to lounge around for post-practice coffee afterwards. During coffee time, you could talk about your pelvis problems, sex problems and money problems. No matter the problem, at least we had our practice. That was the most important thing. Whatever happened, as long as you practiced, you would be somewhat okay. 

When I moved to Halifax to live with the Boatman, I had two main objectives.

Number one: Do not get pregnant.  Number two: Do not stop practicing. In Halifax, there were two different Ashtanga studios. I confess I was hideously judgemental of both of them.

At the first studio, there was an enormous prop room. What a scandal. The prop room was full of straps, blocks, blank chairs, pool noodles, bolsters, iron weights, sand bags, dumb bells and even an exercise ball. Some people did the “traditional” Ashtanga sequence. Others lay on chairs, bolsters, with sandbags or weights on top of their legs, or they rolled around on pool noodles. Still others did a little bit of both. There was a lot of chatting, and a few ipods.  I felt smug and a bit special because I could do all of second series and I didn’t use props. 

As for the other studio, I arrived one Friday morning for Led Primary. My timing couldn’t have been worse. The teacher hobbled into the class. Her hips hurt so much she could barely walk. She had one of her students lead the class for her as she breathed and winced through the practice. At the end, she reported feeling much better.

“That really says something about the power of the practice.” All her students chipped in about their experiences with pain, arthritis and cortisol shots.

“Yikes,” I thought.  For the most part, the ham wraps won over the cortisol shots. I ended up spending more time at the noodles and chairs studio. It was easier to get to and the teacher there was quite brilliant when it came to anatomy and adjustments. And he asked me if I had ever done tick tocks. I said no. Darby didn’t really teach those. I reverently went on to say that of course I never asked for postures because that was like asking for oral sex which the Vegan Life Coach says wasn’t allowed.

 “You’d be surprised,” the teacher responded. “Sometimes you’re allowed to ask.” Henceforth, I got to learn tick tocks.

Kino MacGregor mid Tic Tocks (Image from here) 

The first time I did tic tocks was in a bar in Montreal with a celebrity actor personal trainer who also happened to be a little person. The second time was with Sri W. Ham Wrap.

Another big perk was that he was willing to let me teach a bit. Although I’d done teacher training with Darby in 2008, I remained utterly inexperienced. For me, teaching yoga was in the same category as oral sex and yoga postures. You couldn’t ask for it, you had to be asked. But when I was asked, it was a big ego trip.

“Teacher training with Darby is a good thing,” said Sri W. Ham Wrap. Perhaps it was. This didn’t prevent most of my classes from being terrible. I apologize to anyone I disappointed.
I had only a couple of moderately inspirational lines. In Janu Sirsasana B, I told students to “luxuriate on their perineums,” and when they switched sides, I’d say, “same perineum, different heel.” It was charming.

I also remember saying to yoga students, “Just because you did it yesterday, doesn’t mean you have to do it today.” Alas, those who cannot do, teach. My peppy words never applied to me. Every day, I demanded the same results from my body. Because I was severely unemployed, I figured I didn’t have an excuse not to go full throttle. Plus now I was a “teacher.”

A couple of months in, my left s.i. joint shifted out of place. If you have never done yoga, perhaps you have never heard of an s.i. joint. Lucky for you. Before I started yoga, I didn’t know what my s.i. joint was either. Then one day, crunch, there it was.  I injured it soon after Darby started to take me through second series and ever since it has probably shifted out of place three or four times a year, if not more.

Many yoga people think there is something internal and symbolic about their injuries. Pain is not just physical. It represents an emotional, psychological, and spiritual pattern coming to the surface. Some people see pain as a pranic or energy blockage. Practicing yoga, and other breathing and meditation techniques is supposed to help liberate the blockage and ultimately heal the injury. I believe there is some truth to this. Over the years, my pain hasn’t been constant and seems to appear and disappear mysteriously. Sometimes all it takes is a good fuck for it to go away. Or an uncomfortable email for it to reappear. I have longed for the pivotal moment where the deepest root of the injury reveals itself and burns away and I become a whole and liberated person. In the meantime, however, pain radiates intermittently across my sacrum, down my hip and above my knee. And I wonder if I will need surgery within the next decade, and if I will be able to walk when I’m eighty, or even forty-two.

