Monthly Archives: January 2010

Cleanse: Day 6

The Cleanse is taking a toll on me today. I don’t know if it’s also the weather and its gloominess that’s contributing to my extreme ennui, but I was definitely running at very low RPMs today.

I resorted to my SAD light this morning and left it on for the entirety of my writing time, and it really did help.

(I have this one. FYI.)

But as the day wore on, and it was becoming clear that this was not going to be an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind kinda day, I started to doubt my ability to complete all 21 days of this cleanse program.

And this was disturbing.  Disheartening, even.  I was so loving this eating plan up until today, and now I was  cranky.  I missed my cup of Sumatra in the morning.  I wanted more than a smoothie for dinner.  I wanted something warm and toothsome. (Spaghetti?) It’s Friday night and I wanted my glass of Pinot Noir, dammit.  These are my rituals. These are sacred. They are written in my personal Torah.  Extra-Bold coffee in the morning. Wine on Friday night.  We cannot live in this higgeldy-piggeldy way, there have to be RULES, right??!!

(meep)

For almost the first time ever, I did not know how I was going extricate myself from this funk.  I did not know how to de-frag myself before my yoga class.   I knew I couldn’t very well go in and say, “Okay folks, the smoothies are really not cutting it for me today, and I miss my coffee in the morning, so it’s gonna be all savasana tonight.  Grab your blankets and eye bags and I’ll crank up the Syncronicity OMs and best of luck to you. See you on the flip side. Namaste.”

(Though, some of my students out there reading this might be thinking: Shit yeah!  I would pay good money for a 90-minute nap on a Friday afternoon after the hell week I’ve had!  Bring it, Yogamama!)

And if that’s the case I really need to know this, so I can make it into a 6-week session for February, so call me, k?)

But, I got to the studio and all my right people walked in: Jim and Bob and Mirium, and Linda, and Wolf!  my new person, and another new person, Brenna! who is a yoga teacher herself, and Fred and Lenore and Diane. And seeing them raised my spirits and my mood even better than the SAD light, so I let all my gunk go, and we rocked out: suns and variations and flow and backbends and forward bends and kapalabhati and warriors and, whew!

Yoga, for those of you who don’t know, is the best medicine.  It will cure what ails ya.  It’s going to get me through 21 days of this damn cleanse, that’s for sure.

Yoga, and my right people, that is.

General Hospital

Today I went to the hospital with Ira so I could drive him home after his colonoscopy.

Question: What’s with all the TVs in hospitals?  I couldn’t find a single place to just sit and read my book in peace and quiet.  In one room it was  the latest horrors from Haiti. In Room 2, 3, and 4 it was a mindless game show, a reality show, and a cooking show.

Does TV viewing aid healing?  Or does it just distract from pain and suffering?

I thought about trying to find the morgue for a little peace and quiet, but I wasn’t so sure there wouldn’t have been a TV  in there too.

My mother was addicted to TV.  She couldn’t handle real life so she lived through lives of the people she watched on TV.  When real life mimicked TV, my mother’s performance in real life was stellar.  But when real life strayed from the script, or a problem  went on too long and she couldn’t just change channels and make it go away, she crumbled.

She joked that when she died, we should just hook her up to the cable, and she’d live forever.

As I walked around the hospital this morning, looking for a TV-free space to read, I thought someone should do a study about the healing effects of watching TV.  In this proposed study, one group would be allowed to watch TV in their rooms, and the other one could only listen to music or look out the window, or read, or sleep.  Then track recovery times.

Yeah, I’d like really like to see that study.

Seeing much better now

I feel sorry for Jared, my optometrist.  I went in there this morning with a whole list of things I needed for my problematic eyes.  It took me almost 20 minutes of complex narrative, complete with subordinate clauses and multiple parentheticals, to lay out all the potential options: continue with bifocal contacts or switch to regular ones and layer with glasses for reading? Reading glasses? Glasses to layer over contacts for computer and reading? And on and on.

And I feel doubly sorry for Dolly on the frames end of this optometric operation.  Good god, poor Dolly.  I walk in, she sees me, and immediately holds her index finger up, says “One minute, OK? and dashes across the street for a double espresso and chugs it before she can even begin to deal with me.

After then, after two whole hours, and much reading about the little boat that flounders along the rocky coast in increasingly smaller fonts,  I emerge with one tester pair of new contacts and no frames at all.  I will return tomorrow to finish.  It’s like a soap opera, except I’m not having Jared’s baby, and Dolly isn’t my biological sister, separated at birth and raised by Mormons.

