Playing catchup The holidays do not leave a lot of spare time. I have not gone to a yoga session since December 20. I have been doing my daily practice, but light on the hatha stuff. I have concentrated on my personal journaling over the past couple of weeks, and my blogging has taken a back seat. I've been digging deep and discovering a lot of things about myself that I had not realized before. Sorry, folks, but the writing is for my eyes only. This coming year I will be focused in on rekindling my creative writing, and I think yoga will play a key role in keeping me grounded and focused in this endeavor.

I have started the e-mail course from Kelly McGonigal. She advertisede the course for 2005, all 52 weeks of it. To my surprise, the first contribution turned up in my inbox on December 26. I've checked out the material, registered in the online forum and posted my first note as well as my personal introduction. Kelly obviously wants to get a headstart on the new year.

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  My yoga intention for the new year I was reading the Bulletin Board from eSutra (brought to you by the NYC's Breathing Project) and saw an interesting idea: Kelly McGonigal is offering an e-mail based course called "Can Yoga Really Change My Life?" It will last all year and consist of weekly course content sent to you (by e-mail, naturally) and include:

"instructions for specific breathing exercises, meditations, or yoga poses, as well as more general themes for your personal practice. Practice suggestions integrate yoga philosophy and tradition with current psychological and medical research. You will also receive ideas for applying your practice to daily life."

For more information, check out the announcement.

I have cited Kelly's website and her work before. She is associated with Stanford Psychophysiology Laboratory. I like her approach to yoga, and her involvement in Western scientific research in yoga.

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  Daughter and yoga This Monday evening, I went to my class with Stephanie. She had never done any formal yoga before, which surprised me because I thought she would have run into it at college or in her dance studies. She has taken the Art of Living intro course so it all can't be that foreign to her. A Yoga 1 class is a lot to throw at a beginner because there's a lot to keep track of. We both sweated up a storm because the room was packed and we were getting into a really dynamic flow.

Afterwards, we had a light dinner together, a veggie sandwich for her and a salad for me. We talked about the class and our plans for the holidays. Some quality father-daughter time together. She says that she wants to do it again. We'll see if her enthusiasm continues.

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  Taking note of a lucky find I came across another yoga blog, yogagirl - As a mantra of fact, thanks to an assist from Gail Pickens-Barger who shares my love for Peru and yoga. Yogagirl blogs very diligently. I really am going to have to set up a blog rolling feature on this site.

I mistakenly wrote Mantra of Face, originally, and the error has been correctly. I even added the "As" to be textual. Sorry, yogagirl, it was a long day.

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  Four points and creative ambitions The following points aren't my equivalent of the eight limbs of yoga. My yoga practice and self-discovery seem to contain four components:

• Healing: after 55 years of mostly physical neglect and even abuse, restoring my body's strength and flexibility is long-term project. I'm healing the degraded function caused by lack of use but also what's happened to my body since the previous practice. I've been most aware of this healing function because of my lower back pain, but it's much broader than that. Jon Kabat-Zinn says, "Healing always involves an attitudinal and emotional transformation."
• Stretching: getting muscles to extend and contract to their maximum is one side of the story. The other is pushing back what I sense as my maximum, my limit. Stretching also causes a release of built tension.
• Growing: over time, this discipline has an effect of expanding my physical capacity beyond what what I could have done last week or last month.
• Inspiring: this aspect is what calls the soul and spirit to engage in the process -- it's not just the asanas and the physical workout. It's the intellectual and spiritual curiosity that makes yoga and meditation a challenging endeavor. It's engaging the inner teacher who is really the source of what I learn about myself. It's what gets me back on the mat again, and also searching for new creative challenges.

I was really surprised when the inspiration/creativity point came to me, but it seemed a natural consequence of the other three. It marked a shift out of survival mode into a human wholeness.

For the past month, I've been journaling privately a lot, which has distracted me from this weblog and other online writing. It's been back to the basics, with a fountain pen and notebook. But it has also allowed me to examine my creative goals. For the first time since 1991, I am seriously expanding my horizon and risk-taking. It's extremely exciting, gratifying and enlivening. Writing has always been a tool in my professional career. My practice will see its fruits in the creative field. Right now I'm just being playful with my writing, flexing my muscles, but I've started to map out a few, more ambitious writing projects.

Since I have not directly touched on inspiration and creativity here before, I've decided that it also has to have a page on this site.

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  Hip openers and lower back pain Over the weekend, I took a Hip Opener workshop at TranquilSpace. It was a two-hour workout, double what I normally take. The instructor was Kevin Waldorf-Cruz, and we had a nice chat before class, when I told him of my history of lower back pain and what I had been doing to treat it. I was fearful that I might overload my lower back because of the intensive nature of the session, but it was the opposite. I came out really tired, pushed to my extreme, but my back felt fine. I don't think I "cured" my lower back pain, but I did come to release into it and accept it as a given in my practice. I learned I had to listen to it attentively and patiently -- and apply that lesson to the rest of my body.   ¶ 10:03 PM 0 comments