That said, despite my pain, I have always insisted on showing up. For every practice and every posture. During my early Halifax days, although I may have done primary instead of second series, my practice remained ninety minutes to two hours. For better or worse, I attempted every posture. It was egoically and emotionally painful for me not to complete a posture in its full expression and for this reason, I would only slightly modify postures, “working my edge” too intensely in attempts to make the desired shape. I never really gave my injury the space to heal.

When I told the hip-injury cortisol-shot yoga teacher about my injury, she said, “Well, I’m not surprised.” I waited for her to continue.

“You have a flexible body and no Moula Bandha.” She told me to draw my navel strongly into my spine and stop fiddling around to get further into the postures.

“I have arthritis in my s.i. joint,” she said. I think she said it was from going too far in backbends with no Moula Bandha.  At her studio, I did my best to focus on following the breath count and engaging what I vaguely understood to be Moula Bandha. While I always left her studio with a clear and focussed mind, my back hurt more every single time.

Sri W. Ham Wrap had a pretty straightforward exercise for getting my s.i. joint to go back in. All you had to do was squeeze his legs between your knees while he pushed out hard. This worked about 70 percent of the time. About 80 percent of the time the joint would click back out within a few days, if not during practice. As I practiced, I cried frequently. Sometimes this might have been deep rooted emotional baggage coming to the surface; however, more often it was a primarily shallow frustration at the fact that postures that had once been so easy for me were now painful and out of reach. One day, Sri W. Ham Wrap was astute enough to point this out.

“You’re only happy when you can do the postures well.” I asked him what the solution was.

He took out his Iphone. “You can take delight in something,” he said. “But you can’t expect it to last forever.” I didn’t care about Iphones and I wasn’t ready to let go of my practice yet.

“What should I do? Only primary series?”

“You know lots of postures beyond primary series. There are twists, inversions. Lots of options.” I imagined him taking me through a long boring sequence with pool noodles and sandbags and chairs. This sounded like a terrible option.

“But what if I want to stay within the Ashtanga sequence?” I asked.

“Then you may as well join a church. Churches are even better. You get nice comfy cult robes.” I told him that at Darby’s we would always keep practicing through injury, just making sure to avoid acute pain.

“That’s one way of doing it,” said Sri W. Ham Wrap. “But there are consequences to that. Poverty. Homelessness.” I can’t remember what else was on his list. Depression, suicide. Whatever it was, it was very dark. And all this from sticking with Ashtanga. Then he told me a weird story. I get the sense that maybe there are different versions to this story, and I cannot confirm which version is the truest. To protect the privacy of those involved and hopefully reduce the spread of Ashtanga rumours, I am altering several details.

So a man started doing Ashtanga later in life. His body took very easily to the practice and soon he was executing advanced and impressive postures. People were amazed that he was able to learn so much, so quickly, and at his age. He drew a great deal of attention and the man became a huge inspiration.

Then he had a bad car accident. He didn’t become paralyzed or anything, but he broke a few bones and suffered from nerve damage throughout his body. The doctors said that although he would recover and remain independent and functional for his age, it was not likely that he would be able to continue to practice as intensely as before. Certainly the advanced postures he’d been doing would never again be possible.

“So what happened?” I asked.

“He killed himself.”

Regardless of whether or not this story was true, Sri W. Ham Wrap was essentially calling me an Ashtanga suicide candidate. I went home in a huff. The Halifax yoga community was leaving much to be desired. Either I could eat ham wraps and lie around on chairs and pool noodles, or I could break my back. Or I could commit suicide. Or all of the above.

There was no post-yoga coffee club in Halifax. Except for me, everyone seemed to have jobs. Back at the Boatman’s house, I decided it was a desperate housewife sort of day and so I vacuumed and mopped. I can distinctly remember the sharp nerve pain travelling around my sacrum, hip and swollen knee as bent over and tried to vacuum the dog hairs from under the couch.

I spent the next week moping around and practicing at home, enduring the same moderate level of pain. At least for now, I wasn’t homeless or dead.

