I don’t mean doing it right in a “thou must get thy leg behind thy head” type way. No, I mean doing it right for your body.

I’ve been practising yoga on and off since I was a child and up until about 2001/2 did an awful lot of that gym-based Yoga/Pilates/Fusion stuff (which incidentally I love, and it did me the world of good when it came to getting well and strong again). Then around the time I finished my MA and started working in the City again, I discovered Astanga Vinayasa.

And this, along with the whole working in the City again thing, was probably where I started doing it wrong.

Let me take a little tangent here and remind you a bit about hip joints.

The hip joint is a ball and socket joint and is basically where the top of the thigh bone attaches itself to the pelvis. The whole she-bang looks a bit like this (these are not mine – it will not surprise you to know mine do not look anything like as symmetrical as this – as I said to Himself the other night, I am the prototype for how humans should not be put together).

The angle at which those thigh bones sit in your pelvis is decided in the womb. This is why some people can happily do the split and others can’t. Yes, there is always room for improvement and you will always be able to improve your range of movement but….and this is important….when bone meets bone there is nowhere further you can go.

So…

Pushing and striving and striving and pushing to get my knees to the ground in Baddha Konasana and my feet behind my head in Supta Kurmasana won’t do you much good at all if, y’know, your beautiful body isn’t built to do that. And mine isn’t. (Nor is Nadine’s and she writes beautifully about it here).

The pushing and the striving and the striving and the pushing that I put my body through for years whilst practising Astanga Vinyasa became a metaphor for what I was doing to myself day in and day out. Fuck feeling sick, Fuck M.E, fuck the fact that everything hurts and I can hardly walk – I’m gonna get out of bed at 5am, practice yoga for an hour, go into the City, work really hard all day and go out every damn evening because life is too short not to.

Turns out life is to short to live like that.

I was lucky. The pushing and the striving was noticed by my very wonderful Astanga teacher and I was instructed encouraged to go and see his partner in crime, Tara Fraser for a little bit of working out what my body wanted and needed.

My practice became slower. Much slower. I did less of it and breathed a lot more. And things started to change.

At first I was bored senseless. I didn’t really see what the hell good all this lying about breathing could possibly be doing. I resisted it. I wanted to stand on my head and sweat my ass off. But I stuck with it. My muscles started to relax. My mind started to stop whirling along at 100 miles a minute. The tops of my thigh bones didn’t hurt quite so much. And although I’m not going to pretend my health suddenly got better overnight, there was a slow improvement.

Well that was a bit of a revelation.

(Full Disclosure: this switch to slowness didn’t happen as smoothly as I make out. There were a lot of stops and starts and a huge amount of sneaking back into Astanga classes).

And when I realised how amazing yoga could be when you found out how to make it work for your body and your energy levels well…all I wanted to do was share it with the world.

Embarking upon 3 years of yoga teacher training on top of the City job and the M.E. may seem like lunacy to many. Maybe it was lunacy. But to me I think for the first time in my life I was doing something from my heart, rather than listening to my head telling me I could and should be doing all and everything.

