Grombe No More!

 

 

Back in March I posted some thoughts about the process of letting my hair go gray.  It was part of a revised time management initiative for 2020;  it got hijacked by the pandemic.  My monthly cut & color, along with a nice plan to transition to gray with highlights and other expert techniques: out the window.

 

 Here's where I started. 

The pandemic forced a change of thinking, and once I accepted my new hair-normal, it turned out to be a pretty hands-off deal.  I decided to wait to get a haircut until it was long enough to cut all the dye off, but not require a clipper cut. It took 8 months.  In the meantime,  I trimmed my bangs and I had Ron trim the back at the nape when it started bugging me.  As it grew, the dyed part got lighter and lighter, so a skunk stripe was not as glaring an issue as it might have been.  

 Here's an in-between stage.

 

While I was mostly not watching my hair grow, I decided to change hairdressers.  There were a couple of reasons. The young woman who does my pedicures, Kristin, has a one-woman full-service beauty salon in a separate room in her house. She had a very high standard of cleanliness before Covid-19, and ramped it up when she reopened.  She called me once during the shutdown to see how I was doing, texted me to let me know she was back open and would be happy to have me come in whenever I was ready, then called again for a chat.  That, my friends, is EXCELLENT customer service and EXCELLENT business acumen. Since Kristin books up well in advance, I contacted her two months out for my appointment.  

 NOVEMBER 2!

The final grombre, an hour before my appointment:

THE RESULT!

Except for a little bit still left on the sides, the brown is part of my natural mix.  It's easier to see in person, but there's a lot of gray around the front.  I've lived with it now for a couple of weeks, and my initial reaction hasn't changed a bit:

 

 

I had my hair colored for 18 years.  It started as a lark, a female thing.  Once I committed to having it colored, I had a once-a-month schedule because I didn't want the skunk stripe.  I also enjoyed the pampering, as well as the company of my hairdresser.  I was never too involved in the vanity; it became more the habit, just one of the things I did.  Though the decision to stop coloring was primarily one of time-management, I grew more certain it was right as time passed.  I've never been very far from myself, but for some reason this sure feels a lot closer.   

"The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you really are."

                                                                           ---Carl Jung

                                                                

Starting the Winter Season With An.......OM????? Part II

 

You've already guessed the answer, so I won't hold you in suspense.  YES! I met my practice challenge, messy as it was!  So on November 1, the reward.  I paid the tuition fee and enrolled in the 200 Hour Yoga Teacher Training Certification course with Online Yoga School.

 

  I immediately went through the Welcome modules to see what I was getting in to.  It's ON! 

  Here's the curriculum: 

• Yoga Philosophy
• Yoga History
• About the Yoga Teacher
• Anatomy
• Understanding the Body
• The Esoteric Body
• Meditation
• Chants & Pranayama
• Sanskrit
• Learning Bodies 
• Asanas
• Sequencing
• Introduction to Ayurveda
• Preventing Injuries
• Chair & Restorative Yoga
• Teaching Methodology
• Adjustments
• Yoga as a Business

Looks pretty complete, doesn't it?  It is!

Reasonable cost, thorough curriculum, good reviews.  Why else did I choose this school?  There's no time limit on completion. You can do the lessons in any order. The quizzes are open book.  It's set up for success, in that though there's plenty of work, if you do the work you'll pass.  The final exam can be any sort of Yoga lesson-live, Zoom, one person, a class, etc; or a written exam.    

I've started the lessons, doing them on the days & times when in the past I'd be swimming.  The lessons are mostly audio with a slide-show type video. They're bite-sized; the longest so far has been about 15 minutes.  "Yoga Philosophy" is the first module, so I started there.  It includes familiar and unfamiliar concepts, identified with their Sanskrit names.  Some straight-up memorization going on.  I discovered it's possible to overdo on Sanskrit, so while I'm setting up some flash cards and giving it time to absorb, I started "You: The Yoga Teacher." 

While I thought there might be an element of "you get what you pay for", I'm finding the owner/instructor, Steph, to be genuine and realistic.  She clearly knows what she's talking about, and loves talking about it.  Included in the curriculum are many webinars, further expanding the content of the lessons.  Steph herself is available by e-mail and phone.  Because it's self-paced, I can easily skip around when I get overwhelmed with Sanskrit, or decide it's time to start learning some of the Asanas, or...whatever! On the technical side, it is very user friendly. 

