do what's hard

I had a weird day today. It started off strong. I went to my favorite yoga class in the city and had brunch with friends afterwards. Then I went home and got into bed. I stayed there until late in the afternoon. I was exhausted.

I went to a chiropractor yesterday. (Dr. Kacie Flegal at her new business Elements of Being, just to make the plug. She's great.) We talked about how I get lightheaded really easily. It happens a lot in my asana practice. I've come close to fainting a few times. I'm also a complete sugar junkie. I have intense cravings for sweets, and I almost always give in. She put it all together for me. After the sugar spikes come the falls. It doesn't help that I don't drink enough water. The result is that my blood sugar is low and my blood volume is low, so I come out of prasarita worried that I might fall over. It's been like that so long, it doesn't even seem unusual anymore.

There have been these moments since I began practicing yoga when I have had flashes that what I consider normal and okay is actually completely contrary to what I believe in. I realized at a certain point, at the end of a certain summer after a certain number of years of daily drinking and lots of coke snorting, that I was not okay unless I was ingesting chemicals. I went to a yoga class the next day, and it became clear by the end of the class that I just had to stop, that I wouldn't be free until I did. So I stopped. (The stopping wasn't quite as easy as I make it sound here, but the realization was sharp and clear.) It happened again around eating meat. I was having chicken at some chain restaurant after a hike and all I could think about was how that very chicken that I was eating suffered immensely so that I could eat it. I could not stop picturing this living, feeling creature in a tiny cage where it could not move and where it had to wait its whole life, painfully, to die. Why would I eat that? Why would I go anywhere near having anything to do with that? In both cases, I just could not hide from the truth anymore. Yoga brings clarity.

Today was the first day in a long time that I didn't have any chocolate. No pastries, no cookies, no cake. Most people probably have lots of days like that, but I really can't remember the last time I have. No refined sugar in my blood (or very little), and I feel really, really tired. And I have a headache. I've been kind of sad and grumpy most of the day. But I don't want to see stars when I do yoga. I want my body to have a steady stream of the nutrients that it needs. And I don't want to be beholden to sweets. It's a health thing. It's also a freedom thing.

I had a conversation with a student tonight about headstand. He really likes tripod, and I feel pretty strongly that tripod's okay in certain circumstances, like coming into from crow or prasarita, but that good old, simple, steady sirsasana is the headstand of choice for our regular practice. Tripod is flashy and for fun, not for the serious focus work of headstand. He clearly disagreed, and we went back and forth about it for awhile. He finally said that traditional headstand is much harder for him, so he should be practicing that more.

Bravo, I thought. Exactly. We do what's easy and we get into these grooves, these mindsets, these habits, these samskaras. In my experience, they are nearly impossible to break by sheer will. If we are even so lucky as to notice them. Something has to open. Yoga has provided me with all of those openings. And then once it's open, the choice is so clear, so obvious. I only have to decide once. There's no struggle, even when it's uncomfortable.

No more daily (or twice daily) pastry. It's fucking with my practice. So obvious.