Yoga

No Excuses

/ Tessa Pagones / 8 Comments

My friend Anna got me thinking about excuses yesterday. Specifically about excuses for not writing, but generally about excuses for why we don’t do the things we say we want to do. Why I don’t do the things I say I want to do. And why I say I want to do things that I don’t really want to do. My excuses vary, but not much. At their root they are mostly shoulds or fears. I say I want to do something because I think I should do it, or because someone else wants me to do it (or I think they want me to do it, or I think they think I should – my mind can be a tedious spiral). I don’t do something because I’m afraid I won’t be good at it, or I will look silly trying, or I will have to choose between it and another thing. Fear of choosing is the worst because it usually leads to doing nothing at all.

For years I said I wanted to write. I took writing classes on and off so I would have to write, in theory. When I took a class and had a deadline, I often wrote, but not always. Sometimes I would skip a week, and sometimes I would just drop out after a few classes. “I don’t have time” is a nice blanket excuse that people don’t question much, but the truth is that I’ve always had the time. I just didn’t make the time. I didn’t really know how to take a class for the pure pleasure of learning and working on a thing. I didn’t see the reasons behind my excuses about time.

I took classes sporadically, and I wrote even more sporadically. A few years ago, I joined a writing group and I started this blog. For the first couple of years I wrote when I felt moved to do so, and months would go by without me posting anything. Without me writing anything. It’s not like I had a pile of writings I started and didn’t finish – I wrote nothing in those in between times. I wrote more than I had before, but I still didn’t have anything I’d call a writing practice. Then my friend Elaine started posting a blog a week, and I thought “what a good idea – I can do that.” And so I did. To my great surprise, it really was that simple. Now there’s no question about it. It doesn’t matter if I have a great idea or if I love what I’m writing or if I have other things to do or if I feel like it. It’s a thing I do.

I’m taking writing classes again now, with a whole different outlook. The classes are not the reason I’m writing, or the only writing I’m doing. They are a way for me to practice different techniques, to hone my work, to get feedback from other writers, to be in community with other people with similar goals, to be inspired. I no longer skip assignments, and I understand now that when I’m procrastinating it’s because the assignment is hard or I haven’t figured out how to do it or the topic I’m writing about brings up things I’d rather not feel. These assignments are short. I can do anything for a page and a half. And I’m always glad I’ve done it, even if I fight doing it every step of the way.

Over the last month, yoga (speaking of things I fight every step of the way) has also become a thing I do. Last night Rose said “Do you want to do yoga?” and I said “No, but I’m going to” and she said “That’s exactly how I feel.” Our daily breathwork group is another thing I just do. Committing to a writing practice has made it easier to commit to other practices. Seeing that tiny, incremental, almost unnoticeable changes add up over time has made it easier not to worry about whether I notice if I am making progress. Just doing the thing has become more important than making progress.

Getting better at doing some things has not magically made me good at doing all the things. There are things I say I want to do, and even put on my calendar, and yet somehow never get to. My new rule is that if I put something on my calendar for a month and I don’t do it regularly, it gets axed. Studying for additional work certifications, for example, has gone on my calendar for what are clearly “I think I should do this” reasons and not because it’s something I want to do or feel is necessary for my job. This study time is no longer on my calendar.

Sometimes I get distracted by something that looks cool. I am constantly exposed to cool looking crafts because Rose is an amazingly skilled and dedicated artist and artisan – she knits, and sews, and quilts, and plays multiple instruments, and sings, and draws and paints, and makes wonderful things out of clay. Some of these things she did before I met her, and some I have gotten to watch her learn, and I see how much time she puts into each thing. I enjoy a few of these things (clay and music), and when I feel like it I practice them, and I know I would be better at them if I practiced more. But when I want to practice something, I find it’s usually writing, baking, photography, or messing about with the dogs. My dog training method is very … informal, let’s say, but I am dedicated to it, and to the dogs.

Working with my dogs and horses falls into a mix of the “want” and “should” categories. I have mostly accepted that I do the things I enjoy and want to do with them, and I don’t do the things that are on my or anyone else’s “should” list. I had a friend once say, when Rose and I were talking about how easy our horses are to ride, “Well, sure, they are easy for YOU to ride.” A couple of years ago we were at a clinic where the clinician was talking about setting up your horse so that if something catastrophic happened to you, your horse could be passed along to a total beginner and it would be successful. I spent some time thinking that I needed to make it possible for my horses to schlep along with any old rider on their backs doing any old thing, but you can probably guess how many steps I took towards that aim: zero.

