The Yoga journey is still on

If you have been reading this blog, it has been going all over the place.. to July 2024, then finally to other things.. There are a few things that don’t get mentioned which are reasons for all the anachronistic posts.

Last summer San and me knew there was a 9 day anniversary trip. Still we had signed up for a 60 day challenge. T-shirts make you do things I guess! For me it was a no brainer. The earlier two week trip in February had made me skip signing up for the Winter 2024 challenge. I haven’t missed a winter challenge in years! So the family knew I will sign up for the summer challenge. Given a 10 day miss for travel, we started doing doubles every day in the hot July summer. The first 22 days saw us do 44 classes.. mostly back to back. San had never done doubles before, so I was really impressed and proud of her effort. Then we went on the trip and came back to finish the challenge ahead of time. It was good we finished it ahead.

Just two days before the challenge end date, my mother called me to show my dad in Apollo ICU in Chennai. The prognosis was that he would’t make it by the time I left here and reached him. It was a timely call as I was booked for a business trip first thing the next morning. Cancelled that trip and flew to India.

By some miracle, my dad went from ICU to general ward and back home in the week I spent there. The doctor’s told me that at this point, his condition is expected to be the same for weeks or months. He was home though. My mom was relieved that he was home. Even though the room became a hospital room, he had pulled through. So with happy tears I flew back. Right after coming back we did attend the 60 day challenge party. It was a great way for me to take my mind off everything. Went right back to the regular yoga routine. I was even more determined and sure that if I did this yoga regularly, there might be a quick and painless death instead of a prolonged debilitating disease. No one knows what is going to happen or when, but one can always do some preventive maintenance.

There was no blog posts .. not just about yoga.. There was simply no mood to write anything for the rest of September and most of October till my dad stabilzed to a new routine. Then we had a planned trip to the grand canyon to hike the south rim and that brought me back to Facebook , blogging and a social routine.

Went back searching for the videos of my speech from that challenge but could only find these two pics.. (one done before my dad ended up in hospital) and another from the challenge party. That was my 15th successful challenge out of 17 attempts.

Then it was January again before we knew it. This time my MIL had informed me that she will visit us from Jan to March just to join me for the 60 day challenge. She wanted to do another challenge (having done it once). The two of us had signed up and I signed up San, given she joins me most days. Initially she was hesitant and did not want to do it. She did not even do the stickers to keep track (I was keeping track for her). When there were only 10 days left and she had to do just a few doubles, she got enticed by Michele to complete. The T-shirts were back! They had the right size too apparently! All three of us finished this challenge.

My goal for this challenge was to do a 1000 classes in trying 60 day challenges. Had already done 900 in the 15 good attempts and in the two failed attempts there was another 93. So by class 7, the goal was done. Still the challenge teaches us something about how to carry on when your brain goes on strike and how to overcome adversity.

We did go to the challenge party this time and got to share the experience. You can see the video highlights reel..

One more T-shirt got added to replace the worn out ones..

After three weeks of not being able to go do Yoga much because of nosebleeds, finally made it last two days. Plan to get back to going everyday. Yoga makes me happy and peaceful. It is a reflective time and a meditative time to let go of things that don’t serve me right. It is a great way to reset.

That said, every day, learn something new. Even this morning in class Michelle tells me “Sundar, nothing should happen with the standing leg. just move the hands and the other leg!”. This was while doing a balancing stick pose where I was instinctively rolling forward on my ankle to compensate for the imbalance. Not doing that made all the difference in the second set. Have to remember that in tomorrows class. As we form good habits, bad habits have a way of creeping up as well. Constant attention to detail with a watchful set of teachers helps me fix them over and over again. To all my teachers at BYSJ, especially Michele, Matt and Sarah, who by now know my every move and even pre-emptively correct me , a heartfelt and sincere thank you!

Thank god for teachers!

The best part of this challenge was doing it with my wife and MIL. Hopefully someday, the kids will do a 60 day challenge. One can always hope.. and screw Parkinson’s disease.. Hope they find a cure for this shit so in case I do end up with it, there is some relief. Even if I cannot avoid the physical eventuality, the Yoga practice will definitely help me handle anything mentally down the road. That much I am sure of!

A very different 60 day challenge

Most of you who know me, have seen this once a year post around the end of March about the 60 day yoga challenge. 

BYSJ organizes two of these challenges a year. The winter challenge where you sign up on any day between Jan 1st to 14th and do 60 classes in 60 days (ideally without missing a day, and if you do miss because of unavoidable reasons, do two classes on another day to make up for it). A similar challenge in Summer with same rules. 

This is my 13th year of doing Yoga and this was my 13th 60 day challenge. My family doesn't try to stop me from doing this challenge anymore. They know I somehow manage to finish it and I am usually happy doing the challenge.