That weekend I decided that my best bet against homelessness was to write a self-help book. My goal was to write it in three days and make one hundred thousand dollars. Then I could keep living at the Boatman’s house, and I could pay for more than just toilet paper.  And I wouldn’t have to get a regular day job, which seemed excessive, strenuous, and unconducive to my die-hard practice. The book was supposed to be about the nine gurus in my life including Darby, the Vegan Life Coach, old bosses and a couple people with disabilities I had worked with.  Unfortunately, the guru book didn’t write as easily as I had anticipated. The idea seemed more awkward than catchy and I contracted horrific writer’s block. All weekend the Boatman had to endure my obnoxious behaviour and it was looking like maybe I would end up homeless.

On Monday, I went to Sri W. Ham Wrap to pick some bones about cult robes. I told him about the self-help book, and my money problems.

“You cling to things until they die,” he told me. So many times, these words have pervaded my psyche. During my practice and during my life. Because they are a little bit true. Nothing in my life is casual. Everything has to be a major monumental action that will bring me something that lasts forever.

I told Sri W. Ham Wrap that one thing I have clung to consistently is this idea of surrendering to a magical yoga teacher. In blogs and ashtanga memoirs, I always read about these beautiful surrender moments. A student meets her teacher and her heart melts and from then on that person is okay forever. Certainly Darby and I had a strong connection and until my body gave out, I was wholly committed to whatever he taught me. Despite all the misplaced boundaries and drama, I believe we both carry one another in each other’s hearts. Still, I can’t remember my heart ever melting and well, being okay forever seems a tad unrealistic. All this could simply be a mythological experience. And yet, I feel like so many people have been through this heart melting thing. Sri W. Ham Wrap got it, I think twice. Why not me?

“Well, you can’t plan for that,” he said. Alas. Another thing he said you couldn’t plan for is having your deep-rooted injury to heal itself on a physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual level and never come back. Alas again. Even the best Lululemon goal setters can’t plan for this. That said, Sri W. Ham Wrap healed his spiritual s.i. joint injury after months of getting the shits in India, plus a day or two of similar digestion in New Zealand. Maybe all it takes is a good bout of Delhi Belly. Mysore is an okay place for this. I could try and drink more tap water.

I’ve been in Mysore for two weeks. So far I don’t have any Delhi Belly, but yesterday I ate too much coconut chutney. I used to think I was allergic to coconuts. My roommate just told me that coconuts were a laxative. This makes a lot of sense. Coconuts and Delhi Belly might heal my pelvis. Or possibly my future is paved with hip replacements and cortisol shots.

Anyways, let’s bring this mammoth tangent back to the breath below my nostrils. Meditating on the breath below my nostrils turned out to be one mammoth tangent after another.  I had looked forward to vipassana because I thought it would be great to get eleven whole days off from yoga. For seven years, I’d barely taken any days off beyond the sanctioned rest imposed by moon days, Saturdays and ladies’ holiday. Probably the most I’d ever stopped practicing was four days, and this occurred only a handful of times. Vipassana, I believed, would provide an excellent break, both for my mind and for my pelvis. This turned out to be merely wishful thinking. As Goenka says, “Nothing doing.” Apparently there is no rest for the neurotic. Pelvis angst remained alive and well and all through the day, I obsessed about practice. Should I stop Ashtanga completely and take up wilderness camping? Yes, I should stop. The hell with it. I shouldn’t go to Mysore. Or I should stop practicing until I get to Mysore. Let Sharath fix me from scratch. Or I should quit and become a nurse. Definitely I shouldn’t do any more than sun salutations until Mysore. Maybe I could do one sun salutation per day until I got to Mysore. This went on and on.

I felt pissed off at Darby. Even though these days he is so mellow I worry he might float away.

I felt pissed off at Sri W. Ham Wrap. Even though he was right. I cling to things until they suffocate and perish.

In Mysore, people are constantly taking turns rehashing their “Ashtanga Memoirs.” Some people have magical heart-melting type stories. Some claim that their practice didn’t start until they met Sharath. Others are way more low-key about the whole thing. They have teachers who they learned to trust gradually. They came to Mysore because they were curious and they keep coming because they like something about it.  So far I haven’t met anyone who is heinously injured, though many have tweaks here and there.

