Posts Tagged “yoga”the little bit of time we have at night after her brother has gone to bed, i become her playmate…
(ok, so it’s actually Ballerina Barbie.) the girl got a bit creative with pseudo-Yoga Barbie, taking her to my bed railing, hooked her feet upside down and declared with the full seriousness of a preschool-going yoga instructor: “this is Bat Pose”. erm. Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.  a lot of controversy on this one lately…. “This controversy seems to come up because people are offended by combining sex appeal and yoga…but sex appeal is already all over the mass-media in many forms, both in-your-face and subtle. We all are highly influenced by the sex/shame controversy and it’s beyond yoga. I am unfazed to see it come into yoga because the tradition has already turned into an american commodity. If we use sex to sell everything, and we want to sell yoga, of course we are going to use sex. In my personal opinion is that the video shows a great home practice, with a beautiful body, in some clothing that one would naturally wear while practicing at home. We must be bigger than sex, bigger than capitalism, and bigger than nudity to thrive, and the fact that this yogini is not ashamed triggers people’s shame of themselves, of others, and of our own society.” all those prudes/feminists/purists/plain-jealous-women who made a big fuss over this should just take a few ujjayi breaths and a chill pill, i say… “Life is easy if you don’t live it. If you put yourself out there…especially these days on the internets…we’re all putting yourself out there not only for accolades or backslaps…but for criticism. Criticism is essential, and helpful—when and if it’s constructive. But…particularly these days on the internets…criticism is all too often as lazy and casual as it is vicious. We forget there are humans behind the targets we throw our words at.” –> interview with the brave and beautiful yogini herself at huffingtonpost.com (ps: she has a 7-yr-old kid too!) **** hmm, so how about this guy then, in nothing but a white loin cloth? ok for him coz he’s 1) a man, 2) non-Western, 3) set against a gritty backdrop, 4) not in an advertisement for a yoga studio…? ahh.
(speaking of which, dear True Yoga: STOP CALLING ME ALREADY.) (and while we’re at it, dear yoga-apparel-brands: Y U NO sell your stretchy halter tops and pants at more ‘spiritual’ prices?! i don’t get.) *ok, ujjayi breaths…* i start off my practice this year with a pose that’s taken me quite a while to ‘get’…
YEAH! *wipes off sweaty, slippery underarms* today, on the last day of the year…
i FINALLY did it…
all on my own, yeah! (ok, it’ll take a bit more time still before i move away from the wall and to the middle of the room. :p) the feeling when you’re on your head – EXHILARATING. and the realisation of your strength and ability to overcome your fears – priceless. i now have a new party trick! awww cute cat action alert. namaste! already feeling all hunched back after only two days back in the office. need to hit that Esc button and click Refresh on my body’s browser soon…
ok ok, srsly, let’s see adam levine do it, shall we? mmm. (headstands never looked sexier ha ha.) (dammit, i’m still struggling with that.) (or just trying very hard to peer down the streets of KL from a hotel window sill.)
May
20
2011
 
planking duoPosted by izadd in Antics, Parenthood, Photography, Places, Travels, tags: yogawhat do you do when you have equally bored kids and parents? bought this from a Borders sale for five dollars some time back for the kids. it’s called ‘Stretch’, but they associate it with ‘yoga’ coz mommy does some of the strange stuff on the pink mat too….
like this… and this… and this… gotta keep those limbs flexible after all… so you can dance. found a kids’ yoga book at the library, so that evening they dragged out my mat… Bow pose (Dhanurasana) Triangle pose (Trikonasana) err… Wrestling pose? (WWFasana ha ha) inevitably, they ended up in a crumpled heap within minutes and started horsing around instead. a 5yo and a (almost-) 3yo staying in one position for more then 5 seconds? HAH, fat chance.
meanwhile, mommy is always trying to find her inner calm, peace and zen… because she tends to lose them a lot. *does a Lion pose (Simhasana) on her cubs* with the daddy on night shift, it’s easier for me to impose my no-tv rule in the evening before bed (we activated the child-lock, and it’s SO effective, even mommy doesn’t know how to unlock it… erm..), which means having to come up with more ways to ‘entertain’ or keep them occupied. so we’d play bouncing balls or monopoly or ‘masak-masak’ or drawing, and sometimes they’ll ‘exercise’ with me….
