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Yoga Journal's Makeover Blogs
: Leah Castella
I'm not sure I could precisely call my pains injuries, but they sure are making yoga difficult. The first is a constant, aggravating heel cramp. It pretty much hurts all the time but it really hurts after about ten seconds of any standing pose. Which has made my practice a wee bit challenging. While I've tried the grin-and-bear-it approach, it's just painful enough that it's not really an option. So, my practice has been a bit restrained. It has, however, made me really focus on some of the backbends that I've been working on, since they don't involve my heel. Backbends make me nervous, since I'm constantly convinced that I'm going to permanently injure myself in the process. I have to think hard about how I'm rolling my back and what parts of my spine are activated.
Backbends are, I think, the hardest for a relative beginner like myself to incorporate into a home practice. My back (and, I suspect, many of the rest of you out there) is just in a constant state of stress courtesy to sitting hunched over in front of a computer for most of the day. So any out of the ordinary movement triggers a pretty quick response . . . and not usually a pleasant one. At any rate, hopefully this heel thing will heal itself soon. Which brings us to injury two . . . a swollen, painful finger.
I have to laugh at the fact that the only two injuries I've sustained during this entire process are to my heel and my finger. It's also equally telling that such seemingly minor injuries have such a substantial impact on my ability to practice effectively. It is, I suppose, the flip side of the fact that yoga engages your whole body. When any piece of it is out of whack, you can feel the impact in your whole practice.
That doesn't mean that I can't practice. I can, and I do. And I'm excited by the fact that I've come far enough on this journey to be able to roll with the punches and keep moving forward, albeit in a modified way.
But it's still a pain in the heel.
The week that the article about my yoga makeover came out, I first found out from my friends who have subscriptions to Yoga Journal. I got a few phone calls and some e-mails, including one from an old friend who I hadn't seen in a few years. It was a little shocking, to say the least. Having an article about you in a national publication is a pretty exposing thing. And, having that article focus on a private struggle is even more daunting.
While I wouldn't call myself a particularly private person, this was a lot even for me. In the spirit of the project, I turned to yoga to try to deal with my disquiet about the article. It turned out to be an effective tool. I spent a couple days focusing on restorative poses. I did a lot of forward bends and other seated poses, and spent a long time in Savasana. I was really trying to use the practice to obtain a sense of peace and balance with myself, which worked really well. Ironically, much of my disquiet was anticipatory. It was actually a few weeks after the article came out that I actually was able to get a copy for myself. By then, the yoga had calmed me down and I was able to really enjoy the article.
Since I've started doing yoga, I've wanted to have one week where I practiced every day. It doesn't seem like such a big goal, but, as I'm sure many of you can appreciate, carving out space to practice each day is challenging when you have so many demands on your time. Despite the challenge, I really want to see how it feels to get a daily dose of yoga. I was hoping that this week I would do it. Things started out on the right note. Monday and Tuesday I had a vigorous home practice and Wednesday I met with Jason. We worked on taking the Sun Salutations and flowing from them straight into standing poses. I loved it. I really felt like I could put together the pieces of what I've learned into a fluid, almost dance-like series of movements, and for the first time I understood the concept of flow as it applies to yoga. It also made me see how much each yoga pose fits into other yoga poses. I think I realized that in concept, but my home practice has always been a bit choppy. I do one pose, then stop and adjust and move into the next pose and I continue on like that for the rest of the practice. It's rewarding, but this was something entirely different.
Then I missed Thursday. I can't even recall precisely why. I'm sure it was some combination of friends and wine and food, but whatever the reason, I couldn't bring myself to practice. And on Friday, I was so bummed that I hadn't accomplished my goal that I skipped again. I got it back together on Saturday, and tried to really incorporate the flow methods that I had worked on with Jason. And on Sunday, I took a class so it ended up being five out of seven days. Not bad, but not quite what I was going for either.