The other day I was in a café and two women beside me were going on and on about their elbows and obliques in karandavasana. I used to do that pose every day. The laboured, grunty process made me feel like a mammoth. I had all sorts of beautiful visions and fantasies about what my life would be like when I could finally do that posture.  Until it died. I haven’t thought about this posture in a long time. At the café, I jumped into the conversation and told the girls with the elbows and obliques that the key to karandavasana was childbirth. I read this on a yoga blog somewhere. No, no, no, they emphatically responded. Neither one wanted kids. I can understand. Kids seem like they would be horrible for your pelvis. Although I imagine that when a small creature pushes its way out of your crotch and begins to say funny things, it can be somewhat rewarding. 

Karandavasana, the Mammoth Pose

Besides teaching yoga, Sri W. Ham Wrap throws super fun parties where he makes awesome martinis. One night over martinis, we argued about practice and diet and following rules. Sri W. Ham Wrap said that imposing rules upon yourself is just another form of violence. Forcing yourself to be a vegetarian is more violent than eating meat. Blindly and dogmatically following a tradition is more violent than staying up late watching Netflix and sleeping in. And being self-righteous about following all the rules is worse than breaking them. At the time, it seemed like a cop-out, as well as highly convenient for people who liked hamburgers and sleeping. But everyone knows at least one starving, die-hard vegan who, went running for the bacon after years of deprivation and turning yellow. And although Ashtanga yoga most often makes people thrive and glow, it’s possible that some long-term practitioners have hung on too hard for too long, ending up with washed out faces, creaky joints and infertile uteruses…

Sri W. Ham Wrap believes that our practices and lifestyle choices ought to evolve organically and without force. For some of us, this means that our future holds heaps of ham wraps and Netflix. Others gradually make their way from ham wraps to vegetarian lasagna to sprouted lentils to coconuts to occasional sips of air and water. Or from Netflix to yoga blogs to crossfit to Mysore rooms. Everyone has a different path, just like everyone has a different pelvis. One pelvis isn’t necessarily better than the other. You could argue forever about whether or not this laid back approach justifies and perpetuates destructive choices. But arguing is probably horrible for your pelvis. 

Mr. Goenka was always saying, “deep attachment equals automatic suffering, automatic misery.” Deep attachment, this is also horrible for your pelvis. You can try and let go, but letting go is hard to plan for.

In the meantime, perhaps there is not much to be done.
Your Iphone is breaking.
Everything is dying.

Dear Halifax. I am sorry for my cult robes, and for being such a yoga snob. I look forward to seeing you and the chairs and the pool noodles when I get back from India. Until then, may your pelvises remain free of cortisol shots.

The End.

 

After the guru book died, I tried my hand at another self-help book called I Let Go. I have yet to crack 100 grand with the profits. Maybe this is because I cling to things until they die. Or maybe this is because it is only 2 dollars. Anyways, if you have two dollars, please click here to buy it. (In fact, prices have gone up to $2.99 to account for coriander's 300% market jump.)

Follow me on Twitter: @mypelvicfloor

My $2.99 self-help book, Plug #2

Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook

More on Going to India:

Our lives will never be the same

Our lives will never be the same, part two
Presents from my father

Laundry Day

Lady with the Stick

Vipassana Diaries

Last Practice Before Vipassana
Bus 
Day Zero 
Food Belly
Why I Like to Pee Outside  

Laundry Day

Probably we could cure most of the world’s angst and obesity if everyone had to do their laundry by hand. Even if you do a terrible job like I did, it is still hard work.

It was yesterday morning when I decided to take my first stab at laundry in India. I woke up at 3 a.m. after falling asleep in a strange nauseous deep-fried food buzz.  Or maybe it was a coma. Hard to say. My bed is so hard it’s like rolling around on a wooden foam roller all night. If I'm lucky, this will cure my i.t. bands. When I woke up, the fretting began. Deep-fried food frets. Femoral Acetabular Impingement Syndrome frets. Changing apartment frets. Backwards time zone frets.

After practice and two meltdowns on Facetime, I ventured out to get locate some coffee.  I have a little portable French press, but no coffee to make it with. Jois Coffee, where all the yogis buy their ground beans was closed. So I grabbed some coffee on the street. Here it seems that coffee is made with about one tablespoon of espresso and then a bunch of boiled milk and lots of sugar. The sugar to milk ratio is pretty high

“You have any with no sugar?” I asked.

“One moment.” They were about to boil some sugarless milk for me when I thought, the hell with it. It would make up for the low caffeine and tie me over until my landlady made chai for breakfast.