Today when I look at things I’m making excuses not to do, or things I’m not making time for, the conversation I have with myself goes something like this:

Do you really want to do the thing? If so, do it.
Don’t worry about if you do it well immediately, or ever. Do it.
Do you get pleasure from it? Do it.
Are you learning something you want to learn from it? Do it.
If not – don’t do it. The end.

Drama

/ Tessa Pagones / 3 Comments

Somehow it’s almost February. Earlier today I was trying to figure out if it was Wednesday or Thursday, and then I realized it’s Monday.

Dogs know how to bring the drama. Let me begin by saying that Scout is fine now. I, on the other hand, will be recuperating for a while after he gets his sutures out next week.

It started, as so many things do, with dog vomit. Around the middle of the first week in January – no wonder I can’t figure out where January went – Scout started vomiting. And then he stopped eating. I’ll leave out all the graphic details but over a week and a half it involved a trip to the dog ER, a trip to the regular vet, another trip to the regular vet, a trip to a different dog ER, surgery, and a couple nights in the dog hospital. It didn’t really start with dog vomit, I guess – it started with the dog eating something he had no business eating, which eventually needed to be removed, hence all the other things.

Anyway, he’s home now, he’s fine, he’s off all his meds, he’s eating, his incision looks great, he’s acting like himself. All good news!

And yet. I AM SO TIRED. I’m sure it’s not just because of the dog-related anxiety, and more that all my free-floating anxiety from the last year got a focal point during the dog-related anxiety. At first I was sleeping with one ear open to listen for Scout asking to go out, and taking him out in the middle of the night when needed. Which was probably once, maybe twice, but I didn’t want to miss hearing him. I’m not sure I can exactly call it progress when this turned into me going downstairs once an hour to make sure he was not dead. Full disclosure: I can make the vomiting and the not eating and the surgery sound scary, and it was scary to me, but he never really acted that sick. The likelihood of him dropping dead was pretty minuscule. But the worry about it was real, and the lack of sleep was even more real.

I have two primary go-to activities for major stress: eating and baking. It’s been a baking kind of weekend. Yesterday, in between baking three loaves of two different kinds of bread, I told Rose that I wanted to do nothing but bake for about a week. I’ve been going to sleep reading recipes for complicated layer cakes, and waking up with plans for my own recipes which might be really bad ideas. Then again, the actual cookbook I’m reading in bed has things like green curry banana cake, and I’m not sure I can do much worse than that. It didn’t even occur to me until today – Thursday? Wednesday? – that my inability to think about much besides baking is stress related. In related obliviousness, it hadn’t occurred to me that the anxiety about the dog was super sized because of all the general anxiety I’ve been trying to pretend I haven’t been feeling.

I’m happy to report that even though my brain is full of fog, I can still bake bread. True, one of the loaves bears no resemblance to the shape it is supposed to have, but it has all the right ingredients, it’s baked well, and it’s delicious. It has cheese in it, which may be cheating (of course it’s delicious!), but still. The other two loaves look perfect. But about the time I was ending my yoga practice this evening and realized that during savasana I was doing a little supine dance to the music, I decided that I don’t care so much about the form of things right now. Including, apparently, this blog post. Hug your dogs, keep them from eating their toys, bake bread and cake and enjoy it even if it’s weird, and dance even when you’re supposed to be doing corpse pose. Those are my lessons from January, if that’s even what month it is.

Lessons

/ Tessa Pagones / 8 Comments

Boo and I went to a training class for the first time when he was three. He already knew the basic things I need all my dogs to know: come, sit, down. He knew roll over and high five because I thought that would be fun. When I said “Boo, what do you have?” he would merrily bring me the thing he had snuck from a surface somewhere and was chewing up in the middle of the floor – a sock, a hat, a bill, a packet of tomato seeds. He was like a one-canine scavenger hunt, but he was happy to share his findings with me when I asked.

The class we signed up for was a tricks class, because again – fun. He is the happiest dog I know and he loves to play, so I figured this would be a good place to start. Plus I wanted him (and me) to get out of the house some, and be around people we don’t know in places we haven’t been before to try new stuff. Spoiler alert: this is a very human definition of “fun.” It’s not even my definition of fun for me, but for some reason I thought he would feel differently.

