Day 14: Toe Stand (Padangustasana)

With an eye towards the most difficult and advanced pose in the series, I have to confide what the toughest part of this challenge is: writing every day.

It’s not that the yoga isn’t difficult. It’s just that the first and main thing I have to do each day is show up. Once I’m at the studio, what else am I going to do? Play pinochle? Besides, the 30 Day Challenge is about spending the 90 minutes in the hot room every day. Your success is measured by showing up and putting in your time. No one’s getting a medal for doing every single posture in every single class. Nobody’s keeping score. Make it to 30 classes in 30 days and your teachers and peers will acknowledge your consistency, discipline and perseverance. No one will say, “But Scott, you really only did Camel pose about a third of the time. Tsk tsk.” Spend the time and put forth your best, most honest effort over the 30 days. That’s all anyone can ask.

The blog? That’s the toughest part. (Yes, I know, world’s smallest violin and all that jazz. Don’t cry for me, Argentina. Or Arlington, for that matter.) I find having to write something new every day to be a bigger mental challenge than talking myself into the next posture in an especially difficult room. Part of the problem is that if I wrote about the actual classes, the resulting posts would all look like this:

“See Scott. See Scott do Eagle pose. See Scott fall out of Eagle pose. See Scott sweat like a Peruvian rainforest.”

So that’s why the yoga talk gets mixed with Bill Shatner and the metaphysical and Neil Young. That’s why you may yet hear an MP3 of me demonstrating what a Bikram class would be like if Sean Connery taught it. “Push your hipsh forward, Goldfingah. That’sh what your mother did lasht night when I ‘ad her.”

So in a way, getting a post up every day is a bigger challenge than entering the hot room. For 90 minutes each class, I’m encouraged to banish all thought, bringing me closer to much of the American electorate. When I sit down at the keyboard, it’s all blank screen and what the hell am I going to say?

In the end, I think of this blog as Mentalmucil. I’m trying to get regular in my writing and thinking. Of course, it would be nice if the end product doesn't resemble the normal byproduct of what we call regularity.

____________________________________________________________
Today marks the conclusion of the first two weeks of the challenge. A little Grizzly Bear to celebrate?