60 days of Bikram / Day 1

January 22^nd

I haven’t practiced yoga in several years. It’s been torture. I think about it all the time, like a missing lover. I romanticized about getting back into that room and fixing all the stuff that’s still wrong with me. I became an evangelizing, abstaining yogi.

By the time my friend Lora Rosenbaum opened her new studio on the west side of Ann Arbor, I was seriously considering doing a 60 day challenge—taking 60 classes in 60 days.

Lora was working her butt off every time I came by to see the studio- painting, directing crews and overseeing the construction.  I’m not sure of the exact process used to finish the floors but they’re stunning and I’m pretty sure we can time travel through them. Wouldn’t surprise me, actually. I’ve had pretty cosmic experiences with Bikram yoga, and Lora is one of the most compassionate, strong, positive accomplished women I know-- and I know strong women.

She founded the first Bikram yoga studio in Ann Arbor about 13 years ago, the one right across the street from where my husband works, but recently sold it and opened a this one across town. One day I stopped by, and she and I sat together in the huge window seat facing the sidewalk. We talked about endings and beginnings, about how quickly things change. How grateful and amazed we are to just be alive and walking the earth. Tears welled up in my eyes, spilling out onto the dusty construction floor. Tears of joy and wonder mixed with Lora’s hard work and nearly finished dream.The place felt alive too; vibrating and humming. 

The grand opening on January 18^th started with a free class. It was packed. We stood shoulder to shoulder and cheered when Lora came in the room to lead us. She looked so radiant.  Strong.

Class was fantastic even though I was terrified to go and literally had to force myself. I was amazed at how much my body remembers this practice. It was easy.  Well at least in yoga room it was easy. After, I was reminded that I have muscles running up the fronts of my hips and even more deep under my sternum.

After discovering Bikram in 2008, I practiced at least three times a week, often times five. It transformed me absolutely, literally transformed my suffering. I learned to focus on myself, focus on what was best for myself and the kids instead of obsessing about things that I have no control over. What can I control? My breath. My actions in this moment. My thoughts.

I lost 30 pounds, started a newspaper and found my place in a community of revolutionaries. I tried to work things out with my husband, forgave us both and moved on, sometimes with and sometimes without him.

By 2012 my practiced slowed to a complete stopped and my health deteriorated. I gained all that weight back and my chronic pain and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) escalated. If you’ve ever met me in real life, you’ve maybe wondered if there was something a little off. Yep. There is and I’m hoping that taking 60 Bikram yoga classes in 60 days will fix me up good.

Can I do it? To be honest I have no idea, but I’ll be 50 freaking years old in July- 50!- and want to heal my crazy, heal my chronic pain, heal my knees, be comfortable in my own damn skin and truly truly release the things that no longer serve me. Somehow I think doing yoga in that hot freaking room every single day will do that. So, on Wednesday January 22 I went back to Lora’s new studio.

Each Bikram yoga class is exactly the same. The room, the heat, the poses are the same and the instruction is the same for every single class but this one was SO hard, not at all easy like Lora’s inaugural class. I had to sit down during several poses just to catch my breath and stop the room from spinning. That’s the beauty of this practice. Everything is the same except for me. Each time I’m different. And this time I wanted to barf or run out of the room, but I didn’t. I stayed and sweated and prayed and thought about being thin, strong and happy.

One down, 59 to go.

60 classes in 60 days: Bikram Yoga

Friends:
Starting tomorrow, I will be publishing a daily blog, "60 Bikram Yoga Classes in 60 Days." This is the launch; some background on how I came to practice Bikram Yoga. And predictably, it's ugly.

I hope you'll join me at some point at the new, magnificent  Bikram Yoga Ann Arbor West studio in Ann Arbor that Lora Rosenbaum has created. Everything about the space is gorgeous; from the elegant floors to the stunning original artwork, all the way up to the ceiling where the carefully crafted light covers don't blind you while in savasana. Or however that's spelled.

To be honest, I don't know if I can do 60 classes in 60 days, but I'm going to give it my English Bulldog Determination and write down what happens while I do. I pray it helps other folks.
Namaste
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60 days of Bikram Yoga

In 2008 my husband had an affair. It definitely was one of the top ten traumatic events I’ve experienced. I came home and knew there had been another woman in my house. When I confronted my husband he said, "don't burn my guitars," and left for work.

