09.03.19 Falling Out of Your Practice.

It happens.  It’s no big deal.   In the 17 years, I have been practicing yoga, I have been not practicing yoga for about half of that. 

I would look at my mat and feel kind of mean and defensive and guilty all at the same time, like when I am mad at someone because I am embarrassed about a mistake I made with them.

Dude. it takes a butt-load of courage to practice yoga and some days I don’t have it.  Somedays my practice is beautiful and inspiring and somedays I fight myself the whole time.  The thing is I never know what it will be like until I face the mat.

Doing yoga can be courageous act for many many types of bodies and the minds that come with them, but I am willing to go out on a limb and say it is particularly courageous for a large body to come to the mat.  All the other bodies are important and good, but I have a large one and I know something about that.

It is courageous because when we practice, we are fully in our bodies.  We are daring to visit the places in our bodies that we are ashamed of, that hurt us, that we are angry about, that have disappointed us, that make us feel inadequate.  We challenge our mobility and stability and strength when we have been assumed to be weak.  Maybe we even believe we are weak. We revisit our injuries and their pain. Practicing in a large body is courageous because nobody ever wants to feel those feelings ever again, but we know the only way out of those feelings is through them. 

There is no place to hide on the mat, so there we are in it with our bodies.  Our minds are looking for an exit, so our only real allies in this endeavor are our breath and our community.   

Every time our bodies scream to leave the mat, we fill ourselves with air and magnetize our feet to the ground, exhaling doubt and fear.  After enough breaths, our mind quiets and our bodies find some ease. 

If we can stay for long enough, we might forget everything we ever heard about the wrongness of our bodies and what it might mean about our value or character.  If we stay for even longer and let the breath carry us through our practice we often find actual joy in our bodies. 

We need our community to see our courage and nurture it.  We need our teachers to know that on some days, unrolling the mat is the “peak pose”.  People with large bodies need to have community with each other.  We need to remember that yoga is not a reward for being thin and beautiful.  We need to see the beauty in one another’s practice so that we can see our own beauty.  We need to borrow strength from one another when we don’t have it.I feel like I have turned a corner around feeling shitty about my practice.  Sometimes I don’t make it to my mat and when that happens, there are definitely physical, mental, and energetic consequences, but I know how to recover from them.  Sometimes I need to spend my time practicing yoga in other ways so I meditate, breathe, sing, clean, I honor my loved ones, nourish myself, and enjoy nature.  The mat is just one tool.   A powerful one, but it’s not all of yoga.

But here is the thing, once we decide to do yoga, to unite every part of ourselves, that is what we are doing.  The wheel has been set in motion and we are moving.   Part of honoring that process might be acknowledging our edges, observing them and honoring them.  If we come to an edge on our mat, we don’t have to rush to push past it.  It’s ok to stop and examine that edge.  If our edge happens when we are trying to make time or muster the will to get to our mat, then we can be patient with that edge too.

I am not suggesting that we give up, I am suggesting that we don't fight ourselves in the moment.  Instead we can stay in the struggle until it yields.  We get to inch our way closer to what we desire with great patience.  We all get to where we need to be.

05.06.18 I Am A For Real Power Lifter Now

Y’all I love tribes.  I’ve got my family tribe(s), my St. Augustine tribe, my Covington tribe,  my yoga tribe, my work tribe, of course my Iron Tribe and many many more.

In 2018 I made some big moves.  I re-aligned myself with a new power-lifting tribe.

I haven’t yet said a proper good-bye to Iron Tribe.  I want to say that Iron Tribe was a total game changer for me.  I went there to lose weight, I left knowing that I didn’t need to lose weight to be an athlete.  That is not their mission, but it is a lesson that has been critical to my mission.  

I will say that another way.  I learned that I didn’t have to wait to have a different body to live my life fully.  More on that another day.

After squatting 300lbs in December at Iron Tribe, I thought maybe I will check out competitive power lifting.  I rallied my resources. I leveraged the community and my coaches past and present.  I consulted all the wise allies that I collected over the years.  I went to the coach at my gym, I got his advice and I got to work.  