Given my MIL has been a big part of my yoga journey, it was always sad to hear her say "want to try and finish this challenge at least once in this lifetime!". She is usually here only after Pongal which is Jan 14th and leaves for Seattle after two three weeks. I don't sign up in summer because of travel and other commitments.

This year, she came early just for the challenge. Had promised her that someone (me, San or the little one who is not so little anymore) will drive her to class for those 60 days if both me and San decide to skip yoga. Given that assurance, she signed up.

For the most part all three of us would go to class. The folks at the studio were very happy to see a car load of folks come to class. Then we went to Alaska on a whim to take care of my wife's bucket list item. One bucket was larger than the other bucket.. or whatever.. fortunately MIL managed to do a couple of Livestream classes when we were gone. Funny thing is that when we got back and I had to do three doubles over the weekends to make up, she joined me! It was not easy for her, but she did. 

While she makes claims that it is not the same thing doing something at 50 vs 70, my take is that age has nothing to do with it. You do what you can and I think she actually gets more out of the yoga than I do and probably does a better job in most classes given the cards she has been dealt. 

Usually it is just a logistics challenge for me but as fate would have it, banged my knee twice on the same day. The last 10 days of the challenge were really tough with the injured knee. Still went ahead and did everything I posisbly could in the hot room every day.

Finished the challenge on March 1st and my MIL also finished it last week!  San did 54 classes in the 60 days but she refused to do any doubles on a matter of principle. She has done one challenge before and apparently that is enough for her. She was happy to cheer the two of us to finish. How she can let it go is where we see that she is a better yogi than me. 

The knee is not swelling anymore but I cannot do tree pose standing on my left leg and have difficulty doing suptavajrasana and the third part of awkward pose. These involve bending the knee inwards towards the other knee or folding it and rotating it out. Given it is better, my teachers still recomended I get an x-ray or get it checked out. So have an Ortho appointment this week. For almost all things that ail me mentally or physically, have used the yoga to recover over the last 12+ years.  Going to see what the diagonsis is. Just because you do yoga, doesn't mean you should bang your knee against car license plate holders and expect to come out okay!

We did celebrate after the challenge with a dinner at Chaat house! Got to share a few words at the Challenge party in hopes that if we can do it, others who are thinking of giving this a try, will actually go for it.

The one thing folks tell me all the time is this.. "Sundar, you do the same yoga everyday.. day after day, year after year.. you do this 60 day challenge every year.. and say you learn something new.. you must be really inattentive or dumb to learn something new in what you do all the time!" 

While it is true that the class is the same day after day, my body and mind are not. As different parts of my body get stronger or weaker, more or less rigid or flexible over time, and my mind gets better at listening to the instruction and internalizing it instead of being in zombie mode, there is new learning! All the time!

Going regularly back to back for long periods of time gives you a heightened sense of awareness of changes happening in your body and we get a chance to remember how we did what we did differently(better)!

My friend Arash summarized it beautifully. He said in the language of Buddists.. which we all learn as kids. Ther is Buddha, Dharma and Sanga. 

Buddham charanam gachchaami, sangam charanam gachchaami! 

Teachers are our gods here! The Dharma is the fact that they stay true to a hard 90 minute yoga practice and the community that is there at BYSJ is truly what makes us keep coming back.

We heard a lot of folks share their amazing journey and stories at the challenge party. You can check those out on the BYSJ website and other social media. A video of what we shared with folks..

As long as there are not major setbacks, will try to keep going to yoga, try 60 day challenge every year and try to keep this body and mind as optimized as possible to deal with everything the outside world throws at me.

Sangeetha says I am still a work in progress and even today she was trying to "knock some sense into me" with little success. For all that, there is progress. Slow but sure progress.

Strongly recommend you try yoga if you are on the fence. They say "do this for 30 days, it will change your body, do it 60 days in a row and it will change your mind". Can attest to it!

Here's to BYSJ for continuing to improve and transform people's lives, year after year, one challenge after another!

A big congrats to all who signed up and gave it their everything (finishing is a different story, signing up is the hard part!) and a special congrats to my MIL for being a great example and role model for yogis out there.

Very proud of her for finishing the challenge and showing up to class on day 61 !!!

A dozen 60 day challenges

This year yet again, the following sequence of events happened..

1. BYSJ announced the 60 day yoga challenge to start Jan 1st-Jan 14th (start within that window and finish 60 classes in 60 days)

2. Started on Jan 1st, and having gone to class everyday till 6th, signed up 

3. Wife and resident kid protested at first

4. Then realized that once I sign up for something, it is not easy to unsign me for anything

5. Negotiations were done as part of letting me go through the challenge

Go through this routine the first week of January as though it is some kind of WTO or Davos type event, without the private helicopters and fancy locations..

An agreement was reached. I was not to skip any of the all day hikes planned for Jan/Feb and will do doubles to make up, but it will kept to a minimum number of days.