you can guess what usually happens during my downward dogs and my bridges and whatever poses i attempt – they’d gleefully crawl under/over me, so yeah, yoga at home – not so safe for me! but i figured out a way around it the other night, by giving them the important grown-up task of taking mommy’s pictures with her grown-up camera. is she a genius or what? :p
my early morning sun salutations lasted all of, err, 3 mornings before i succumbed to a few extra winks instead, while waiting for the shared bathroom at our holiday home to be available. feeling all creaky and slouchy now after not practising for more than 3 weeks. gotta get back on track…! is it too late for new year resolutions? it’s still january, so technically, the year is pretty new and the table calendar in front of me is yet unmarked and crisp as a karipap. not a firm believer of resolutions that often get forgotten by the, hmm, third month (on average, based on purely observational records), so you know, don’t take me seriously (except #3). so here goes: 1) live a healthy lifestyle – so all those years of scoffing at the gahmen’s calls to lead a healthy lifestyle and snorting down cheeseburgers and fries like there’s no tomorrow, it’s all bitten me – hard – on my (expanded) arse. i won’t be so delusional as to say that i’m OBESE OR ANYTHING OMG, but it’s more like a… ‘relative’ thing, you know? as in, i am now (in delicate terms) ‘meatier’ than i ‘relatively’ was, say, a year ago, or heck, even just six months ago. so how did that happen? how did all those carelessly consumed calories suddenly make its appearance so markedly known? tummy, arms, thighs, hips… oh the atrocity! the treachery! ok, so i expect many of you at this point would point out, “oh, but nice what, meatier… more to hold, more to love, blablabla”. sure – IF I WERE KFC CHICKEN BREASTS. i wanna be lean ayam kampung, dammit. marinated in kunyit and ketumbar and deep-fried… mmmm… but i digress. i cite several factors for this hysterics-inducing epiphany: a) age: = slower metabolic rate b) birth of children: nature’s way of saying “your body’s done its job of mating and reproducing, that’s enough attracting of the opposite sex now, time for it to go into frumpy-mode and focus on tending to your young.” THANKS NATURE.) c) end of breastfeeding: the whole year i was on TBF, i was invincible. input means output, producing milk was a workout by itself, which didn’t require any physical exertion other than pulling my shirt up. remember that episode on desperate housewives, where lynette’s female employee broke down when her 5-yr-old stopped wanting to be nursed and she lamented that breastfeeding was the only way she could stay thin? well, yeah, coz it worked for me that way. now, i can’t possibly b/f the kids till they’re of legal age, can i? d) the office: a deskbound job means you’re sedentary for at least 8 hrs a day, 5 days a week. the few minutes you stand up to walk is to get lunch, or to go to the pantry for snacks. (unless, like me, you hoard snacks in your drawer under your desk, which HEY requires absolutely no standing/walking AT ALL.) e) spouse: who loves eating. ‘nuff said. which leads me to The Action Plan. i) exercise more: yes, the one thing that i dread most (apart from cooking). the one thing i avoided like the plague throughout my years since school. the one thing that makes my muscles quiver in fear. but as Mr Nike once said, “just do it, dammit!” and turned it into a (less objectionable) slogan that many an athlete has lived by, do it i did. it’s been a month since my discovery of the painful pleasure (a masochist talking here) that is ‘working out’. now, like i said, it’s ONLY been a month, so no, i have not exactly jumped in the deep end of the pool that is the GYM (i confess i have a deep-seated fear-mixed-with-embarassment of ‘abang-abang body’ who are omnipresent in there). so for now, it’s easing these rarely-utilised muscles in doable stuff like low-impacts, pilates and yoga which i quite like, surprisingly. i don’t expect to turn into jo/jo sinclair or even half of her well-defined buttock, but at least, you know, i’m in control (a control freak talking here). ii) eat less: i used to be this bird-pecker of a girl, you know, the kind who eats to live, too shy to actually buy food at the school canteen, too lazy to lunch at work. but eversince (b) and (c) above, it’s become quite a habit, this eating-actual-meals thing. see, i have this theory. you know how animals, like wolves and sharks and vultures, they go on feeding frenzies when they have to compete for food? well it’s kinda like that as a family grows in numbers. whenever there’s food meant for us, ie. mummy and/or daddy, along come the little children, like wolves and sharks and vultures. “WAH!” says the big one. “MAMAM!” says the little one. and together, they form a tag team to steal bits of our food WHILE WE EAT. it is indeed a rare occasion to have our food untouched by either of them, except when the dish is extremely spicy, so what we do, is gobble up as much as we can, as fast as we can… ok so, no connection, this theory. the point is, i’d turned from a bird-pecker to a wolf-shark-vulture mutant. i’ve never been that much of a foodie, unlike (e) above, so it should be pretty easy to cut down on evil stuff like processed meats and carbs. i think. 2) harnessing my Wild Things, a.k.a The Children – i think i may have made too many compromises lately where the lil ones are concerned. the boy since he turned four is becoming a little worrying. it’s SO HARD not to get mad at him everyday over some silly little thing. the girl, well she’s at that extremely-cute age so although i get mad at her over silly little things too, it’s easier to forgive simply for the fact that she’s not two yet and when she says “awi ami” (that’s “sorry mummy” in tod-speak), it makes you chuckle. but the boy… argh! it’s just SO HARD, raising Wild Things. 3) NOT get pregnant again (or evuh) – arising from #2. because, seriously, i am, at this point, highly doubtful of my parenting skills, and bringing forth more Wild Things from my womb unto the earth would be irresponsible, not to mention detrimental to my mental health and personal well-being. 4) read more books – i may actually have listed this in every new year resolution, and i think i did pretty ok last year (hey the Twilight series count). don’t ask me why this is still important in this age of blogs, internet and short-attention-span. i’ll tell you it’s for the purely selfish reason of the tactile experience. 5) write more – coz i need these kind of posts to purge myself of all the toxic build-ups in my brain. and i could probably go on, but that would not be a good idea because #6 would have been ‘go to bed earlier’, and i’ve already broken that one on 26 counts since the dawn of 2010.
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