Hey everybody - I'm a podcaster now! If you know anything about me, you probably know I love adding to my list of "skills" (often much to the detriment of mastering anything) and this past week I added "start a podcast" to that list. Each of my episodes is one 20-40 minute yoga session, mostly with me just calling out the sequence (and a little bit of blathering). You can find it on
Pocket Casts (my choice for podcast listening),
Apple Podcasts (where they've bleeped out the word "bullshit" from my description) and
Anchor. At least on Pocket Casts, you can just search for "amber yoga" and I'll come up. Since I'm throwing something into the world, I thought I might as well blog about it. And if I'm going to blog about it, I might as well give you all my thoughts on yoga.
Why Yoga
My best friend came to visit me recently, and I told him I was starting to get serious about yoga - sticking to my home practice most mornings, exploring the various studios in Gothenburg and taking advantage of the free yoga classes held every Tuesday night in a church. "So why do you do yoga?" he asked me. It was something I hadn't thought about in a while - yoga is something I have just done for a long time - nearly 20 years.
I practice because it requires me to inhabit my body.
Most of my life is spent in my head. I'm a programmer by trade, and though I've had jobs that required more physicality (wedding photographer), my body is often something that needs to get "out of the way". When I think about my body in my more physically demanding jobs, it's often that it was hurting, twisted painfully as I tried to get a shot behind me, failing on a hot day when I hadn't had enough to drink. Much of my experience in my body is "pushing through" in order to pursue my intellectual pursuits. Even sitting at my desk and dealing with elbow pain while I code is me ignoring my body in order to do something with my mind.
Yoga is different. The only thing necessary in yoga is to be in your body. I love the minute detail to positioning - right hip forward, chest open, lift the arches of your feet. I love the feeling of individual muscles tightening and releasing, of being in control of those sensations. I carry this detailed awareness of myself throughout my day, even if I choose to ignore it at times.
I practice because it requires me to sit with discomfort.
My longest-running yoga teacher is named Emily. She taught at my gym when I lived in Arlington and I took classes with her for a few years, even arranging a work schedule that left room for her twice-weekly morning session. I learned a lot from her but one of the ideas I return to often is the idea of "sitting with discomfort." In yoga and in almost nowhere else in my life, I intentionally create discomfort in my body and mind. Not for the sake of discomfort itself, but in order to grow. My limbs will never be more flexible if I do not tolerate the near-pain of a deep stretch.
In addition to any literal physical benefits of working with discomfort is the ease of mind one can experience. If you can train your brain to tolerate discomfort, you won't have to escape so much of your life. I think about this on the tram a lot. Everyone around me is looking at their phone, mostly just scrolling away at some feed. We're not happy doing it - we're just filtering out the discomfort of being bored. Yoga can teach us to sit with it, tolerate it, handle the noise of our own minds with more ease.
One of my newer yoga teachers reiterates that yoga should be joyful in the body - each pose an expression of the body's love of movement. And if any particular pose is not joyful, it should be modified until it is. Marrying these two concepts is at the heart of my yoga work at the moment. Can discomfort be joyful?
I practice because I want to be nimble.
I've been practicing for a long time and more frequently now than ever before. I think I understand at this point: yoga is never going to make me skinny. I don't mind anymore. Maybe in the past I expected more. Now I expect yoga to make my body nimble, graceful, balanced. And I do think it does.
I also know that as I get older, this movement will be more important to my health, particularly flexibility. I want to be able to keep turning my neck, touching my toes, twisting into a backbend.
I practice because meditation is awful.
I have read all the headlines: meditation is apparently the thing that will make me more focused, happier, more productive and generally up the awesomeness of everything I do. Except, it's fucking awful. I've never been able to make myself meditate for anything more than a few minutes before wanting to scream. But movement meditations are great for me. Maybe they don't count - I don't know - but I do find it hard to think about anything else when I'm practicing.
Home Practice
When I came to Sweden, I wanted to find a yoga class but we were super-broke and I was scared of going to a class with instruction I wouldn't understand. For the first time in my life, I started to practice at home. It has really changed the way I think and feel about yoga. If you practice exclusively at a gym, I highly recommend giving it a try.
Listening to your own body
In a class, there's always a pressure to push yourself to the same edge as the teacher, as the other students around you. This can be a good thing but it is often a bad thing, as you fail to listen to your own body. In a home practice, if the video you're listening to asks you to do a move you know often hurts, you can
just do something else. It's silly to even write it, but I think many of us will just push through it even though we know it's bad for us. We don't want to "mess up" in class.
Having a home practice has completely changed this for me. I spend half my yoga classes "in the wild" doing whatever I want. If I do vinyasa differently than the teacher, I don't really care - the point is to warm up and that's what I'm doing. There are yoga moves I never perform because I know they bother my bum knee. Having a home practice has given me the confidence to make adjustments when I'm in a public setting.
Naked, I Fart
There is such comfort available in a home practice that is impossible around other folks. For one, you have to wear clothes. I often practice at home in my underwear - it's comfy and I don't have shit getting in my way. And don't get me started on all the bodily functions. Yoga is half twisting poses and the other half squatting. Being worried about queefing around two dozen rail-thin gym queens can really ruin a girl's zen.
Why Yoga from Me
So why start a podcast? Why does my voice need to be part of this yoga thing? The short answer is: why not? I'm a person and I practice. But I've been thinking a lot about diversity lately and the yoga world makes me crazy in this regard. Yoga is a 2000-year old spiritual practice that originated in India. And yet nearly all of the yoga teachers I've had, all of the famous YouTube yoga stars, all the bestselling books, are by young, white, attractive, thin women.
