Your Forehead Should Touch Your Toes

Hello my yoga friends!

I have just returned from a family vacation filled with sunny bliss and raunchy movies. (If you have the chance to see We’re the Millers with your family and you’re abnormally comfortable with your parents, I promise it’s a good time.)

And of course we found some yoga along the way.

My dad also came with my mom and me to this Bikram practice, though he opted to be the photographer rather than the photographed after an especially torturous 90 minutes in the hot room. Maybe it was the studio’s slippery wooden floors, maybe it was the instructor’s strangely shaped beard, or maybe it was the fact that all three of us had eaten enough chocolate to kill a Dementor in our week on the beach, but this practice slapped us all pretty hard across the face. My limbs felt like bricks and my stomach cramped up halfway through the standing series. My mom ran out of water and hadn’t hydrated enough before class. My dad… well, my dad only goes to Bikram once every two months, so every class kind of slaps him across the face. But we survived the practice and dragged ourselves out of that studio with genuine gratitude for the fact that none of us threw up on the floor.

Though our single yoga adventure for the week was a little miserable, the rest of the vacation was just marvelous:

• I ran 5 miles in 46 minutes and 45 seconds! Despite my body’s pleas I did not stop to walk once, thus reaching another one of my goals for the summer. (And a big thanks to my cousin Kristina for kicking my ass, couldn’t have done it without you.)

•  We perused little shops that sold signs with all kinds of quotes, many of them yoga inspired.
  
  (I do love me some quotes.)

•  We dabbled in high-fashion modeling.
  

•  We tested the age-old adage, if your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?
  
  (Yes. Yes we would.)

We had to take a boat and a car to get home yesterday, and nobody killed each other in the process. So I’d call the week a success.

My mom and I went to another Bikram class this afternoon, and I am proud to report that we did not feel like we were going to die. One of our favorite instructors was teaching, we drank enough water before class, and we both wore colorful outfits that showed off our bangin’ vacation tans. We rocked it today, ladies and gentlemen.

And so the pendulum swings. Good days, bad days, sunny days, rainy days. (I actually just wrote that as a serious sentence, then realized that my subconscious is quoting Wyclef Jean. Should I be proud or embarrassed?) It just goes on my friends.

On a somewhat irrelevant note, I’ve been doing a lot of research on animal yoga lately (namely googling “animals doing yoga”) and I’d love to share my findings with you soon. Next week perhaps? Same time, same place.

Namaste,
Hannah