One of these weeks, I'm going to practice for seven days straight. I'm not sure why I've fixated on this as a goal, but I have. I want to prove to myself that I can do it, but more importantly, I want to see what it feels like. Yoga brings to the surface misalignments that I wasn't aware of. The more yoga I do, the more awareness I achieve. But the memory fades on the days in between the practice. I think that if I remove those days, at least for a short period of time, my awareness will be heightened and I'll be able to pinpoint the things that push me off balance. Maybe not.But I won't know until I try, which is why each week on Monday I start with the intention of including in my week a daily dose of yoga.
I'll say straight away that I shamelessly stole this title from an article that a friend of mine sent me about yoga. When I read it, the article really resonated with me but after a few more months of yoga, I think I've finally started to really understand what the author was getting at. When you're heavy like I am, self consciousness about your body permeates everything you do. In truth, that statement probably applies to almost every women I've met, whether she's heavy or slender, but the difference for the heavy person is that you feel like you're being judged in a less-than-postiive way all the time. So when you feel like you can't do something because of your size, it's like being cut off at the knees. That happens in yoga more than I would like. There are certain poses that I just can't do. It has nothing to do with tightness—it's about the size and shape of my body. Seated twists, for example. My legs are short and they're wide so getting one leg all the way over the other leg with my foot on the floor, and then putting my elbow on my knee just won't happen. When I realized this for the first time in a class I was mortified. It wasn't just that I couldn't do the pose, but that I couldn't do the pose because my body was all wrong. It brought back every size insecurity I've ever had because, of course, in my head the fact that I couldn't do the pose means there's something wrong with my body.
One of my biggest struggles has been to come to grips with this and to recognize that not all poses work for all body types, and that there's no shame in using props to compensate for short arms or tight hamstrings. Or that sometimes, certain poses aren't for you. The truth is, the "proper" yoga postures don't work for everyone.
I read somewhere that one of the goals of yoga is to push your body to the edge, and then relax into that edge. How you get there can be subtly different depending on your shape. If that wasn't the case, then yoga would only be for the select few who happen to have the body type that's most amenable to the poses. And I suspect that even for those folks, some poses don't quite work the way they'd like them to. Admittedly, it's not always easy to embrace this wisdom in the moment. When I attempt a pose that my body just doesn't want to do, I have to fight off the insidious sense that yoga just isn't for my body and remember that yoga as a discipline doesn't judge. It's benefit is for everybody and every body that wants to embrace it.
Well, since I titled one of these blogs The Downward Trend Continues, it seems only fair to call his one the reverse. And it's true. I think I've finally re-found my confidence. Some of it has to do with integrating new poses into my routine. In doing the new poses, I realize exactly how far I've come with the poses that I've been doing since the beginning.
My standing poses are solid enough that I have become aware of more basic alignment issues that impact me in any poses. Like the fact that my left foot really doesn't like to stay planted on the ground. It seems to be planted, but I've always wondered why on that side of Triangle, I sometimes have trouble with my balance. When we did Half Moon Pose, it was even more pronounced and I realized that the reason was that my whole body was ever so slightly leaned backward. And, after drilling that down a little further, I realized the reason for that was that the front part of my foot and my big toe were ever so slightly lifted up off the ground. So this week, that's been my focus. Jason's advice was to visualize a (painless) nail drilling my big toe into the ground. While it hasn't worked perfectly, it has helped. But more importantly, I realized that the ability to be so nuanced about my practice is a product of becoming more comfortable and more competent.
Some of the confidence has to do with going to class again. I've tried out a variety of different classes, and while they are not always easy, my sense of being out of place has definitely lessened. I wish I'd pushed past my class paranoia sooner. I think that I'd see more changes in my body if I had gone to class more, since yoga class is definitely more of a workout than my home practice. On the flip side, though, yoga on my own is something that I think will be more sustainable after this six months is over. While it has a workout component to it, much of the home practice is about centering my mind and body. My energy comes down a few notches and I let my mind rest, which is something that I rarely do in my life. And I like the feeling—so much that I know that after this "Yoga Makeover," I will unquestionably continue with my home yoga practice.
If there's one thing that I haven't done throughout this journey, it's go to class. I had every intention of going. I blocked out the time and bought cute yoga outfits so I wouldn't feel like a slob. I looked at schedules and figured out which classes I thought looked interesting. Then I went, and I hated it. I went again, and hated it even more. I went a third time, and thought this just isn't for me. For those of your who've been reading this blog, you know why. The Shoulderstands that I couldn't do combined with the general feeling of inadequacy just killed the feelings of calm and centeredness that I was looking for.