Turns out my heart was right.

~~~~

What’s ME20 all about?  Click here.

We’re cycling 20km to raise awareness of M.E. – click here for more information!

I never really knew how I ended up in law.  A series of impossible coincidences I guess but by the time the millennium was out I was renting a flat off a crazy Irishman (cash only of course) in Highgate, north London (the dodgy end) and working as a PA in Environmental Law in a big City law firm. Yes of course I was well enough to cope with the hustle and bustle of London. All the gigs I wanted right at my finger tips.  Famous people everywhere I went (my neighbours included Victoria Wood and her then husband The Great Soprendo as well as Paul Nicholas from Duty Free – I know, who needs Seattle!).

And for a while it was perfection, even if I had to take out a mortgage to buy a gin and tonic.

But buzzing away in my DNA hard code was this little bastard M.E. thing – constantly demanding my attention like a cranky toddler. Plus the job was stressful.  Couple that with a lot of late nights and smoky bars and you get a recipe for not very well again.

By the time the Twin Towers came down in New York 10 and a half years ago I’d given it all up.  I’d spent more of the previous year in and out of The Whittington Hospital than I had at my desk and I realised enough was enough.  I cut and ran with a pretty hefty bonus (back then you still got bonuses and payrises in the City even as a PA) and used it to pay my tuition fees for a Masters degree in English.

Yeah, I know.

One cannot survive on rest alone!

I spent the next two years blissfully writing about atavistic others in Victorian Gothic fiction, nipping to Spain for regular Vitamin D upgrades (seriously, I need to live somewhere sunnier than Eastern England) and doing a lot of Yoga and Pilates.  By the time I graduated in the spring of 2003 (a day on which I got a Penny Lane tattoo and a parking ticket) I felt better than I had in…well…ever.

The thing was of course, the previous two years had been pretty unsustainable long term.  I still needed to find a job and wonderful as the Masters degree was, it didn’t leave me any more qualified for anything than I had been before.  So back to the City I went.

I spent the next 5 years working for a firm took me on despite the rather patchy C.V. and the fact I accidentally turned up to the interview wearing Converse trainers. The woman who interviewed me didn’t even bat an eyelid – just asked me when I could start (turns out she turned up to work most days wearing Converse trainers and loved The Grohl almost as much as I do – best office manager ever). It boded well right?

Yes and no.

In many ways I loved that job which meant that when I inevitably got sick again, instead of doing another runner, I confessed.  I admitted how ill I’d been, how ill I still was.  And you know what?  They were absolutely great about it.

And I learned two things.

Firstly, that (for me at least) it is possible to get much much better from this damned M.E. but if you go and put yourself back into the exact same situation (City job, late nights, not eating enough) you will get sick again.

And secondly, most people – a lot more than you’d think – do believe M.E. is real and are completely on your side.

That’s when I learned I didn’t have to hide this.

~~~~

What’s ME20 all about?  Click here.

We’re cycling 20km to raise awareness of M.E. – click here for more information!

I hated it. Seriously hated it.

Because loathe as I was to admit it, by half way through my first year the M.E. was back with a bloody vengeance. As was the chronic tonsillitis.

After returning from Australia (via the Middle East) and a failed attempt at culinary school, I went to Canterbury to study Classics in the autumn of ‘94.  Kurt Cobain was dead, everybody was in love with the Gallagher brothers and everything had changed. Canterbury was pretty much the only place that would have me.

I used to get my hair cut (asymmetrically – someone had to keep the 80s alive) at a Toni & Guy’s near the Cathedral.  For some reason I can still remember every detail of that salon.  Clearly I fussed with my hair then even more then than I do now.  On this particular wet afternoon I felt like living hell.  My skin was flaking off, my hair was practically coming out in handfuls and I was back on the prescription painkillers.

Not. Fun.

I can remember it taking every ounce of effort to get to the hairdressers, but I’m a great believer in appearances being of tantamount importance.  Start to let your roots grow through and you may as well take to your bed forever!

After all I only had to sit there when I got there.

But it was a turning point.  A sudden realisation that this thing hadn’t gone away. Probably wasn’t going to.  And what was I going to do about it?

~~~~

Australia, land of my heart, beckoned me back that summer and after a few weeks of walking barefoot on beaches in Queensland I started my second year at university with a lighter heart (and a better haircut). I was so much better I relieved the boredom of university (turned out I hated it even when I wasn’t ill) by waiting tables again.

Don’t get me wrong I didn’t become the party queen overnight – everyone who knew me at university knew I was the one who slept a lot and got tonsillitis all the time (Bex, if you’re reading this I’m sorry for all the shifts you had to cover for me) but I did have more of a semblance of a life if I gave myself enough time to rest and do yoga (more on that later).  And despite having tonsillitis again during my finals, in the July of 1997 I became the proud owner of a degree in Classics from the University of Kent.

I didn’t really know what to do next.  I’d half-heartedly applied for Graduate Training Programmes but my unwillingness and sureness that I didn’t really have the health for the hours involved must have shone through in the applications and I didn’t get a single interview.  So I carried on waiting tables until they gave me “management responsibilities” which basically equated to more hours for less money.

And so it was that I was Duty Manager the day that 80 Australian Bishops and their wives came for dinner (it’s Canterbury, the seat of the Church of England, it’s full of bishops). It was a logistical nightmare.  For starters they wanted to sit in the garden, so I spent weeks praying that it didn’t rain because the thought of trying to move 160 people inside a restaurant that would be full of other people didn’t bear thinking about. The gods were clearly on my side (or there is in fact only one God and He was on the bishops’ side) because it stayed dry and against all the odds I pulled it off with only two mishaps neither of which were my fault but let’s just say I will never be the Bishop of Sydney’s favourite person.

I can remember how absolutely fucking knackered I was when it was all over.  But I was so proud of myself.  At that point in my life I considered the Day of the Bishops to be my greatest achievement.  Bigger than the degree, much bigger.  But it was also a tipping point. I rosta-ed myself four days off to recover but even that wasn’t really enough.  I had to admit to myself that much as I loved waiting tables (and I really did, as much or if not more than what I do now), it was starting to play merry hell with my health. I had to think of something more gentle on my body, a job with a bit more routine, shorter working hours, holiday pay….

And so it was with a quick detour via Barcelona for some much needed Vitamin D I ended up at typing school and, at the age of 24, learning to turn on a computer for the very first time.

On a side note, typing school is the reason I always put two spaces after a full stop and why my blog posts always look so weird on Google Reader.

