Please Don’t Talk About My Butt

Posted: April 18, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: | 3 Comments

Life at Maroma is great. Not perfect, but great. I will not bore you with the great things because the list is too long, but there is one thing that keeps this place from reaching the non-attainable height of perfection, small that it is -the Yoga instructor.

I am such a yoga novice I am unsure how instructors are supposed to act. I am fairly certain that the actions of the unnamed instructor I had were out of the norm and my two other friends in the class seemed to have the same reactions as I did, so I think I am safe in calling him out for his poor behavior.

I always thought yoga was a non-competitive sport. Your practice is your practice and you do what you can. Not for this yoga teacher. When I arrived at class he took one look at me and asked if I was going to be able to keep up with the difficulty of the class. I do not take kindly to being threatened by someone whose job it is to ensure that guests at their pricey resort have a good time. My southern training quickly left me and I reverted to my Yankee upbringing and told him, “I’ll do my best to keep up, but it did not make a bit of difference if I failed,” in my best, back off buddy voice. This little guy had no idea what could happen if he provoked me into full on bitch.

He obviously had dealt with the likes of me before and realized he better try some nice tactics for a while. It was a short-lived while because he over reacted a few too many times when someone breathed thought their mouth. Chilax, it’s yoga.

My favorite crime was when he was instructing us to get into a position with one knee bent and the other leg straight. I don’t know the position’s name because I was so taken aback by what he said as he told us to get in it. Word for word this was what he said, “If you have a big butt, use a block.”

I don’t care what language you do or do not speak, never in one hundred million years should you start a sentence with, “if you have a big butt.” I was quick to stop him right there and tell him that he would live a lot longer if he never uttered those words again.

Then he proceeded to wrap himself around each of the three of us to try and help us into a difficult pose. my friend Nancy told him to stop touching her and basically get the hell off her. After the class we all agreed it was way too “couples retreat” the movie. I can guarantee you that none of us was going to take the private hot yoga one-on-one class that he was trying to sell even with the 700 calorie burning promise.

Not Hair Paradise

Posted: April 17, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

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I don’t know when the part of Mexico south of Cancun became known as the Mayan Riviera, but from the water it is certainly paradise. I can’t vouch for the road side which looks more like the Myrtle Riviera, as in Myrtle Beach, than the French Riviera. I have not explored off the resort property yet so I’m sure to have more colorful descriptions in days to come, but for now I am enjoying the Caribbean blue water, warm tropical breezes, soft white beach and sunshine.

Well, my mind is enjoying it, but my WASPy body is not made for paradise. Here there is no such thing as hair paradise for someone with thin, wispy, limp, lifeless hair. The natives all have thick, course, heavy, black hair that seems impenetrable to humidity and wind. I, on the other hand, look like a wet dog who just came in the house and shook to dry off and that is just after spending time washing, drying and styling my hair.

I am doing my best to keep my delicate skin from burning. I only have two skin colors, blue or red, except for where the brown age spots are. Since I don’t care to add to the spots I try and wear my giant hat as much as possible, but the wind makes that difficult. The cooling wind makes you not realize how much sun you are getting so I have to constantly monitor myself.

I went to yoga this morning for an hour to stay out of the sun only to discover it was difficult day at yoga. After an hour of continual breathing through only my nose without a moments rest between cobra, upward dog and plank I was so sweaty that my hands could not grip the yoga mat and my hair looked like, you guessed it, a wet dog.

I am just going to embrace my paradise look and be as generous with everyone else who is here. It would be too much to ask to have the people look as good as the place.

No Boobs For Yoga

Posted: April 8, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: , | 1 Comment

 

I started taking yoga in January as a faux workout between my training torture days.  Before all you yoga lovers jump all over me for using the word faux and workout in the same sentence as yoga, I am not saying your practice is not strenuous, just that as an unbalanced person mine is not perfect.

 

Today I went to try and get a nicer yoga shirt for my trip to Mexico.  I was unsuccessful and now I am beginning to realize that I may never master Yoga because it is clearly not designed for anyone with big boobs or ones that need industrial support.

 

Here are the clues.  First every “yoga” shirt I have ever seen is a little slip of a thing, usually with some sort of shelf bra built in and tiny straps.  A shelf bra is really a training bra, in my view.  If you have the lift and separate girls than shelf bra is not going to do much for you.  Even if I got the tightest one that I could shimmy into the second I went into forward fold my heaving bosom would jump out of that shelf and try and plant themselves on the floor next to my hands.

 

The second clue concerns forward fold.  I have finally loosened up those old tight hamstrings to the point the I can go into forward fold and keep my hands on the ground, but I just don’t look like I’ve folded up enough because my two widest parts, being my breasts and thighs, are at a meeting point preventing a really good fold.

