My Yoga Baseline

Let’s be clear. I ain’t skinny. At 5’8”, 185 pounds, all the charts say I’m overweight. And, though I’ve got a fair amount of muscle from years of bike riding and cutting and hauling firewood in my younger days, and though I lost 25 pounds (well, 30, but got 5 back, read back over the last year of posts to read about losing the weight), I’m carrying at least 30 pounds of extra fat around the middle. At 62 years old, it’s unlikely I’m going to become a yogi, a person who is proficient in yoga. And by proficient, I guess in my mind, I would have to be able to do a full lotus and maybe some other complicated, twisty poses.

Of course, by some definitions, a Yogi is simply someone “on the journey,” which reminds me very much of psychotherapy, Zen Buddhism, or nearly any “discipline.” At any rate, let me tell you some of the things I can’t do, so that, if over time I can do them, we can agree that Yoga has had an effect on my body. The possible mental/spiritual benefits I may report on, but I don’t know how I can objectively report a baseline short of asking people to write down their impressions of my personality now and some time in the future to see if it’s changed.

I cannot do a full or even a half lotus. In those poses you start cross-legged, bring one foot on top of the other thigh for half lotus and the other foot on top for full. Your knees should be touching or almost touching the floor. When I bring either foot on top of my thigh my knee sticks almost straight up in the air. And with one foot on a thigh the other won’t come anywhere near the other.

I cannot hang one arm behind my head, put the other behind my waist, and grasp hands, in fact my arms stay at least 6 inches apart (I’ll have my wife measure the gap before my next post).

I cannot do a full squat where my butt touches the back of my calves. I can almost get there, but my knees or thigh muscles protest. Same thing when I’m kneeling: can't sit on my heels.

I can touch my toes, hold my ankles, but can’t put my put my hands flat on the floor with my knees locked. I’ve got about 4 inches to go. I can’t come near folding my body in half and putting my head on the floor when I’m sitting on my butt no matter where my legs are. When doing “the clam” I get the closest. That’s where your legs are out in front of you with the soles of your feet together, you hold your feet and pull yourself forward and drop your head. Honestly, I can’t begin to do it. Maybe I’ll have Rita take a picture.

There are a million other things I probably can’t do or do right, but these are some of the important ones. So I have a long way to go. If you read my post last week, you know that one of the issues I have is a history of back pain. I’ve been pushing myself pretty hard this week, practicing yoga at least an hour each day using “Priscilla’s Yoga Stretches” a series of 15 minute programs which shows on WVPBS-2 in the Charleston, WV and online at http://video.scetv.org/video/1832171696/. She runs through her lessons pretty fast, so I take at least 30 minutes to complete a fifteen program because I’ll pause it to spend more time doing what I can do to approximate what she’d doing and maintaining and stretch more deeply into my facsimile of the pose.

In the course of my stretching, I have had cause to well remember back problems which plagued me between the ages of 25 and 45. I’ve come to realize that I never fully healed, or perhaps more accurately never fully strengthened myself after those episodes of severe back spasms and pain. And that is one of the reasons I am so tight.

The physical therapist who worked with me taught me that it was not really through stretching that I would heal my back, but through strengthening exercises. She taught me some, but after the pain receded I stopped doing them. The bike riding I do works some of those muscles as do a couple of the machines I use sometimes at the YWCA Nautilus, but I have to confess that actually strengthening my back and stomach muscles more than has been needed to keep pain at bay has not been something I’ve felt motivated to do…until now.

As I do the yoga stretches I feel the old ball of tightness down in my lower back on the left side and know that is what is keeping that left knee high in the air when I attempt half lotus and what is stopping me from bending far at the waist.

So, while I say I’ve been practicing yoga an hour or so a day, I’ve also been spending additional time as I sit and watch TV or even use the computer working those back and stomach muscles, stretching this way and that, tensing my “core”, even getting down on the floor sometimes to work on something. And as I walk around the house or take a walk outside, I’m trying to keep my stomach and lower back muscles tightened, which results in what I think of as the Denzel Washington walk (or the George W. Bush walk, but I really don’t want to compare myself to him)—a military walk: stomach in, back straight, butt tucked.