My house is easier to find now. On the corner of the street there is a home with a sign advertising “Positive Health Classes.” Although I have seen this same sign in a couple of places, this landmark does help.  Maybe you are interested in “Positive Health Classes.” They promise to “Add Life to Years.”

Positive Health Classes
Add Life to Years

When I got back to the apartment, Pushpa my landlady was standing at the balcony.

“I wait for you,” she said. “You lock-ed me.” Oops.  All the doors at Pushpa's house open and close with horizontal metal latches. The day before Pushpa had asked me to make sure that I latched the bathroom door when I was done. I guess I became overly diligent about doors and locked her in from the outside. Luckily, I had only been gone a few minutes.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” I said, shaking my head. There were about forty-five minutes before breakfast. Already I’d been awake for over five hours. It felt like years. The day ahead of me felt like years. With no positive health classes, how would I add Life to Years?



my mildewed yoga clothes and underwear

I hauled my mildewed yoga clothes and underwear to the corner of the balcony. Pushpa watched me as I dumped my clothes on the big square laundry stone. She frowned slightly as I bent forward awkwardly and ran water over a purple American Apparel t. shirt.

“It's making wet,” she said, pointing to my bright pink long flowy skirt. “In bucket.” So all the clothes went into the red bucket that I hadn’t noticed before. Water filled the bucket and then I pulled out the purple t. shirt again. wet t. shirt

wet t. shirt

“Hmm, hmm,” Pushpa mumbled as I tried to figure out where to put the soap.

 
All I had was Ivory Bar Soap. You have to rub some soap onto the stone and then rub the shirt over that. The scrubbing part is vigorous and rewarding and it makes lots of bubbles. I squatted the whole time which was wonderful for my pelvis and my bowel movements.   Definitely the process counteracts angst and obesity. First you rub soap onto your clothes. Some people who don’t want their clothes to smell like mildew leave their clothes to soak in a bucket of soapy water. This is probably an excellent idea. I, however, wanted to get it all over with and so I rinsed everything right away. Pushpa instructed me on how to lift the clothes up and down as I poured more water over it. I got a bit lazy and probably didn’t get all of the soap out. So if you see me at the shala and I’m a bit mildewed and covered with soap streaks, you’ll know why.

The End.

 

Obesity and Neurosis Cures on a String

Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook
Twitter: @mypelvicfloor
I Let Go, my $2.99 self-help book
 
Our lives will never be the same

Now I am in Delhi
Brand New Mysore Clubs
 

Move Your DNA, by Katy Bowman

I will remain forever grateful to Halifax’s belly dance star Laura Selenzi. Knowing how obsessed I was with my own and everyone else’s pelvis, one day Laura said to me, “You know, I think you’d really like Katy Bowman.”




The Dazzling Laura Selenzi
Check out Serpentine Studios for Laura's belly dancing classes in Halifax

 So I rushed over to her blog, katysays.com (now nutritiousmovement.com !) where I found all sorts of ramblings and the pelvis and the pelvic floor, as well as any other musculoskeletal issue you can think of. One of her posts is even called “Ramblingsfrom my pelvic floor.” You should read it. You learn how to make pelvises and penises plural. In more than one way.

Three years later, I continue to follow Katy’s work religiously.  What a delight it was to learn that she would be coming to Halifax to launch her new and highly exciting book, “Move Your DNA.”  Obviously, I attended. For those of you who have never met Katy Bowman, she glows and radiates. She looks like all the cells in her body are delighted.

Katy considers “Move Your DNA” to be her life’s work. You can usually tell when people are in the midst of their life’s work. Their cells radiate.



Katy radiating with a pelvis

 Pretty much, the thesis of Katy’s book is that human bodies in the modern world have adapted to a life in captivity. Our cages are the modern conveniences of life-chairs, beds, cars, couches, houses, elevators, refrigerators, strollers, shopping carts and various electronic devices that outsource any physical activity you can think of. All the cells in our bodies have morphed to accommodate the movement that these modern conveniences demand of us. This means that our bodies are only equipped to do hardly any movement at all. This isn’t about simply preventing obesity. Our chronic “movement drought,” as Katy calls it, affects every cell in our body, leading to everything from cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, deteriorating joints, diabetes, and certain types of cancer. And you can’t just fix the biological repercussions of our life in captivity by going to the gym for forty-five minutes three to four times a week. (And maybe not even by doing yoga neurotically every morning at 5 a.m.)

