TUNE UPS

Your Body Can Start Anytime, But What About Your

Your  Head?

Lisa Fitzpatrick

 "You're never too old, it's never too late."  I began by relating to this idea in THEORY more than practice. What I never quite expected was when changes actually started to HAPPEN. I suppose there are trained athletes, dancers and lucky souls who have an innate sense of dominion over themselves but for many who practice Yoga, certainly me, my approach was more pedestrian. Basically healthy? Check. Even so I fancied myself more like a rough piece of clay.  Never when you expect them to be, never what you thought they'd be ... sustained physical changes did begin to creep in as a practiced more. Ah-ha moments struck at times as well, when I would hear the very same line of dialogue for the umpteenth time and yet as if for the first when the words magically matched up with a moment in a pose. You don't know what you don't know, until you do. To me, that's the beauty of Yoga and that idea is now at the very center of what keeps me going.

I first discovered Bikram in 2001 when I was living in San Francisco. After picking up some rhythm and a steady practice (I'm talking six months to a year) it was surprising how significant some of the changes I was making were. I didn't know I could stretch this far or that far...I didn't know I could breath that deeply...hey, I'm standing up straighter. I hadn't known what was possible. Truth is, beginning in college when I first learned the terms Kundalini, Hatha and Iyengar, I've had this pervasive instinct that someday I'd really get into Yoga. Not on some kind of adept track; I just knew that this was one long-standing aspiration my life would be incomplete without. Ever curious, I've since read loads of books, always on the hunt for deeper insights into the mechanics of the universe. For whatever reason, however, it took me a decade to lay down the gauntlet and make that dream happen for myself.

When I finally did begin I thought "keep your goals simple," but it was within the practice things began to get really interesting, and my perspectives, on and off the mat, slowly changed. The best of what I've learned so far is the less I theorize about what Yoga is and is not for me, the richer it gets. Just follow the dialogue and let your body show you the way.

I know this sounds unbelievably trite. "What kind of saccharinny, new age pablum is that?" some may ask. Well believe me, as an editor I've published my fair share, with teachers of all stripes. The culture of noise surrounding these truisms which can give this 5,000 year old practice a thick patina of "cheese" can be the very thing that makes these simple insights difficult for some to hear, and make it nearly impossible for sincere teachers today to convey without sounding like some tofu-toting, navel gazing, PETA activist. For many people the word enlighten still simply means "to brighten a space." Perhaps that's the only definition any of us ever really need. The body itself is blissfully ignorant of fashion trends and fads of philosophy or "group think." It is, plainly, the temple of life that all those boring old texts of all faiths claim it to be. Everybody's got one. Everyone can do Yoga. Everyone can get something out of it and perhaps even more than they expected. Even me.

What keeps me returning to the torture chamber? I put faith in a simple idea-that your body has its own natural intelligence and what's more is that it WANTS to be healthy, even when you don't, or believe it can't. It's vastly more than a jumble of tendons, muscles and neural pathways that you can inspect under a microscope or through an X-ray. You can count on it - and in practice you can lean into that idea while your discerning mind takes a brief hike. Often I've had friends over the years say, "Don't you find it boring and repetitive, doing exactly the same exercises in exacting the same order, every time you go?" To which I always reply, "That's the beauty of it!" The mind quiets-what Herculean relief. Your body gets to know the poses or what Bikram calls the moving meditation, your muscles build memory and the teacher's voice drives the process so you don't have to. How cool is that? In fact, Bikram refers to his Sequence as "a song he wrote to the human body" (p. 96, Bikram Yoga).  I like that. Many take yoga for exercise, but the real genie-in-a-bottle is all the other high-potency perks that come from regularly sweatin' it out for 90 minutes.  Call it a gas station, a natural high, a happy antidote to pill-popping of all sorts; it all works.

Over the holidays I was speaking with a family member, an Anatomy Professor at UW (and fellow, occasional Bikramite) who affirmed that, yeah, those things they say in class about compression, natural irrigation and internal cleansing? Physiologically, it's all true. It all works precisely as they say. In fact the lymph vessels, for example, are "flimsy" (her word) and need help from gravity and muscular contractions in order to move fluids along. The breathing exercise at the end of class, aka "the abdominal compression against the Thoracic duct" (I had to look it up, worth the effort) does exactly that. Even I had thought the dialogue for this particular pose sounded heavily esoteric. Who knew? Now, I try harder.

Practice makes the body and the head, the heart and the lungs more pliant, receptive and calm. It certainly does mine, at least. Instead of "thinking hard," now I practice "trusting hard." Expect yourself to be capable of more than you think is what I tell myself. Why not? The body talks and will talk back to you, regardless of when you begin. And so I write to you dear reader, while the body may be ever-ready, what about the brain?

 Lisa can be found practicing at the Capitol Hill studio.

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