So, for a few months I practice yoga at home. I have a good home practice. But, the truth is, I'm never going to push myself as hard on my own as I'm going to be pushed in a class—a fact that Jason has pointed out to me on more than one occasion. So, after much prodding, I went to Jason's 12:00 Thursday class at the Bay Club. To my surprise, I liked it. I could do everything. In fact, I even felt like it might be too much of a beginner class for me. It was a revelation. The energy was good and I was able to concentrate on my own practice. There were still things that I didn't understand immediately, but in each instance it didn't take long for me to catch on.
So hopefully, at long last, I can insert the class component back into this experiment.
For the first time in a few weeks, I'm feeling good about yoga. I finally met with Jason again, and we did some new poses, which was fantastic. I love balance poses. I'm not that good at them, but there's something about them that makes me really conscious of the kinks and twists in my body. In principle, I know I should be able to hold these poses. And when I can't, I know it's because I leaned too far forward or too far backward, or because my alignment is not quite right. So I strive for perfect balance in the pose, which is tremendously centering.
I'm hoping this newfound sense of calm stays with me. This whole process is a search for me. And it's having a profound impact on me. I had a long conversation with some friends the other day about my yoga funk, and I realized that it's actually more of an overall funk. I know what it's about. I've always been a person who (I thought) had a pretty clear sense of myself and how people perceived me. But that is leaving me in part because my sense of myself isn't as clear. I became a part of this project because I wanted to address some fundamental components of my life that were unhealthy and unsustainable. I'm too frenetic and too impatient. I can't sit still, and I have trouble with the concept of enough. Yoga is impacting those traits, but it's not conflict free. I can't help but subconsciously resist the transformation out of fear that I'll come out on the other side having not just altered those things that I want to change, but having lost traits that make me who I am.
But for now, I'm not going to think about it. I'm going to stop typing and attempt Tree Pose instead.
I wish I could say that this week was better than last. But again, no Jason. And again, no class. And again, the same thirty minutes of poses that I've been doing for months. And I'm caught in a quagmire because the classes scare me so I don't go, but then I don't learn anything new so my home practice bores me. It's a ridiculous cycle, made all the more ridiculous by the fact that I understand it so well yet don't do anything to change it.
So I did yoga. Three times. And each time, immediately following the practice, I felt good. But despite that, the next time I thought about doing yoga I dreaded it. Wished I didn't have to. Felt like it was an imposition. All of those emotions cloud the practice and make it not what it could be. Which isn't to say it's bad. It's not. But it's blah, and that's not enough to keep me committed past the six months that I've already committed to. People keep asking me how it's going and I smile and say fine when underneath I really want to say it's going horribly (an overstatement, but still.) I want it to be over, and I wonder why I ever thought that this would be a good idea.
The challenge of incremental change is that it's hard to see. And when it's hard to see, it's hard to stay focused and keep moving forward. While I wouldn't say I'm precisely stagnating, I have noticed a marked decline in my motivation. I suspect the novelty is wearing off. No longer is yoga something new and interesting. Instead, it's quickly becoming yet another obligation that I have to fulfill. And another thing for me to feel guilty about not doing, which is precisely what I didn't want to happen.
So I need to re-focus. But I'm not quite sure how. It doesn't help that I didn't have my one-on-one class with Jason this week. While the class is only a small part of the actual yoga that I do, having someone to track my progress is the way that I stay focused. He can see what I can't...the small things that I can now do that I couldn't before ... like the ability to coordinate breath and movement that has become much more natural. And ironically, it's very naturalness makes it hard to view it as progress.
Hopefully this is just a phase. I'll see Jason and he'll give me a pep talk and I'll find the perfect beginner yoga class that is actually for beginners. And my home practice will start to feel fulfilling again instead of boring and obligatory. I know that each of those things will happen. But right now, I'm going to continue to wallow in my yoga funk.
