POINT YOUR FEET!

Grrr, my feet.

I dislike my feet for a lot of reasons.  They are weird and knobby with callouses.  My toes are freakishly long, and because my second toe is longer than my first, sandals never look right on me.

My newest gripe is that they've never been trained to point.  Because of yoga, I can flex and even floint like a boss.  (Flointing is when you point your feet but flex your toes.  It is really ugly, but it is very good for engaging your feet and legs.)  You know that when yoga teachers tell you to lift you toes and spread them wide in tadasana?  I can spread my toes like fingers and move each one individually (yeah, it's freaky looking).

But pointing is taking some time and work to become a habit.

Learning to Release: Magic Movement

As some of you may remember, I started my journey of movement study exploration because of the fairly traumatic experience of losing my job. I had never failed anything before, and it hit me very hard. I figured I should try lots of things I wasn't naturally good at to learn that it wasn't the worst thing ever. I haven't written about about aerial that much here, but that was the activity that really "took" for me. I've been training about two to three times a week for a year now, and my teacher has declared me NOT TERRIBLE. Trust me, I started out pretty terrible, and while I am not exactly amazing now, I am not terrible. 

With this new found not-terribleness at aerial, I've been thinking that I should try something out of my comfort zone once again.  Well, sometimes life gives you exactly what you're looking for in unexpected ways.  Yesterday, I was at the aerial studio for my weekly lyra class when my teacher asked if I minded if we took a Magic Movement class with Magic DS instead.  None of this really meant anything to me, but as fairly non-demanding person, I simply said yes.

Laterpost - Intro Horton at Alvin Ailey

I wrote this post a while ago and had been letting it languish on my Google drive.  Remembered about it because I'm looking for a class to take on Friday.  Anyway, without further ado, my write up on Intro Horton at Alvin Ailey.

From 4/19/2013

I LOVED this class.  Loved, loved, loved.  A bit too tired to write in proper paragraphs with transitions and things, so a list after the jump.

I LOVE TV! Part I: Bunheads

I love TV.  I've always loved TV.  The only people who might love TV more than me are Mike Teavee and my sister.*  Anyway, at one point, the focus of my ardor was Gilmore Girls.  I would not take any phone calls while it was on, no talking was allowed during the episode, etc, etc.**  So it's kind of surprising that I did not immediately jump on the Gilmore Girl's creator Amy Sherman-Palladino's latest show about ballet students, Bunheads.  It probably has something to do with the fact that I am no longer a 14 year old girl.  More on this after the jump.

*Seriously, my sister loves television to a scary degree.  She has a journal from elementary school where she only wrote about TV shows we would watch after school while my parents were at work and we were watched by my doting grandmother.  Who ALSO loves TV.

** The only other show I have ever been so serious about is Boy Meets World.   A sequel of which is now being made about their CHILDREN.  God, I am an old.

A Reflection on my Yoga Teacher Training

When I received an e-mail asking me to write about my yoga teacher training experience, I immediately had a vivid memory of the first session of my training.  We were asked a similar question that evening, twenty-odd strangers sittings in a candlelit circle.  "Why did you choose to do this?"

That night, I dutifully fell to my task earnestly and honestly.  And then we were asked to share.  Share!  With a group of strangers!  I was not ready to expose myself to these people.   As the first person in the circle began to read from their journal, I frantically composed sentences in my head to say aloud  instead of what I had written.  I want to teach because I want to learn!  Or I want to spread the joy of my practice to the world with a pageant smile.  Content with that lie, I relaxed and anticipated my turn.

It would be a narrative device to say that I was the very last person to share and by the time it was my turn, my heart grew three sizes and I spilled my guts and that is what my teacher training means to me,  blah blah blah.  As it was, I was somewhere in the middle of the circle, and I was no yogi grinch, but listening to the others share openly did touch me a little.  Not enough to reveal everything, but enough that when it was my turn, my voice wavered as I spoke these words of truth, "Because I need this."