So I tried to run him over with the car, threw everything of his I could lay my hands on in the front yard and then booked a ticket to stay with my sister in Key West. For six weeks. I told him, “When I come back, you will have moved out,” and left.

Once I arrived in Key West I looked at my little sister and said, “What kind of woman do I want to be? Cause now’s the time.”

I knew I didn’t want to put myself in the victim role, although no one would have blamed me. But I wanted to be free of the pain so badly I was willing, quite honestly, to do anything.

Even try Bikram Yoga.

When Dora told me about Bikram I thought she was crazy. She acted like it was a great thing, doing an hour and a half of yoga in a room heated to 105 degrees. She showed me some of the poses while I chain smoked cigarettes and envisioned my husband and this unknown woman together.

I was vaguely aware that I needed to somehow get my anxiety down.  I shook uncontrollably, non-stop. I was obsessed with their affair. It coiled around me like a life-sucking python and squeezed the sanity, the dignity from me. I couldn’t eat, sleep, drive, work or stop crying. I felt sorry for the folks sitting next to me on the plane ride to Miami because I had cried the entire three and half hour flight, and loud.

So I went to this class with my sister. First, I  asked the instructors if they knew we were on a tropical island. They had heaters on and running in the little studio on the corner of Truman Ave and White Street. Heaters. It was very, very hot.

I also went to the bathroom once to throw up, not because of the heat (although it can absolutely make you feel nauseous) but just because that was what I did about twice a day. Vomit and weep into the toilet and wonder if this might actually be the end of me.

It wasn’t the end of me. It was the beginning of an amazing journey.

Bikram is where I create my own healing crisis. Where I put myself in a 105 degree room and focus and work for 90 minutes and balance on one leg for an eternity while pulling the other leg straight behind me and listen to a stream of information from the teacher and connect my body with my mind and say over and over again, “thank you thank you,” even though I feel like I’m going to die.

But I don't die. I keep breathing and working and praying and sweating out toxins and pain and hate and soon my skin is glistening and my clothes are soaking wet and my body is listening to my mind and I am strong and I am calm all at the same time. And I do this TO MYSELF. I put myself into this insane environment. I honestly think if I weren't in such trauma already, there's no way I would even try it.

In this way I control how and when I release my emotion, how I work out my pain. It's not my cheating husband or my dying dog or anything external pushing me to fix myself. I do it. To myself.

I say, Self. Today we’re going to yoga. And my Self says, Aw hell no. No way. I don’t have the time and I haven’t been hydrating and besides I didn’t get enough sleep and my knees hurt and my heart is broken and I just want to lay in bed and cry while the kids are gone and I need to bla bla bla

But in the end, the Me that’s determined to take back my life wins, and I drive my excuse-making sad little self to the yoga studio and I look right at the building next door where my husband met the woman of his dreams and works there with her now in infidelity bliss and I sometimes cry and I sometimes get very angry but I always park and climb the stairs to the ridiculously hot studio. Once I’m there lying on the mat getting used to the heat and stretching out my hips and back, I remember why I do this.

Because here, I do extraordinary things. I learn to work hard and recover quickly. I work hard again and then stand still and breath. I learn to control my mind and my body with my breath. I focus.

And I remember that I can do the impossible.

Magic Sister Power Today

I'm in line in Kroger, talking on the phone to my sister Dora. She's actually the one doing the talking, doing her Wise Woman Talk: don't worry about pleasing everyone. You can't make everyone happy. Just do the next right, good thing.

When I hang up, I look at the woman behind me in line and say, "I love my sister." She chokes up. "Oh I love my sister too except she had an aneurism yesterday. She's ok now, she's home. Her husband took her to the hospital because she had such a bad headache. We think it's from flying all the time"

My stomach drops and I hug her and let her talk. I tell her I'll pray for her sisters healing. She thanks me and tells me more. They're keeping it from their mother because it's her birthday, but the mother knows anyway. "She called me last night and asked if everything with Kelly is OK because she had a feeling something was wrong."