Half way through my training I looked around and realized something about my gym community.  It was that however much in love I was with this awesome community of athletes and coaches and however much I felt I owed them for the gift of realizing my own power (in so many ways), they were just doing something different than what I was doing.   My mission was now very specific and not connected to the mission of the tribe.   They would have been happy to support me to the best of their ability, but it wasn’t a good fit anymore.

Just for the record.  I love that place, the owners, the coaches and the people every day.  For anyone that is not sure how to get started with a dynamic fitness program or wants to get super awesome in a cross-training environment – this place is amazing.

As I started down this path of training I had about 3 months before my first meet.  Half way through I began to crave more.  I needed to find a new peer group that could usher me into this sport.  I wanted to be around people that could practice and talk about 3 movements - endlessly. 

This is a post for another day also, but there is so much more to those 3 movements than people realize.

So, I opened my third eye and it saw a post on Instagram for a pod cast featuring Shawna Mendelson.  I listened to it and there was something about her words that clarified my sense what was missing from my training.  So, I looked her up and wrote to her and incredibly, she wrote me back immediately and we connected.

We got to work, she found my baselines, she corrected my form in some key areas and got me to my first meet, which I attended yesterday.

Here are 10 things I learned yesterday that I would love to share:

1.     I am an athlete. From now on, I cannot think of myself as a strongish fat girl that can pick up heavy things.  I am a person in possession of skills, strength, drive and discipline – all of which I will apply with integrity daily to compete with my best efforts to beat my best from the day before.

2.     Hanging out with the other women lifters is an awesome time. We all watched each other and marveled in one anthers efforts.   We shared space and baby powder, cheered each other on.  We talked about what we loved and what we were afraid of.  

3.     The women of power lifting are some of the toughest, kindest most badass humans I have ever met.  It is not surprising when I think of what it takes for a person to fight for themselves and their own strength.  It takes equal amounts of courage and compassion.   Everyone has known these women and everyone knows that when they are not lifting heavy weights, they are lifting all of us. Their strength is not just physical – it’ total complete emotional, psychological strength.  These are the people that make the world turn even if they must do it manually.

4.     The men in this sport are either helpful or oblivious.  This is great.  I have met nothing but awesome men in the powerlifting space.  They are encouraging, helpful and pretty much never talk down to me or other women around me.   Men who did not come to support women, are happily getting awesome on their own, which is also great. 

5.     Competing is so much fun.  I know where I belong in my sport and that feels great. 

6.     I have a sport!  I found an activity that my body loves.  I don’t have to participate in sports and activities that make my body feel bad.  I get to be comprehensive about my fitness, but I don’t have to fight myself. I am super strong.  I am excited to combine that with better technique and experience.

7.     A t-shirt and a singlet is hella comfy.  Sure, you look shitty, but not one single person gives a shit.  This was a great opportunity to stop thinking about how I should look or dress.  Before the meet, I had a horrible 6th grade nightmare that I would arrive in my singlet and t shirt and nobody else would be dressed that way.  It all worked out.  Also, my nails were so on point, I didn’t need a better outfit.

8.     Powerlifting is an individual sport that requires a team.  Each of my success and failures reveal a new truth to me, that is useful only to me.  I can’t access any of that without people to guide me. 

9.     Trust is everything.  It is necessary to trust my coaches, spotters, and organizers. The foundation of my success rests on my ability to trust my guides and everything that they have learned and the work that they have already done.   

10.  I deserved my award.  I got an award for being the best in my division.  There was nobody else in my category….so it might seem like an overly gratuitous recognition.    Not so.  I am a 41-year-old, 300-pound woman using not one piece of gear.  I used no belts, or wraps, or suits.  I didn’t even use lifters.  All those things are fine and I look forward to learning how to use those tools.  I just didn’t use them this time.  I arrived on that platform with nothing by my self.  It took me an entire lifetime to make my way to that platform.  The fact that nobody else that fits my specs was there with me, speaks volumes about how special it was that I made it.  I guess sometimes you get an award for showing up, but showing up is the actual work and it is worth recognizing.  There were a lot of awards, but there were also a lot of circumstances.  Not one single lifter there was the same.