Because I had never taken him to a class with other dogs before, not even a puppy class, I did not know what to expect, but he was super good. He ignored the other dogs, he stayed with me when I let him off leash, he obeyed all the commands he knew just as well as he did at home. He willingly went with the instructor and obeyed the commands he knew from her too, and did his best to follow her instructions when she asked him to do something new.

He was also extremely subdued, which is not a state I am used to seeing him in, not even at the vet’s office. When I take him to the boarding kennel he runs happily into the arms of whoever is working in the office. He’s just a happy little guy, and he was not his normal self in class. Aside from the newness of other dogs, strange people, and a new place, it was an indoor place. We do have some house rules, and while any amount of zooming and wrestling and jumping is fine outside, the dogs tone it down inside. Boo and Scout mostly do what we call “whisper-play” in the house. The training facility was a small indoor warehouse and maybe he thought there was a rule against romping. Or maybe he just didn’t feel like it. All the newness and all the learning had one effect I am certain of: it made him tired.

Just like how I have struggled to find a yoga class that works for me, I have struggled to find dog training classes that work for me and my dogs. In both things I can go pretty quickly from the logistical difficulties (it’s too far away, I don’t like the way the teacher teaches, it’s too crowded, the other attendees get on my nerves) to an existential crisis (Why am I doing this, anyway? Is it even my idea, or just something I think I should do?). This also happens with my horses, though it’s been years since I felt like taking a horse to a lesson.

For both the horses and the dogs, my existential crisis is around the “why.” In theory, classes are a way of getting out with other like-minded people with the same interests, a way of giving a horse or dog experience with new situations and other animals, a way to keep them (or us) from getting bored or stale at home. It’s also less expensive to take a group lesson a private lesson.

I’ve been to many barns and dog training facilities where the focus is on competition. Competition is encouraged as an opportunity to put what you and your animal have learned into action. Students of a facility who perform well at competitions are also an advertising tool for the facility, but that’s another story – or maybe it isn’t.

All of these reasons for attending classes and for competing sound really people-centric to me. Exactly one of my dogs likes being around strange dogs, and even he is wary at first. The rest of the reasons, from showing what you know to being exposed to new stimuli to alleviating boredom – all human. I read an article recently about managing stress in agility dogs and I was somewhere between amused, intrigued, and mildly outraged that at no point did the article even mention how stressed humans get at competitions and the effect that will have on their animals. I feel like I should throw in a statement here that I know people and dogs who purely love agility. I know this is not about the sport – it’s about me, and how I feel about both competitions and group activities. Maybe everywhere in this post I should replace “human” with “extrovert.”

There are humans – perhaps the extroverts, perhaps others too – who enjoy all of the things above, plus they also like competing. For me, the stress is the most notable thing – certainly at competitions, but sometimes even at classes. I know I will pass that on to my dog or horse, and the alleged up side for the dog or horse doesn’t outweigh the down side. I’m still not convinced the up side is an up side from the perspective of the actual animal. Don’t get me wrong, I think there are definite potential benefits to training a dog or horse. I say “potential” because it’s so easy to start pushing too hard and cause more problems than we solve. But there are benefits: physical strength and endurance, mental stimulation, connection with the animal. That last one, though, still maybe more of a human desire. I have brought horses and dogs into my life and I interact with them daily, so I do think developing a connection and a relationship with them is key – because they are stuck with me. I don’t think that in the abstract there’s a horse out there saying “If only I had a human” in quite the way I might say “If only I had a horse.”

One of the unexpected benefits of the pandemic restrictions has been that I finally found a yoga practice that works for me. A little over a year ago, I discovered that I actually enjoy yin yoga. I found a teacher I liked, in a studio about five minutes from my house. Even so, I managed to dread going to class almost more than I enjoyed having been to class. The tie-breaker was how I felt during class, which had a lot to do with who showed up on any given day. This is strikingly similar to how I feel about going to the dog training facility that’s five minutes from my house in the opposite direction. I freely admit that my inability to keep other people’s energy off me is entirely my issue, but it is my issue and I can’t just ignore it and hope for the best. I tried that for the first 53 years and now I’m ready to try something different.

In this year of Zoom everything, I know a lot of people who feel they have been saved by the ability to take Zoom yoga, or or pilates, or whatever classes they were taking in studios before. They have been able to take a class with the same people they are used to taking classes with in person, and they are still able to feel connected to those people. Since I did not have people I was used to taking class with, or even people I particularly wanted to take class with, this was not a big motivator for me.