I tell her simple things. Don't lie to your mother. Keep praying.

I leave and drive to the bank to meet my other sister Cheryl, who makes me laugh and then walks into the bank to do her business. I call Dora back to tell her about the woman I just spoke with in Kroger and am amazed (sort of) to see that sad sister enter into the bank behind Cheryl.

So I follow them both and introduce my new friend to my other sister, "See?" I tell her. "There are three of us Gholson sisters and you're today you're surrounded by Magic Sister Power and everything is going to be just fine."  We hold hands. She looks exhausted and thankful. When we go back outside, she drives by and rolls down her window to shout, "I just talked to her husband and she's doing fine. Her name is Kelly and thank you for your prayers." I love that.

Now Cheryl and I go into Bells Diner to eat spicy spicy Korean food.  After we order, three sisters come in with three babies-sleepy, blond cherubs about a year old.. They sit behind us and tell the waitress that the babies are triplets. One of the sisters had triplets and now they were all  taking them on an outing.

From behind my seat one baby places her pudgy, fresh arm near my neck. I turn to see her unblinking blue eyes.  Cheryl and I smile with her, whispering prayers across generations.

Poison and Healing

My ongoing histamine reaction just won't go away. I chewed two Benadryl earlier in order to stop the swelling in my lips and neck, I think that's bad, This has been going on for years.

I used to think I'm allergic to everything but today I realized I'm not. We're just poisoning ourselves. Poison is everywhere; it's in our food, medicine, earth, water and air. I know it, hell everybody knows it. So why am I confused and cheesed off that my body is not functioning properly? Why am I surprised?

Toxic thoughts flood my system as well.  War is hell.

I call Dora. I can hear her navigating her big orange truck through the tiny coral street of Key West as she listens. She says Yep when I talk about how we've poisoned ourselves. And she says Oh Yeah when I tell her I better get my thoughts right, that the first step in healing myself is to get back to praying every morning, before my children get up, to cleanse my thoughts of negativity because right now I feel stuck and swollen and desperate and afraid.

When I go outside first thing in the morning and pray,  everything is better.  The veil lifts between our world and the Spirit world. Shimmers.

Why do I not do this, I ask her. Why do I not take care of myself?

Our relationship with ourselves just like our relationships with other people, she says. We have to work on it every day, like we work on our relationships with everybody else but yeah, if i forget to do it, everything gets really fuzzy and out of focus. Life gets blurry around the edge if I"m not doing what I need to do to take care of myself.

 She yells Hi! out her truck window to someone on the street. I wonder if that person knows how lucky they are to live on the little island and be able to see her drive by.

I need to constantly work at connecting, grounding myself into the earth she says, and then I say, 'oh yeah, that's right. I have this body.' But even then, sometimes I'm chemically, hormonally in a place where even that doesn't make everything all better.

Dora is clearly further along than I am, and not by accident. She's been working hard at creating the exact kind of life she wants. She makes a living doing what she loves, is deeply committed to organic, vegetarian foods, sustainable living and healing. She inspires me. I miss her horribly.

I know I have to cleanse my thoughts, cleanse my body, heal myself. My Elders say it is the our job as women to heal ourselves, to heal our family, then our community and finally help the living, breathing Earth heal herself. Today I'm still stuck at healing myself.

Dora is leaps and bounds ahead of me. I'm a baby, working so hard to toddle to me feet while she grows weary of flying.

Grave Digger

GRAVE DIGGER
June 16, 2007

The soil reluctantly yields to my borrowed shovel
Top layer so cool. Black
Below lies a happier, light brown
Roots thrust into the damp hole
Sweet Earth

Mosquitoes want to bite me
they light and leave
wary of the guilt and grief shimmering from my arms

My dog Bitty lies in the garage
Wrapped in the blanket she anguished on for days

Right now I could stop shoveling
Heed the cries of my hip and knees
Walk across the yard
Look past her glazed staring eyes
Stroke her velvet head. Bolt upright ears

But I’m desperate to bury her
before the sun goes down
before the buzzing flies find their way into
the baby blue blanket
before the agony
of my inability to save her
carries me into this hole

See? By the time
I've dug her grave
—is it deep enough?—
her delicate legs have already stiffened


Still. How unjust
Put her in a bag
Lift her onto the wheelbarrow

Careful, careful

At grave’s edge I’m stunned
How can I put her in this hole?
How can I lift her little body one last time?

