For Monday’s Yoga for Posture I wrote about Mountain Pose. When I was working through the step by step, how to do the posture, guide I got to thinking back over how I came to love this posture.
You know I do a lot of Bikram Yoga. Unfortunately, Bikram Yoga makes assumptions about the practitioner’s anatomy that flat out don’t hold for me. The end result of this is that I can’t do several of the postures without modification, and I can’t do 2 of them at all.
One of the postures I cannot do is hands to feet pose. I won’t bore you with the details, suffice it so say that if I do hands to feet pose I will blow out my lumbar discs, while destroying my hip joints. Since I don’t want to do that, instead of hands to feet, I do 30 seconds of mountain pose instead.
With one modification, I close my eyes.
Those two, 30 second periods of time give me a chance to
- align my spine,
- feel my breath
- feel my heartbeat
- feel my balance
- tune into every muscle, bone and joint in my body and see what’s going on
- practice perfect posture
It’s an amazing experience. I recommend it.
Bait and Switch
And here is the turn. I said I do a lot of Bikram Yoga. The truth is, I used to do a lot of Bikram Yoga, right up until some idiot in Wuhan saw a bat and instead of thinking, “Oh, that’s kind of weird, gross and creepy” he thought…”MMM, yummy!” Now I don’t do Bikram Yoga at all.
On the bright side, my studio has finally re-opened. On the not as bright side, it’s summer, and I’m on my annual summer yoga hiatus. On the really not as bright side, the studio is struggling. Hopefully sanity will prevail and when the kids go back to school after Labour Day, our halfwit powers that be will further reduce the stupidity, and enough normality will return that yoga studios and gyms will be able to survive.
I read the most distressing thing a few minutes ago. According to the CDC, about ¼ of Americans (25.5%), aged 18 to 24, have seriously considered suicide in the last 30 days.
Okay, folks, this is really fucking bad. That particular age range is the final years of growing up, and these stupid fucking lockdowns have a generation on the cusp of adulthood seriously considering checking out.
What in the hell are we doing?
Suicides, drug overdoses, depression, anxiety, anger, domestic violence, child abuse, all skyrocketing as we protect kids and young adults from a virus that doesn’t harm them.
This is supposed to be Wellness Thursday. Which it was going to be as I riffed on using Mountain Pose for posture correction and meditation as a leap into living well.
But I read about that CDC study and I can’t. I have three young children, and I’m doing everything in my power to help shepherd them through other people’s stupidity. Other kids simply aren’t so lucky. Other men also aren’t so lucky, as I have been, with my industry being deemed critical. I’m good, when so many aren’t.
So, no happy stories today. No cheesy pop culture references. No admonition to get out there and exercise. Instead, a request.
Connect. Reach out to someone. Show someone you give a shit. Maybe they’re doing fine, cruising through the bat flu lockdowns with no problems.
Then again, maybe not. And maybe you touch the life of someone who really needs it.
