Daddy gets a trophy.. among other things!

The blog has seen a long break. It has been a rollercoaster ride for the Traveling Narayanan's if we can say that.

First we had a nice Saturday evening last week with dressing up and going to a temple. Even clicked a gorgeous snap of the little one as she was shy and blushing when I complimented her on her paavaadai (frock).

Then like San says "Don't cast your admiring eyes on her.. bad things happen!" (what she says in Tamil is "kuzhandhaikku un kanne pattudum") and who knows maybe that is true.

San left on a business trip to China the very next morning and she pretty much took the family luck with her. The house has been seeing things like never before to the point where we look like the Indian village after the Sankara stones were stolen from it in the Indiana Jones movie! We need our Sangeetha stone back.. We demand it!

The little one came home Monday with a 103 fever and missed school for most of last week. She also passed on a cold and sore throat to daddy and grandma. Fortunately Jr. avoided her little sister for as much as she could and that saved her.  

To top things off, daddy went to the dentist with pain for the black tooth and ended with a double root canal and a bad prognosis for both front tooth. Apparently the last root canal was not sealed off properly and the black tooth was not black because it was dead. When my local dentist removed the plug, everyone pretty much reeled back from the rotten smell that came out of the tooth, except for me as I was in the chair and could not move my nose away from my open mouth! It was a small logistics problem that no yoga pose can accomplish. There is a 50/50 chance that I will lose both my front teeth in six months or so I am told. If things work out, the tooth will survive and hang in there.

Dentures at 40?! Not so looking forward to that. Again, we need our Lucky girl to come back from China..

Every morning the scene in the bedroom looks like this..

That and a big pile of blankets and comforters that need to be laundered, if the little one decided to throw up her dinner in the middle of the night. I figured that it was better to leave them in a balled up pile and do laundry in the morning than do 3AM laundry. Just got tired of it.. and believe me when I say this.. we do a lot of laundry in this house. Every week we wash 35 towels just for Yoga!

Finally we got to the weekend after making it on a one day at a time mode during the week and there was one bright spot. Yesterday, it was time for Daddy to go get his 60 day Challenge trophy! That was for doing 60 yoga classes in 60 days in Jan, Feb and early March. 

Daddy did make it to almost 73+ classes in 73 days and then it stopped early this week. Well, it will start again.

Jr. took this photo after the little one suggested "Appa, you got a tropy. But you should put a picture of you doing yoga now and show people how well you are doing, before putting the trophy picture". Well, have definitely redistributed weight around, a lot of fat is gone and new muscle is there. I am reasonably sure that if it were not for the Yoga marathon, would have fallen ill a lot more what with all the sickness going around in the house and everywhere in the bay area in general. At one point 8 kids were out sick in the little one's class including her.

Definitely recommend the 60 day challenge to all Bikram Yoga practitioners. We spent Saturday evening listening to the stories of all the folks who finished the challenge and it was truly inspiring. Daddy got to say his story also and he pretty much stopped short of doing a demo, throwing the little one in the air and catching her. There is still a lot to improve if you look at the picture above. Yes, the hamstrings and core are strong enough to lift the body off the ankle, but if you see the symmetry in the shoulders and the legs, it is clear that there is a lot of compensation going on to keep the balance. Well there is a lifetime of yoga left to correct these things. . .

 After we listened to everyone tell their story, there was a raffle and guess what? The kids won the raffle. I say the kids because at one point my MIL was worried about the kids going to bed late and the little one falling sick again.  They both insisted they stay for the raffle and I quote the little one "I think today my luck is going to change. I am sick but we are going to win!" and Jr.'s ticket was the winning ticket! We got a bunch of Yoga goodies as part of the raffle. The shirt which two years earlier would have been two sizes too small.. fits daddy perfectly! 

We really missed Sangeetha at this Challenge party. There was no trophy, if she had not pushed me to go. Three days into the challenge she even said "are you just going there and sitting down for a lot of poses or are you doing your very best?". While she was only kidding, that gave me the idea to track down how many poses I actually miss in the Challenge and was planning on doing one extra class for every 26 missed.  She also took a lot of the pick up drop off duty on days where my resolve was wearing down a bit so I could switch to evening classes instead of morning for a full week.  So technically she gets a tropy for supporting it.

