Given that I’ve been hanging out in little Suzy B*itchfaceland lately, I’m happy for my 5-posts-about-chocolate plan. How can anyone be unhappy when there’s chocolate? And while we’re at it, though I’m SO sore today that every movement is *felt* deeply (ouch: yoga), I can’t help repeating yesterday’s mantra with each step.

Now, really, I’m NOT so into the whole spiritual side of yoga. My spirituality is my own thing, and while I like meditating on my own, I don’t FEEL it when I’m in public. I mostly go through the motions for the whole chanting and singing part of yoga, and by that I mean, I am completely silent… which is its own achievement for a little ball of frenetic activity like myself.

But this mantra… it’s GOLD. The instructor says it with her kids ’cause it’s THAT great, and while you can’t see me waving my arms about in the accompanying spasm, say it with me now!:

“This is my LIFE!
MINE to enJOY!
I… feel… GREAT!!!!”

Cute, no? I say it with each footfall and it makes me smile. Sorta like this little number, the reverence for which led me to devote some time to chocolate on my blog:

**cue the crickets**…

I know. It doesn’t look like much, a half-moon wafer on a red file folder in my office, but think of this as the chocolate equivalent of “still waters run deep”.

In its proper form, it looks more like this:

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And their royal gorgeousness can only be procured for £9.98 in the UK.

Can you read what’s on there? INTENSELY dark chocolate! FIERY chilli with COOL lime! And I’m telling you, the lime seals the deal. My colleague got a box of these from his brother-in-law, to whom we have now built a tasteful shrine, and whenever we’re in heated hallway debate about something and the box o’ wafers is produced, the silence descends… and “I… feel… GREAT!!”

(PS: I submitted my completed application to UVic today, which is probably my first choice. Scary. Exhilerating! 2 down, 1 to go!)

What makes you feel GREAT? Will you send me some?

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I have a cousin who is a personal trainer. As I drove back to the Hinterlands after Christmas, I happened to have called my mother and a family do was going on. My cousin answered. I told him about my goals and what I do, and asked his recommendations for how to structure my strength training. He had one thing to say:

“If you’re not doing yoga, everything else is just wasting your time.“

His reasoning was that you become stronger when you address muscle imbalances, to say nothing of the overall genius of full-body conditioning via yoga. So no matter what else you do, if you’re not adding yoga in there to balance it all out, at least some of the time spent training is futile.

I believed him, and in fact even when my medical professionals had told me (when I had bad bad cholesterol levels in 2006) that I should not be doing *any* physical activity that wasn’t cardio, I still thought yoga was only a good idea.

And then I tried it.

And I realised it was only a bad idea. Kidding, kidding, it’s just bloody hard for me.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: I have a lot of tone. At rest, doing nothing, adding muscle mass at the gym, I’m ahead of the game in this one. The downfall of this is that stretching feels totally contraindicated, as I’ve mentioned before.

I’ve been trying to do more yoga, as I mentioned in my New Year’s goals post, when Kath briefly made me disgusted with her because she’s mega-bendy. But I got over it, because, oh yeah, I tend to be relatively strong and I have to move soon. I own a lot of books. Strength will be good.

Back when my awesome Norwegian roommate, May Kristin, was here, she went around town and found the best yoga there was. It was at a little studio on my street… in the basement of a union building. It didn’t feel like it had an abundance of feng shui, but we went. This one class that we both liked was good—hard, but good.

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I hadn’t been back without MK. Blah blah blah, I got busy, disintrested, and again re: the feng shui.

Walking around town last week I saw a sign: “Grand Re-Opening at our new location! Come check us out! Free 30-minute yoga classes every 45 minutes!”

That re-opening was on this past Friday night—and what with my craptacular day Thursday, I figured it was a sign from the universe that I go. I ended up chatting too much with everyone to do a class, as they told me “hot yoga! We’ve got hot yoga!” And I said, “well, thanks to Kristen, I know I don’t want that. Plus, I actually thrive in cold weather workouts…” So they showed me which were “sorta hot” (is there such a thing as “tepid yoga”? ), and then they told me about the one-night-only sale… so I made a commitment: 21 classes, $200. FIERCE! $9.52 per class? That’s something like half price what I’d get *anywhere* in Vancouver!!

On Monday, it’s 4 months until I move: that means 12 weeks of 1 class per week, and 4 weeks with 2. Hello, cardigan? You’ll be mine soon! (and if you’re counting, I’m at only 13 workouts, but have been steadily accelerating since I started.)

Well, this morning, I went for my first class in the new space. It was Vinyasa. Not my beloved Ashtanga, but I’ll cope. Or SO I THOUGHT!

There was a temperature malfunction in the new space. By the end of the class, it was 29°C. Now, if you want that, and if you’re not cheek-to-jowl with a SMELLY MAN, then that’s FAB! And it’s cool by hot yoga standards. But I ended up so nauseated that the “Bird of Paradise” nearly did me in.

(source—the “Bird of Paradise asana…)

(source—I got this far into it before I thought I might die)

I was almost in tears. They assured me it wouldn’t be like that normally, and that I’d acclimatise anyway, if I kept coming back.

