#yogapain

[miriamswartz]

So a lot of you know I've been struggling with back pain! It's really affecting me in a bad way, I can't workout and worst is I can't teach classes like I want to! Most pressing is the pain and the stress from having pain! Anxiety follows as a part of the pain, what if I never get better? Will it hurt like this forever etc. I'm meditating a lot, trying to trust the process, finding good ways to spend my time - long walks, loads of music and just... well... doing nothing!!

[jenair4]

Day 16 #aminuteaday @cyogalab much harder than it looks...couldn't stop collapsing when I grabbed my toes😂 #hamstringstretch #yogapain (at Arlington, Virginia)

[poutineandgreencurry]

Temples and not so superheroes

Today was an important day. Today we finally gave up the ghost and started drinking water from the cheap as hell reverse osmosis machines around town. 6L of water for 5 baht ($0.20 Canadian). Diarrhea watch is back on but so far we are in the clear. We have been hitting the gym pretty often in the last week. Today we made the awful mistake of following up a morning gym run with yoga at Fitness Thailand. It was a solid class but we discovered that it actually meant a second hour and a half workout. That little Thai woman was not fucking around. At one point, following our core workout day, this lady was forcing some brutal core work and Maggie looked over at me with eyes burning with the fury of one thousand suns and gave me the finger for suggesting it. Afterwards, we limped out of the gym and headed for lunch. We have started a few weeks of trying to live even cheaper than we have been. Previously, our meal budget was roughly 250 baht or $10 Canadian for the both of us. Now, we are keeping below 150 or $6 Canadian per meal. It hasn't been much of a struggle. We just have to be more selective with where we go. I'm really enjoying it so far. It makes every new place like finding treasure. We grabbed coffee and food at a little restaurant inside a terracotta garden canopied by trees. It's a great place to relax on a hot day and a new favourite of ours. This weekend also marks a Buddhist holiday called Makha Bucha which means three days where the entire country goes dry. No booze. Can't buy it anywhere. Tough days but we soldiered on. We took the opportunity to check out a Wat in town doing a beautiful display, burning candles and setting them afloat in the pond around a statue of the Buddha. It was amazing. Afterwards, we grabbed food at a night market across the moat near our place. It's on every night and the food is amazingly cheap. 100 baht ($4 cdn) usually gets us out of there well fed. We also had the opportunity to take in, what we like to believe is, a local celebrity. Fat crying superman. This kid was going on like the most spoiled kids back home. All while decked out in a full superman costume. Cape and all. I loved it. I'm not usually a big kid person and this chubby blubbering mess cemented why. You do you, bud. You do you. That entertainment capped off the evening before heading home. Tomorrow the silver temple

[artrepnyc]

New piece for The Guardian, illustrated by Yonatan Popper. You can read Kathleen Hale’s piece here.

[daleydialogue]

I’ve been a competitive athlete for most of my life. Competition is something I identify with wholeheartedly as a part of me. Like anyone else, I like to excel and win. As I digress out of my prime athletic years, opportunities for success in this realm are fewer and farther between. And as it happens, my victories from my younger years have taken a toll on my body so that I’m no longer able to run around like a spry spring chicken. This has brought me into new fitness ventures, the most recent of which is Yoga.

I understand that yoga has become all the rage, largely among the green juice-drinking housewives of any affluent city. They either are carrying a small dog or a yoga mat, speed walking to somewhere important, like the nail salon. They look fit enough, so I thought I should give this yoga thing a try.

I asked my friend what yoga is, and she said it’s really good stretching. But isn’t just stretching really good stretching? Sit down, touch your toes, it’s all good. I also heard yoga called a spiritual discipline. If I had any discipline with my food in the first place, I wouldn’t need to be in yoga.

So, I thought going into a stretching class targeted toward pixie housewives would be a magical relaxing way to suddenly lose 20 lbs. I did not know that yoga is really the art of anorexic contortionists mocking those of us who can’t support our entire body weight on one hand. I spent most of the class in a shameful crouching fetal position they call child’s pose. Whenever I tried to enter downward dog or upward cat I would nearly topple over. I felt the sideways glances of the ballerinas around me - Oh, you can’t stand on one leg and hold the other above your head? How sad for you. But all I could think every time we were told to change positions was WHY? Why the F would I ever want to do that? Ask around to people who have played competitive sports and they aren’t calling out the practice of crouching camel toe as the key to their success. What was most embarrassing was that in this BEGINNER class, everyone knew exactly what move to make every time she called out an Indian term, like somehow everyone became fluent in Sanskrit.

After the session concluded, the teacher approached me with her Namaste hands covered in prayer beads. “Welcome to the club,” she smiled saintly. “It will change your life.” It was clear by my bruised wrists and ego that I was a first-timer. I did not know what a Chaturanga was, but now that I have experienced it, I’ll stick to the workouts that are strictly in English.