We are just a couple of days away from Mommy's return trip back home.

On a funny note one of her co-workers asked her "I heard you are a vegetable. Is that true?" and she knew the co-worker meant "vegetarian" but was not sure how to answer.

Later in the week when she found out that the little one was sick, she went to some local Lama temple as part of sightseeing and prayed to the local god..

I am reasonably sure that her prayer went something like this "Dear Lama god, please make sure my little one stops throwing up fast. she has been throwing up too long" and the Lama god went "okay.. I got this one. Let me stop. You want the little one to throw up long and fast.. Done!"

It might have done us some good if she had a translator before she went into the temple.

Well, we are counting days and that is all there is to it. Our luck will change when she is back. We know it!

From Pranayama to Kapalbhati - A nerds eye view

March 5th 2013 was a special day. If my life were to flash past my eyes that day will definitely be on that flashback!

The San Jose Bikram Yoga center had a challenge. Do Yoga 60 times in 60 days. The idea was to come every day. But if you had to miss a day for travel or other reasons, you take a class in that location or do a makeup class the same week. I had originally misinterpreted the Challenge to be 60 days in 10 weeks. That meant one rest day a week. Later found out that it was 60 days 60 classes. No rest day!

Given my once a week trip for work, was doubting my ability to go take up this challenge. With a lot of encouragement from San and the kids as well as my co-workers and the entire BYSJ community, signed up on Jan 5th. March 5th was day 60! March 5th was also class 60!

It was a roller coaster ride where the body and mind went through more than a few challenges. Hot Yoga is not a new thing in this family now. On March 11th, it will be two years since the day MIL and myself attended our very first Bikram Yoga class. Even in our best stretch of 91 days attendance in our first 100 days, we took breaks every now and then. There was the day or two where we said "let's not push it. we can go tomorrow". That determination to go to class when you are slightly sore from an outing with the wife and kids or when you ate dinner at some restaurant with co-workers and it doesn't agree with your stomach or you just drove past Sacramento and back between 6AM and 5PM with one long meeting thrown in and came in to a Yoga class at 6:30 PM so you don't miss a day.. was simply not there in any previous streches of doing Yoga.

When we first started Bikram Yoga, our weight was dropping every day, we were becoming stronger and more flexible, our skin was glowing.. the benefits were visible and measurable and obvious to everyone around us. So just the fact that people around you notice positive changes keeps you going. After you go for a few years, the changes are incremental. Every few weeks or so, you manage to reach a new level in one of the poses or your body and mind work together to realize that you have been interpreting the teachers words slightly off and correct for it. In short, slow and steady progress. Fortunately being a Six Sigma person and having run a Fab, yours truly understands the value of Continuous Improvement and that helps a lot!

It is more of a metal challenge to do 60 classes in 60 days. Once you manage to get up at 4:45, get ready, drive to the Yoga studio, spread that mat and lie down to savor the heat, you realize that you will have a great class.  Making it to the room is the hard part. Doing the Yoga after that is like hot fudge! (Not a big fan of icing on cakes if you can't tell by now).

There were so many days in the last 60 that either tested my physical strength or resolve where San or the kids or most importantly my MIL (who has been coming with me to Yoga class the last 17 days) would say "Don't you dare give up now!" San even let me go to evening class for a lot of days and said "I will take care of both the kids routines. Just go.. and I am letting you do this only because you are doing the challenge and you have come so far!" and I accepted her offer with tears in my eyes. The challenge did some funny stuff to the head too and I would get all emotional and weepy, especially between day 45 to 60!

The challenge was also well documented in Excel to see if the stats would tell me something or let me share anything with the rest of the world. . .

First things first. If you do take a challenge like this, it might not be a bad idea to take two classes on weekends in same day just to compensate for future misses..

If that strategy had not been adopted, it would have been a good reason for the mind to say "no way to catch up now.. so drop it!"

There was a self imposed goal to track how the classes actually went, just to see if the energy level stayed flat, increased, decreased, tracked the lunar cycle.. just wanted to see what the data showed, especially after hearing from other folks who said that one starts sitting down for a lot of poses towards the middle of the challenge.

