JUICED

I want to eat my steering wheel. Yours too. I’m on day one of a three day juice cleanse, and all I can think about is chewing and swallowing. Hey look! A spruce! I bet it would taste fantastic. A deflated beach ball! Choice! Would it be bad to eat all my patient education brochures instead of handing them out to doctors’ offices?

I don’t normally do this kind of thing, the clean-eating-pure-hippy-food-nonsense thing—I love candy and diet soda for Pete’s sake—but I need a clean slate. I’ve been working my body hard lately yet feeding it poorly. Which is unfair. I’ve ever said that the thing I get from my yoga practice is a respect for my body that I never had before. Well if I do respect the little form that’s been toiling on my behalf, I gotsta do a food about-face.

The hard work the body’s been up to? It’s all yoga. (Duh.) There was a day last week when I did two Bikram classes back to back and then followed up that sweatfest with a power yoga class. That's a good four and a half hours of not-easy yoga. And, like, on purpose. Of late I’m averaging 8-9 yoga classes of various styles each week. It’s like an asana binge. Which, weird.

My practice turned 10 back in July. In those ten years I’ve done around 2,500 hours of class, spent thousands upon thousands of dollars in yoga clothes and studio membership fees, attended festivals and conferences, read books, subscribed to magazines, and most recently enrolled in a yoga teacher training. The right teacher training. I started a different training six years ago. Mistake. I wasn’t ready. I needed a stronger practice of my own before I had the foundation to fiddle with other folks’.

We started the training last weekend. Therefore now I listen to Sanskrit in the car, dream about sequencing, and walk around mumbling stuff I’m working to memorize, which makes me look like a crazy person which goes right along with how I want to gnaw on whatever's in front of me.

Upon hearing that I’m doing this yoga teacher training thinger friends have asked, “Oh, so when you’re done will you quit your job?” Oh my, no. Next to Jim, spending money is my favorite thing. (An exaggeration, yes, but not a big one.) Yoga teaching: not lucrative. Therefore, not a career for me. Hobby, yes. Main source of income? Nope. But I will learn a lot, and I intend to acquire a new skill set, a thing of which you cannot have too many. 

One of my Bikram teachers, Cameron, is also doing this training. That’s right yoga “purists,” a Bikram teacher adding vinyasa to his yoga repertoire. Worlds collide and it’s about time. I couldn’t be happier that we are plowing through this together. See, Jim and I love Cameron to bits. After a full day of training on Saturday we had him over for dinner, and I’ll be damned if Jim didn’t surprise us with a seriously extensive salad bar, a key lime tart (zing!), and a spread of fancy cheeses all labeled for our sampling pleasure, for cheese is what makes Cameron's heart sing.

Mmm. Food . . . 

Jim is real, team. I’m not making him up. Yet for how dreamy he is and how unimaginably fantastic he treats me, the guy sounds straight out of a summer RomCom. We meet for lunch. We got to yoga. We hold hands in savasana. We text. He’s proud of me. We respect each other. We talk business. We walk the dogs. He builds me stuff. We watch Iron Chef. I want to be where he is. He surprises me every day. We are happy together. He’s happy. I’m happy. Friends and colleagues see it on our faces. And we are constantly stunned at how great we’ve got it. I mean, I could be so delighted with another human? He feels the same way. He says, “You're so good to me. I don’t deserve you!” I reply, “No, you deserve better!” We are pathetic. I’m digging it.

Also, I just swallowed my gum. Not on purpose but that’s very probably frowned upon when in the throws of a fatiguing, rage-inducing juice cleanse.

UPDATE—

I wrote all that yesterday during lunch but wasn’t near a hotspot so I didn’t post. During yoga last night Teacher Grace said that if we listen to our bodies they’ll tell us what they need. Mine said pizza. So I bailed on the cleanse, and Jim, Dustin, and I went to Blind Onion.