Cardio Junkies Anonymous

Hello, my name is Gail Mondry and I am a cardio junkie.

I think I’m mostly in the clear though. It’s been several years since I overcame the worst of my symptoms. I realize now that the dual injuries of a broken toe and torn back changed my outlook—that’s when I first took an honest look at my fitness habits and acknowledged the addiction I’ve been facing for thirty or so years.

Okay, so my so-called “addiction” obviously isn’t as serious as the ones that cause people meet regularly at Alcoholics Anonymous. It may not threaten my life, but it can and did threaten my wellbeing. And I think my self-realization can help other potential “addicts.” Maybe my cautionary tale will prevent others from suffering injuries like mine.

I got my training in fitness during the era when group exercise was becoming more defined. Before, it was a luxury to get a quick, intense workout with instruction. Now exercise as social activity is the norm. There are so many ways to get your cardio fix in a class—spin, pilates, zumba, etc.— and the list keeps expanding. This is both a good and bad thing.

The modern variety in fitness options means you can find the class that suits your body type and interests, but it also causes people to inadvertently abuse their bodies. It makes it easier to indulge your cardio addiction, get the rush of endorphins so frequently that it causes imbalances. Not only this, but cross-training without proper stretching compounds injuries and issues. When you’re in the midst of a vigorous regimen you feel invincible. But we know that you have to stretch as much as you pound.

The suburban lifestyle that has become so ingrained in the Midwest has only exacerbated these problems. Many of us sit, in front of a computer or in a car, for large portions of the day, and try to compensate in bursts extreme workouts.

For years I got “high” on all the exciting things happening in fitness clubs. I loved teaching those invigorating group classes. But I wouldn’t stop there. I would go from teaching a double step class to playing 1.5 hours of tennis in a clinic and round it off with a spinning class. I would do maybe five minutes of stretching after each activity. And I did this for twenty years. Thinking I could maintain this daily aerobic schedule injury-free was kind of foolish.

Maybe I’m still a junkie, but nowadays I’m not able to satisfy my cardio urges because of my schedule, which got considerably busier since starting a business. Yoga has certainly tempered a lot of my cardio dependence. After only my second yoga class, I knew my body had found what it craved—not the intensity and constant movement, but to be treated well. I immediately learned things about my body. For starters, I found that my knee injury actually originated from my hip.

Even after discovering yoga it was still a challenge not to overdo it. I sustained my recent toe and back injuries at the height of my yoga teaching and practice. I got hurt because I couldn’t get rid of the junkie in me. It was a rush to be upside-down on my hands, and to teach others to do the same. I pushed my body too hard. I took classes on the coasts, where everything seems to be harder, faster, and hotter. I took what I learned and incorporated them into my own teachings. In short, my practice became more intense.

Even though yoga promotes a healthy lifestyle, you still need to be careful and recognize your own limits. If you’re doing yoga three times a day, that’s an addiction. Yoga is not about transferring your need to raise your heart rate into a more sustainable practice. Don’t get me wrong, I’m overjoyed to see so many in their middle-ages find an option that allows them to keep working hard. But as Sharron Gannon stated at the Jivamukti Tribal gathering, “If your practice always has to be harder and faster, it means you’re not at peace.

I Knew Madonna When ...

A couple of weeks ago I “watched” the Super Bowl. But for me, the football was the least interesting part of the broadcast. The Chrysler advertisement featuring Clint Eastwood was amazing. I was most attentive, however, during Madonna’s halftime show.

I’m a little biased though. Against football, because I just can’t seem to get into it and practice nonviolence, and towards Madonna, because she’s a former classmate of mine at Marygrove College in Detroit. Watching her career progress over the years has been so exciting. She was a dance major. I was working towards a dance therapy degree. We performed in the same dance company and our lockers were right next to each other!

Despite our proximity, I can’t say I knew Madonna all that well. Basically, she didn’t have time to make any purely social connections because she was the most focused and driven dancer in the program. Perhaps she cared only about her career, practiced incessantly, and viewed us as potential rivals. But that’s just speculation.

She definitely left an impression during the short time she took classes at Marygrove. Every day her arrival was like a comet streaking through the hallways. Sometimes that comet looked like it had slept in a car the previous night, but the luminosity never dimmed. She had, what my teacher would call, a burning desire to create change in her life. It showed in the way she practiced, day in and day out.