Now for the weight tracking. It was more of an afterthought to track weight on a daily basis. One thing I learned over this weighing process is that when you drink two 500mL bottles of water within an hour after you finish class, that is 2.2 lbs. Started to measure exactly an hour after class and that showed good tasty food does correlate to a baseline weight change!

When you track stuff and enter a few things every day on a spreadsheet before going to bed, you can actually have some fun trying to stare at the data..

There was a stretch where the classes in general were intense and there was one weekend where a 10 year anniversary class had a record 100+ people in the room. It was more of a communal event than a class and I did push myself way past my limits and that correlated to the low weight and the 4 missed poses the next day. Other than that there are many factors that are not charted that could be reasons for the red bars.. One good thing? Managed to do the 60 classes without missing more than 26 poses.

Even tracked the count by teacher. The list was 20 strong and the count ranged from 6 to 1. Do have favorites within the 30+ teachers and my favorites are different from the MIL's favorites. MIL and me classify teachers into three groups. The fire breathing dragons who push you past your limits just with their voice, the horsewhisperers who get you into a trance and make you do what they say and teachers who are a combination of both. They push you during the pose and calm you down with their voice when you are in relax mode.  While I love the dragons, the MIL prefers the horsewhisperers. Maybe it is an age or personality thing.. End of the day, have a lot of teachers to thank, for encouraging and watching out for what I do in class and giving me suggestions to improve my practice!

When we ask a lot of folks we meet regularly after class "Did you sign up for the challenge?" the answer is "No. I come 2-3 times a week regularly anyways. So don't see any reason to do this 60 day thing!".  I used to go a lot more "regularly" and still, this was a great eye opener. If you are doing Bikram Yoga and your studio has a 60 day challenge, TAKE IT! Why?

1. There are a lot of poses that I was stuck at with a certain level or step. Have managed to get past those points during this challenge. Do not know if it has something to do with the ability to form muscle memory when you go without a break of more than a day, but the end result is obvious. Maybe you will get past those sticky points.

2. It is not easy to prioritize Yoga over other things. Need a high level of dedication to go pull it off and you get to test your ability to do a good thing for yourself above other things. Kind of makes you realize that the most important thing in your life, is "your life"!

3. Your whole family might cheer for you and support you. San, the kids and the MIL who joined me for the last 15 classes.. which was the most difficult streach, supported me like never before! They have also never openly said "I am proud of you" under any circumstance in recent times and hearing them say that was worth the effort.

4. Finally, you realize that you can actually pull it off and it was not an unrealistic goal as you originally thought! Realizing you are made of tougher stuff (mentally and physically) than you thought is a great reward in itself.

Then again, if you are a nerd you might also have some fun staring at Yoga graphs for a change...

ps. Will post pictures next week of the new and improved Shaolin monk looking me..

New Year Resolution

Do Yoga at least sixty days (or times) in the first 10 weeks of the year!

Not easy. Not impossible given there are 70 days in the first 10 weeks and we did go 91/100 days in 2011 March-May.

Also very measurable!

Will let you know Mid march if the new year resolution was met...

Learning

Yesterday I was trying to teach the little one Chess after she saw me playing a game with Jr. 

So we tried to start with placing the pieces on the board. Before the first sentence was out of my mouth, she said "I Know daddy. I know.." and started placing the pawns in a row.. after that she was stuck. 

Jr. does the same thing. She knows everything! If they do not listen to any instruction completely how will they ever learn anythign?

The google generation defintely has a challenge when it comes to developing listening skills! 

Given that, seriously think that teaching Yoga to this generation will be a lot more challenging than teaching the previous one.. and that in itself is a challenge. 

A yoga teacher knows what his brain is telling his body to do and how it reacts. Given every body is different slightly but has the same features, he has to take that thought and transfer it into your head so it can make your body to the exact same thing.

In geek terms, this is like taking a piece of code on a windows machine and putting it in a Mac which has almost the same processors, memory, logic etc.. and making that code do a similar thing on a different machine.

The instruction has to be very clear and specific. As in an earlier post Jim Kallet managed to pull this off for me. 

Also there is a picture on the BYSJ site. Someone had taken a cell phone photo. Thank you! 

