reading

I've just started rereading The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff. I first read it when my son was about two or three. For practical purposes, the book has led many to practice attachment parenting with infants and young parents: breastfeeding, cosleeping, and carrying babies instead of placing them in strollers, etc. I already did much of that with my own son so the book tended to validate what I was already doing, but it also made me sad to think about how I was raised and how so many of us were raised in modern, industrialized Western culture. I picked up the book ten years later because Liedloff writes about meditation as a way of connecting with that pre-socialized self, the infant self, and I wanted to see if what she speaks of somehow relates to the yoga that I'm studying now.

But, what struck me right away in rereading the first chapter this morning was that what is missing with most of us is a real connection with nature. Liedloff speaks of an experience that she had as an eight-year-old. She saw a glade, an open patch in the forest, that spoke to her so deeply. She carried this experience with her for years and finally reconnected to it only when she arrived in the vast rain forest in South America as a young woman. I wonder if our collective feeling of something not being right is tied up in that lack of a connection with nature--of our not being in nature. Honestly, if I am in nature, and I rarely ever am these days, I don't need for anything. I am mentally, emotionally, and physically content. If I arrive out of sorts, I'm soon back to a better state of being. That is my natural state in the habitat that I was made to be in. Once we leave nature, then we have all sorts of problems and try all sorts of ways to get back to that good feeling. You could even say practicing yoga and meditation as a stress reliever rather than a way of reaching higher consciousness is one of those ways that we've developed and practice to begin to feel right, to get ourselves to that baseline equilibrium that would be there naturally if we were actually in our natural habitat.

dairy

Here's a pretty heavy post on dairy. It is depressing, I promise. 

           Lately, I have felt like I knew all I needed to know about diet. I've studied it a good bit, and just knew about it--I knew how to eat organically, I possessed the whole-foods ethos passed down by a 70s-era health food mother, refined by a nine-month stay at a backwoods sustainable living community, and enhanced by access to high-brow health foods stores and my own reading and experimentation. I'd seen Food Inc several times and show it to my classes that I teach. I'd done a project on chicken farming, and I'd watched several other documentaries all extolling the woes of the Standard American Diet (SAD) and modern industrial agriculture. I provided a reasonably healthy diet for my son and myself. We didn't eat fast food, but still, it was mostly okay.

            So, in yoga teacher training, I was a bit taken aback by all of the focus on diet, a vegan diet in particular. Despite my feelings, I decided to give it a try and have stuck to a mostly-vegan diet with a lot of backsliding. I'd resented the categorization of diet, the politicalization of diet. It's a private issue, I'd think. What does this have to do with teaching yoga? It may be helpful for the people that don't know anything about food, but me? I know. I get it. So, I was more dismayed when the second term began just a few weeks ago and diet and nutrition came up full and center. I thought this entire training, this entire studio is a ploy to get people to go vegan under the guise of practicing yoga.  Then when I saw that two books were on the reading list that blatantly advocated a vegan diet, I rolled my eyes. Here we go, I thought. Can I skip this? I know this already.

            Today, I picked up one of them, The World Peace Diet, The World Peace Diet by Will Tuttle, and turned directly to the dairy section. This was one area that I did not know as much about as I thought. I knew dairy was bad for the body and I ate it in very limited quantities. It had always seemed strange and wrong to drink another animal's milk, especially as grown adults. But still, I'd eat pizza and cheese and ice cream and yogurt. My son, too. Though I'd never promoted drinking glasses of milk like many families, he loved cheese, yogurt, and ice cream and ate more than me. I'd pretty much stopped eating it, but still bought some for him.

            Then I read the chapter on dairy "The Domination of the Feminine". I was so shocked, saddened, and appalled in such a visceral way. I started crying, and I haven't cried for months! Maybe yoga and meditation has provided me with some emotional equilibrium, but the intense sadness I felt about reading about these dairy cows and how they and their calves are treated was huge. And then, to think that about how dairy is so central to our culture, to many cultures throughout the world. That you can be vegetarian and still consume a lot of dairy products. That this product is inherently bad for humans and even worse for the cows that must undergo this treatment. I won't share the details here,  but I encourage people to find out more for themselves.