Okay, enough about me. How about posting your story about your back or your experience with back pain, yoga, or exercise? 

Yoga: How Far Can I Go?

Does anyone get through life without back pain? 50% of Americans experience back pain each year! My back problems are probably relatively small. Sometime in my twenties I strained it pretty badly. Since I was living in poverty at the time, it took me awhile to see a doctor, and when I did, I took the meds he prescribed, stayed off my feet as much as I could for thirty days, did some of the exercises and got over it…more or less. Apparently what I actually did was to start favoring one side of my body that didn’t hurt as much, and over the next fifteen years I had a couple recurrences, for which I sought help from a chiropractor.

That provided relief, but finally, at the age of forty-two I went down. Literally. On the floor of my classroom. During the pledge of allegiance. I’d been taking increasingly higher doses of ibuprofen for a few weeks, going to a chiropractor for the past week, and had been squatting to try to stretch out the spasmed muscles of my lower back, and on that morning they said, “No more.” I curled up in fetal position, motioned for one of the fifth graders to bring me pencil and paper, and wrote a note to the school secretary to call an ambulance. Another teacher came, took the students to the playground, and I was carried out on a stretcher. With a month of sick days, the help of codeine, valium, and a fantastic physical therapist, I learned how to start strengthening the muscles of my lower back and abdomen, especially on the side that had become weak from my efforts to protect myself from pain. Luckily, my problems were with muscles, not discs.

Fast forward to age 62 and retirement. I have had no relapses since then. I’ve maintained my physical condition through bike riding and using the Nautilus machines at the YWCA a couple times a week.

But I would never claim to be limber. I am flexible…to a point. Which, I guess is true of everyone. Over the last five years or so, I’ve dabbled a bit with Yoga. I participated in a couple sessions at a resort and found out what it was – basically stretching and breathing mindfully, and I bought a DVD by Lilia of PBS fame and have used that off and on for the past couple years. But Lilia was a bit too easy on me – she didn’t push me to go farther than what I was already able to do, and consequently, I made little progress.

I recently attended a Yoga class while in New York City from a young man who showed me a bit more about what a true practitioner of yoga does. Of course, I knew that people who “practice Yoga” do amazing things, turning themselves into human pretzels, but I have never pictured myself attempting that.

Now I’m not so sure. Or, at any rate, now I’m open to stretching my body…pushing my body to stretch to new limits.

When I returned home I started with another PBS yoga program, this one called Priscilla’s Yoga Stretches, which airs on our secondary PBS channel (Suddenlink channel 5 from 6:30-7:00 am….I use the DVR). Priscilla does things that are far beyond my capability, but she says that if you keep trying, you will make progress.

When I say I’m not limber, I mean I can’t even squat comfortably. I can barely sit cross-legged, let alone do a half lotus (one foot on the other thigh) where the knees rest on the floor as Priscilla does. I can’t hang one hand behind my head and bring the other one up from below to clasp hands…not even close. So if I’m going to make real progress with Hatha Yoga, I realize I’m going to have to stretch some muscles and ligaments to “open my hips” and “open my shoulders”.  

Many people reject Yoga without trying it because of its exotic name or because they believe it is a religion. Many practitioners report benefits that have some of the earmarks of religious claims: connecting the mind and body, opening up of energy centers (chakras), and such. While I’m not seeking benefits greater than a more limber and presumably longer lasting body, I am open to the possibility that restoring my body, and most importantly, my spine, to a healthier, straighter, more limber and resilient condition while breathing in ways that lull my mind into a hypnotic or meditative state might over time improve my mood or even result in what are sometimes called transcendental experiences.

As I did with my weight as I changed my diet and dropped thirty pounds (of which I have now gained back several) over the past year, I may report my progress in this space from time to time. If I open any chakras (or learn what they are), I’ll let you know, too.

