Tuesday, January 15, 2013

A new post...finally.... a new practice

Where the hell have I been? It's been ages since I've written! I've thought about it, it's crossed my mind to sit down, I thought about titles for new posts and topics for discussion, but the truth of the matter is I never sat down at my computer, opened up my good ole blog and started to type.  Shame on me!   So here I am! A new woman, Mrs. Mitnick and 8 and a half months pregnant! Talk about being busy!

In the past 9 months I have been a busy busy gal.  I have been teaching yoga, 12 classes a week, practicing yoga 5 to 6 times a week, becoming a wife, becoming an aunt, forgetting how to cook, learning to eat pizza and ice cream and oh that's right making a baby.  He is about ripe and ready to become the world's newest yogi, musician, genius....or what ever my little baby boy might want to be, let's be honest, hopefully he is  good with numbers and is interested in, oh I don't know becoming a private investor/ stock broker/ someone that makes money.

So I taught a class tonight, not much different from any other Tuesday night, but as I get bigger and bigger stepping in front of the mirror get's harder and harder.  Not only because of my ever growing waste line, but also because I'm f-ing exhausted and there is a foot in my ribs making it difficult to breath when the room is a little too humid!  Today was a lazy day, and I was feeling super tired as I unlocked the door to the studio, but as I took my place on the podium, my energy came back and I remembered why I keep on keeping on, it's because I love what I do and even the hard days as a yoga teacher are pretty amazing days!'

So today student O stood in front of me, a little to the left.  He has been going non stop for over a year now.  He takes more classes than there are days in the week, and as I watch him day after day I'm noticing him getting more and more tired.  And I get him.  I totally get it, it's the thing in his life that feels good.  He is good at this.  He is good at taking lots and lots of classes, but I also get that one of the beautiful things about yoga is, that the real yoga happens when your not in the room.

Bikram teaches you 26 basic yoga asanas.  It teaches you how to be still in the midst of discomfort, and it teaches you the importance of checking your ego at the door.  Sometimes the best thing you can do, is take it easy, skip a posture, skip a class, hell, skip a week so that when you come back you are stronger and you are doing more of the yoga more correctly rather than to much yoga asana incorrectly.  I thought about myself, in fact some one even asked me tonight "how are you going to manage to take 6 weeks off" my response "let's see if I actually do?"

Since I have been pregnant my yoga has been an experiment.  In the beginning I thought I was going to be uber flexible and able to become a yoga champion with a bowling ball in my gut, then reality set in, and Pranayama became really hard, and then I had super strong days, and then I had to sit down, leave the room, cry a bit, skip a week, eat too much before class and throw up a little in standing separate leg stretching pose, open a window, buy bigger shorts, cry a bit more, have the best standing bow of my life, the worst standing bow of my life and completely give up on ever touching my forehead to my knee.  The bottom line is, I had to check my ego at the door.  I had to take my yoga day by day and I had to learn to take my new body day by day.  That has been my practice for the past nine months. Learning to let go of all of the assumptions and expectations I had for my self.  I'm doing my best every day, that's all I can ask inside and out side of the room.  That's what I preach to student O all the time, to all of my students "hear what you can, do what you can and have a little bit of fun"

So let's start a new chapter, yoga inside and outside of the room.  Yoga as a mom, my toughest classes at teacher training have only started to prepare me for what's in store, but I am positive that those weeks I spent training to be a teacher, these years I have spent pushing myself through the hottest, sweatiest classes have taught me that I'm a lot stronger than I think I am and I am capable of anything.  This yoga makes me bullet proof, sex proof, money proof and when I can let go of all of my attachments to who I was before I was mom and forget about judging who I might become I can get through this tough one too.  So let's get started. Toes on the line! I'm all in.

Oh and I'll try to be better about keeping you guys up to speed too.  I know it's so hard when you don't hear from me!  Keep breathing you guys! Breathing in I calm my self, breathing out I smile.

Namaste
Molly and my soon to be little man!

P.S. a special shout out to my sister tonight, Lyla Jane was born just over 6 weeks ago, you have shown me how strong you are, what an amazing woman you are and what it means to be a new mom! If we were in the hot room, you would be in the front row, showing us all how to get through the hard days with a happy smiling face, english bull dog determination, and the strength of a bengal tiger!