So what can we do?

At the talk on Thursday, Katy generously gave us a few tips on how to get started.  

Step One: Most of the shoes of the world mess up your feet and your feet are really important.

From stilettos to sneakers, any kind of high heel distorts the angle at which your whole body touches the ground. This results in inappropriate loading that can damage every joint from the ground up. Shoes with stiff soles prevent your feet from accessing their full range of motion. And the only way to move forward with flip flops is to grip and scrunch up your toes which is not very healthy. Ideally, you should be able to spread your toes like a cave man, with and without your shoes on.  Katy devotes a whole section of “Move Your DNA” to her essential foot wisdom. Practice her strengthening and mobility exercises and you too will get your very own troll toes. If you want to go even deeper, I recommend reading Katy’s other big hit, “Every Woman’s Guide to Foot Pain Relief.”  (Now available in a new revised, gender-neutral version: Simple Steps to Foot Pain Relief !) I devoured this book in one evening and got hooked on the exercises right away.

Step Two: Try not to sit on chairs and furniture that call out to you and say, “Hey, sit on me and don’t do anything.”

I work at a Montessori school and the children I work with are mostly terrible at sitting on chairs. They wriggle around from one butt cheek to another, or they rock the chair back and forth, or they try to stand up. Getting kids to sit in chairs is a terrifying battle.  At least once a week, I like to rant about how sitting in chairs tightens the groins, weakens the lower back and puts children on an early path towards cardiovascular disease, pelvic floor problems, osteoporosis and very sore joints.

There are minimal health benefits to sitting in a chair, and yet, as Katy describes the typical childhood in her book,  

“After a couple of years, sitting still in your chair would be your most-practiced skill, trumping time spent reading, writing, playing games, and physical education in school. Like a ninja of sitting, you practiced sitting still in a chair more than any other activity, with hours and hours in training, with no other learned activity even coming close in time spent practicing.”

-Katy Bowman in "Move Your DNA"

It’s time to start practicing new positions. In her work, Katy cites physical anthropology professor Gordon W. Hewes study, World Distribution of Certain Postural Habits. Hewes examined 100 different resting postures from all around the world.  As fate would have it, almost none of these positions involve chairs.



Alternatives to sitting in a chair. From Hewes "World Distribution of Certain Postural Habits"
Notice how nobody's at a standing desk. (Here is what Katy says about that...)

 Katy suggests exposing children to this poster to give them different ideas on how they can be still and focus. Perhaps having twenty kids sit at tables to eat lunch once a day isn’t the end of the world, but Katy encourages teachers and caregivers to be creative and “think beyond the chair.” The day after Katy’s talk, it was my co-worker who had the brilliant idea of helping the kids build a fort in the gym on a day full of thunderstorms. Giggling uncontrollably, all the kids crawled in and we passed them their watermelon and crackers, which they ate on the floor. I thought this was a happy ending.

Step Three: Spend more time outside

Katy says that our relationship to nature is essential. The broad spectrum of movement required to keep your body healthy spreads far beyond running on a treadmill for an hour in an air conditioned room. Goosebumps count as movements. Sweating counts. So does your skin’s response to the wind blowing your arm hair. Easy. Inside, your life can easily regress to staring at different sizes of glaring rectangles all day. But outside, you can look at the clouds, the chipmunks and the funny looking Nordic Pole Walking People. Your eyes have muscles too. For many people, these muscles are always scrunched into one position. Go outside and un-scrunch them.

Step Four: Walk more often.

Walking is great because it uses a vast majority of the muscles in your body. The best would be to walk outside. Then you can get your goosebumps and people watching in. Most of us have adapted to walking on flat, hard surfaces. Try to gradually vary your walking surfaces so that your cells can expand their range of motion.  And pay close attention to your footwear choices.

So here are some simple ways you can start to mobilize and transform the trillions of cells inside of you. As Katy says in her introduction, "this is a serious call to movement - serious, but not unpleasant."  She goes on to say that thousands of her readers and students "have found the physical, psychological, and emotional shift that comes with this material to be profound and delightful..." "Move Your DNA" isn't about frantically avoiding illness with a neurotic checklist, but rather looking for healing opportunities within your daily life. And the range of healing opportunities is huge. You don't have to throw out all your furniture and build monkey bars in your living room to experience noticeable benefits.  Although some people say that's kind of a fun time...

