Is Hot Yoga Awesome?

Sticklers argue that overuse of the word “awesome” has dumbed it down. 

“Awe” is defined as an experience so life-changing, it alters your perceptions; your worldview actually has to expand to accommodate it. Following an experience of awe, people experience an expanded sense of time; suddenly you have a lot more of it.

More time? OK, that's awesome.

And it explains beautifully what I tell students who lament their lack of time to do hot yoga:

Get yourself to hot yoga and the time will show up. Not just for hot yoga, but for everything.  Hot yoga has the potential to change your time/space reality, because hot yoga is fertile ground for awesome experiences. Here's how that works...

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"Which hot yoga poses can I practice at home?"

I love enthusiastic Riverflow hot yoga students who ask me, "Which hot yoga poses can I do at home?"

The answer: all of them - as long as you never move a muscle.

Once you have a steady, 3-times-a week hot yoga practice, you can improve all 26 of your hot yoga poses by rehearsing them in your mind.

That's right - sit back and be lazy. (Repeat after me: Lazy is good; lazy is good; lazy is gooooooood!)

Only it's not so lazy; it takes commitment, focus, and giving up the guilt about "doing nothing." Get ready for your Hot Yoga Mental Rehearsal.

Mental rehearsal isn't a New-Age, touchy/feely thing; it's science. Countless experiments like the one above, usually done with athletes, prove that the results can be exactly the same when you exercise your mind. 

Can you pretend your hot yoga practice into perfection?

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A Well Spent Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is coming around again.

For everyone who requested, here is my Thanksgiving story from last year. Thanks for asking.

Yesterday was Thanksgiving.

I have a lot to be thankful for, blah, blah, blah.  But I don't feel thankful.  I feel scared. I am going off to Italy on Monday for 21 days mostly alone, and I don't have a clue what I will find there, what I will come home to or who I will be when I return.

I am lost already.

Yeah, I know, the whining of the entitled. Some people don't know how they're making the next rent payment.

Neither do I. For now, I am putting one foot in front of the other and heading to the airport. Wednesday was stressful....

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Hot Yoga and the Law of Attraction

Are you living the same life, different day?

How can something so consistently the same - hot yoga - be so disarming, while something so unpredictable - your life -  bring you the same things over and over?

How do you get more of what you do want and change what's unwanted, once and for all?

Here's the secret answer you wont hear from your teachers, parents, friends or therapists:

Do nothing. Take no action at all. Stop thinking about it. Stop talking about it. Look away from the problem.

And how is that supposed to work, you ask? In a word: beautifully. And here's why:

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Are you going too far in Hot Yoga?

"Only those who risk going too far will ever know how far they can go."

I am choosing to go too far because, far too soon, it will all be over. Ninety years can pass as quickly as 90 minutes.

Hot yoga has prepared me for a breakout.

When I first started hot yoga some 15 years ago, I didnt even realize how hemmed in I was.  I entered the room with my old injuries, ideas, limited beliefs, misconceptions, misunderstandings. In other words, my life thus far.

Hot yoga's instructions were to go for it,  play at 100% (the last time I remembered living at 100% I was a kid playing handball in the schoolyard) Don’t think; do the yoga.

Don't do what you can. Do whatever it takes.

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