What I started with was Youtube videos. I found a yoga instructor I liked who had videos I liked. Rose and I did one of the videos a couple of times. What we both found we like better, though, is to create our own sequence of yoga poses, whether yin or restorative, put them in a yoga timer app, and then pick our own music and do our own thing. There are some drawbacks. We got terrible giggles when I misspelled “savasana” as “shivasana” and the yoga timer app voice yelled “SHEEva-sana,” and every time she blurts out “BANANA” I think of the grocery store self check out voice saying “Put your BANANAS in the bag,” but a little laughter during yoga isn’t such a bad thing. This homegrown yoga practice is the best I have done with getting what I’ve been looking for from yoga: a combination of relaxation, meditation, and very gradually increasing flexibility. It is, in fact, the first time I can actually say I have a yoga practice – one which I do every day.

At the same time as I have figured out a yoga practice, I have also found a Zoom group that I like. It’s a breath work group, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the sense of community I get from it. I didn’t know what to expect since I’ve never done breath work except in the context of riding horses. It’s the first time in a long time I have done a group activity that actually did give me the feeling of being around like-minded people, even if the only way in which we are like-minded is that we have committed to doing the same thing – and it is a commitment, six days a week. I don’t think that is the only thing, but it’s useful for me to recognize that even if it were, that could be enough.

It took me nearly a year of not being able to physically attend classes I didn’t really want to attend anyway to figure out what works for me. I’m pretty sure I can apply that to my dogs and horses as well. There aren’t really that many criteria: it has to be something we all enjoy, something we find relaxing, something that everyone gets something out of. There are a lot of different ways to learn things, and I can live with being creative about that, even if we do it all at home. If it also makes me giggle, so much the better.

Yin Life

/ Tessa Pagones / 2 Comments

Finn

Not long before covid-19 shelter in place began, I discovered that there is, in fact a form of yoga I actually like. I don’t pretend to be any kind of yoga theory expert, so I mainly have my own experiences of classes to go by. And I do know that the one thing in common all the yoga classes I have taken is that I am there, so I can’t discount that as a factor. The wherever you go, there you are factor.

Most yoga I have taken fits into one of two categories. There is pretzel yoga – generally based on Iyengar, in my experience – where you twist yourself into complicated shapes while balancing on one toe and hold each pose for approximately 37 minutes. And then there is competitive yoga, generally referred to in class schedules as hot yoga, or sometimes flow yoga, or power yoga, or at one memorable studio in D.C. “stroga” which sounds more like pasta but I gather is a portmanteau (do we still call them that, or does that go with troglodyte and zaftig on the list of words only my parents used in conversation?) of “strength” and “yoga.” That kind of yoga appears to be an endurance test my shoulders simply are not up to, and for me almost always involves a lot more swearing than I think can be normal for a spiritual or meditative practice.

I have taken a few other kinds of yoga that I don’t actively dislike: some classes labeled “beginner,” restorative, partner, goat. But none of them spoke to me or made me want to keep doing that kind of yoga. When the most positive feeling I have leaving a class is “well, that wasn’t as bad as I expected,” it doesn’t inspire me to keep going back.

For a couple months there last winter I found a yin yoga class that I really liked. The instructor is always thoughtful and well prepared. She mixes a little traditional Chinese medicine theory in with the poses. We hold poses longer than some classes (though not as long as pretzel yoga), but they are manageable poses and usually on the ground. I always come away from her class feeling stretched in a nice way, not in a “I’ve been on a torture rack for the past 50 minutes” way.

In one class this instructor said that ideally a yin yoga class would be in a cool, dark room, or a cave. Her comment got me thinking about yin as a concept, not just a name for a yoga class. For me yin yoga is every way the opposite of a hot yoga class, though I’ve never heard anyone use the term “yang yoga” to refer to hot yoga. I know in the West we often distill yin and yang down to male and female. I also know that is a gross oversimplification. The thing that struck me most in reading about the concept is that yang is the active principle whereas yin is the receptive.

In working with horses, I grew up in a “make him do it” environment, as if little eight year old me, probably 55 pounds soaking wet, was going to physically make even a fairly small pony who was ten times my size do anything. In case I was unclear about this, in my first horse show at the end of a week of summer horse camp, my horse left the show ring in mid class and went back to the barn, totally oblivious to the child on his back, tugging and kicking ineffectually. As I got older and bigger I rode bigger horses, so the horses and I have tended to stay near a ten to one weight differential. Making them do anything is an illusion, but that didn’t stop me from trying.