Oh, and the tester contacts?  Full of win.

Cleanse: Day 3

Still feeling all sattvic and sweet.  But smoothies are a cold thing to eat at night in this weather, which is why most people do these detoxes in the spring. But I need to do it when I’m motivated to do it, when I can be quiet and turn inward, when I can rest and reflect and take a nap if I need to. And that time is now, in deepest January.

In the spring, my life gets wackadoo and extremely rajasic with a training with Yoganand in March, the Yoga Challenge in April, and the birds and the trees and the flowers calling me in all directions in May.

So I am relishing these winter days when I can spend my mornings working on my “Project,” meditating with Holosync, and practicing my yoga, and then in the afternoon, prepping for, and teaching my classes.

In addition, this body cleanse has inspired me to clean up my living space, get a jump on my taxes, straighten out my files, pare down my wardrobe and thoroughly clean my kitchen.  For Xmas I got a book called Unclutter Your Life in One Week by Erin R. Doland (Srsly? One week??? Is she kidding??) but even if it takes longer than a week, it will be glorious to have everything in perfect order by spring.

That’s the plan, in any case. Stay tuned.

Cleanse: Day 2

Went to Ithaca on Saturday to shop for the Cleanse.  I decided not to wait till February as I had originally planned, because  after almost a week without sugar, caffeine and alcohol I felt more than ready.

Started shopping for all the permitted foods at Wegmans and finished at Green Star.  Bought every vegetable in existence from avocado to zucchini–except the ones not allowed: potatoes, eggplant, corn, tomatoes and peppers.

One observation?  You have to be rich to be really healthy.  The book warned that the cost of the food on this cleanse (all organic) would triple your weekly food bill, and I’d say that’s about right.

Here’s most of it before I put it away:

groceries January 10

(The chia seeds are coming in the mail.)

I thought this would be hard, but it’s surprisingly easy!  I actually LIKE eating like this.  You have 2 liquid meals and one solid meal a day.  The liquid meals are in the morning and at night and the solid meal is at lunch time.  So for example, yesterday morning I juiced 6 carrots, 2 celery stalks, one apple and 2 leaves of kale.  For lunch I had a chicken stirfry with onions, garlic, rappi, daikon radish and zucchini over kasha with green beans. Then for “dinner” a smoothie consisting of almond milk, coconut water, avocado, kale and mango.

I know, I know, it sounds uh, kinda gross, but it was delicious.  No, really.

There is a 12 hour “fast” involved, which is simply not to eat after dinner.  So I finished my smoothie at 7 PM and ate my breakfast at 7 AM.

And that’s basically the plan for the next 5 days, and then I will evaluate and possibly continue on for another 2 weeks.

I feel soft and focused and serene.  My energy level–no, it’s not the “level” of my energy, it’s the “quality” that’s different.  It feels like a lower vibe, but it’s really a “different” vibe.  I’m not as time-freaked, for example, not as concerned about how many hours there are in the day and how I’ll never get it all done.

I like this feeling.  So we’ll see.  This is the end of Day 2.  Stay tuned.

Oh, and here’s the puzzle, day 7:

Puzzle Day 7

A Slow Day, with snow

A little fresh snow, light and fluffy, is a joy on a winter day.  We got a few inches overnight, and then a little more during the day.

I am slow these past days with no caffeine to jolt me, no wine to mellow me out, no sugar to jazz me.  There is something rather nice about this slowness, even though it feels very peculiar.

I wrote.  Did some laundry.  Paid some bills.  Walked Boomer.  And watched birds.

The Eliminator

Junco

A Little Sun? Please?

So, first, here’s the progress on the puzzle as of yesterday:

Puzzle Day 4

And the other happiness of the day was that I got back into the writing groove.  I am safeguarding the hours between 9 and 11 A.M. everyday to write, and I feel really good about that.

But 3 days ago I gave up caffeine as part of the Elimination Diet that precedes the cleanse and I am really feeling an energy sag as a result.  I know I will bounce back, but at this point, I’m finding myself  slogging through these days, waiting for the energy to kick in.  This dreary, sunless, cold weather isn’t helping a lot either.

Oh, January! Is it really time to take out the S.A.D. light again?

