Back in January, I did a Personal Year-End Review. I was bowled away. It's taken me since then to assimilate what this inventory means. I'd like to share part of this review as it pertains changes in my physical conditioning and work methods over the past 12-18 months.
- I started jogging regularly by joining a running group at work and having a weekend run, giving me aerobic activity at about 12-15 miles a week. No injuries have kept me from running. I look forward to my run.
- I kept up with my daily meditation practice, focusing more on mini-sessions rather than 20-minute blocks
- I kept up with my yoga practice 3-5 times a week, and made breakthroughs in several poses, especially improving balance and flexibility
- I took at least 2 weeks of real vacation (travel away from DC) - Ontario and Quebec, Canada; Orlando; Eastern Shore MD
- I upgraded my Omega-3 pills to higher quality and increased intake.
- I found my own personal doctor and had a full physical examination
- I brought down my total cholesterol by 23 points while raising my good cholesterol (HDL) by 5 points, compared to 2 years ago
- I got a specialist to check out my sinuses, finding a long-term infection that had been a drag on my health
- I lost about 15 pounds and 6 inches off my waist while increasing muscle mass and strength.
- I am getting to the gym as often as feasible, doing a few exercises every day at home, fitting other simple things in daily routine (walking up 8 flights of stairs).
I've been doing some of these things for more than the past year and I've mentioned them on this blog, but the intensity has picked up. This progress also meant reducing time spent on other activities, like doing outside consulting, watching TV, surfing the Web, reading the news (magazines and newspapers) and some books.
Measurable success (having concrete milestones) has a reinforcing effect on my motivation. I am also aware of other benefits that I had never expected. I hope you don't think I'm just bragging on myself, but I was not really aware of what I had done until I sat down and listed them in the review -- and this is just the physical side of the change!
The most significant conclusion is that I have made physical well being as a top priority, rather than an afterthought to fit between a 9-5 job, moonlighting and TV. That decision translates into time and energy spent on taking care of myself. I made a conscious decision to take command of my body and be proactive about my health. I decided that maintaining the discipline of physical exercise was the single, most important thing I could do to ensure my mental, physicial and spiritual health and a long-term investment in my future. If I can't do that, other efforts at self-improvement have less of a chance of succeeding.
My son Matt 
had one of his photographs selected for a collective exhibit, Photography Exposed, by dcist. There were over 600 entries by 200 photographers and 60-some photos were finally chosen. The exhibit opened last night.
Matt's been working with photography for a couple of years and he's taken a couple of courses. It's become one of his creative outlets, and he's invested a lot of time, thought and money into it. For his birthday two weeks ago, we (including Stephanie) gave him a Nikon lens. This is the first time that he submitted his work for public viewing. You can see more of work at Flickr.
The opening took place at the Civilian Art Projects, just off the DC Mall. The place was packed, and there was a line that went down two flights of stairs and around the corner in the rain because the gallery could only hold so many people. I suspect that not all of them came to see Matt's work. When you have several scores of aficianados showing their works, they tend to invite a lot of friends and family. Stephanie and her steady squeeze Ron showed up as did several of Matt's house mates.
The exhibit will be shown until March 15, 2:00 pm to 6:00 pm, Wednesday to Saturday. If anyone is interested, you can buy the photo for $135. The selected photo is below. All rights reserved.
Andrea Franchini was my first yoga teacher at Tranquilspace and then she moved to Flow Yoga Center and I soon joined her. I introduced my daughter to Andrea and we took classes with her together. Stephanie and Andy struck some common vibes and kept in contack over time. I was really fortunately to find a teacher like Andy. She has a nurturing, therapeutic approach to yoga, typically of the Anusara tradition, so she helped put to rest a lot of my early nerves about doing yoga in a classroom setting. She's always been a kind of marker in my practice
Two years ago, Andy decided she wanted a change of scene and moved to San Francisco, but once or twice a year she comes back to Washington to give a workshop or a master class. Stephanie, Teresa and I joined her this time around at Flow Yoga. Of course, I was going in part because of the ego trip — I wanted to hear her tell my how far my practice has come in two years. For instance, I realized that I had to use a bolster under my hips and back to get into reclining hero's supta virasana pose when Andy was teaching me, and now I can get by with just a folded blanket. But that was only a sidebar in the rush of mat-focused learning that took place in those five hours. Workshops allow me to push through a lot of artificial barriers that I erect in my mind.
This Saturday-Sunday workshop was back in January and I'm just now getting around to writing about it so I am playing catch up. My yoga practice and its internal processes has pretty much overwhelmed my capacity to digest it through writing, either in a journal or a blog. Blasting off a quick entry about a news item on yoga, a website or my trip to St. Thomas is just a gesture to pacify my angst.
This past weekend, I surprised myself by kicking into my first unassisted handstand (Adho Mukha Vrksasana) against the wall. It is probably harder, I believe, to get into handstand (with or without a support) than to actually balance in the pose. Susan Bowen had been leading a class to reach into unexplored poses that we assumed were too difficult for us so it was appropriate that I reached this milestone in the class. We had spent a large segment of the class practicing keeping the core firm and kicking up to the pose, leading with one leg and pushing off with the other. The first couple of rounds I held back; I refrained from attempting the full pose with someone to spot me up for the final push into the pose. But as we were going into the last round of repetitions, I got down into the starter pose and something clicked. I just did the lead leg lift-up and it just kept going. I was in the handstand. My form was lousy: my back over-arched, my shoulders too tight, my legs too loose, but I just held the pose absorbing the sensation of being suspended upside-down on my hands.
I think a key trick was something that Jill Abelson had taught us a week before a Flow Yoga: when using the lead-leg kick-up, make sure that the toes on the lead leg comes all the way down to the ground before kicking it up because it is the full swing that give you momentum to get all the way up to the wall. The tendency after doing a couple of attempts is to bring the kick-up leg midway down, kind of waving it in the air, instead of lowering it completely. I also found that the less I thought about it, the easier it was to get up.
Labels: core, inversions, milestone