It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I first encountered trainers who approached horses in a different way, with the focus on the relationship between horse and human, rather than (as much) on the dominance of human over horse. I’ve learned a different way of approaching my horses, and both they and I like it much better. Even so, much like yoga, when I have taken a lesson from one of these instructors I have often left the lesson feeling more like “Well, that wasn’t so bad” and less like “How can I do more of that?”

One thing that comes up often in the lessons I’ve taken with this newer (to me) approach is the idea of giving to pressure. Whether it’s me riding, or the instructor working my horse, just about the first thing that happens is to see how the horse gives to pressure. I understand it in concept – if your horse is pushing against you or ignoring you or exploding when you apply pressure, even very light pressure, you are in a bit of trouble.  But lately I’ve been wondering what would happen if, with another human, I approached them with the intent of applying pressure on them in some way to see how they responded to it. Even if it was an employee, someone I am paying to do a particular job, I can’t think that would go very well. I know it doesn’t go well for me when the main thing I feel – in, say, a yoga class – is pressure. Like many horses I know, my response to it is often to shut down. I may appear to comply with the instructions I’m given, but I don’t enjoy it, I don’t find it relaxing, and I don’t want to do it more often.

I don’t ride much these days, but I have my horses living at home and I handle them daily. Sometimes I just go through the motions, because doing what I need to do with the horses is something I need to check off my task list for the day. If I approach the horses in this frame of mind, if any of the horses has any concerns about anything at all that day, our interaction is not going to be very positive.

Case in point: blanketing Finn. I blanket my horses below certain temperature and/or in certain types of precipitation. Never mind that I have been blanketing all of the horses for years and years, blanketing is always something of an issue for Finn. The worst it ever got was several years ago when I was trying to take his blanket off on a cold, dry day, and after I undid the leg straps and the belly straps, I moved to unhook the chest straps. In doing so I touched him on the neck and we gave each other a little shock of static electricity. Let me clarify: to me, it was little. To Finn, it was huge. He took off running, blanket flapping in the breeze. In not too many seconds the blanket flipped off his back entirely, leaving it hanging around his neck and front legs as he galloped in a blind panic. I figured (and hoped) the blanket would tear off – and it did, in a way. The binding around the neck and the chest straps held, so while he tore most of the blanket away and left it in the dust, he was still wearing a collar of blanket remains around his neck.

It took a long time that day for me to get close enough to him to get that blanket collar off. Just as Finn’s brain went into panic mode, mine went into “make him do it” mode, and instead of just leaving him alone (in retrospect, the “worst” thing that might have happened would possibly have been the best thing – if he put his head down to eat hay and the rest of the blanket fell off over his head of its own accord), I decided to stay out there and keep approaching him until I could get the blanket bits off. Probably because I did that, and in doing so kept his fear and adrenaline spiked, approaching him with a blanket – or a halter, or just at all – did not go smoothly for quite a while afterwards.

Last winter I went out to feed and blanket the horses one evening. As I picked up Finn’s blanket to put it on him, he spooked and jumped sideways away from his feed. I stayed where I was – I didn’t back up, move closer, speak, or raise or lower the blanket. I just stood. He took a hard look at me while facing me, and then he swung around so his left side was in front of me. He took in a big breath, squared up on all four feet, and then let out the breath and I could see and feel him settle his whole body and wait for me to put the blanket on. I did, and buckled all the straps, and then he calmly resumed eating.

As I was walking back to the house, I found I was thinking about yin. I thought about my friend, horsewoman, and writer Anna Blake saying that a huge percentage of riders are women but almost all instructors are men. I thought about the state of our country right now, and the percentage of elected officials (I just can’t call them “leaders”) who are men. But again, it’s not – or not only – a male/female distinction. The terms associated with yang include heat, light, strength, active, and giving form to all things. The terms associated with yin include cool, dark, soft, receptive, and giving spirit to all things. The yin yang symbol shows both parts of equal size. I think the work in front of me is to even those things up in myself, and in order to do that, just as if I were trying to even up an underdeveloped set of muscles with an overdeveloped set of muscles, I have to focus on strengthening the weaker ones and not on further working the strong ones. More dark, more cool, more soft, more receptive, more spirit. I’m pretty sure my horses will be grateful.

Finn2