This experience was so precious to me and it was just the beginning of all the work I get to do with Shawna and my new tribe.  Also, shout out to my dad who drove all the way from Bandera Texas to sit in a pretty uncomfortable chair for 9 hours and cheer me on.  I could feel all day how proud he was of me.   It was easy for me to branch out and be brave when I was so close to my roots.  Thanks Dad, I love you forever.

One other thing that happened yesterday, is that there was a woman in the bathroom who said to me "I wish I could do what y'all do"  I told her "you can".  Everyone of us has power.  We just need to reach out and grab it.

01.21.18 I Really Want You As My Ally

Dear Men,

I see you.  I have noticed your awkwardness.  I hear your defensiveness in the way you construct your words or hide behind your best actions. It must be a little scary to not know how to act or what to say.  I can imagine that must feel very unfamiliar.  Especially since so many women have been trained (mostly by each other) to reassure you continually. I bet many of you didn’t know that. I can’t even tell if that is your fault, but I am mad about it and I don’t know who else to blame. 

That's the thing, I am tired of blaming myself.  I think we all are.  So we need you to let us be mad at you.  We need you to remember your goodness, on your own without our help even if you have made mistakes.  You have to love yourself enough to hang on to your integrity at all times.  You must do this even when and especially when you fuck up so big time you can’t stand to see yourself in the mirror. We need you to grow roots in these moments and stand tall and strong, so that we can rage in your face with the force of a hurricane until we are done.  

If you can do this, If you can stay, It is very possible that we will want to stand with you when its all over.  You will have walked through a fire with us and we won’t forget it.  We will all be changed.

You will loose some things.  It will make you sad.  You men will all need to learn how to love each other for real.  You will have to tend to each other as we women decide one at a time to give up that job and tend to ourselves.  That  might not sound fair.  Maybe it isn’t, but neither is sexism. To be perfectly honest, none of us (including you) can survive another moment of this hideous oppression.

I don’t know if you guys know this, but carrying out all of the jobs of maintaining sexism in the world has been very hard on you.  I need you to trust me, that you will feel better without it.

 All of us have witnessed the absurd devices that men have employed to suppress feminine power.  It looks exhausting.  It looks like there is a cost of self for  every tool you buy from the devil’s store to maintain this system.  You have had to rely on weapons of economics, sexuality, religion, physical strength, mental trickery, and many others.  Every time one of these weapons is used, men grow more confused.  Aren’t y'all tired of that? Men, don’t you want your mind back?  I truly want that for you.

I have noticed the altruistic ways that many men allowed their spiritual belief systems oblige them to participate in the systematic oppression of women.  I have seen you enjoy your free time and you extra cash while I agonized over working late nights after taking care of my family only to make $0.78 on the dollar (or worse). Many of us women have been beaten, raped, lied to, denied the rights to make decisions about our own fucking bodies and futures, we have been endangered by modern child birth, we are still sold into slavery and on and on and on.  

We have been kept busy scared and quiet. So maybe you didn’t notice? Or maybe you did but didn’t know how to extract your self from your position of privilege do anything about it.  

Have you ever asked what you personally would have to give up or endure to live in a world without sexism?   I am wondering (and I think you should know for yourself) what you are willing to let go of in order to have equality for me. 

Listen, stay with me here.  I see you and I still love you.  I am just pissed. I have not forgotten that men have been seduced and manipulated by privilege.  I can imagine (because I am white and have my own work to do here) how hard it is to want to extract yourself from it.  I am fully aware that you have been experiencing the world differently from me.  You see things differently.

Men, if we could trade places for a bit, it would be amazing!  I would miss the closeness I have with all the women around me.  You would get to know what it is like to be required to hold the wellness of other beings above your own. I could walk through the world without implicit obligation. I would know the horrors of war in a way I can now only imagine.  You would know the tortures and joys of the female body.  You would understand what it is to organize your thoughts around the possibility of assault at any moment.  You would wonder if you were too fat or too thin or too blonde or too female or not female enough or if men liked you or women liked or if you should do something to be more anything.  I imagine I would think of a ton of shit once my mind was done with all of that.