~~~~

What’s ME20 all about?  Click here.

We’re cycling 20km to raise awareness of M.E. – click here for more information!

Don’t ignore glandular fever.  Better still find a decent doctor who will diagnose it when you have it and not tell you much later on that you had it months ago. Is it any wonder I’m dubious about western medicine?

The years between 16 and 18 can be tough for many, many reasons.  In a lot of ways I was lucky.  I was at an artsy, liberal sixth form college, had a bunch of great friends and for a freaky weirdo in a leather jacket was relatively popular (the key thing about artsy, liberal colleges is that everyone is a freaky weirdo….) but it was still tough.   Three A levels in English, Classics and Biology, Dance Foundation (kind of three-quarters of an A Level), a part-time job and a semblance of a social life filled up most of the hours that I didn’t spend asleep.

And I slept a lot.

It started the summer I turned 17.  I went on a college Classics trip to Greece. I spent the first three days of the trip asleep. I have no recollection of visiting the Corinth Canal.  I had to make a special trip to the Acropolis because I slept through the first one.  This wasn’t normal teenage sleeping, this was borderline narcolepsy.

But as I mentioned, I was busy.  I didn’t have time to wonder why I was so cripplingly tired, or why my throat was always sore and my glands were always swollen and tender.  I had dance shows to choreograph, rehearsals to sleep through attend, endless pieces of homework and coursework to hand in.

By the Christmas of 1991 I was beginning to feel a bit broken.  Everything ached all the time.  They gave me prescription painkillers and I just got on with it.  By the time I sat my A Level exams in the summer of 1992 I’d had to stop dancing and I’d pretty much given up any hope of going to university that year.  There was talk of me having had glandular fever the year before, but nobody bothered to tell me at the time.  M.E. had been mentioned – burned out before I’d even begun.

I can barely remember my exams.  How I passed them is a mystery to this day.

As soon as my A Levels were over my parents took me to Portugal for a week or two in the sun. Looking at the photographs I resembled a cadaver.  A ten day old cadaver.  Attractive.  Then I got tonsilitus.  Again. By the time I got home from my recuperative holiday in the sun I was sick as a dog. The doctor had to be summoned from Stansted Airport. I am the only person in the history of the western world who didn’t drink at her 18th birthday party because she was on such high doses of antibiotic.

And then my friend died in a car accident.

I could have given up then and taken to my bed.  I knew there wasn’t a hope of university that year.

But I’m not one to give up.  As you may have noticed.

So in a rather mad move I decided that I was going to take my sick body 12000 miles round the world and live with my aunt in Tasmania for a while.

Turned out to be the best thing I ever did.

I got me some space.  Space away from all the things that had gone wrong, space away from what I “should” have been doing if this horrible thing they still liked to call “Yuppie Flu” hadn’t hit me.  I walked barefoot on the sand (walking barefoot apparently is the cure to all ills, sadly you don’t get to do it much in the UK), I got some sunshine, I missed an entire British winter, I swam in my aunt’s heated pool every day.  I started to put on weight and my skin turned from that shade of white that is so white it looks blue to a more normal sort of white (to say I tanned would be a huge overstatement). I made new friends and went to parties and saw (terrible) bands (good bands never went to Australia in the early 90s – it was like grunge never happened).