Even though she never said explicitly that she wanted to be famous, we all felt it. And it would have been a bold proclamation because she spent all her time dancing. I’ve heard that she’s often been self-conscious about her voice. While that may not be what she’s known for, I’m sure that she worked at it with the same zeal she did as a dance major.

Madonna certainly did become successful, probably beyond even her wildest dreams. She wasn’t at Marygrove for very long, maybe a little over a year, before moving to New York and rocketing to stardom. And she’s been at or near the top ever since. I can’t help but wonder, since I’ve changed career paths as well to become a yoga instructor, if her well-known fanaticism for yoga has contributed to her longevity and youthful looks. Some of those moves she made during halftime showed that she’s been practicing yoga for many years! In my brief acquaintance with Madonna, I never knew her to do anything but at full speed. This applied to dancing, lifestyle choices, and from what I’ve heard and read, yoga. Her longevity in the business, her ability to avoid career-threatening vices, and her sustained athleticism gives a strong argument for the yoga’s efficacy.

So to me it’s no surprise she’s become so famous. Passion is the key ingredient to achievement—there’s no better example of this than Madonna.

An Inspirational Weekend at the 5th Annual Bikram Yoga Women's Retreat

[I have included quotes from memory of Emmy Cleaves and Rajashree Chaudhury throughout this entry.]

Your time is now.

Recently, I had the wonderful opportunity to attend the 5^th annual Women’s Retreat in Texas with around 200 other women. It was an amazing event for a number of reasons, but the teachers truly made the weekend stand out.

Keep happy memories alive, let go of sad ones.

Emmy Cleaves is a Holocaust survivor in her mid-80s. I had read about the tragedies in her early life and was interested in her story and relationship to yoga. But during the course of the retreat, she never once uttered the world “Holocaust” or made reference to those events. She only made a single, passing remark about “tension headaches,” and the relief she got from Bikram yoga.

As you might expect, Emmy prides herself on being tough. When you learn of her story, Emmy’s dictum—“life is hard, get over it”—takes on a profound significance. She is old school, direct, and teaches you to practice yoga and life with as few crutches as possible. In other words, take ownership and responsibility.

Don’t feel guilty. You deserve to be happy.

Emmy’s fellow teacher, Rajashree Chaudhury,  is the co-creator of the Bikram Yoga Teacher Training program. She is younger than Emmy but carries the wisdom of many lives. Her story is one of adaptation. She was married by arrangement and then had to integrate her old-world customs into her newfound California lifestyle.

You can feel Rajashree’s warmth as she teaches and lectures. She talks about the love she feels for her children, as well as the joys and challenges of being a businesswoman.

Sometimes you need to inspire yourself.

Discern the difference between pain and challenges.

The intermingling of these two different perspectives was fascinating. Some of Raja and Emmy’s core principles were the same. For example, they both preached the importance of working diligently towards your own happiness. But on the means to arriving at that end, they diverged.

Emmy’s past informed her realist perspective on life. Every day, every decision, and every pose is a challenge and you must stay focused through it all. Yoga is a key element to that constant vigilance.

Thanks to her much deserved success, Rajashree is much more of an optimist. Us women drew inspiration from her positive attitude and hopeful words. For her, yoga keeps one balanced mentally and physically and on the right track.

Yoga without mindfulness is just calisthenics.

Much of the insight they imparted would apply to any practice. But in this context, considering their life stories, the women’s retreat reinforced my choice to move towards my own happiness. These two women have experienced a great deal in their life. You can tell this just by listening to their wisdom and witnessing their health, personalities, and attitudes. Yoga has made them very solid in their belief that a physically and mentally challenging daily practice prepares you for the very real demands of life. 

Student of the Month

I was recently named Bikram Student of the Month by the Detroit Bikram studio! Here's the story:

At Detroit Bikram, we are always amazed at the wide variety of students who come to practice at our studios. Our students come from all walks of life. They range from different age groups (early teens to way into their 80's believe it or not), to a wide variety of professions. From doctors, teachers, nurses, stay at home moms/dads, lawyers, architects, waitresses, retirees, college students, professional athletes, and even yoga instructors who teach other styles of Hatha Yoga. That brings us to our next Student of the Month: Gail Mondry.

Read the rest of the story here.

A Lesson from a Master Teacher

Amidst all of the stories being released around the 10^th anniversary of 9/11, I was reminded of my own experience soon after that tragic day. This is not meant to be a commentary about the event—there have been plenty of those already. Instead, I wanted to relate a relevant story, which highlights the benefit yoga has in traumatic times.