So listen, for what it’s worth, I still don’t blame you.  I don’t actually think you asked for this construct.  However, sexism is a problem that needs to be solved.

So, if you are a guy and you are wearing a “Time’s Up” pin or you support the #metoo movement or you are just trying to be a good dude, I am asking you to stay while we figure this out.  If you are a man and you hear a woman tell her story about any kind of sexism she has experienced, please stay and listen and hold space.  If you are a man and you get accused of being sexist, clumsy, pervy, aloof, complicit, quiet, handsy, abusive…etc., please stay and listen.  If you are a man and you hear a story that a woman tells about her experience and you don’t believe her or you think she is wrong  or you think she just wants attention, give her the fucking attention please.

We women as a group, historically, have not had much experience in telling our stories of sexual harassment, abuse and inequality.  Many of you thought you were doing right by us the whole time and nobody told you otherwise.  As you can imagine, we have not been trained to notice or speak of sexism.  So many varieties of abuse and oppression have just looked normal to us for so long, we need to bring our stories to life so we can study them and to try and understand them.  We can be expected to be in inelegant at times. Elegance is not a luxury we can afford in this moment.  Please stay and help us process it. I believe it will be good for us both.

XOXO,

JGC

PS -  Also,  can you please not tell us we are doing it wrong, or correct us.  We will work it out. We totally got this.

01.14.18 Is Yoga a Tool of Liberation?

Is yoga actually a tool of liberation? I mean, I think so.  So does Master Patanjali from what I have read, but let's not take it for granted.

A friend of mine sent me an article the other day suggesting otherwise.  Yoga was described as a kind of cute navel gazing activity that helps people feel more comfortable with their privilege.  If I am honest, that is not always wrong.  I still think it's not entirely fair.

I can get with the idea that  a person who's end goal in a yoga practice is perfecting their downward dog is not exactly leading the revolution.  But, it is probably fair to say that no matter how superficial the reasons are that deliver a person to a yoga practice, most get more than what they bargain for.

Once we begin to still the mind, connect with the body, allow the breath to lead us, align ourselves, disconnect from struggles, we become profoundly better prepared to perceive the world. Being able to perceive the world can feel like turning a light on.  When the world becomes illuminated for a person, things tend to change.  

We begin to notice our connection to each other.  It is unavoidably real.  People do lots of different things with that information.  Some seek more truth and justice.  Others observe the world and carry their observances to another lifetime.

Our practice teaches us to grow roots, dig deep into the earth, find strength and grow in every direction.  We take a look at what is in our way and patiently move it one breath at a time.  We learn persistence.

The thing that happens in yoga that i think is the most helpful is the way we develop courage on our mats to stay in a moment no matter how difficult.  We do things that are physically, emotionally, and intellectually challenging.  We learn how to rely on our breath and stay.  We learn how to fail.  We learn how to come back over and over again. We practice discomfort.  

Yoga is about dissolving illusion and living in union with oneself, with god, with each other (all the same thing in my opinion).   Each of us do this in our own time with actions that we have the capacity to execute.  Which reminds me of another thing that happens when we practice yoga.  We become increasingly prepared for honesty, struggle, peace, enlightenment.  We spend time experiencing the benign reality of various states of being.  We create capacity for power.  We also reduce our indifference to that which causes harm.

I practice and teach yoga.  When I practice I don't always think of the big picture of liberation. In fact, I try to engage with my thoughts a little as possible.  I focus on my breath, my energy, my alignment.  I suspend the drama of attachment and outcomes and exist on my mat.   When I teach, I offer instruction that I hope lead my students away from the turnings of thought and towards their breath.  I hope this allows them to experience their life force, reduce attachment, build capacity, work through struggle and gain strength. 

All of that is happening when I teach someone how to root down, balance, expand from the heart and stay with the breath.  When I teach those things, I am building and army of liberators.  The revolution must happen inside first.  We come to our mats and then we take it to the streets.

I believe yoga is a tool of liberation.  If you are skeptical, try it.