Our big orange cat rolls at my feet
Flipping from side to side in the tall grass. Flirting
He use to swat at Bitty until she wrestled him to the ground
growling fiercely
biting and wetting his fur
then she stood over him, triumphant

And we would laugh
Get him Bitty we'd say. Get that cat

She was blind before we moved to this house
She learned to navigate the steps, the yard

Lately when I opened the door
she’d stay right there
Look up in my direction
Come on Bitty I’d say. Come on in

Now my transgressions rise
every harsh word
each impatient moment
A whirlwind of regret
circles my head and heart
Spins my vision.


The sun is setting. I gather my courage
Gather my prayers and
fill the hole
with dirt
with streaming tears
and with what used to be
my dog

Going Home

Ghosts in the Orchard

My father comes into town. Unexpected, uninvited. He drives to the store in Ann Arbor where my sister and I work and just walks right in. We squeal when we see him and clap our hands. Then we parade him around, introducing him to everyone we find. They’re delighted to meet our Dad.

We decide to go for a drive together. Dad wants to see the places where our family use to live. There are two. He’s walking ahead of us, fast, and Dora and I laugh as we follow him to the truck. He is very, very tall.

Soon we are sharking through tiny streets in Ypsilanti with houses that are very small. Dad parks the truck in front of the first house and we sit and look at it. I can barely remember living here; the green porch, the bare wooden floors. Dad is narrating into his window…”just before you were born, Dora. Yep. That summer I took a shovel and dug out a basement under this house…can still see where the yard is raised up a good six inches…” My sister and I smile at each other and watch Dad remember. We don’t stay long.

As we drive to the second house, the one in Saline on Willis road, the house we all loved, Dad tells us stories of his days as a county sheriff. “…Me and Chet was chasin some guy up Ecorse here, they gave us a ’66 Dodge that night. We must have been doing a hundred and ten up this stretch when that guy decided to give up and just stopped. We shot passed him of course…”

I ask my father, “What was he doing? Why were you chasing him?” I’m in the back seat.

“I dunno,” he shrugs. “Somebody called for help and we were chasing him.” We keep driving and Dad keeps talking and I look out the window at the rain. I think about my Father chasing bad guys and how simple things must have been for him in 1975. I think about how much easier it is lately for me to let Dad be Dad.

The drive into Saline is lush and when I point out one of the huge birds I keep seeing in little trees, he says, “Oh use to be you’d hardly ever see any red-tailed hawks when they were using all of that DDT. Now they’re everywhere.” I wonder how it is that as I grow older, my father gets smarter.

As we get closer to our old house, we’re quiet in the rain. Going back to Willis road is hard. We spent years and birthdays and storms here. My dog Freckles is buried here. I was married in the back yard here, right where I use to lay in the soft grass and laugh at the sky. And for all of my childhood, the cottonwood tree sang to me here—beautiful multiple women’s voices in harmony.

After our Mother left we finally got to know our father here. And when he really did sell the house and moved away from it all, I lay at the top of the stairs and cried harder than I can ever remember.

Dad slows the truck as we pass our house. It’s the same; same color, same neighbors, same flagpole. But twenty years later, the trees that line our long drive reach the sky. When we planted them they were just little sticks, like us, but we watered them every night hoping they’d grow. I close my eyes and imagine walking among them, showing them how I’ve much I’ve grown too.

As we pass our house and crest a hill, surprise, there’s a new road that takes us into what use to be an orchard. Massive, brooding houses have sprouted in tight circles where rows of gnarled apple trees once stood. Why would someone pay a bazillion dollars for a house that’s right next to another? Why would they fill in the sand pit, cut down the trees and cornfield?

I spent long summer days right where these houses are. The day Dora was born, Dad’s third and final daughter, he came home from the hospital and said to me, “Well it looks like you’re the boy.”