By the time I came home I looked and felt better.  Ever the optimist I foolishly thought I’d beaten this thing.

Still if you can beat it once you can beat it a thousand times right…..(TBC)

~~~~

What’s ME20 all about?  Click here.

We’re cycling 20km to raise awareness of M.E. – click here for more information!

If you follow me on The Book of Faces, you will already know that May marks the 20th anniversary of my initial diagnosis of having M.E. I was 17 and just about to take A Level and Dance exams. The timing couldn’t have sucked more quite frankly! If you’d like to read more about my journey with this chronic condition then go here.

Whilst there have been things I have had to give up and dreams that have had to remain dreams because of this horrible bloody illness I want to mark 20 years as a celebration of all the things I have managed to achieve in spite (or because of?) it and to remember how without it my life (and Type A personality) would have led me down a very different road.

So how am I going to mark this momentous event other than by blatantly ripping off paying homage to the PJ20 logo and posting it all over the internet?

Well firstly during May I am going to write a short series of posts about all the amazing twists and turns my life has taken with this condition just to prove that an M.E. diagnosis doesn’t have to be the end of the world.

And secondly, in July, Himself and I will be taking part in Cambridge’s Big Bike Ride to raise money for Action for M.E. It goes without saying we will be doing the 20km ride not the 200km one (I have got M.E. y’know!) and while 12 miles might not seem a lot to some of you mammoth bike riders/walkers/marathoners out there, it is a huge deal to me.  Most things I do feel like they are being done in a sea of jam after all!!!

If you would like to help raise awareness, a penny or two donation would never go amiss and you can visit our JustGiving page and read a bit more about why I’m doing this here.

Sometimes I think I must have lost my bloody mind….

It doesn’t feel like May.  It’s freezing for starters.  Apparently we’re going to have the coldest May on record or something. And the rain it raineth. UK weather – I love you….

May Intentions

1. Time to do some mock Pilates multiple choice exams I think. And pass them obviously.
2. Finish reading Women who Run with the Wolves. It’s been sitting half read on my bedside table for a year now.
3. 3 x Pilates mentoring sessions (my last 3 before exam day!)
4. Clear out dresser drawers so you can actually find stuff in them.
5. Register for the Big Bike Ride with Himself – just the 12 miler for us I think.

April in Review

1. Study Study Study – that Pilates exam won’t pass itself! YUP starting to feel a lot more confident about this.
2. Save £100 (which means not buying Soundgarden tickets). Well, I saved the £100, I didn’t buy Soundgarden tickets.  But then I bought Noel Gallagher tickets instead.  The intention was there y’know.
3. Pedicure/Eyebrow Wax/Massage. DONE.
4. 2 Pilates mentoring sessions. DONE
5. Actually get around to reading The Hunger Games to see what all the fuss is about (it’s downloaded on to the Kindle). DONE – read the whole trilogy in 2 weeks and loved every minute of it.
6. Go to the beach (weather permitting – my brother claims it’s going to be snowing by Easter). See above re: weather.  We were going to go on Easter Saturday but it was freezing and damp so we went to the Home Farm at Wimpole instead.

Back when I used to do the 9-5, I always found Thursdays a bit of a slog.  They always seemed to drag on interminably …. waiting, waiting, waiting for the weekend. I was always exhausted by Thursday morning but Friday afternoon still seemed so very far away.

Way back when, before I met Himself, when I lived in a tiny little studio flat in North London, when I was still a yoga teacher in training, when I didn’t have to worry about spinal flexion, I used to go to a 2 hour yoga class on Thursday evening.  It was at a wildly inconvenient time – the sort of time that meant either staying late at work (and believe me no-one would ever just leave you alone to play Bejewelled), or hanging around Finsbury Park for an hour, but not giving you time to go home and come out again. Neither option was particularly inviting and the number of times I nearly didn’t go were many.

But ultimately, despite being exhausted and despite having hang around for an hour, I always did go.  And not just because I needed my contact hours for teacher training!

It wasn’t a particularly happy time in my life back there in my little flat in North London and my weekly yoga class marked something important to me.  It marked a turning point in the week, away from the job I disliked and towards the weekend where I could be me again.  But more importantly my Thursday night yoga class also marked a meeting of the nearest thing I had to a community back then.  And I relished it, no matter how exhausted I was.