08.14.18 Strength and Fitness

I understand that people may not look at me and get that I am very much interested in physical fitness. Generally, we don’t see fat people and believe that they care about their bodies. However, it is true that I have dedicated pretty much my entire life to learning and thinking about my body. 

At first because I hated it and blamed myself for the shape my body.  This started at the age of 5.  I remember being in kindergarten and my friend Shannon and I were wearing the same dress.  I looked at her skinny legs and I looked at my big legs and felt ashamed.

Just 6 years later I was in my first weight watchers meeting. What I now understand is that an 11 year old girl has no control over the shape of her developing body.  Nor should she.  I wish someone had told me at the time that an 11 year old girl is hungry, growing, changing and needs nourishment and patience.  An 11 year old girl should be dreaming and playing and learning and testing her power in the world.  I should have been marveling at the magnificent changes happening to me.  Instead, I was trying to make people approve of my body while at the same time hating myself for not being able to control it make it submit to the expectations the world had for it.

I felt shame constantly.  Sometimes by many of the women I loved and trusted the most.  They loved me, but were afraid for me.  People were urgent with me about solving the problem of my fat body. 

Y’all, I wasn’t even that fat.  WTF ever that means.

Ironically, to solve for that I started doing things that actually were bad for me. I starved myself, I stayed up late at night running on a treadmill punishing myself for eating.  I was afraid to eat in public. I smoked.  I ate fake, chemically processed low sugar low fat food.  I deprived my body of nutrition.  I tried to not notice that I even had a body.  I tried to work harder and get approval from people by making them more important than me.  I drank.  I took drugs.  I didn’t sleep. 

I didn’t believe that my body, the very thing that carries me through his life, was valuable.

I lost sight of my own preciousness.

I lost a lot of weight once for a few months in my early 20s and it was terrifying.  People wouldn’t shut up about it.  Men, wouldn’t stop looking at me.  I had a teacher at the time that felt particularly dangerous and creepy when he looked at me or stood behind me.  I didn’t know what to do.  I had been desperate for people to approve of my body for so long, and now they did and I hated it.  No thanks.  I gained the weight back and with it more shame.

The majority of my life was a cycle of that, gain weight, feel ashamed, get scared that I am spiraling out of control, loose a little bit of weight, can’t sustain it, gain more weight feel more shame…..etc.

Over these years, I read all the books, I did all of the things.  I got a lot of information.  Through all of the good and bad info, trial and error, I came to know a LOT about nutrition.  I took it all in and listened to my body. I know so much about the body.

I know so much about my body.  There are still mysteries left, but not many.  I have built a feedback loop that I trust.

I will do almost anything to not go to a doctor.  Almost every doctor I see will identify fatness as the root of every illness. instead of a symptom of abuse of which I am blameless for.  Which means, they turn out to not be helpful identifying real problems and solutions.

Once a doctor told me that I was pre-pre-diabetic.  Meaning my blood sugar was almost on the high side of normal.  I think that is still called normal.  That is medical code for fat.

I have said a thousand times, that if given the option, i would have chosen thin-ness and complicity.  I tried  with all my heart and with excessive discipline to loose weight.  I am not like bravely IDGAF fat.  I actually don’t know if anyone is.

I  would have traded everything I loved for it.  I have made so many deals with the devil that compromised my actual health and also my integrity.  I have made decisions that were designed to devalue my very being.

Now I am in my forties and working hard to reclaim the time I lost trying to escape my body.  I am trying to reconcile the moments adding up to years where I was paralyzed by not being worthy.  I am collecting the debt of time where the world made me feel that I was too broken to accomplish anything.  I want back every minute of every gym class where I was too afraid of being embarrassed by being noticed to try to have fun or notice my own physical power.

I moved my life forward by toggling between two states of being.  I would ignore everything and bulldoze my way into spaces I was not welcome and pretending it was fine. Alternately, I would examine every little detail of myself, building a massive taxonomy of traits that were on a spectrum of acceptable and unacceptable.  I would re-write the criteria continuously.  I would build new categories between truth and fiction, human and inhumane, changeable or static.  I moved toward the light while everyone wanted me to stay with them in the dark. 