Somehow my body trusted his words better than it trusted my own brain and that is interesting. Why? 

Will figure it out in time!

Had signed up for six months of Unlimited visits. Today is the last day of the six month period. My attendance was not that great for the last six months. 64 classes here and 7 in Austin. That is 40% attendance. The travels continue with the new job and manage to go 4 times a week these days. 

Have never been able to beat the attendance that my MIL and me had last year. We went 91 days in the first 100. 

All said and done the deal with San to renew the commit was "at least 50 classes in 6 months" to keep this going. Passed that test!

Guru

The word Guru means "remover of darkness", someone who lights you up with knowledge. The darkness in this case does not mean literal darkness but the lack of knowledge!

If you go to Wiki, you see that Westerners manage to take a very important word and associate a negative connotation to it. That is really sad!

In days when word of mouth was the only way knowledge was transmitted from teacher to student for generations, a guru was everything to a student. We are taught at an early age in India "Maata, Pitha, Guru, Deivam" or  "Mother, Father, Guru, God" to put things in perspective for kids. We are also taught

Guru Brahma, Gurur Vishnu, Guru Devo Maheshwaraha

Guru Shakshat para Bramha Thasmaye Shri Gurave Namaha

which means "I salute my guru who is the embodiment of the Trinity of Creater, preserver and destroyer (Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva)"

Most kids in India that I grew up with would treat our teachers with deference. Teachers word was gods word. That helped a lot till the Ph.D started, at which point my thesis advisor promptly said "I am not always right. You seem to agree with everything I say. Your job is to question me and come up with answers on your own!" 

That was enlightening in its own way. Be your own guru?! Was that the message?

Once that phase was over and a new balance was achieved in taking your teachers word as gods word with an amendment  that said "the guru is always right except when the guru says otherwise"!

My teachers appreciate me obeying them implicitly when they give instructions that are to be followed as part of the learning process. Be it my Guitar teacher or a teacher in any training class or Yoga class!

Bikram yoga works using a dialogue. It is called a dialogue because the teacher talks and your body does what the teacher asks you to do with your body. It is a dialogue between the teachers voice and your body. So if there is one thing that is still pretty much following an oral tradition of teaching, it is Yoga. 

This weekend some of us got an amazing treat. A chance to spend the entire day with Jim Kallett, a senior Bikram Yoga practitioner and teacher who actually does the Teacher training. 

This is like meeting your thesis advisors advisors advisor! It was an amazing experience as he shared his experiences of learning Yoga from Bikram, his wisdom and "trusting the process". 

He took apart every posture in the series with clinical precision and helped those in the room  one by one! After doing Yoga for almost two years, I finally learned what the dialogue "relax your shoulders" meant. 

One thing with the oral tradition is that the teacher says something, your ear hears it, your brain processes it based on the sum total of its vocabulary and experience and different people will still "interpret" the dialog. 

Jim pushed, pulled and stood on people (yes, at one point he stood on my back to prove that my body could do a pose with external help and it was up to my mind to get there on my own.. wish I had a picture of that) to make folks realize one very important thing..

Your body is capable of doing things that you cannot realize are possible. Everything is in your mind!

Now there are pages of notes from the all day yoga session, little reminders that go a long way in improving the practice. Based on what Jim said, in another 4-5 years, things should be a lot better! 

The whole day was truly enlightening, a series of light bulb moments. For many of the questions his answer was " I am not here to give you permission to take the easy way out. If that is why you are asking the question, do not even bother! You do what it says in the dialogue, no more, no less and that is the only way!"

At the end of the day, after talking and demonstrating non stop, he got up and taught a class! Do not know how he has that kind of energy. He said after a few years of practice I will also have that energy and that is good to know.

Jim Kallett is a Guru in the true sense of the word. 

He did an awkward pose where he stood on the tips of his toes. I can stand on my toe and was proud of the accomplishment till I saw him stand on the tips of his toes.

Apparently that is what the dialogue says! Nothing more, nothing less.. 

When we were done for the day, I instinctively touched his feet to take his blessing. He smiled and said "Good luck to you and your family!". That made my day!

Now Jim has piqued my interest in meeting his thesis advisor, Bikram Choudhury! Who knows, that also happen one day..