 

If I were one of those small and tight breasted woman then when I threw my legs over my head and attempted plow pose I would not have any trouble with boobs covering my face and preventing me from breathing.

 

I am not going to let my bust keep me from my practice of Yoga, but I do wish the Yoga clothing community would recognize the opportunity to appeal to a large population of larger breasts.  No body needs a strong core more than a woman carrying around a big endowment.

 

 

 

 

Head Up, Shoulders Down

Posted: February 27, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: , , , | 1 Comment

Which came first, a person with a very long neck and then the desire to be a ballerina or a person doing ballet and then a very long neck?  Of all athletes I always think of ballerinas as having the most beautiful necks and shoulders.

 

I had a very short lived and doomed ballet career.  In the fourth grade I spent one tortuous hour every Saturday morning at Mrs. Kruger’s ballet school.  Mrs. Kruger was an old, mean Russian woman who ran ballet class as if the livelihood of communism was dependant upon perfect child ballet dancers.  I was consistently getting whacked on the back of my knees by her bamboo stick for locking my knees.  You would have thought I was spitting gum out on the street in Singapore for all the caning I took in that class.  It turns out that I was double jointed in my knees and they naturally went back further than Mrs. Kruger deemed acceptable.  After one semester of being beaten my parents decided to save their money and the skin on the back of my legs.

 

Fast forward four decades and I have now discovered the joys of yoga.  The same lengthening of the neck as ballet with none of the instructor inflicted beatings.  Today, while RJ our teacher was having us do a bridge pose she told us that it massages the thyroid glad because it moves the chest up towards the chin, thus increasing our metabolism.  What?  What was that part?  Increasing my metabolism?

 

Apparently opening up my chest or holding my head up higher, my shoulders down lower, my shoulder blades back as far as they can be makes my thyroid happier and maybe helps me burn calories more quickly.  I intuitively knew that increasing muscles burns more calories and increasing heart rate was the bomb, but massaging my thyroid was a totally new concept to me.

 

When I think about all those beautiful ballerinas with those giraffe like necks, looking that way because they held their shoulders way back and as far down as they could get them, I begin to see they were secretly massaging their thyroids all the time.  Aiding their quest for that perfect ballet body. Why has this thyroid massaging exercise not been more highly advertised?  For goodness sake any woman over 35 knows what a Kegel exercise is and what that is improving is almost never seen by the human eye.

 

So if you see me out walking around like I have a big stick up my ass with my head held high like I’m trying to eat the leaves off the top of a tree don’t think I have became pompous.  I am just practicing my thyroid massaging hoping that will improve my ever-slowing metabolism.

Yankee Workout

Posted: February 9, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: , , | 3 Comments

This morning I went to Yoga class where I got to think good thoughts while trying to stretch my body to be longer and taller.  One thing I was giving thanks for in that class was that I do not live in the blizzard hit area of the country any more.  For those of you who are stuck inside with two feet of snow outside I am sorry.  Even if you only have one foot of snow I am sorry.

 

Living in North Carolina now and almost never having to shovel was a choice Russ and I made nineteen years ago.  Why my southern born parents ever left the south to live in Connecticut for thirty years I will never know.  We came here after living through fifteen snow storms in twelve weeks in 1993 and have never looked back.

 

One really memorable snowstorm took place in Wilton when I must have been about nine years old.  It happened before my parents built on to our house and we still had four garages all in a row.  It was a blizzard very similar to the one Connecticut had yesterday so huge amounts of snow fell and the winds were so strong that they blew it up against the house.  The drifts were way above the garage doors so that when we opened them there was a wall of snow at least eight feet deep outside.

 

I remember digging tunnels out of one garage door opening and looping back to another garage door opening.  It was like a giant hamster habit trail in snow.  Our garage was heated and I’m sure that my sister Margaret and I spent at least $300 in heating oil because we opened all the doors at the same time to dig tunnels.  My mother must have been glad that we were just not bothering her and never came down to see what we were doing.

 

Shoveling snow is the hardest exercise on earth.  It uses lots of different muscle groups that don’t get used enough unless you are a prisoner who breaks up rocks all day.  The trick to shoveling is to do it throughout the storm, unless it is blowing like it did yesterday.  The second trick is to shovel as soon as the snow stops because new snow is lighter than old snow.  The worst snow is one that ends with sleet or freezing rain on top so you get a really hard crust on top.  That stuff is hard to break through and really heavy.

 

For all my Yankee domiciled friends right now, I hope you have power, are warm and have shoveled already.  If you have done all those things try some Yoga.  The stretching will do you good.  If you don’t have power, or heat or own a shovel do some Yoga.  You will need to find some inner peace.  Namaste.