The Revolution Begins...

Who I want to be when I grow up. via FFFFOUND!

Nearly 25 of us - lycra-clad, pony-tailed, mostly women, ranging in age from college students to grandmothers - crowded into the smaller room of the yoga studio to begin our 40 Day Yoga Challenge: Revolution from Within.

The program of 40 consecutive days of yoga, meditation, dietary changes, and calm focusing is based on noted yogi Baron Baptiste's book, 40 Days to Personal Revolution: A Breakthrough Program to Radically Change Your Body and Awaken the Sacred Within Your Soul.  

 

Big promises for a program of just over a month, but my long-time yoga teacher, in whom I have great trust, promises that it is "ahhhh...mayyyyzzzing!"  

Having felt a bit like a hamster on a treadmill for the past few years - unsteadily balancing grad school, fieldwork, personal life, work, learning to be a wife - it felt like time to reclaim a bit of spaciousness and sanity in my life.  And fitness.  I spent a month over the holidays doing nothing but eating delicious foods (probably as a come down from the hectic pace that preceded the holidays), and a month after the holiday fighting off a vicious cold (ditto).  Time to ratchet back a bit and take stock of the moment.


There wasn't much active, hatha yoga in the two hour orientation today, though we were all prepared with our stretchy pants and yoga mats.  Instead, the teachers invoked the Four Directions to watch over us and purify our practice during this program.  I often feel a little itchy when well-meaning white people employ Native American practices, and today was no exception.  The invocation seemed to be be half prayer, half instructions to the students.  I would have preferred them separately.  Also, I'm unclear on the connection between an ancient eastern Indian practice, and the Native American tradition.... is there really a match?  Had we started off chanting in Sanskrit, I would have been more at ease.  However,  I'm trying to calm my judgmental, hyper-analytical mind, and what better time to begin than the beginning of the first class?  Judgment noted and set aside.


The teachers gave some instructions on food choices, and noting our mood and energy level when we eat.  I think that will be helpful.  Even more, I need to note what I'm doing when I don't eat.  During the week, I often get so caught up in meeting a deadline that I forget to eat, ending up grumpy and lightheaded hours later.  I'm not really sure why this happens, and I know my days would be more pleasant if I ate healthy meals on a regular basis.  This is a good reminder to pay attention to that.


Finally, we were released from our cross legged positions for a few Sun Salutations.  I was ready to move, it felt good to stretch.  But after only two Sun Salutations, we sat down again to proceed with introductions, facilitated by a Native American (again??) "talking stick."  Yes, it helps group process to have an item for people to hold as they speak, but this east-west mashup is bugging me.  Several people shared trying personal circumstances that had brought them to the class.  Tears flowed.  People shared their goals and desires for the class - for me, a greater sense of spaciousness and ease in my life, and a deepening of my yoga practice.  Two people had been signed up by others - a husband and father, respectively - and the lone man in the class was there because his wife was also there.  So many different motivations brought people to this program, and now we set out on a journey together.


I think the biggest challenge will be simply getting to yoga class six times a week.  Usually, I go once or twice a week, and practice a few days on my own.  Now I need to carve out time to get across town every day, and to meditate for five minutes each morning and evening.  I'll try to write about it each day, and share my progress.

Eat less, weigh more

At this time when zillions of people resolve to lose weight in the new year, a friend of mine is wondering how to gain weight.  Especially now that she's cut sugar and all meat but fish out of her diet, she's having a hard time keeping her weight up.  The months of nausea that have made all food unappealing haven't helped either.  Like many women, she struggled with keeping her figure trim in the past.  Now she's struggling to avoid looking skeletal. 

In one of those cruelly unfair twists of fate, my friend, athlete, non-smoker, and mother of two small boys, has been undergoing cancer treatments for more than a year.  She attended our wedding with her family just after finishing the first round of chemotherapy.  I was too caught up in the whirl of the day to notice how gaunt she was.  The treatments, along with the changes she's made in her diet to maximize nutrients and minimize toxic chemicals, have made it difficult for her to sustain her normal weight. 