Thirty days after 9/11 my husband and I flew to New York for an international meeting of a scientific institute we support. Naturally I was nervous to fly. But I took comfort in my yoga mat, which I slung over my shoulder and felt securely against my back. Arriving at LaGuardia with heightened security was quite startling. There were police and dogs and more than once I was asked to open my yoga bag.

The meeting was at the mostly empty Waldorf Astoria. Soon after unpacking, I researched potential workshops and found one in the Village called “How to Improve the Quality of Your Practice,” taught by Mark Whitwell. I had never had the opportunity to practice with Mark, but had certainly heard about him. I signed up online and got up early the next morning to go downtown.

When I exited the subway in the Village, I was immediately overcome by the astringent smell in the air and the presence of silt everywhere. On the mailboxes, benches, windowsills, street signs, there was a film of the debris, which I knew had been the remains of the planes and buildings. It is one thing to see images of the aftermath on television. It is quite another to experience the devastation. The fact that so much rubble remained thirty days after was extremely startling.

I arrived at the studio to find close to a hundred teachers in a very agitated state. I heard a louder than normal buzz in the room from nervous chatter and students grabbing woodblocks and straps and bolsters and trying to find a place for their mat. I wasn’t used to practicing with props but I grabbed a couple anyway, feeling agitated myself.

In strode the striking presence of Mark Whitwell. Without much explanation, he encouraged us to let go of the props and start breathing. He seemed oppressed by his inherited responsibility as a master teacher to help all of us deal with the situation at hand.

But his practice was precisely what every teacher in that room needed.

This workshop forever changed how I will view a yoga practice. It wasn’t about postures, or sequencing, or props, or alignment. It was very simple asanas, coming to our breath, child’s pose. There wasn’t any music or adjustments. There was crying, moving toward healing, and repetition of simple postures. And a lot of sitting.

Mark revealed to me the true purpose of yoga: connecting the mind to the breath, linking breath to movement in order to still the fluctuations of the mind.

Processing trauma is very difficult. It takes a focused mind to move out of a harmful situation into the promise of a calmer self. What I participated in that day was something to which I and the other hundred teachers could immediately relate.

But, what about the hundreds of people I passed on the street and in the metro on my way to the studio? They walked briskly, heads down, as if trying to bore their way to their destination. They were still paranoid and stressed, like I had felt when navigating through the airport the previous day.

Mark Whitwell’s workshop reminded me of the skill set that a steady yoga practice provides. It is grounding. It prepares you for battles that you can’t anticipate in your life. But when they arrive, you are much more fit to face them. 

What Does 'Vacation' Mean to You?

In the interests of full disclosure, I run a business called Yoga Vacations. This post is meant to explain the differences between two valid kinds of yoga which incorporate travel.

The yoga retreat has been around for a long time. If you generalize to include spiritual expeditions like pilgrimages (“retreating” from society), then perhaps millennia. Today’s retreats are all based on the group experience. A teacher takes a small number of students, usually into the wilderness, with the intention of becoming more spiritual, cleansed, and connected. Activities are done communally, whether it’s the practice itself, meditation, diet, or daily rituals. Many have dorm-like housing. Everyone shares in the challenges. Except for a few breaks for rest and recovery, you’re with the same people all the time.

When yoga first got a foothold in the States, the retreat was a kind of fringe service for people who wanted to detoxify and have a spiritual experience. It was, and still is, a more demanding method and a little radical. As yoga became mainstream, the retreat didn’t change much except in variety. Nowadays, it covers a wider range of people, places, and practices.

Over the last 12 plus years that I’ve been teaching yoga, I’ve observed that vacationers would travel to wonderful locations but felt they lacked the accompaniment of a great yoga practice. At the same time, they didn’t want the rigor of a retreat. I sensed a need for something with fewer guidelines, and a service which allowed for ample personal time. I certainly wasn’t the only one to notice this. But out of this need, the yoga vacation arose.

A yoga vacation is an all-encompassing sensory experience. The student gets plenty of time on the yoga mat, but can also eat great food, explore the city, go hiking or do other outdoor activities. The daily yoga practice grounds the vacationer so they can be more open to the adventures and cultural experiences on their trip.

People on a yoga vacation use the practice to open up their senses and absorb everything around them. It’s not an excuse to pig out or go on a bender, but rather a way to be a more tranquil self and gain all you can minus the distractions of a job or kids. Ultimately, you’re still on vacation, and enjoyment is a definite priority.

I would like to relate a personal story that highlights what yoga does for me on a vacation.

