Honor your body

I went to yoga class last night, and this time, I was careful to eat before I went. It's so hard to figure out--I'm at work until 6:00, and class is at 7:00, and it lasts until 8:30, so while I can't eat too close to class time, I have to eat something that will get me through until nearly 9:00, when I get home. So it's a dilemma.

However, it's now a different dilemma, because eating didn't help. I still felt lousy about a half hour after class started, found it difficult to get through to the end, and felt like I was going to die by the time it was over. Either that or throw up. I felt dizzy and weak and weird, kind of the same symptoms as I was having before, which I interpreted as low blood sugar. But after having it happen twice in a row, with different circumstances, I have to determine that it isn't low blood sugar, but my unique inner ear.

My father has always had a problem with dizziness and nausea if he gets his head out of balance with his body . . . I'm not sure how to describe it, that isn't quite right. If he has to lay underneath the car, or a sink, or something like that, to work on it, it can make him sick for days. I've never been quite that bad, but I also have it to some extent; I also can't read while I'm riding in a car, I stay away from revolving restaurants, and I don't like to sit too close to movie screens. All because of my fragile inner ear situation.

It's not really fragile balance, because I can mostly do balance positions just fine. And I can (or used to be able to, I haven't tried it lately) stand on my head or do shoulderstand or bridge or bow with no problem, all postures that put my head upside down. But there's something about hanging my head down that bothers me, and what bothers me even more is revolving my head. Well, not all the way around, but, you know, revolving it in a circle that's supposed to reduce tension and stress.

You're supposed to close your eyes when you do that, but I definitely can't do that, I just do it a couple of times, and leave my eyes open. It still bothers me. So, we revolve our heads a few times, in both directions, and then hang our heads down, touching our toes or the floow (or in my case, my knees, basically), and then she has us stay in the same position, but lift our heads so we're looking straight out, and man, I hate that.

This is about the time that I start feeling icky. Then we do some other stuff, that it seems pretty much okay, but she always seems to come back to the head hanging down thing between almost every other pose, and I think that's the problem.

I was talking to Bob about it last night, and I said I just don't think it's the food, because I always took yoga classes in the evening after work, they were always around 7:00, and I don't remember ever having to eat beforehand, and never had a problem. But I was taking from a different teacher, and while I do remember doing neckrolls and having to be careful about not closing my eyes, I definitely don't remember so much of the forward bend thing.

Part of it is, I know, that I'm taking what I called before "health club yoga." As I described it to a friend in an email this morning, it's geared toward people who are more interested in reducing their butts than in achieving enlightenment. I'd like to do both, I guess, but I'm more interested in the enlightenment--I can reduce my butt on the weight circuit.

The difficult part for me is that the yoga classes are one of the reasons that I joined the health club. Not the biggest reason, but it was definitely a selling point to be able to take class and not pay extra for it. Sadly, though, I think I'm going to have to pass on it, just concentrate on cardio and weight training, and maybe after the first of the year start a new class with my old teacher. I hate to do it, but as Bob said, getting sick every week isn't exactly accomplishing anything.

I could, of course, just do the things that I can do and just sit (or stand) there during the rest of it, and that's mostly what I did last night, but you feel like kind of an idiot. I don't mind "honoring [my] body," as yoga teachers always say--don't push a pose to the point of pain, honor your limits--but since so much of this teacher's classes seem to be devoted to forward bends, it seems silly to even attend. I don't know if it's worth trying again or not, but after last night, I'm thinking not.

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