These days my only commitment on a Thursday is a term-time only after-school yoga class for kids.  Other than that the day is my own and Fridays are my day off so in a way Thursday is my Friday now.  But I still feel that sense of a turning point towards the end of the day as Himself finishes work and things begin to slow down for the weekend.

What is the highlight/lowlight of your weekly routine?

(source)

(source)

I couldn’t decide between them.

Today and tomorrow, the kindle version of Fiona’s new novel will be completely free. This also means you can download it to read on your phone, PC etc… for more information click here.

Remember how I gave up Twitter for Lent?

I felt kind of uncomfortable doing so.  I felt like I’d miss out on huge things.  Massive things that I absolutely must know about or I’ll die.

Turns out it was the easiest Lenten Challenge ever.  A million times easier than giving up biscuits.  And apart from a couple of announcements of bands touring I didn’t miss anything.

So returning to Twitter after Easter was anti-climatic at best.  A bit of banter with people I know in real life, who I’d been talking to, emailing or texting during Lent anyway in that way that people who know each other in real life do, but apart from that I didn’t really know what to say in my 140 characters.

I was a ludicrously early adopter of Twitter (under a different username than the one I currently use).  I don’t know what attracted me to it way back then when 9 out of 10 tweets were in Japanese and I didn’t know anyone else who used it (everyone was still on MySpace then – remember that?).  I guess I thought it had potential.  And it did.  For years.  But I think it has long since peaked.  Or my interest has waned.  Or maybe I’m just getting old.

Because it turns out that ultimately the only thing I missed about Twitter were the bands.  Everyone I know in real life has a myriad of other ways of contacting me and everything else is kind of irrelevant.  Coming back after 40 days away just stressed me out.  There was too much activity, too many chains of conversation that are impossible to follow, too much snark.  It did my head in.

So, Twitter, I don’t think I’ll be seeing you as much as I used to.  I’ll pop in now and again to partake in the daily #musicquiz. I’ll mock the local newspaper.  But I think that might be it.

I’m sorry.  It’s not you it’s me.

(source)

I want to talk about class etiquette.  I want to talk about how we behave to our teachers, our students, our fellow classgoers.  I want to talk about respect to our fellow human beings.  I want to talk about how much we should or can put up with.

Over the years I have spent teaching yoga I have come across people from all walks of life.  99% of my students have been polite, sweet, kind and very, very open minded (which is really just as well).  I have had students who have come once, contributed fully to the class and never come again; I presume because they found yoga wasn’t for them, or my way of teaching wasn’t for them, or that life just got in the way.  You learn not to take it personally (more on that next week!).

But then there are that tiny handful of students who can be downright rude.  Now maybe I rule my yoga classes with an iron thumb, maybe I’m too strict but I feel I have to look after the good of the whole class and not just the individual.  My students come for a variety of reasons, some of which I will never know, some of which they probably don’t know and I want their experiences to be as safe and as comfortable as possible.  This means that arriving anymore than five minutes late is not an option.  Neither is leaving during or before final relaxation unless you have told me you might have to beforehand and  I have put you near the door.  If your mobile phone rings I will let it go once.  If it happens every week I will pull you up on it.  And may the gods help you if you actually have a conversation on it during my class!

But by far the worst thing that has happened to me was when I was covering a friend’s class at a gym.  Suddenly, about five minutes into the class one particular student began to do her own personal practice in the middle of the room.  I quietly asked if everything was OK.  She told me she didn’t like “this kind of yoga”.  Now, everyone teaches differently and not everyone welcomes the cover teacher with open arms but I do believe if you teach from the heart most people will enjoy it.  Clearly not all though.

I said I was sorry to hear she was unahppy and quietly asked her if they would maybe like to leave and come back the next week when the regular teacher returned.

She just carried on.

And I just carried on teaching.

She continued to practice throughout the class and throughout my relaxation session.

She was still going when I left.

I honestly didn’t know what else to do.

Even now, with many more years teaching experience behind me I’m still not sure I would know what to do.

Of course, we should all be practicing mindful detatchment and letting these situations go.  What can I say?  We’re only human!

“Though the unwise cling to their actions, watching for results, the wise are free from attachments, and act for the well-being of the whole world.”

–Bhagavad Gita, 3.25