Am I pleased?  This school is EXACTLY what I hoped.  It will teach me Yoga from A-Z and expand my knowledge and practice.  The timing, both the winter season and where I am in my yoga development, couldn't be better.   Yes, I'm going to work for it.  And yes,

 

Starting the Winter Season With An.......OM???? Part I

 

 YOGA AND ME

The topic of Yoga practice has come up on this blog a few times. Here's a little background on my yoga journey.

 

Let's say something like 25 years ago, when I was in the throes of my adrenaline-driven dispatching career, I found that though running was keeping me sane and alive, it had a not-insignificant element of constantly pushing myself to keep that adrenaline thing going.  I decided I wanted to lend some balance to both work and running, and yoga might be the answer.  I looked in the newspaper for classes.  I saw one that looked most like it would fit my needs, called the teacher, and the rest, as they say, is history.  The teacher, Meena, taught a Yoga With Ease class in the Kripalu Yoga style at the Adult Center.  Her yoga was learned at a traditional master/guru ashram in MA based on Swami Kripalu's teachings.  She and others broke ties when the master/guru relationship was discovered to include mistress/guru relationships and all that implies.  After some mighty internal struggles, the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health evolved and is well known on the high end yoga retreat circuit with numerous classes, workshops, certifications and so forth.  

 

 Meena's Yoga with Ease turned out be strictly on-the-floor mat yoga, which was exactly the balance I was looking for.  It was relaxing, yet provided the stretching, focus, etc that you might expect.  I attended weekly classes for many years. Though I intended to develop a home practice, well, it was the usual story. Meena and I became personal friends as well, and though we eventually went our ways, both the friendship and the yoga were profound experiences for me.  

 

A long break from yoga ensued.  I tried a couple of different classes a couple different times.  They were not presented as Yoga as Ease style, and they weren't.  That made them another hard physical activity, and I didn't need that.  I had off and on periods of home practice using Meena's style, but it didn't stick.

When I retired, I thought for sure yoga would take.  I even wanted to do a long retreat/study period and get serious.  It would be my retirement gift to myself.  The Kripalu Yoga Center was on my mind.  HAHAHAHA!  Readers of this blog know that my retirement reality grabbed me by the throat and hasn't let me go!  I've been WAAAAYY too busy to take time to go to a long retreat!   Every year, though, regular yoga practice made it on my annual goals list, and stopped there. For 8 years. Including this year. Then Covid-19 happened.  You'll recall I made a list of things that I would regret not doing in whatever remained of my life, however long that happened to be.  1) Play my flute again.  Check.  2) Eat more Papa Murphy's pizza.  Check.  3)  Make the yoga thing happen.  Uhhhhh.... 

I happened to be doing some casual looking on-line, as one will do when trying to not do something else and telling oneself that spending a hour or more on the computer "researching" is time well spent.  The topic:  On-line Yoga. There is no end to the yoga classes available on-line; literally, there's more free yoga than you can do in a lifetime. With Covid, many teachers and studios necessarily switched live classes to some version of Zoom for pay.  However, I'm not interested in on-line classes.  Whining here, but how the heck do you see the teacher on a desk top computer when you're on the floor on a mat?  Okay, okay, I could put our laptop on the floor, but really, I just didn't wanna.  What I wanted was yoga training from A-Z, presented in an organized fashion.  My perusal eventually led me to on-line Yoga Teacher Training.  Which does exactly that.  But can you take Yoga Teacher Training if you only want to expand your own practice, not be a yoga teacher?  Well, pay the money and of course you can!

After more than one gulp and dismissal of on-line schools due to cost, I came across a school called.....wait for it....Online Yoga School.  I looked at the curriculum.  It looked thorough.  I looked at the cost.  Suspiciously reasonable, despite a nice explanation about an intention of making yoga accessible. I looked up reviews; mostly glowing.  I put it on the back burner. I looked at it several more times.  Then on June 15, in another spasm of self-motivation,  I decided that if I completed a certain number of practices by November 1, I would reward myself with Online Yoga School for my Winter Season.  It would also serve to replace the Winter Season swimming I can't Covid-do. 

 

 

Oh, did I still a wrestle with myself!   I skipped practices and made them up. I redefined what practice meant.  I wondered if, since yoga continued to be such a struggle, did it mean I should just drop the whole idea?  Just give up, roll over, call it quits?  Well, what do you think?  Did I meet yet another self-motivation attempt and FINALLY commit to yoga????   Or did I pull the plug????

To Be Continued.........