It’s been a long time since I’ve learned something completely new. Just like everyone, I pick up new skills and refine old ones all the time, but usually they relate to things that I’ve had some experience with. Yoga is something I’ve had almost no exposure to. It’s a new language, a new way of thinking about your body, and a new way of breathing. After 30-plus years, it’s a real challenge. A challenge compounded by the fact that yoga is not an easy thing to teach.
I’m sympathetic to the challenges faced by yoga instructors who teach beginners. You’ve got 20 students who, despite the fact that the class is designated for beginners, have all levels of experience. There are the lapsed students. These are people who haven’t done yoga in a few months but who before that went every day for a year. So within 10 minutes, they’re back in the groove. There are the timid intermediate students. These are folks who have been doing yoga for a while, but are intimidated by the intermediate classes so they stick with the beginners. Like their lapsed counterparts, these students know what they’re doing. And then, there are the actual beginners like myself. We are unquestionably the minority, at least in the classes I’ve gone to. So, the instructor starts with a bunch of folks with different expectations and backgrounds, and then the challenge is compounded by the need to describe complex movements in easy-to-understand language while simultaneously watching to make sure that nobody screws up their backs or their necks in the process. It’s a tough job. And I pretty much always feel like I get lost in the shuffle, and leave feeling frustrated. It’s not good.
So, I’m struggling. I don’t like it, but I’m trying to embrace it—to make the struggle a part of the process, and to patiently work through this.
What I’m also rediscovering through this experience, is that I am a solitary learner. When I was in school, I was an unapologetic class skipper. I learned by sitting down by myself with the book and someone’s notes. This is why, I think, my home study is going so much better than the classes. In class, I’m constantly a step or two (and sometimes more) behind. Half the time, I don’t understand the instructor. He or she will use language that I’m not familiar with or describe a movement in a way that doesn’t register. This week, I think I’ll buy a book and a yoga tape and spend some time learning on my own.
It’s hard to believe that I’ve been doing this for over a month. I feel like I’m doing the same things that I did the first week I started. And while I’m sure I’m doing them a bit better, I’m starting to get anxious about learning new things. At least the way I’m learning it, yoga seems to be all about repetition. It’s a bit like when I learned the multiplication tables. You just keep doing the same things over and over until you get it right. But the difference here is that "right" isn’t a clearly defined answer, which makes me wonder whether I’ll keep doing the same things for the next three months.
In some ways it’s good. My practice isn’t interrupted by the need to figure out how to do something new. I feel like the poses and the sequence are ingrained in my head. First, I do a few leg poses, then work on core strength, Sun Salutations, more leg poses, restorative, and end with Savasana. If I never ventured out of my own space to do yoga, I’d probably be fine.
The public classes, however, are a different story. There, they completely shake things up with poses I’ve never done before. In the class I took this week, we did Salamba Sarvangasana (Shoulderstand)—or perhaps I should say the rest of the class did Shoulderstand. I tried to get my legs up over my head, but failed miserably. There were some other poses I couldn’t do, but that was definitely the worst. I couldn’t help but peek around the room at the other "beginners" and immediately became terribly intimidated at the fact that none of them seemed to be having any problems. I know that I shouldn’t gauge my own practice by the practice of others, but when you’re in a class with 20 people and you’re the only one who can’t seem to get the pose right it’s hard not to feel like a yoga loser. It kind of killed the whole centering/balance thing I was going for.
Ironically, this made me wish for repetition—or at least that the classes would be the same each week so that I could learn yoga like I learned the multiplication tables—by doing it over and over again until it feels natural.
It's hard to believe I've been at this for almost a month. Each week presents different challenges, and this week's was a doozy. I let my impatience get the better of me and decided to supplement my home practice with a yoga video. I don't recommend that for a beginner.
While the video itself wasn't bad, it went so quickly and was filled with so many poses that I just couldn't do. I quickly became overwhelmed and frustrated. When it was over, all I could focus on was the tightness in my calves, the weakness in my core, and my wobbly balance. All this just as I was starting to feel confident. My video lesson brought sharply into focus the fact that at the end of six months, I'll still be a beginner.
