A Nice Little Happy Bubble, and a Return

At this point today, I've had 2+ liters of water. This is significant, because:

a) I had to get another teacher to watch my class twice in 30 minutes to run to the restroom and pee.

b) One of my neurotic, potentially ungrounded fears (one of my yoga teachers might ask me at this point, "so what is a grounded fear?" but I digress) was that I'd have to give up Bikram and the resultant good, happy, calm, well-balanced me I like so well, and up in curled in a fetal lump underneath my computer while my 7th graders bayed like wolves to come inside. Or something like that. All because I couldn't drink the wa-wa.

So, I made a few minor changes to help ward off this nightmarish...er...nightmare. One, when I woke up this morning, at the ungodly but soon to be regular hour of 5:30, I downed a 22oz tumbler of water. Before coffee, people. Secondly, I forsook my true love, the delicious nectar of the heavenly bean, after that first cup, and had 22oz of yerba mate instead. (Someone please tell me if this is as healthy as I hope it is!) And thirdly, I drank a liter of water with Emergen-C during the afternoon class--and really, the building is so dry, my throat still hurts.

My bag is packed, my heels are off, I am READY for the 8:15 class. On the one hand: lord, I miss vacation. It's so easy to be calm and open-hearted and steady when there is no monkey wrench to be thrown into my gears. On the other hand: the test of this practice is going to come every day, when I'm finding my peace and breathing in the melee that is a high school or middle school classroom. Dedication comes in the form of ounces of water, patience in the form of 100 different students, commitment in the form of late night classes. That's just the layout of the neighborhood I live in.

At this point in weeks past, I would have tossed off a cheeky little, "well, we'll see how long that lasts!" but now, I'm not willing to consider forgoing my health and happiness. I don't want to even introduce it as a possibility, so I'll that I intend to hold true to my intention to create my own peace and happiness, and I intend to find myself in a hot room tonight.

Last night's class was a lovely coda to vacation: not effortless, but very nice. I sat out for a round of something--triangle? and fell out of standing bow, but did both camel and locust, which I sometimes let myself avoid. Doing both felt sweet. I try to leave the pose behind and return to my breath as soon as it's done; even though I spent the first two classes gasping like a mouth-breathing prank caller with asthma, I have really been trying to focus on inhaling and exhaling calmly and deeply through my nose, which does seem to make all the difference. I want to write the lesson into my body: calm is there, at my command, during and after stress. Calm and peace are there, and I can meet them after I'm done.