            And to think about how we are encouraged to drink milk constantly. As children we are given it in schools. WIC, the program that provides food assistance for pregnant women and women with young children, provides vouchers so women can buy milk. We're all familiar with the "got milk?" campaign, and we've all been told from an early age that milk, it does the body good. These slogans and ideas are ingrained within our psyches. Milk is good. Drink more of it. Sure there are hints that it may not be so good--acne in teenagers that could be linked to milk consumption, early menstruation and puberty in girls that could be linked to hormones in milk, and just the utter strangeness of the practice--but those slip away as young women buy Greek yogurt to stay slim and another generation drinks milk with breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

            So, when I read about the actual situation, what is actually going on, the massive cruelty and deception that goes into that carton of milk that each school child buys, to that carton of yogurt I buy for my son, or the cheese we sprinkle on our pizza or pasta, I feel appalled and guilty and angry to be part of such a system. None of us know the reality of the situation, and even if we do, it is so easy to go back to the SAD because it is what is right there. I was so saddened by how the cows are treated, and then looked down at my loving dog, Lexi (she really is amazing), and imagined what it would be like to treat Lexi in the same way we treat those dairy cows, seeing the love and pain in her eyes, that she definitely has feelings. So wouldn't a cow as well? Of course.

            And then I read about how the calves are taken from their mothers right away and go down one of four paths (I won't go into this here), one of them being male calves destined for beef production. Those males are then castrated immediately, without anesthesia. That got me thinking about how we circumcise baby boys, without anesthesia, within days of their birth. I remember when I had my son. I was young, twenty-two, and didn't know anything about anything when it came to circumcision. All the men I'd known were circumcised; it was the norm. Because it was the norm, and because of outside encouragement, I elected to have him circumcised. The doctor said that they didn't use anesthesia because "the baby can't feel anything". So they whisked him off to have him circumcised. I think about that now and it brings up a whole other wave of sadness, guilt, and regret, and just the utter alacrity of a situation in which millions of people are prompted to do things that are wrong, and do so because they don't know any better.

            The way we sexually abuse dairy cows and the mechanization of the hospital birth process and the treatment of newborn babies and their mothers correlate. It is there in the way human babies are immediately taken from their mothers after birth to be poked and prodded. It is there in  how we routinely cut women open to get the babies out rather than let them be born naturally, and how many women actually prefer this. It is there in how we feed human babies formula made in factories rather than the milk from their mothers and then switch them over to cow milk at one year for what will become a life-long dependency.  Isn't that weird when you think about it? It is there in how fucked up this entire system is. What is the most appalling though is how we all buy into it and think it is a good idea. Why? Because that is how things are done. Why? Because the doctor says so, because the government says so, because of all the people in high places advocating for a violent and destructive way of life, feeding us propaganda from an early age so we don't know any better, say so.

            In  Food Inc, they speak of "lifting the veil" on the food industry. And it does need to be lifted. But when it is lifted, you may feel massive guilt, anger, and sadness for being part of such a system. Honestly, the way I felt after reading the chapter on dairy cows was similar to how I felt after learning about the holocaust in a real, visceral, emotional way. And we can sooth ourselves and say that we didn't know what was going on, and that is true, we don't bear all of the responsibility because we are fed lies from childhood. But when we learn the truth, everything changes.

memoir, an addendum

I feel a little bad about my mean-spirited response to Dederer's Poser. I've kept reading and got to a couple of parts that are actually pretty good. She describes a bit of her own research in to the roots of  yoga and discovers that it isn't all about asana, after all. She also discusses the rise of women-instigated divorce in the late sixties and seventies and what it was like to be a child of that era when women began to discover they didn't have to stay and could do whatever they wanted to do. If she could have gotten to the good parts just a bit more quickly maybe then my negative review would not have been so hasty.

I think some of my negative reaction to the book arose because I wanted to write this book. I wanted to delve into the history and relevance of yoga and write about my experience with yoga, damn it. I know I still can, but has she cornered the market on yoga memoir? Maybe. I'm still a little irritated with her as a narrator but I thoroughly enjoy the parts that are about yoga. By the end of the yesterday, I couldn't put the book down. I do like parts of it and it does get better as it goes. She also talks about taking a certain yoga class with a certain teacher for a long time, and in that class the students would slowly work toward harder poses, like scorpion and side crow. I'd like to try this approach. Much of the yoga I've been doing lately is vinyasa, which can be challenging in that it is strengthening, but I would like to spend time working more on doing poses I never thought I could do, rather than recycling the same poses I know I can do. So that is my intention: move past my own preconceived limitations.