It was a humbling thought, and it reinforced the need for me to view this experience, and yoga more generally, not as a goal but as an end in itself. I read somewhere that one component of yoga is to let go of the ego. I think that's good advice. It's the ego that drives us (or at least me) to be so goal oriented. I'm cursed (or blessed, depending on your perspective) with a strong desire to be good at things. When it's something I can't be good at quickly, I lose my focus. I don't quit, but I stop trying hard. That's a mindset I need to overcome. I need to try hard not because I want to get better, but because of the value inherent in the trying.
On the positive side, the home practice (minus the video) keeps getting better. Each time I practice, I can hold the poses just a tiny bit longer. More importantly, each time I practice I can hear what my body's telling me more clearly. The small adjustments that Jason makes during our weekly meetings seem less mysterious. I find myself adjusting my body on my own, and sometimes sinking deeper into the pose in ways that I didn't do a few weeks ago. That is my progress. Incremental but tangible.
As I progressed through week three, it occurred to me that I’d been out of town for about a third of the time that I’ve been doing yoga. My crazy schedule has given me a unique perspective on exactly how transportable yoga is. All I need is some non-restrictive clothing and I’m good to go. And the significance of that, to me, is more than just the fact that it’s an easy activity to pack for. Yoga feels unencumbered, which makes it seem so much more organic then the other physical pursuits I’ve tried over the years. So many activities that we embrace for our health require so much stuff. Even running, which isn’t exactly a gear intensive activity, requires a particular type of shoe. There’s something so amazing about just using your body without the distraction of equipment. Which isn’t to say I don’t like the strap and the mat and the blocks. I do. And when I’m practicing at home in the space I’ve set aside, I use them. But I don’t need them—and that’s empowering.
As for the practice itself, after three weeks I feel like I can do the poses that I know how to do well. I’m starting to feel my way through the practice instead of thinking my way through the practice. And I can honestly say I love it. But I also know that there is a universe of yoga that I haven’t even glimpsed yet. And while I’m excited to explore, I’m also afraid that the confidence that I'm starting to build will be crushed beneath the weight of all the things that I don’t know how to do.
This week was really good. I spent much of the week at Ft. Worden for a camp that I run every year for the Women's Debate Institute. Ft. Worden is amazing, and the weather was perfect, so spending a half an hour every day doing yoga wasn’t difficult, particularly since I could practice outside in the sun with beautiful views of a big, grassy field and the smell of the ocean to keep my mind at peace. And, to make it even better, my friend Rae, an instructor at the camp, is also a yoga instructor. So it was like having three more days of one-on-one lessons. Plus she taught me to roll the bottom of my foot over a tennis ball to relieve annoying foot aches—a trick that I will be forever grateful for!
While finding the time to practice was not a challenge this week, the actual practice was much harder than I expected. My yoga knowledge is so limited that I really have no choice but to follow the path laid out for me by Jason (my yoga instructor) if this is going to work. And part of that means following directions very closely—including the directions that said hold each standing pose for one to two minutes. (This didn’t seem hard when I read it on paper, but after 30 seconds my calves and neck were screaming. Thirty seconds started to feel like an hour.) By the second side of the last standing pose, that minute took an awfully long time. On the second day, I timed my breaths before I started practicing since looking at a clock seemed just a tad antithetical to the Zen space I was trying to create. That worked better, but I had to resist the urge to breathe faster to make the poses last longer.
By the third day, my legs and neck were really, really sore. But the soreness wasn’t really bad. It was more like an awareness of those parts of my body. The problem was that it was so uneven, which makes me think that my body is somehow unbalanced in the poses. Or maybe I’m just stronger on one side. Who knows?
The non-standing poses are easier for me. So far we’re only doing modified Sun Salutations and modified Downward-Facing Dog, which may be the reason. I love Sun Salutations. There’s something so peaceful about them. And after a while, when I stop thinking about coordinating my breath and movement and it starts to happen naturally, I think I can see off in the distance the balanced place I’m looking for.
After much anticipation, my yoga journey has begun. Aside from the rather ridiculous concern about what to wear—one of my only yoga experiences to date involved me wearing a too big T-shirt that basically came off when I tried Downward-Facing Dog—I was really excited for the first lesson.