It is through that fire that I walked to arrive in this place.  And this is place where I fucking belong.

If I had lived with the privilege of unearned social acceptance, I would not have realized the glorious fruits of all that labor.

The truth is, I have moments now (long ones) where I forget that I am fat.  I am not in a constant state of terror with my internal voice screaming at me things like “Change! You are not ok! Nobody could love you! You are dying, stupid!”  You don’t deserve help!” “Don’t let them see you!”

Those recordings show up sometimes, but they don’t run me.

I have enjoyed lots of different types of movement and exercise.  Pretty consistently, it was humiliation around my body that stopped me from pursing any of them in the long term.  

Throughout the last 17 years, I hung on to yoga.  I would practice, get discouraged, get busy, stop practicing, come back, repeat. 

After having a baby, my body was so destroyed it took me about 2 years to return to my practice.  I had no choice and it was almost impossible to practice.

I was enormous, swollen, enflamed and immobile.  I just grit my teeth and did it anyway.  It was sometimes peaceful, but mostly it was physical and emotional torture.  In those days, my practice was all about showing up to the mat.  It is a noble practice.  In the end I didn’t have the strength to stay in my practice.  So, I took a break and went to the gym.

At the gym I pushed myself with cardio, which I hate but continue to engage in (in moderation - for balance).  I also learned about lifting weights.

For me lifting was the antidote to all of the inadequacy and discouragement I had been plagued with.  I was immediately good at it.  Before I knew what I was doing or how to properly move, I was unbelievably strong.  This was an absolute revelation.  I was unbelievably strong.    

Here is an example. I can remember the first time I did a bench press.  I slowly built up the bar with to maximum weight recommended for the women and tried to do the prescribed max reps.  I did this slowly, because I didn’t imagine that I could be as strong as the strongest in my group. The other women I was lifting with were fierce and I looked up to them. None of these women hit the weight that I did and they could at best accomplish 3-7 reps.  It was confusing to watch, I had never been physically the best at anything.  At the maximum weight, I got up to 10, 15, 20 and then just stopped, because I was wasting our time.  It was way to light.

I remember that day and think about how grateful I was to be with those supportive badass ladies in the gym.  It would have been so easy to make me feel shitty or lessen my accomplishment - but they didn’t.  That too was new.

I began to learn how to move smarter, find my alignment, work on my mobility, and get stronger and more confident.  Now that I had strength, I went back to yoga.

I went back to yoga so big time, I went to a teacher training and now I teach it.  The main thing that get out of yoga, and that I teach in yoga is listening to the body.  I want all of us to find the safety and presence of mind to stay in a moment and listen to our bodies enough to make good decisions about how to best serve our bodies.  Our bodies hold our consciousness we need them.

Now, I am so very in my body all the time.  I practice yoga even when I can’t stand it and my body gets in the way.  I stay there on my mat until I can dissolve the ideas I have about my body being unworthy of this kind of loving attention.  

I connect to my breath. 

I  notice it running trough my body. 

I close my eyes and explore every energetic pathway inside my skin.  

I travel these pathways in mind looking for places that feel unhealed or un-nourished.

I keep my attention and energy in those places as long as I can and go back as often as I need to.  Because that is yoga.  It is not turning away from yourself.

I lift.  I lift as much as possible as often as possible because I like being strong.  I lift smart because I am a yogi and because I am smart.

I like spending time noticing the strength that was given to me by god.  I think it would be a sin to not accept and enjoy that gift.  In many many ways, the gift of strength saved me.  My physical strength lends me emotional strength regularly.  My physical strength allows me to walk through the world less afraid.  My strength makes me large.  My largeness insists that others make space for me. This is space that I decide to be unashamed claiming as often as I can.

The very idea of women being as small as possible is a bullshit proposition created by sexism and maintained exquisitely by capitalism.  Fitness is important to me.  Health is important to me. Strength is important to me. Peace is important to me.

I will not force myself to be small.  This commitment is one that I make for myself.  I hope that this commitment serves others in reminding them that they have options in how they live their life.