A Non-Religious Prayer

*2 Day Diet Report at end

I was musing (isn’t that the promise of this blog?), about how I ended up so incredibly busy working the last couple months, even though I’m now fully retired. Somehow my musing led me down the rabbit hole of religion and my beliefs (or lack of). Because the way that I have approached the creation of the project that has consumed so many waking (and dreaming) hours, AWARE: Artists Working in Alliance to Restore the Environment (www.awarewv.org), is not very different from the way “true believers” approach their lives.

Though I don’t attribute my mission to an outside force, or God, I do feel an inner compulsion that is probably very much like the feeling religious people express when they say they were “meant” to do something or any of the many ways that idea is expressed.

When I consider the compulsion that drives most of the human population to attribute their success or failure, their purpose in life to an outside force, who are willing to give money and time to create organizations, buildings, cities, and even whole countries (and dreams of all humanity) dedicated to worshiping or celebrating that force, I can’t help but believe that there are, at the very least, biological and physical properties that these ideas derive from.

What I mean by that is that the practice of religion or the practices of religion have real benefits for people whether the beliefs of religion are scientifically observable or confirmable or not. For instance, we know that prayer, or meditation, has value whether the mind is focused on a supreme being or on clearing the mind of clutter. Singing and dancing in large groups or chanting has benefits and can result in states of euphoria whether this occurs among groups of worshipers or attendees of rock concerts or dance events.

So, to me, it’s no big surprise that soon after retiring in the months following the chemical spill into the Elk River which tainted the water of Charleston, WV and 9 surrounding counties, after attending meetings and rallies and lobbying on Earth Day, I began to feel as if there was something important I could contribute. In retrospect, my dreams and fantasies about how I would accomplish this were wildly optimistic. Like someone who reports having received a “vision from above,” it was very difficult for people I talked to about this to convince me that success would be difficult, slow, or unlikely.

Stories abound in all human endeavors of people who believe: in their religious visions, their business endeavors, their scientific pursuits. Rarely is it smooth sailing from vision to reality.

On Thursday, July 3^rd, a scaled down version of AWARE’s first event (my first idea for helping raise money for environmental organizations involved a stadium or the Civic Center) will take place at the Woman’s Club of Charleston. There will be some popular local bands, singer-songwriters, and a few artists selling work. There will be snack food and a cash bar with wine and beer. How many people will show up? Hopefully advance ticket sales do not tell that story, because that number is small. How much money will actually make its way to the groups I hope to help? It’s all in the hands of….no, not a magical power. It’s in the hands of a small group of people who are dedicated to the idea that it’s important to be ACTIVE in environmental issues, and the many other people who have heard of this event, seen the posters, handbills, e-mails or Facebook invites, and are balancing the possibility of going out on a Thursday evening before a holiday for a good cause.

Yes, it’s in their hands…your hands. I hope to see you there if you’re in the area! And, I offer this blessing, as blessings and prayers, I believe, need not be solely for the religious to dispense or benefit from: May your life be enriched through generous giving of your thoughts, time, and resources to finding ways to help make our planet a cleaner, healthier, and more beautiful place for all life.


*My 2-Day Diet Progress Week 34, June 30, 2014

I took a week off from blogging last week, but maintained 177 at weigh in both last week and this week. I seem to have reached a plateau for the past month or so, and will now stop posting weekly, but I will continue posting once at the beginning of each month for at least the next 6 months. I'm still hoping to reach my goal of 165 pounds and maintain that weight, but for now I am very satisfied with my weight and as long as I remain below 180 will remain so.

Beginning weight 11/3/13: 209 lbs.

Height 5'8" Age: 62

Goal weight: 165 lbs.

Total loss goal: 44 lbs.

Beginning waist size: 43 in.

Current waist size: 37.5 in.

Weight end of this week:  177 lbs.

Gain/Loss this week:  no change

Total Gain/Loss:  -32 lbs.