We started with things that seemed pretty simple. The aforementioned Downward-Facing Dog, but with my hands on the wall, leg poses that seemed much like the kind of stretches you’re supposed to do after a long workout, and some standing poses that actually looked pretty cool in the full-length mirror. But what I quickly came to realize, is that, sadly, they were only easy when I wasn’t doing them properly.
The thing that absolutely amazes me about yoga is how big an impact really small changes in position and posture can have. I think to emphasize that, my instructions for Week 1 were just to do one set of leg poses each day. With just the one set to focus on I could really concentrate on coordinating breath and movement and aligning my body correctly to really feel the pose from head to toe.
The other piece that I know is going to be a struggle is trying to incorporate practice into my life every day. This week, my practice only took about 10 minutes—and even then, it was remarkably easy to get to the end of the day and realize that it was now or never. I need to work on that, and to carve out time that’s inviolate. I’m just not quite sure yet how to do that.
Sometimes things are just meant to be. After spending almost seven years as an associate at a large law firm, I changed jobs less than two months ago. I wanted to do something different—something more interesting and more meaningful and more, well, me. But most of all I wanted balance, which is in short supply in the law firm world. So when a friend at my old job forwarded me the e-mail from the Bay Club a mere two days after I started the new job, it felt like it was meant just for me. It was the universe’s way of pushing me along.
I’ve had those moments before . . . a few years ago I was training for a triathlon, and one morning when I was so tired and so sore and so sick of training that I had made up my mind to quit, I got into my office and had a message from my gym that I’d won a bike. You just can’t ignore signs like that. The makeover story e-mail was the same. New job, new mindset, new body—a new me. I’ll be like those women in Yoga Journal who look completely at peace, their bodies still and beautiful while they hold some pose that right now seems a million years away. And, I’m hoping, that peace will permeate everything I do.
I know it would take a lifetime of study to achieve the inner- and outer-peace of a yogini, but hopefully I’ll get part of the way there. Along the way, I want to learn to embrace the process, not the goal. I want balance. I want to take time each day to nourish every part of me. So instead of working like a mad woman one week, relaxing the next, and going to the gym every day the week after that, I want to try integrating each thing into my life every day. Instead of strictly dieting one week and eating doughnuts the next, I want to be health-conscious everyday—with some occasional chocolate.
My natural state is more frenetic than balanced. It will be a struggle to adjust to a calmer way of being. I will need to slow down and develop patience, even though a big part of me is afraid that in doing so, I’ll lose some central part of myself—or that I’ll lose that part of myself, but see no other change. That is, without a doubt, my biggest fear. Change is a funny thing. Because it’s incremental, it’s hard to see (which is why I lose patience with diets and quit them, or get frustrated with the gym and stop going.) I don’t want this to be another thing that I don’t sustain. My hope is that, through yoga, I can learn to embrace and celebrate small changes both to my body and my mind. And of course, that in six months I’ll be strong and slender and able to twist my body like a pretzel!
Leah Castella is one of the subjects of Yoga Journal’s Yoga Makeover stories. As a shameless fan of magazine and television makeover stories, Leah is extremely excited to be on the other side of the page for a change.
Leah grew up in Texas, but couldn’t resist the pull of the Pacific. After high school, she moved to Portland, Oregon to attend Lewis and Clark College. She reluctantly left the West Coast for law school in Austin, Texas, but returned immediately after graduation. She has lived in the Bay Area ever since. Leah is an attorney at an East Bay law firm, and breaks up the work day by coaching a high school mock trial team and a law school moot-court team. She also sits on the board of the San Francisco School District’s Law Academy, and is the Executive Director of the Women's Debate Institute.
Leah lives in the Mission District in San Francisco, and spends her spare time throwing dinner parties for friends, reading tarot cards, playing poker, and traveling. She’s a yoga novice, but is excited to develop a favorite pose. She has a sneaking suspicion it’s not going to be Downward-Facing Dog (Adho Mukha Svanasana).
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| WEEKLY POLL |
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What is your favorite time of day to practice?
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