He was serious. He taught me to weld, hunt, box and ride a dirt bike. We built a dune buggy out of a VW frame and rode up and down the sand dunes. And at night we would sneak out to steal apples from the orchard.

The passage of time and space leaves me feeling small.

The Earth surrounding my home was everything to me, but by the time I was in Jr. High, things started to go bad at home. Quite bad, actually. Not even the singing trees could comfort me and my suffering seeped into what was suppose to be my educational experience.

I remember several of the high school teachers reaching out to me, trying to help a troubled student. Some were quite kind, others carried only contempt.

It would have been nice if one of the genuinely concerned teachers had known the right questions to ask, the right action to take. But this was the late seventies and we didn’t talk about such things in our little town. The good news is that I emerged from these times a Truth Speaker and today, I’m grateful for the each of life’s lessons. Proud of who I’ve become.

In high school, my friends came from several different “clicks.” Some Jocks, some Theater People, some Brains, but it was The Freaks that truly loved and accepted me. We were all outcasts, bonded together in our isolation. One of my attempts to fit in was by competing in the Miss Saline Pageant. I took 1st runner up and made all the Freaks proud. I felt like a spy, like I’d infiltrated the Popular Girls turf and quite easily at that. We had one of our own right there on stage, in the middle of the dirt at the fairgrounds.


Bobby Brown told me that night, right after the competition, “Girl, you were the finest girl up there.” He and I had been crowned King and Queen of The Freaks in 7th grade one day during lunch. Despite being a good foot shorter that me, Bobby was the coolest and most gorgous guy in our school, with crystal blue eyes and perfectly feathered brown hair. His attention that night made me feel like an actual Queen. But he was dead just a few years later, murdered outside of a Chicago bar late one night after an altercation. It’s still hard to believe he’s gone.

Amazingly, not all of the past has vanished. As Dad, Dora and I slowly drive around the cul-de-sac of monstrous houses, in what use to be our backyard, Dad has spots his old deer blind. It sits wedged in a tree, in a little square of woods that’s somehow remained intact. Standing sentinel on a little hill that overlooks the development.

As we pull away, we don’t say anything but I wonder about the children in these houses. What are their lives like? Where are their dogs buried? Do they play in Dad’s deer blind?

Can they hear the trees?

Journal Entry June 2008

I’m obsessed with my husbands affair. I’m obsessed with this woman. I look for her car. I have visions of them together. It coils around me like a life sucking python and squeezes the sanity, the dignity from me.

That's when I go to Bikram Yoga.
Ah. Yoga.

This is where I create my own healing crisis. Where I put myself in a 105 degree room and focus and work for 90 minutes and balance on one leg for an eternity while pulling the other leg straight behind me and listen to a stream of information from the teacher and connect my body with my mind and say over and over again, “thank you thank you,” even though I feel like I’m going to die.

But I don't die. I keep breathing and working and praying and sweating out toxins and pain and hate and soon my skin is glistening and my clothes are soaking wet and my body is listening to my mind and I am strong and I am calm all at the same time. And I do this TO MYSELF. I put myself into this insane environment. I honestly think if I weren't in such trauma already, there's no way I would even try it.

But I do. And in this way I control how and when I release my emotion, how I work out my pain. It's not my cheating husband or my dying dog or anything external pushing me to fix myself. I do it. To myself.

I say, Self. Today we’re going to yoga.
And my Self says, oh no. We can't go there. The yoga studio is right next to where Cheating Husband and Skanky Whore work together. What if I see them? I can't go near that building, near that part of town, I can't take it and besides I’m too tired and my knees hurt and my heart is broken and I just want to lay in bed and cry while the kids are gone and I need to bla bla bla

But in the end, the Me that’s determined to take back my life wins and I drive my excuse-making sad little self to the yoga studio and I look right at the building next door where my husband met the woman of his dreams and works there with her now in infidelity bliss and I sometimes cry and I sometimes get very angry but I always park and climb the stairs to the stinky hot studio. And once I’m there and I'm lying on the mat getting used to the heat and stretching out my hips and back, I remember why I do this.

Because here, I do extraordinary things. I learn to work hard and then quickly recover. I stand still and I control my mind and my body with my breath. I focus.

And I remember that can do the impossible.