Death Trumps All

*2 Day Diet Progress at end of post

Death trumps all. With many topics in mind as I sit down to write today, the funeral I attended yesterday has to come first. For seventeen years, from 1975-1992, I lived on 17 acres in Roane County, WV, between two Moores: Daryl and Nina (pronounced nine' ah -- she was her mother's ninth child, and I suppose she'd run out of names) Moore and Frazier and Bernice (pronounced Ber’ nis ). I built a house there, and it’s where, with my ex-wife, Pat, we raised our daughter, Hannah (thirty-seven this week), who now lives in Albuquerque, NM. Daryl was Frazier’s uncle, and when I first moved there, they were friends who helped each other out, plowing a garden with a pony, getting a chain to pull a stuck vehicle out of the ditch on the steep, muddy road we shared with two hairpin switchbacks (that’s redundant, but maybe everyone will understand one or the other).

Frazier worked for Pennzoil in the local oil and gas fields and Daryl drove a water truck delivering water to schools (hmm, correlation? I don’t think so; just a lack of a water system and dependence on wells) Sometime in the eighties Pennzoil went on strike and Daryl’s son-in-law took a temporary job as what was euphemistically called a “replacement worker”, known among union guys as a scab. Frazier held Daryl responsible for his son-in-law’s choice, and they never spoke again, that is, Frazier never spoke to Daryl, and he also did some unkind things I won’t go into. Not quite a feud, but definitely a falling out. Daryl was a very laid back country boy at heart, he loved to farm and he had, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful, well kept, “head of the holler” properties you’ll ever see. He died a few years ago of complications from diabetes, and Nina, now 84, still lives in the house alone, her daughter and son-in-law who live on the paved road at the top of the property her only lifeline. She never learned to drive.

Frazier, who had moved to South Carolina to be near children and grandchildren, died in a car accident last week at the age of seventy-six. His children brought him back to West Virginia to be buried on the homeplace, just down the holler from my (former) property. I’d watched the kids grow up, and two of three of them are parents now. Ginny (Virginia), told me that Frazier used to stay up late into the night sitting on their porch to listen to the fiddle music drifting down the creek from my house.

Ginny asked me to sing Country Roads (aka Almost Heaven, West Virginia) at the gravesite ceremony. He was to be buried across the small creek from his house in an area he had used as a garden that would now become a family cemetery. Kenny asked me to sing Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven.” I spent the last few days learning and practicing it.

The funeral itself was in a little country church, one room and some picnic tables outside. A woman who sounded a lot like Hazel Dickens sang a couple hymns, including Will the Circle Be Broken. A soft spoken man Ginny had asked to lead the bulk of the service talked about Frazier, read some handwritten tributes in a hesitant and stumbling way, and spoke confidently about the need for all of the forty or so people, local folks who have no doubt been hearing this message all their lives, to understand that death is only temporary if they just give themselves over to Jesus to be saved. The regular preacher took up that message a little later in the Evangelistic preaching style full of praise Gods, dear Lords, shortness of breath and exclamatory explosive Hut’s and such. It was somewhat hypnotic, but thank goodness he did not actually do an alter call and ask people to join him, and no one offered to.

I don’t think Frazier was that much of a churchgoer, and I don’t think his kids are either. He struck me as the type who might stand in the back of the room with some of his buddies. If Tears in Heaven as a choice is any indication of belief, it reflects a bit less certainty, “Would you know my name if I saw you in Heaven?” And the youngest, around thirty, spent some time in front of the open casket speaking to his father, begging him tearfully to open his eyes, “just open your eyes, just come back to us, it’s easy,” and assuring him when he didn’t respond that he would see him again someday, and reassuring himself that even though they disagreed about a lot of things, that they always talked later and forgave each other.

I also took the opportunity on that beautiful cool spring day to sit on the porch with Nina, who, perhaps reflecting on Frazier’s passing, showed me a quilt she was working on. She has always made quilts. She does the embroidery by hand, but the actual quilting on a machine; I’m not sure if among aficionados that counts as hand-made. She told me a story about a grandson who had asked for a quilt to put in Daryl’s casket, and when he’d come down from the upstairs room where she keeps them with one he said Daryl had always claimed as his own, she decided she ought to have one for her own casket. As I left her, I said, “Don’t be in a hurry to finish that quilt.”

I love the tilt of Daryl's cap. They were married in 1947.

Nina's making this for her casket....