I'm considering sharing much of what I write in my yoga journal on this main page because that's all I'm blogging about these days, and mostly all I'm writing about. I'm revising some old essays to send out, but other than that, I'm writing about yoga and doing teacher training. So, be on the lookout for more yoga words on this page.

hating on a memoir

I recently started reading Poser: my life in twenty-three yoga poses by Claire Dederer, the first memoir I've read in a while. I want to keep reading the book but I find myself entirely irritated at the narrator, the real or constructed persona of the author herself. When I read a memoir, I expect that the author is going through some trouble or has a problem to overcome. That problem is usually apparent in the first few pages--drug addiction, alcoholic parents, illness, whatever. But, Dederer has no problems at all and seems to manufacture problems just so she can have some sort of narrative thread that leads the reader, I'm assuming, to a breakthrough or an enlightening moment in her yoga class. Her problems, so far: she has a baby, is a nearly full-time mother with a husband who works, and she's tired. She feels like she needs to be a good liberal mom and willingly goes through the actions she claims to despise: she wears Danskos, nurses her daughter, joins the baby co-op--which seems to be a playgroup for babies that parents pay for that includes a teacher who doesn't actually teach anything, and shops at a health food store. She's middle class, at least, and works from home. I gather she doesn't actually work much at all. Her husband is supportive and she's got best friends that she hangs  out with regularly. But still, she's got problems. Her parents aren't together. She's in her thirties. And, that seems to be about it. She likes yoga. She likes her baby. I'm not sure how this book was actually published, given that I've read much worthier manuscripts in graduate school that have yet to be published, not for lack of trying.

Immediately, I didn't like this book. The prose is sloppy, and it feels like something I would have written because yes, my prose can be sloppy. So, why do I keep reading it? I want to see what happens. Maybe, deep down, I want to hate on this over-privileged narrator just a bit. Also, after not reading memoirs in a while, I can see why people think those who write them are narcissistic with little to say. Not all memoirs are this way, for sure, but ones like this are.

Happy New Year!

January 2, and we got our first real snow of the season, if only a dusting. My son is exited, and outside right now in full winter gear: snowpants, snowboots, and all, if only for a half an inch.

I haven't been updating this blog too often, but I have been updating the yoga practice journal, so if you're interested, check it out (tab on upper right corner of this page). I've also been writing a bit more lately and plan on sticking with it. Here is a link from Jennifer Lauck's blog about finding time to write. She says that writers, or would-be writers, writers-in-name-only often say that they don't have time to write, so much so that it becomes a mantra, and we all know how powerful mantras can be. She borrows advice about how it is a good idea to document the use of your time for one week, to see where the time goes and if in fact you do have time to write. And, she's betting you do, and I'm betting I do.

I have a lot I like to do: a daily yoga and meditation practice, running, and writing. I could spend three or more hours per day just doing these things. Then comes work (I go back tomorrow. I've loved Christmas break so much.) and parenting, and keeping the house moderately clean, and I find that my days are quite full.

Resolutions:
Write daily, for at least a half hour. Preferably an hour.
Go camping at least three times this summer.
Learn to be cool in a messy house.
Start a garden.

and others......

notes on the cleanse

It is day three of my juice/soup fast. I'm following instructions given by Adina Niemerow, who "has worked as a personal chef for movie stars, fashion designers, recording artists, and CEOs of Fortune 500 companies" (this should have been a tip off right there), in her book Super Cleanse. I'm following the "Winter Wake Up" cleanse that consists of drinking fresh juices and eating soup. I've also been drinking tea. Day three, and I feel fine, but more than anything I am HUNGRY. Granted, Niemerow did caution that one should not try the Winter Wake Up if one is new to detox diets/fast because it is intense. But, well, I decided I should go for it. What is it about the word "hard" that makes me want to do something?

The cleanse is supposed to last 5 to 7 days, but I think this will be my last. I will make it through today. Benefits of the cleanse, according to Niemerow:


"This cleanse will fuel new levels of energy, clarity and lightness into your life. You'll feel rejuvenated on every level--in fact, many of my clients report feeling euphoric. In addition, the boost in hydration and nutrients will easy the dry skin and lips so common in the wintertime and get you glowing again."


Last night, I read a very funny article on juice cleansing by Judith Newman in which she chronicles her own three-day juice cleanse, and has this to say:


"The next three days could be summed up thus: 1. I need food. 2. Hey, this isn’t bad! 3. Kill me now.