So now, I have my reservations. But I’m committed, and at the very least, it won’t kill me.

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It’ll probably make me stronger. Go figure.

Anyone familiar with Groundhog Day?

Specifically, this part of the film:

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I love this part—it’s Bill Murray at his best, when he says to Punxsutawney Phil (the groundhog) as they drive into the quarry to, hilariously and impermanently, commit suicide: “That’s not bad for a quadruped. You gotta check your mirrors, just the side of your eye… That’s it! They’re chasing us! Come on, make it fun! Don’t drive angry.” It is from there that this post has its title.

Because a little comic relief was DEFINITELY in order when I pulled into the Hinterlands tonight. On the plus side, no traffic around Vancouver-Abbotsford-Chiliwack meant that I did the drive in 8 hours.

Yay.

The minus side, however… oh dear. +4°C in West Van became -12°C in the Hinterlands. OK, I can deal… I got my favourite Indian food for dinner—from the only restaurant I eat at in the Hinterlands, ever since my fish allergy drove me away from the awesome sushi place… and I was told by the delightful owner, “I’ve sold. I’m going to work at my husband’s restaurant. Oh—he doesn’t do Mattar Paneer like this though.” Suddenly, Alina, I felt like we were one stomach dwelling in two bodies, in terms of your pad thai quest. Now, I SO FEEL YOUR PAIN.

I pulled into my back alley to find that my neighbours had not only helped themselves to my parking place, but a guest of theirs had also blocked my access. Nice. If they ever ASKED to use the place, I’d say yes, and tell them when I’m coming home so they wouldn’t obstruct my unpacking, as they do EVERY. TIME. I go AWAY. I’m a right bitch about it, and so I then parked my car to obstruct their guest, and went inside to eat my last mattar paneer.

I braced for cold…

… and was greeted with tropical warmth the likes of which I hadn’t felt since New Zealand, a few weeks ago… there, however, it was natural: this was a hot and humid day… my fave!

My mind whirred back to my departure, when I set the temperature for 55°F (12.78°C). No one was going to be home, so that seemed reasonable.

Then it whirred again, to when I strolled through the grocery store in Auckland and my phone rang… it was my landlord, so I answered it. I said, tersely (since he KNEW I was in NZ, and this could only be bad news): “George, I’m in New Zealand—what’s wrong?” He said “oh, nothing! Just wanted to let you know that the furnace guy is coming in to do some work this week!” I said: “great. I won’t be there. If there’s no emergency, this is expensive… bye!”

Furnaceman changed my thermostat from Fahrenheit (which, after 3.5 years in my house, I still don’t understand) to Celsius. Sweet! But he also left the temperature at 19°. See? On the left? Shit.

On the right you see *my* set temperature… for when I’m AT HOME. Not galivanting around the world. I’m REALLY miserly about the heat, and I’m epically pissed that now, I have to pay for 23 days of my furnace revving the house up to 19°C. AND I DIDN’T EVEN GET TO FROLIC BAREFOOT IN IT!!!!

(PS: furnace man also clogged my kitchen sink…) Ookie.

Lest you think I just took to the blogosphere to vent my spleen, I actually am turning these lemons into… well, not lemonade, something stronger. Maybe a Mike’s Hard?

I took all this negativity and am turning it into a HUGE positive: TONIGHT, finally, I’m restarting my nightly meditation. Clearly, I need it , but I’m also calling it Step One in my “Back to Basics” detox… so if I haven’t turned you off with my anger (think Punxsatawney Phil instead!!), I hope you’ll please come back tomorrow and play the interactive game of giving your two sense for how to find what’s important and stick with it…

Because, unlike the Bill Murray / Punxsatawney Phil suicide pact, I’m going to work this out.

Not bad for a biped!

I’ve not been quite as chipper recently as in the last few months… I don’t know if it’s noticeable to the blogospere, but I feel it.

On the one hand, it’s landslide season at work: I don’t see my house anymore except for sleep, and there’s not lots of that happening… that would DEFINITELY crush one’s spirits… but there’s something else.

True story: It takes 21 days to form a habit (or so I’ve read)… and, apparently, just one weekend away to make you forget you ever had one!

I’m talking about my meditation.

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I had been *so* happy about my nightly meditation since I began “5 Weeks to Fine” in September—and then I went on and on about how I was going to keep going. And I did, too, right up until I went to Calgary at the beginning of November. It’s not that I wasn’t comfortable meditating at my friends’ place, but just that I forgot while I was there. And when I got back to the Hinterlands, I forgot I had forgotten!

It occurred to me about a week ago that I’d fallen off the wagon, and I tried to hit the rhythm again. But in 10 days, I’ve gotten 2 sessions in. Interestingly, I had been cranky at work a few days in a row, but the day after I meditated again for the first time, all was considerably better—in spite of my still being pretty tired.

Even though the comments suggested that there are those who don’t believe in the power of meditation to make real changes in one’s life, my experience tells me it does…

So why can’t I get back into the habit? Have you ever felt somehow blocked by a good habit you were trying to adopt? How did you get over the hump?