6 Months into a Life of Healthier Eating

My 2-Day Diet Progress Week 26, May 4, 2014 

Beginning weight 11/3/13: 209 lbs.

Height 5'8" Age: 62

Goal weight: 165 lbs.

Total loss goal: 44 lbs.

Beginning waist size: 43 in.

Current waist size: 38 in.

Weight end of this week:  178 lbs.

Gain/Loss this week:  -2 lbs.

Total Gain/Loss:  -31 lbs.

Twenty-six weeks, 6 months, ½ a year. When you hear someone say, or you say yourself, “I’m going on a diet,” how long do you think that will last and what is the goal? In most cases, there’s a goal: ten, twenty, fifty pounds. Sometimes it’s for a health reason, but the words often used in that case are, “My doctor put me on a diet or I learned I have x, and now I have to change my diet." When I began thinking about doing this, literally just a few days before I started, I was just thinking about the weight loss, not the other benefits I might experience. After reading more from the 2 Day Diet book, I began to realize that it was long term commitment to healthier eating that was called for, not a quick loss plan. And my life has changed because I've taken that approach. I believed I was eating a pretty healthy diet before, but despite the fact that I ate a lot fresh fruits and vegetables, fish and poultry rather than red meat mostly, and very few sweets, I was piling on too many carbs--even though many were whole grain. 

Changing my way of eating and getting control of hunger has empowered me, not just in relation to food, but it’s had some impact on my confidence. It’s not that I’m thinner, so I know I look better and have better “self image.” I never had a negative self image. Not really. When I looked in a mirror, I usually thought I looked pretty good, or at least I’d become pretty good at convincing myself I did—and many people have told me they never thought of me as fat, just big or overweight. I have broad shoulders, a big chest (and I had about 50 pounds of extra fat). “You carry it well,” people say. Boy, the euphemisms we use. I was obese. Strong and fit—I could ride my bike up the steepest hills in Charleston, but obese.

So it wasn’t self-image. No, there’s just something about not being addicted to carbs that has helped me think more clearly I believe. Over the decades, especially as a classroom teacher, I learned to be decisive, but I’m feeling even more so—not because I feel a need to take control of situations, but because I feel I’m seeing the intricacies in a situation more clearly and therefore able to see the solution. It is possible, I think, that a healthier diet has balanced my body chemistry.

This is going to have to be another short post, but things should slow down for me soon. Though I must say, the short post format is probably better (for the reader, too), and maybe I'll just begin making more of them. After all, I haven't managed to post my weekly post on Sunday for the past three weeks. 

I’m coming to my second retirement. When I retired from full time teaching almost two years ago, I had a part time job directing Central WV Writing Project, a teacher professional development initiative. It was a 1/3 to ½ time job, and this time of year it’s full time as I get ready for WV Young Writers Day. CWVWP runs West Virginia’s Young Writers Contest, and on Friday I’ll be running a program for over 600 students, their families and teachers with writing workshops by authors, a keynote presentation by Goldenseal editor and songwriter John Lilly, and of course an awards ceremony.

I had taken over in January of 2012 from the previous director, who had gotten ill. The Graduate College of Education and Professional Development at Marshall University South Charleston, where we have our office, wanted to shut the program down, but I volunteered to take it on. I kept it strong, wrote grants, ran summer institutes, professional development programs for teacher, young writer's camps, and the WV Young Writers contest, and now I’m turning it over Dr. Barbara O’Byrne (she’s actually been directing since January—it’s been a pretty smooth transition). I’m hopefully going to have more time for writing, singing, and the job I recently gave myself: running AWARE – Artists Working in Alliance to Restore the Environment, a project of WV Citizen Action Group to organize events to raise money for environmental orgs in WV. Hope you’ll join me in that effort, come out to hear my music with the Contrarians, the Gypsy Stars, or when I’m performing my original songs, or at least keep reading my blog (and leave a comment sometimes? J ). And if you decide to change your eating habits and need some encouragement, give me a shout. Here are a few links where you can check out the other things I do:

www.marshall.edu/cwvwp

www.paulepstein.net

www.contrarianswv.com

www.awarew.org