Combining two interests

Yoga and Photoshop..

call it what you want, but these two pictures were a good time pass.

Jr. volunteered to take the individual shots. She said it was more fun to keep clicking and watch me do yoga than have to do the Yoga herself.. also she got to yell "body down, stretch forward" a few times. (had taught her to repeat the right keywords at the right times to motivate me). 

One of my teachers Matt always tells me "Sundar, you have to take it one millimeter at a time. Trust the process. It is a process. Go for progress instead of perfection". Every word is etched in my head. 

Being a process engineer by background, this Process is asymptotic and can be imperceptible on a day to day basis.. but, a millimeter a day adds up to 36.5 centimeters a year.. that is more than a foot! That assumes you come every day. Sometimes a weeks break can reset you more than 7 millimeters.. but that is another story. 

If you keep going and practice routinely, you can see the millimeters add up.

Will leave you with these two pictures of the half moon pose backbend 

and standing bow pose

both of which were incredibly difficult for me to do as a beginner and as a regular student in every class.. Was probably going back or forward only to the first step you see in the pictures. Today can do slightly better than the lowest bends in these pictures given all the poses we do prior to doing this (in heat) compared to directly jumping into it without any warm up at home. 

Matt was right.. those millimeters all add up over the years. 

All that said summer is always a tough time to keep up the regularity of the practice. So the process takes an erratic path and some semblence of regularity is regained in fall.

Was originally going to spot the 10+ things wrong in every pose, but today has been a good day. So instead I took a different approach, admired my handiwork on photoshop and decided all those things can wait. 

They are going to take a lifetime to fix.. and I am surprisingly okay with it!

Hope all of you got to do or try some Yoga on International Yoga day on Thursday. If you tried it for the first time, hope you had a lifechanging experience and you keep coming. If you got your regular yoga done, go you! 

It takes an inner will to be absolutely selfish to go do Yoga on a regular basis. The only way you can take care of others if you take care of yourself first. 

Behavioral economics and Hot Yoga

If you have read the book "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Kahneman, you will remember the test he does with data from colonoscopy patients. The patients rate their experience of a long colonoscopy treatment that might have varying degrees of pain throughout the procedure, purely on the basis of the last few minutes of the procedure.. if the pain goes down towards the end, they say "not bad" even if the peak pain level was high or the average pain level over the entire duration was high! This apparently is explained as the experiencing self vs. the remembering self and also explains how folks are impressed with an other wise dull movie that has a fast paced ending in the last few minutes etc. 

I just realized the same thing happens to me during hot yoga. During the standing series I start off great and by the time we are just past the 60% point, I have to catch up and really make an effort to breathe and concentrate and sometimes just stand in attention and focus and get back in. Then I give it everything while doing toe stand which is the last asana in the standing series. If I don't do well on the right side, push myself to do an even better job on the left side to get the series to a "happy ending". Even if I stood out for two or three poses during the standing series, I go down on the mat thinking "that was good" simply because of the toe stand. 

Then the same thing happens during the floor series. As long as I come back and finish strong my brain evaluates my attempt on the class as "stellar" no matter how crappy I did during the early part of that series.

Looks like a happy ending and all is forgotten. The opposite is also true. Sometimes I give it all I got during class only to end up not doing a 100% during the last five minutes (hanging on for dear life) and even though nothing was missed, come out feeling not satisfied with the effort.

All this might just be the natural way a brain works between experiencing something through the class and remembering only the way it ended.

Behavior or not.. two things are for sure.

1. Going to keep up with the happy endings

2. Going to treat the second set of every pose as a mini ending in itself

Hoping that those will improve the practice! 

On a completely tangential note with human behaviour... 

It has been almost a month since I started doing this five tibetan rites thing as soon as I brush my teeth in the morning. It takes me 15 minutes to do the five exercises 21 times and while doing it, make tea for my wife. She thinks I have already finished drinking my morning tea. Truth is I gave up drinking tea in the morning to cut down the milk and sugar. Have tea only in the evening on some days. Have also reduced the amount of milk and sugar in the diet. We also switched to 50% white and 50% brown rice. I cannot give up white rice and milk on the diet. My stomach has indeed stopped bloating in the middle of yoga class. There is definite improvements in abdominal strength and forearm strength after doing these exercises. 

A few weeks ago I went to say good night to the little one and told her

"I am cutting down on Tea and sugar and trying to eat brown rice and also cut down on milk products"

LO : but you love tea and thachchi mammu (rice with yogurt). that is pretty much all you eat? 

Me : I know. But the brown rice mix isn't all that bad. Still drink tea every alternate day in the evening.. 

LO : rolls her eyes.. 

Me : maybe your dad is just an idiot ?!

LO : gives me a big kiss and goes "I knew that the day I was born!"

That took me by surprise. Just smiled and gave her a big hug. Well she knew an idiot as soon as she laid eyes on one.. Probably the first idiot she saw! I am happy to be that idiot in her eyes because I will always be "her idiot". 

As an experimenter I am now upset. Was it the 5 rites ? was it the reduced tea, milk, sugar, white rice that helped? (also that book said to eat a meal with similar stuff only.. in other words if you eat bread eat only bread.. not mix with rice.. keep the meal to similar fiber contents) Not sure if that made the biggest difference. Always do one split at a time to evaluate the experiment. Use a control split. If you are doing a complex experimental design make sure you can analyze with good confidence and order your variables with decreasing expected impact. 

I teach this to people everyday and in what has been a huge experiment on myself, fail to follow my own rules for experimentation. Now to figure out what made the difference I have two options..

Keep the diet and stop the 5 rites or the other way around..

So I am going to keep the 5 rites and go back to my old diet with tea twice a day, finish dinner with thachchi mummu and go back to white rice for a month and see if the belly reappears.. 

I am doing it for science, people!

The back.. it bends .. or not

Almost a month ago, after coming back from India.. I started trying this exercise to backbend using the wall for support. Three of my yoga teachers helped demonstrate it for me and gave me tips. The advice was to try this after doing the class when we are already more flexible. Given I end up finishing the class at 10PM, it is not easy to stay back and try this. Usually have to come back home and call people across the Pacific. 

Still gave this a shot around 20 times a day.. wouldnt go back all the way all 20 times, but would just stand at work or in meetings and just go "up and back" to try and bend my upper spine. Then come home and try this on the wall. Over weekends, would spend 30 minutes trying to do this with breaks.

It is interesting to see how much change is possible even with limited attempts. 

The last clip was from last weekend. Then I had to travel. One single trip where you end up sitting for 12 hours can set you back a lot. I had a window seat reserved, but apparently this one had no "window". So I asked the ticket counter person to give me a window seat that actually had a view. He said "is seat 26 okay". I was tired and said "fine". turned out that this is the seat with the back to the restroom and that means it does not recline as much as the other economy seats and you get the added sound effects from the flush every 5 minutes. Given how tired I was, dozed off for the most part. When we landed, my foot would not go into my shoes! It was swollen!  Managed to squeeze it into the shoes and made it home. 

Given my panacea for all phyisical ailments is Yoga, went to yoga class right after coming home. The foot became normal again. Tried to do the back bend on the wall, bright and early on a saturday morning and I was back to where I was when starting this.

Now I have to start from the top.. but I will.