Boobies, Boys, and Bitches

This past weekend in teacher training I learned that I am still not quite doing downward dog correctly. Granted, I may have been overcompensating because it had been pointed out before, but anyway, still not right. Seems I round too much in my thoracic spine, which is pretty much the exact opposite of what I thought I was doing. I also learned that this arch is a good little indicator of osteoporosis and becoming a little old hunched back lady. So that got me walking around for the rest of the day with my shoulders rolled back and standing tall. 

After a couple of hours with proper posture, I realized it's not just uncomfortable because of how the muscles have weakened from not being engaged, but it's also uncomfortable because I feel exposed. That's why in yoga backbends are also known as heart openers. They help you practice vulnerability. When you're in a backbend you're leading with your heart, not tucking it away. But practice this enough and it can make you more emotionally open and more compassionate. But if you've spent years protecting your heart, it's not so easy to just let it shine. 

I remember a few years ago trying to get into camel. It was too much for me and I would panic. My heart would race, my breathing would become shallow, and I'd have to come out of it. One day my teacher said to me, "Just drop back. Nothing is going to happen to you." I realized he was right and the pose became one of exhilaration instead of a place of fear.

We all live with a lifetime of weight from spats with our friends, spats with people who aren't our friends, relationships that came and went, job stress, and for some of us, the unique challenges that come with boobies. Seriously. I remember them being pointed out from the second they made their awkward little appearance on my chest. The first instinct then is to round the shoulders forward and try to make the chest look flatter. Well, it was mine anyway. But all of that, life in general, can make it hard to not want to protect yourself, which can physically express itself as rounded shoulders. Couple that with sitting in front of a computer all day, like many of us do, and there can be a lot of work to do on that heart opening. 

I can't imagine a better time for me to be in teacher training and to be exactly where I am in my life right now. I think about the other times I considered getting more involved with yoga and they just weren't the right times. I wasn't ready. So while my downward dog could use some work, I've realized it's the perfect time to work on it because life is good. In fact, life is pretty great. I am safe and I don't have the negativity that used to seem to hover everywhere—you know, all that stuff that the hunched shoulders were trying to keep out. 

What about you? Take a moment to sit up straight. Lift your shoulders up towards your ears and then roll them back and down. Sit. Breathe. How does it feel? Are you uncomfortable? If so, why? 

I think a lot of us can work on this. And then maybe we'd all be a little nicer to each other and to ourselves. :)

Sometimes Things are Exactly as They Seem

We got a lot of snow this week. Aside from generally sucking, it makes parking in the Hoboken/Weehawken area something that takes the stars aligning to accomplish. But yesterday, I headed up the boyfriend's place around 10 p.m. and got parking right in front of his building. Awesome.

It was also garbage night, and oh boy, was it piled up. So, while parking, I managed to dislodge a bag from it's pile and it got stuck under my tire. After expressing my concern about the snow and the garbage and whether or not I'd be able to get my car out in the morning, my wonderful boyfriend helped me get the bag of garbage out from under my car.

"All the snow everywhere and you manage to run over garbage," he noted. Well, yea, welcome to being Jen Minchin. But whatever, garbage issue solved.

This morning, I was leaving for work and my car was making a weird new noise. My car has been through the ringer the past year so I just assume weird things are going to continue to happen until one day I am driving and it just falls apart around me. Then I'll be all Fred Flintstone like pushing a car frame down Route 3 with my feet. Anyways, so my car is making this weird noise. I texted my friend and described it as, "metal scraping the pavement." But I figured since it's been, I don't know, all of 7 degrees out, there was probably ice stuck somewhere and the whole thing would just resolve itself. I turned the radio up.

Traffic today was horrendous, which, in retrospect was fairly convenient. As I was sitting in traffic a woman stopped next to me motioning to the back of my car, but then drove away. I shrugged and kept rocking out to T. Swift. A couple of minutes later a guy in a white van pulled up next me and motioned for me to roll down my window. So I did.

"You have wire ALL OVER the back of your car!" He warned.
"Interesting," I thought.

Then dude jumps out of his van and tries to get it off of my car. (That's where the aforementioned convenient bumper-to-bumper traffic comes in.) But alas, the wire wasn't going anywhere. He told me to try a gas station and see if they had wire cutters. So, I did. When I pulled into the gas station and got out of my car I laughed at how ridiculous the situation was. There was like four feet of tangled up barbed wire-like coils hanging from my muffler trailing behind the car like a metal wedding veil. But, good to know my sound deduction skills are dead on. It WAS metal scraping the pavement. (What the hell was in that garbage I ran over last night??)

Here's an artist's rendering of the situation:

I managed to get the wires off of my muffler just as the guy from the white van pulled up behind me letting me know he found wire cutters. (See, there are good people left in this world!) I discarded the strange coiled wires in the gas station's garbage and I headed back out into the standstill traffic...which was no longer convenient.