The End.

Thank you Katy, Penelope Jackson (Katy's excellent editor) and  Nurtured Products for Parenting for the extra fun evening. And to Laura Selenzi for her transformative recommendation.

Irresistible Photo Op:



I have some serious knee flexion in this photo. Well, my DNA makes longer shapes than Katy's does. Also, I am much more delighted than I look.
Follow Katy on Twitter: @NutritiousMvmnt

Katy's New Website: Nutritiousmovement.com

A couple of Katy's books:
(She has written a whole bunch!)

Move Your DNA 
Simple Steps to Foot Pain Relief
Whole Body Barefoot


Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook
Twitter: @mypelvicfloor
I Let Go, self-help book by Erica J. Schmidt

The Potty Party
Three Things to Make the World a Better Place
Business Ideas. On a Tuesday. 

  

Three Things to Make the World a Better Place

When it all comes down to it, we all have about three things inside of us that will make the world a better place. It's a good mental exercise to think of more than three things. Ten things. A million things.  But if over the course of your great big life, you're able to pull off your three favourite things on your list, you will probably change the world. Last Friday night, I was sitting (and perhaps drinking) on the couch with my boyfriend the Boatman and our cool friend Liz. I surveyed everyone on their Three Things and wrote them down.

Here they are.

The Boatman

The Boatman and the Maxi Pad

1. At school they should bring back Shop and Home Economics class.  Everyone is fighting for music and arts, which is important, but in the long run, it would probably be more useful for people to know how to fix things and make things than it will be for them to play the clarinet.  The Boatman played the saxophone in high school.  Maybe that's why he's so good at giving head. I think the long-term benefits of music are evident.  But it's true, nobody knows how to fix and build anything anymore.  Kids should be learning how to build things and fix cars.  And cook and clean and sew.  First this, then the clarinet and then maybe algebra. That's what the Boatman thinks. 

2. Finance Class. In schools, we're very fixated on how to get a job. We start planning by grade seven, or earlier.  But once we get a job, a lot of people don't know what to do with their money.  Nobody's teaching kids about budgets, or mortgages, or even how to get a student loan. Money is this vague stressful thing for a lot of people.  Most people get all their ideas about money from their parents.  That's two people's opinions out of the whole world. The Boatman is passionate about the Finance Class just as he is passionate about Excel Spreadsheets.  He'll spend days watching youtube excel tutorials.  He wants to spread the joy.

3.  Sex Ed (As you can see, the Boatman is very big on Education.)   Sex Ed shouldn't be about teaching children where their hair is going to grow, or how to put condoms on bananas.  We should be teaching kids how to have sex.  How to get and give pleasure.  How to talk about sex. It shouldn't just be the clarinet players who get to be good at giving head.  Everyone deserves a shot.  Our sex hero Dan Savage goes on this rant regularly on his podcast. The hell with putting condoms on bananas.  Probably the whole world can do this with their eyes closed. And we all know where the pubes are going to end up.  This isn't so important. What's important is knowing that sex is supposed feel good.  Really good. And if you want to know how to make it feel good, you should talk about it. And probably schools should hold a Vagina Appreciation Day.

Those are the Boatman's Three Ways to Change the World.

Now it's my turn.

Two pictures of me and the things I should have learned in Sex Ed:

My Three things:

1. A diaper-free world.  I've ranted and raged about this one. In our so-called developed countries, children are able to make complete sentences about sour pineapples before they are able to shit in the right place at the right time. In India and the majority of other developing countries, there are no diapers.  Parents figure out what sort of noise and grimace their babies make when they have to go and accordingly pull their pants down and sit them on a pot. By the time the kids are a year and a year and a half, most kids can piss and shit in the right place at the right time. With diapers, kids are enabled to be cut off from the sensations of their bodily functions.  Because we don't respond to our infants' signals of having to go, the signals and the awareness stop.  At two, children have to relearn the sensation since it is no longer socially acceptable to shit in their pants.  Being two is difficult and traumatizing enough as it is. I feel like the whole set-up is unfair and excessively challenging for everyone involved. And it is bad for the environment.

Isn't it obnoxious when people who have born absolutely no children dispense parenting advice? 