"Let me rephrase that. By the third day I felt great in the way I’m told that the imminently drowning feel great right before they give up and inhale that last mouthful of water. My juice-aficionado friend Gilly told me I was on an endorphin high. Later, Dr. David Colbert, the New York internist, dermatologist and author of 'The High School Reunion Diet,' told me I was in ketosis. 'That giddy feeling you get is what diabetics get when your body runs out of sugar and starts using other products for energy,' he said. 'I had a model come in recently, clutching the furniture, explaining to me that she’d been juicing for a week. Your sugar metabolism is completely out of whack.'"

So there you go. I can relate to the "I need food" and the "this isn't bad" reaction, but I've yet to reach the "kill me now" stage. Day one was relatively easy, though I was led to expect that I would be going through some severe detox and would be experiencing serious symptoms. The only real symptom was a headache from not drinking coffee. I felt good, for the most part. I drank a few glasses of various green juices made from spinach, kale, celery, cucumber, and apple, and with the addition of the apple they tasted pretty good. In the evening, I made one of Niemerov's soups, lots of well-cooked, pureed veggies, which with a lot of salt, didn't taste bad.

By day two, my headache subsided, but by the afternoon I began feeling intensely hungry. I wanted to talk about food, and my sense of smell got stronger and stronger. I drank about 8 cups of tea, three big glasses of juice (one with beets in it, which I will never love. Beets taste like dirt. I know they are healthy but I've never been able to tolerate them), and about four bowls of soup. In all, I probably got a decent number of calories, so I don't think I'm starving. Just hungry. Unlike the first day, I taught on the second day, and by my second class, I was feeling pretty spacey and hoped that the students didn't notice.

Now, day three, and the hunger continues. I've wanted to get off this thing and have thought of food all morning. I tutored this morning and another tutor had a sandwich and the smell of it just about knocked me over the edge with its deliciousness. My sense of smell is so much stronger now. Emotionally, I feel pretty even. Physically, my body feels good. I look in the mirror trying to discern some change in my appearance but I can't really tell. The only thing I notice is that my eyes seem bigger but maybe that's because of the low-calorie aspect of this fast and I'm losing fat from my face. I haven't lost weight but am at the bottom of the give or take five pound range where I usually reside.

I feel the biggest change mentally. They (experts, I suppose) say that a good bit of blood and oxygen usually goes toward digestion, and without dealing with digestion, that blood is going to my brain, which is pretty awesome. I've come to some conclusions about some things in my life that I need to change and have overall been productive, well, except for the spaciness while teaching. Just as long as I have a steady stream of liquids, I'm okay.

Still, though, this is my last day. I don't want to jeopardize my own health or metabolism, and, honestly, I don't think there is a huge point to this exercise beyond what I've already gotten. Sure, if I continue to not eat solid food my perception will change, kind of like when I run more than 12 or so miles--things change. I'm just not sure this is a necessary or even healthful change of perception. I do plan to continue to incorporate juices into my regular diet and am going to eat better, and not as much.

And in a sense, I might have needed this experience. I tend to overeat and this experience shows me that I don't have to, that hunger is an okay experience. Would I recommend it? Not really.

Yoga practice journal

I've been contemplating starting a new blog devoted to the yoga teacher training I am attending, but then I found this handy page option, so I started blogging here, on this very blog, about it. See the tab on the right side of the page.

The impetus: I started yoga teacher training a couple of weeks ago through the college where I teach in collaboration with a local yoga studio. One of our assignments  is to keep a journal about our practice, and well, being sort of writerly, I decided to post my journal online. I don't want it to be part of my regular blog but a side blog, if you will, all about yoga and my experience in this teacher training program.

Some background: I've been doing yoga for a good while but not too seriously. I practice on my own semi-regularly and go to classes when time and money allow. I took my first yoga class as a senior in college in 1999 (wow! 12 years ago!) and have been doing it ever since. However, I would never have considered myself a yogi by any means (and what does that even mean?). The reading that I'm doing for teacher training is showing me that yoga is more than the one hour asana (the movements) practice, but is part of something deeper and bigger. So, we'll see.

The training program is, in all, about 27 weeks, so I should complete it in late spring/ early summer. For now, what I've started doing is practicing and then writing about it. So if you are interested, take a look at the tab on the right side of the page. I'll be updating it a good bit.