Her current search for healthy, nutrient-rich foods made me realize how much I take my body and all it can do for granted.  I can feed it junk, I can feed it vegetables, still it (mostly) does what I want.  (Though as I get older, I definitely feel more sluggish and spacey when I gorge on refined sugar and white flour than when I eat Brussels sprouts.)

Like so many other people, I resolved to get into better shape in the new year:  lose the seven pounds I gained over the holidays (an extended bout of the appetite-killing Demon Cold seems to have taken care of that), stop eating fattening foods, eat more vegetables, get into aerobic shape, do more yoga.

When my friend wrote looking for advice about what foods could help her gain weight, I had an inspiration.  I am going to "give" all my rich and fattening foods to her.  Since she wants to gain weight, and I want to lose weight, I am going to "give" my nuts, cheeses, ice cream, pastas, etc. to her.  Whenever I want to eat these foods, I'll symbolically pass them off to her, imagining her gaining weight and reclaiming her former strength and vitality.  And I'll grab a carrot.

This will help me be more conscious of what I eat, and it will remind me of healthy, hearty foods that I can suggest to her.  And hopefully, the constant stream of positive thoughts in her direction will have a positive impact on her health.  At least, I hope so.

What are your favorite weight-inducing foods?  Leave them here - even recipes! - I'll pass them on to my friend, and your diet will be lightened for the year.  My friend doesn't eat sugar, so the ice cream, cookies and chocolate (my downfall) are still yours to handle.

Simply elegant silk wedding dress for sale

It's a year on past the wedding, and I'm cleaning out my closet....

My first instinct for the wedding was that it would be a super-simple, no-fuss affair.  Accordingly, I found a lovely ivory silk dress, by Tadashi, one of my favorite designers, that seemed perfect for the beach.

That was before I got in touch with my Inner Fairy Princess Bride, and realized that I needed something with much more drama and oomph. Simple was not to be.

Now I'm selling this first dress on ebay.  Check it out, and let me know if you have any questions.  The fabric is actually much more ivory than it appears in this photo.  It's really lovely 100% silk, with a polyester lining.

I still think it would be perfect for a beach-side or mountain-top wedding...

Breath-taking

Our Labor of Love 

I'm pretty much over reading wedding blogs, but today I clicked over to this via Simple Lovely, and was astounded at these gorgeous images.

To be wed in Marrakesh, amid camels, candles and loved ones... now there's an adventure! More here.

Oh, and: the bride didn't wear white! Check it, Sera.

Not what I expected

Our first anniversary, in my imagination: us, together.

A funky-chic B&B in the redwoods.  Fancy clothes, frozen cake. Sipping Champagne on the deck, watching the sun sink into the Pacific Ocean.

source

Our first anniversary, in reality:  me, myself, on a plane, somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, headed for Asia.  Delay-plagued Skype calls home.  Meetings into the evening.

Remembering the words of advice friends shared at the wedding:

"Love does not consist of gazing at each other (one perfect sunrise gazing at another) but in looking outward together in the same direction."  (Anne Morrow Lindbergh, A Gift from the Sea)

"... And stand together, yet not too near together,
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow."

(“On Marriage,” from The Prophet, Kahil Gibran)

This is the lesson I learn again and again:  It won't look like you expected.  It may not bear any semblance to your imagination.  It may be better than you ever imagined.  It takes audacity to shape a marriage into your own.

(The redwoods and frozen cake can wait...)

A honeymoon 'du

Suppose you were to go on your honeymoon to Nepal.  You would choose autumn, of course, because the skies are the clearest, and the chance of rain the lowest.  On good days, you would glimpse the snow-covered high Himalayas from Kathmandu Valley.

Before trekking around Annapurna or up to Everest Base Camp, you might choose to stay at the Godavari Village Resort, on the outskirts of Kathmandu, where you would find splendid views of idyllic rice paddies and hills, and possibly the high peaks glistening in the distance.