I've learned so much from these women. I do yoga by their videos. I read their books. I take instruction from them at the gym or studio. But I look around the room and everyone looks like me, but younger and thinner.
Where is everyone else? Where are the yoga practitioners of color? Where are the fat women? Where are the old guys? (To be fair, lots of old guys in the books / posters around yoga studios.) Where are people with disabilities? And goddamn it,
where are the Indians? The fact that nearly every strong yoga voice I can find is a whole lot like my own voice is irritating and embarrassing.
So in part, I wanted to do this podcast just to throw another voice in the mix. The voice of someone who doesn't have the time or energy to make this a full-time pursuit. I do yoga for 20 minutes a day and that's it. I'm not thin, I'm not particularly flexible. And I probably never will be. I've been at this for ages and I don't have a lithe, strong "yoga body". That alone would be unusual in the yoga world. I want to hear from more voices, so even though I'm only checking off one a half boxes for diversity (young, thin), it still seems worth doing.
My Yoga Resources
Finally, since I've not written about yoga before (can you tell? What is this like a million words?), I wanted to paste all my favorite yoga resources just in case it's helpful to anyone:
- NOLA trees. This lady is one of the few voices of diversity (again, checking just the one box...) in my yoga world. I don't actually know if she does videos but she does teach and she has a wonderful Instagram feed.
See all those "waves"? They weren't there a few weeks ago when we visited - the ice was completely solid and very thick. Temperatures have been consistently above freezing! So the ice is melting. All the same, I was surprised to find it was still frozen over. I guess once a lake freezes like this it doesn't want to let go.
Puddles on the ice.
So then, Stockholm. Thursday night I bundled myself from work into a train into a little hostel in Stockholm's Gamla Stan (old town). It was really nice to be in the old town - at night it's very quiet and in the morning none of the shops are open so none of the tourists are about and it's quite lovely to walk around.
For whatever reason I took a ton of verticals so my apologies for all the scrolling you must now do.
One thing that struck me on this trip was a number of Swedish things I now take for granted. For instance, every toilet paper roll in Sweden is covered by this little metal hinged contraption that holds the roll in place and provides a convenient lever for ripping off the paper. In the hostel, every time I went into a bathroom, that cover had been flipped up - the other hostel residents apparently uninterested or ignorant of how it works. I also noticed several people standing around waiting for a bathroom that was not locked. I could tell it was not locked because the little lock bit was white (instead of red). I've been here long enough that much of this stuff is really self-evident to me and it's weird to notice other people having trouble with it.
As in most of my travels, the majority of my time was spent just literally wandering around. I did a couple of walking tours, a tiny bit of shopping, saw a movie (I, Tonya). But mostly just walking around.
Traveling hasn't made me as excited in recent years as in the past. Maybe because I've been able to do it so much more frequently. Or maybe I'm just going through a weird life phase. Or maybe none of the above and I'm just a mopey person.
I went to Skogskyrkogården because it's a UNESCO listed site. Honestly, I didn't think all that much of the place and I don't really know how it's of uncomparable benefit to humanity. I had had in mind the idea that George and I might try to see all of the UNESCO sites, but after this latest lackluster one, I think I'll just put that aside. Anyway, it was a nice cemetery and all...
I also have been reading the Stevie Nicks (unsanctioned) biography and been getting really into Fleetwood Mac. This is relevant because I was listening to Fleetwood Mac as I was strolling around this cemetery and just getting really down. I maybe need more uplifting media.
There's a thing in Sweden where people don't leave flowers on the graves themselves but in these other central locations. At the cemetery by our house, for instance, there's a designated place to leave flowers and things for dead loved ones. That way the groundskeepers don't have to go around and pick up all the dead flowers - they can just maintain one little spot. It's eminently practical (and very Swedish).
I don't know why, but there were dozens of tombstones in this back area of the cemetery.
I don't mean to be such a bummer, guys. I'm fine, I think. Just being a little honest here instead of all sunshine and roses.
Anyway, the Stockholm subway has tons of really cool art. I had bought a 24-hour pass so I used it to tromp around and see some of the stations downtown.
Fotografiska was pretty cool. I liked one of the exhibitions a lot: Christian Tagliavini. He makes these elaborate setups and then photographs them. He carves things, 3D prints stuff, sews, does intricate paper work, then makes it look like Renaissance paintings. Really cool.
They also had an exhibition of Ellen von Unwerth's work. It was a huge collection of extremely beautiful women doing sexy things. And it made me feel like a prude because... and maybe I'm just getting old ... but I'm finding all of that really boring. How hard is it to make a beautiful, thin woman visually appealing to people? It's extremely easy, let me tell you. Are beautiful women more interesting? I just don't think so. And I feel like we see the same kind of woman all the time - young, extremely thin, usually white. It's just the same thing over and over and over again. And this was a warehouse-size exhibition of that repetition. I kept looking for some kind of feminist message or for just... something to be said - about women, about femininity, about gender. But there was nothing - just a lot of half-naked women looking beautiful. Maybe I'm just a prude, I don't know.
That was pretty much it! Next trip is back to the states in six weeks. I'll get to see David's house and eat all the things (Tex Mex!) and generally be back immersed in the English language. People who live in DC, make some plans with me. It will be warm (by God!) so hopefully I'll be chipper again.
