Makeovers from the Inside Ot

To feel more beautiful:

breathe.
sit by the ocean for as long as you can.
think about things you love.
drink coconut water and kombucha and green tea and water and feel juicy from the inside out.
laugh at babies screaming with joy as they run on the beach.
find something wonderful to focus on. if you can't find wonderful, choose good. good is still great.

soak yourself with your own sweat for 90 minutes. in those 90 minutes, try to focus on "so....ham" as you breath. try not to focus on Drill Sergeant Instructor looking at you. try not to focus on anyone else's practice. remember that you are loved and wonderful and amazing. be proud of yourself for showing up. do what you can, as much as you can. and give it up when it is over. let the sweat drip in your nose and ears and eyes. smile. feel the calm light glow inside you during those silent 20 seconds, and know it's yours, and it lives in you, and it is you, and it is a certain, true thing.

resolve to never let 4 days go by without yoga again.

Paige Williams says it best, in her recent part-2 of her O Magazine featured Bikram journey:

"One afternoon in the middle of ustrasana, or camel pose—a killer backbend that some consider the toughest posture in the whole practice—it occurs to me that if I can remain calm and focused while in such a physically stressful state, I can get through anything. The studio around me is full of people who know just what I mean. They practice not because a Bikram studio is a particularly lovely place to spend 90 minutes a day but because without it, they would be angry, inflexible, immobilized, fatigued, intolerant, petty, pained, and maybe even dead. The type-A personalities feel calmer. Every student has a story. "

It's exactly like that for me, too: with Bikram, I am calm, focused and engaged. Open, willing, fierce. I can find myself more easily. I can stop those tearing, wild jags of stress and strain and even self-hatred before they become storms. I am beginning the construction of an inner harbor that holds me safe, and keeps me healthy--not just physically, but as Iyengar describes it: healthy of mind, body, and soul. Four days, and for each (well, every one except Friday; I was just plain lazy last night) I had an excuse. And really, I thought today's class would be so impossibly difficult it would set me up for a reason to never go again--you know, oh, sheesh, I went back, and it was just so terrible I never went again, oh whoops, oh jee-willikers.

But it was beautiful. From start to finish, it was like a stream of water being poured into me. I had no attachment to any part, any pose. I was just there and I did what I could, and it was the fastest 90 minutes yet. I felt like I was dancing with all the different elements: my impatience, my fear, my breathing, my tight right side and my weaker left side, my willingness to get back up, my sweat, my inner voice, my points of calm--and everything was just weaving together into some greater journey.

Really. It really did feel just that good. It is not lovely. I don't particularly like having sweat drip inside my ear. or into my eyes, or trying to hoik my legs up in Locust, or try to rotate my hip down in Balancing Stick. But I do love loving myself. And I certainly do love being calm. I hope to find myself in a hot room again. Because in that hot room is the road to myself.

And I feel like making a discovery.