You could go for a morning walk through the mist, as farmers prepare for their day's labors in the fields.

On such a walk, you might come across a fertility temple, where Shiva lingams bless those hoping for children.

Making your way back for breakfast, meandering among the rice paddies, you could marvel at the mysterious placidity of the landscape...

And wonder if you might stay a bit longer to savor all the delights of a magical land.

I do, I do, Kathmandu!

Newly-hatched ducklings fall for the first thing they see - mama duck or not - and will follow whoever, or whatever, this being is wherever it goes.  The ducklings imprint on the first being - dog, duck or human - they lay eyes on, and that becomes central to their understanding of the world.  

Or so I learned in high school biology.  This theory may have been overthrown by now, but at the time I was fascinated by the idea that one brief experience could so profoundly shape the trajectory of the duckling's life.  

I think it's the same with international travel.  Wherever you go first, as an impressionable young thing, shapes all future approaches to travel.

Oddly, my first significant overseas trip (beyond the family jaunt to England when I was six) was to one of the least developed countries, half a world away.  It now seems strange that growing up in a midwestern suburb, I would set my eyes on Nepal for my college semester abroad.  Couldn't I ease into foreign travel, like my friends who studied in Florence and London?  No, my rationale was that those places would always be there, but I would only be young and adventurous enough for the remote corners once.  

 

I dove into the deep end, a distant place, foreign to my experience in every way, that expanded my brain until my ears were ready to pop off the sides of my head.  The city was green, cows and bicycles vastly outnumbered cars, huge smiles lit the faces of everyone I met.  I was in the thrall of the exoticism of the place - fragrant smoke from temples and kitchens hung in the air, around every corner lay a surprise, some curiosity I had never dreamed of - and being so far from home for the first time.

Since then, returning to Nepal, and especially to Kathmandu, feels like a sweet, crazy reunion, like re-meeting an exotic, jet-setting spinster aunt, whose bracelets jangle and whose sentences never quite make sense.  

More than a decade after my college experience, a research fellowship granted me a year in Nepal, during which I kept a flat in Kathmandu, and spent months in the mountains.  I fell in love with the city, even as it had grown choked with villagers fleeing Maoist rebels in the rural areas.  

Car and motorcycles clogged the streets, the two-stroke engines causing a thick pall of pollution to fall over the bowl-shaped city in the winter.  White shirts were grey by the end of the day, and a trip into the city center would result in hacking up black phlegm. 

The friendliest people in the world were now suffering a deep depression as a civil war wracked the country and the throngs of tourists stayed home.  No one wanted to take a vacation in the middle of someone else's war, much to the detriment of the Nepali economy.  Despite the violence, pollution, curfews, and demonstrations, Kathmandu was still magical, the colors of saris and salwars a delight to the somber Western eye, the juxtaposition of religious monuments with urban squalor a constant reminder that enlightenment would not happen at some future place or time, it had to happen in the midst of the chaos of life.

Mt. Everest, the world's tallest peak, viewed from a plane.

A few years after that, I returned again, for a winter holiday break from my Himalayan research.  Kathmandu, with its cosmopolitan tourists, banana pancakes, North Face gear, and trendy restaurants was the best approximation of home I could devise. I meant to attend a friend's wedding as well, though, confusingly, information about the date and time never materialized. These things happen in Kathmandu.  Time is a malleable concept when living in the present.  On New Year's Eve, the streets were packed with revelers from all over the world. 

New Year's Eve, 2007, Thamel, Kathmandu

A week in the big city, receiving the ministrations of an ayurvedic spa, eating good food and shopping for gifts left me considerably restored and ready to return to work after the holidays.

Now, once again, my bag is nearly packed with two methods of water purification, a voltage adapter, an unlocked cell phone, sunscreen, layers, long pants, and plenty of books to keep me busy on the 14 hour flight.  Kathmandu, here I come!