The questions this year were :

You have done this so many times already. you are doing yoga practically every day, so why bother with this challenge?

It is not like you are going to learn anything new after all these years? You better know everything if you have been doing it this long, so just go reguarly but skip this challenge!

First question sounds logical. the second one, oh... that gave me an opening to launch into Sundar's yoga memorial lecture. On any day, I learn something new in yoga class, either about myself on a general basis, myself specific to that day, yoga in general, or something specific about a particular asana. It is a never endiing, continous process. 

Finished the challenge with 4 doubles. There were 4 all day hikes and some of them 10-12 miles with a lot of elevation gain. If there were 6:30 PM classes on Saturday, would have still dragged my ass to Yoga class after those hikes and avoided the doubles.  It was more of a time thing than a capability issue. It was a great feeling to finish. 

The 60 day challenge helps me take any new learning and make a habit out of it. When you learn something new about a part of your body, or a pose or how to adjust to do the pose better, it is important to keep repeating that, at least 10-12 days in a row, for it to stick to your brain so you do it without thinking about it as a "correction".  

It is like remembering Chennai phone numbers when they suddenly added an extra number in front of the 7 digit numbers. You have to think of the original number, add the extra number in front before dialing.. that takes mental bandwidth and slows you down.. it takes a few years of dialing before you don't have to process through those steps and the 7 digit numbers have been overwritten in the head directly with 8 digit numbers. There is no quick "Find all" , "replace all" for my brain! Maybe I am alone in this..

Yoga is like that for me. Have gone to class 2500+ times. Most of the poses are two sets per class. So if you have tried something 5000+ times over 11+ years and they have all gone through multiple sets of corrections, there has to be a faster way to make these updates stick. 

A friend and teacher, Matt told me recently when I quoted "Practice makes perfect!", with "Sundar, you get good at whatever you practice! You practice something that makes it better, you will get better. You practice something  that makes it worse, you WILL get better at making it worse!"

I just was zapped thinking about it. Bad habits are as easy to form, if you work hard! We should scrap that stupid proverb and replace it with "You perfect what you practice!". 

The 60 day challenge is the perfect opportunity to make process improvements (yoga is a process) into habits. Made 4 improvements in this challenge. Two were just undoing bad things that had crept up over time (this happens, don't know why!) and two were new learnings. 

San also signed up for the challenge with me, just to see how far she goes. She did 45/60 and was happy for her. There were two days where the little one was not well or wanted company and they both let me go to yoga. For that and for all the support, silent eye rolling instead of open rebellion, I am grateful to both of them!

Ironically, we had to wear a mask till the last day of the challenge and the very next day, the county declared masks were optional! Did all the 60 classes in the studio, in full heat and humidity, with a mask and without a water bottle.

If you are one of those folks who think it is difficult to do the hot yoga with a mask, do it back to back every day, have worries about having to remove masks to drink water etc.. all of those can be overcome.  That WAS going to be my message.. but now that the mask mandate is gone, just come do yoga!

It has been 4 years since I drank water during a yoga class. One of those things that has become a habit. Has definitely helped minimize stomach bloating during class and compress my stomach a lot more during forward bends. The first 3 days was hard.. then you count day 10, day 100, a year, two years and after some time, just get used to it and when you cross that day on calendar, smile and keep moving. This year I didn't even notice my "no water anniversary" till a few days later. That is when I know, it is time to stop counting for that one!

Have another thing to share that was funny and profound that happened during this challenge. Before a class, we were chatting with a few newcomers. They tell me "You do a great job in the front row. You must be naturally flexible!". Both me and San were smiling after hearing that.  

When I was new to Yoga, used to think that everyone else in that room was naturally flexible and was born with some genes that I lacked for sure. My first class I bent down to try touch my toes and my hands went an inch past my knees. Fast forward 12 years, someone thinks that I am naturally flexible!  

That shows, practiced skill can give the same perception as natural talent. It takes a long long time, but eventually you can get to a certain level of skill with practice. I am planning to do that with music. It doesn't matter if I have any music genes or not.. just going to keep at it and see after a dozen years, what happens. Music and yoga are different.. and I don't know the relative time scales, but going to give it a shot! When the family reads this, their eyes might just roll off the socket.. oh well!

Got another T-shirt this year at the challenge party, to replace the one that is almost dropping off my shoulder from all that washing. Very happy with it.  

Made a lot of new friends this year as well. While I was not fortunate to become a yoga teacher, definitely happy to be a longtime student. If you are one of those people who is curious about trying hot yoga, do reach out. There is plenty of posts in this blog that have explained my journey and experiences over the years and will be glad to share it in person. 

Now, we have until next Jan to negotiate a challenge! You have to keep the benchmarks going.. told my family, it would be good to do a 1000 classes, just in 60 day challenges (that is 17 challenges). So if that goal is accepted, the next 5 are spoken for!

See, simple!