Clean

I just finished reading Clean by Alejandro Junger  and I now I am all fired up to do a detox.  I want to see what will happen.  I wonder how I will feel after 21 days of eating nothing but liquified kale?

(That is a complete misrepresentation of the cleanse diet, but kale IS a very big player.)

Whenever I do weird interesting eating experiments like this (and tell people about them) Whoah!  Big reactions!

“Whatta ya doing that for? Aren’t you worried you won’t have enough energy to keep up your practice?  What if you lose too much weight?  You’re so tiny as it is!“  And on and on.

So here’s why I am going to do this particular detox:

1.  It makes a lot of sense to “clean house” periodically.

2. This particular cleanse is very sane and sensible.

3. I want to see if it’s possible for me to choke down a green smoothie at 4:30 in the morning.

4. I want to prove to myself that I can live without all the things that make life worth living: caffeine, sugar, alcohol, wheat, and dairy.

But most of all,

5.  I want to see if I can raise my vibe as a human being to off-the-chartness.  I want to dump any amma, any stuff that is blocking or weighing me down, dampening my vibe. I want to boost my vitality, see how high I can go and still live, and yet not be a totally obnoxious representation of a human being.

Right now I am doing a week of Elimination–going off caffeine and sugar and alcohol, just so next week won’t be a complete jolt to my system.

Then, next week, it’s 2 liquid and one solid meal a day and a 12 hour fast overnight.  I am going to take it one week at a time, but if I know me, I’ll probably go the full 21 days.

I’ll be posting about my progress, but please, no comments like: Whatta doing THAT for??? Okay?

Thanks.

Puzzle 2010

You know how when you take down the tree, there is this void, this emptiness?

Well, to mitigate this emptiness, to fill it with something amusing (if not piney and sparkly) I do a big jigsaw puzzle every year.

Here’s this year’s puzzle:

puzzle 2010

And here is the progress of 2 days:

2 Days

As I’m working I am noticing that putting together a puzzle is a lot like writing a book.

First you find the edge pieces (the boundaries, the scope of the project), in my case, a time boundary: 1 year.

Then you study the image on the box and begin to find pieces that match the colors.  (This is the hard part.)

The image of what I want my book to look like is really fuzzy at this point, but I do have quite a few pieces.

When you find puzzle pieces that fit together there is always this little frisson of joy–even if there are still hundreds of pieces left –because you know you are “getting there” and the image is beginning to come together.

I’m studying the image on box a lot at this point, then pawing through the pieces, looking for that one that’s mostly green but with some flecks of brown in it, and the lavender one with the blue.

I know that piece is in the box, and that is the supreme security of a jigsaw puzzle.  You know all the pieces are there; your job is simply to find them and put them where they belong.

But when it comes to a book, there is no assurance that all the pieces are there.  In fact, I’m pretty sure they’re not.  And that means I’m going to have to make them, and then make them fit.

(Did you ever want to take scissors and cut a puzzle piece to fit?  Me too!)

You know, you can actually do that with a book.

And that is why it is so very excellent to be a writer.

Excitements

This is the juicy time, the time of the blank calendar, the time of endless possibilities, the time to state, in no uncertain terms, what I want.

I’m a resolution maker, but this year I am changing the word “resolution” to “excitement.”  I am not asking, “What do I want in the coming year?” but rather, “What would make me exited in the coming year?”

So, here it is:

1. The Book (aka “The Manual”)  A lot of people say that they have a book in them, and I am one of them.  I have bits and scraps and pieces that need to be assembled into something that has a beginning, a middle and an end.  But my “excitement” is to FINISH IT.  It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be DONE.  This is my main excitement for 2010.

2. The Body. I am so excited about taking my physical body to its peak of health and vitality, strength, endurance and flexibility.  I am starting this new year with a detox (in February) and I’m looking forward to ramping up my strength and endurance and taking it to a whole new level this year.

3. Yoga.  Personal Sadhana: I have absolutely fallen in love with Pranakriya Yoga.  This year I will continue to train with Yoganand and practice and grow my sadhana.  I also love Ashtanga and my morning practice with Christine & Co. and I will continue to get up early and breathe and grow and evolve in that practice.

The Studio: I want to keep growing the community of the studio with not only classes but other events: films, workshops, casual get-togethers.  The Lounge is a complete blessing and I want to exploit it more.  I would also love to see more people come and at least try a class.

Those are my excitements for 2010.  What are you exited about?  What are you going to rock this year?