Absolutely.  It is absolutely obnoxious. But as they say, "those who can't do, teach."

2. A chair-free world. Wearing diapers for the first couple of years of life likely has horrendous repercussions on the state and our relationship to our pelvises, lower backs and sexual organs.  But what's even worse for us is the amount of time we spend sitting in chairs.  The two-year-olds at the Montessori school are capable of doing the most beautiful squat. Pelvis elevated, knees behind toes.  But what do I have to tell them when they're squatting on a chair, doing a puzzle or eating snack?  "On your bum, please!" Tighten your groins and lower back from and early age!  Begin the journey towards cardiovascular disease, erectile dyfunction, hip and knee replacements, osteoporosis, obesity, and a generally painful and shitty life, NOW.

Last week I had a dream that someone asked me whether or not I wanted to have children. “Hell no,” I said.  “Why would I bring children into this world?  They get 6 months to two years of happy boob sucking and then the rest of it is a big disappointment.  Our whole education system is just preparing kids to sit in a chair for a really long time. You go to school where you have to follow the rules and put things back on the shelf and sit on your bum in a chair.  Then when you finally grow up and finish university, and get a job, guess what you get to do? Sit in a chair. No, I am not bringing children into this world.”

I think that I make this speech once a week. In my dreams, and while awake.  While, standing walking, or sitting in a chair. Maybe it’s a little one-sided.  But nobody ever died from an exercise ball.

3. The whole world should do sun salutations every morning.

5 Surya namaskar A’s.  If you’re feeling really enthusiastic or ambitious, go for some b’s.  Sit down, not on a chair, fold forwards, take some deep breaths. Sit up, take some deep breaths, try and lift yourself off the floor then lie down.  Or just skip the whole sitting down, lying down part.  Just do some sun salutations. Do one sun salutation.  Stand on your two legs, or however many legs you have.  Find your breath.  Raise your arms above your head and look up at the ceiling.

Kino MacGregor, doing Surya Namaskar A. Your sun salutations don`t have to look like that. Just do your best. And you can do it anywhere you want. In Bali, or in Dartmouth.

People think they need to do elaborate and fancy yoga postures.  They think they’re too busy to do yoga. They’re too stiff and too busy and it’s no use.

Everyone has time for a sun salutation.

I tried to be a rich and famous yoga teacher for awhile.  I think I was too ambitious.  If I go back to teaching yoga, my goal will be for everyone to learn how to do sun salutations, and to do a couple every day. 

All you need are sun salutations.  They will reverse the damage from wearing diapers and sitting in chairs for so long.  This is what I recommend.   Now you have read my three thing for making the world a better place.  Here are our cool friend Liz’s Three Things.



Our cool friend Liz



1. Diapers are acceptable at any time.  Liz is a producer for Vice.  She’s a busy lady, and sometimes she doesn't have much time to go to the bathroom.  Well, fair enough, I suppose.  Although we all know my views on potty training,  if  I am ruthlessly honest and envision myself pissing in a diaper, it does seem rather exciting and arousing.

2. Social Media- Help! What the shit are we supposed to do about social media? With Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Blogs, Google +, it is eating up our entire lives. No wonder adult diapers seem so appealing. It is all too much, too overwhelming. People should cut down their social media time by at least 75%. Some good suggestions for using your salvaged time: drinking, having sex, eating chips, handstands.  You can do these things every day. Liz also suggested smoking, but I say that was just the liquor talking and so I am omitting it.

3. Creative Exposure. I like this one. People need to be exposed to creativity every day. Watch someone make something, help someone make something, make something yourself. You can make a movie, a radio show, a biodegradable poem, an ugly children’s toy, a blogpost, a macaroni necklace.  There are lots of things that you can make.  You can expose yourself to creativity while wearing a diaper, or in your bare bum.

And that’s the end of our Three Things to Make the World a better place.  Everyone has at least three things inside of them.  What are your three things?  How will you make the world better?

Your three things need not be groundbreaking and monumental.  Just some things you really believe in. Some way to make the world ungeneric.

In the future, 2016, I will write haikus about a Generic Married Man.

I hope they make the world a better place.

The End.

The Big Black Dog made the world a better place over and over again.

Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook
Twitter: @mypelvicfloor
I Let Go, self-help book by Erica J. Schmidt

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