I was recently in New York City. When I go there, I love to attend a morning class. While I do have a daily practice, I try to seek out a teacher or style that isn't accessible back home. Then I go to the museum followed by the theater. Yoga puts me in the right mindset for these expansive activities. I'm more present and can sit for a long time with an open mind. I better absorb the latent artistic and cultural waves around me. 

Though I run a business that uses the yoga vacation model, I love going on retreats as well. It’s just a different experience. Students might choose one or the other depending on the time of year, who they want to travel with, what style of yoga they practice, what other cultural activities they want to participate in, just to name a few. While there’s nothing wrong with the more spartan retreat, there’s also a lot to be said for sleeping in a comfortable bed and eating fabulous cuisine.

(Warning: promotional material to follow)

Here’s an upcoming example of the vacation approach. Yoga Vacations has planned a wonderful trip in Telluride starting September 29th: Jivamukti Yoga with Dechen Thurman. We will do a vigorous Asana practice every day, then go hiking in the mountains or to the spa. In the evening we will come together for a more focused workshop. At that point in the season, the town will be serene and the fall colors should have arrived. The group harmony of a chant, in this stunning setting, is truly a work of art.

The student should be able to achieve great peace of mind in this setting. There will also be plenty of schedule flexibility, so the student can pursue their personal interests as well. It should be a lot of fun and maybe you’ll consider joining us.

Here's a welcoming invitation from Dechen himself:

Lions on the Mat

These people need Yoga

On any given day at Bikram Yoga Detroit, there is probably a professional athlete in the room. They tend to stand out.

Recently, two football players—not sure if they were Lions or Wolverines, but I heard they were high-level players—came to a class I attended. They arrived together, put their mats down, and chatted in a way which suggested they weren’t accustomed to a yoga class. If I had to guess, they were probably thinking something like: Really, how hard can this be? There’s a bunch of housewives in here, a pregnant woman, some overweight people, elderly people, and a few hardbodies.

Meanwhile, I knew what was in store for them. Despite the teacher’s instruction to focus on our own practice, it was hard not to observe them on occasion, especially when they would speak softly and laugh with each other. 

The teacher walked in and said, “Good morning. Please step to the front of your mat.” The footballers could do that. The first couple of postures weren’t a big deal either, although one of them had trouble locking his arms close to his head. Not surprisingly, his big muscles got in the way. Then we moved into more difficult standing and stretching work. Everyone in the room became more challenged, as is the norm in a Bikram class.

These two young, professional athletes had no endurance issues. The extreme heat didn’t seem to bother them and I don’t remember them drinking much water. The challenges lay elsewhere. They found their edge quickly. Even though these super-athletes must have found it startling to be unable to tackle (pun intended) many postures or keep up with their less-fit peers, they maintained their focus and sense of humor. 

If they couldn't complete a posture or hold it for 90 seconds, they would laugh, then try again. I was pleased that the teacher didn't call them out for communicating with each other, which is typically taboo in the yoga room. Reason being, the lessons they learned and the attitude with which they practiced, are lessons for all of us.

As a student, I often fall into the trap of getting discouraged when I can’t fully express the pose. Since I’ve been a Bikram practitioner for over two years, I have a full understanding of the sequence of movements. Yet I still find myself judging my practice in a way that’s not constructive. It was so refreshing to see these two extremely fit men attempt these difficult postures and stay positive amidst the effort. They maintained great respect for the detailed instruction and didn’t let their egos get in the way.

And their mindset influenced everyone’s that day. We fed off their positive energy, and they in turn looked to us for direction. I would even go so far as to say that we regulars felt pretty good about ourselves. Yoga is a great equalizer, as it can be practiced with the same vigor, concentration, and benefit for housewives and professional athletes alike. In the most general sense, we all showed up, practiced, did the best we could, and left victorious.

This is what I love most about group practice. Everyone comes to the table (or mat) with their own genes, and physical history of injury and recovery. In the end, we are able to move forward collectively in our health.

This particular practice was a great reminder about attitude in class. Even for an experienced practitioner, the best yoga is tough. The practice changes daily depending on how your treated your body in the last 24 hours. One way to deal with the obstacles you face every time is by being a little self-deprecating. A mixture of humor and focus allow you to recover from a botched attempt and prevent spiraling into negativity. Trouble comes if you get discouraged or competitive. These are needless detriments to a healthy practice and drain you of energy. This is true of any practice, sport or otherwise, and is one of the valuable lessons you want to utilize off the mat.