"With your smiling, happy face..."

"I took Motrin for you man!"

...this is what I woke up saying to my dear, hurting elbow this morning. For some reason unknown to me, elfow (elbow) decided that this was not quite the vacation that it had signed up for! -- consequently, bruising, burning, nerve pain, and general ANGER were various ways of it showing its blatant unhappiness about being here.

Tough luck man, you got 7 more weeks of being here! Even if you paid me "3 Trillion Spirit Dollars", you would have no luck with getting out of here. Deal with it!

Cilantro/jalepeno hummus has officially made Rachel's day complete (and it isn't even noon yet!). Our weekly outing to Trader Joe's proved to be quite successful, though I'm afraid we were a bit over-indulgent this time.

"Chocolate-covered cherries?? Well, we need them for our fruit intake!"
"Gummy vitamins?!? It's like CANDY and GOODNESS all in one bite!"
"Original or Cilantro Hummus? Um, yes please."

I'm sure Rachel wrote about it already, but we discovered ANOTHER saving grace for our weekends (sorry Health Nutz, you've got competition!). Native Cafe has officially become our place to eat at on Saturdays (trust me, if they were open Sundays, we would be there today as well!). There menu was full of amazing vegan salads, wraps, bowls, desserts (FYI: Carrot cake + dream frosting = ONE HAPPY YOGI!)...we were in absolute heaven....mmm, almost as happy as we were when we were at Target sipping our Kombuchas.

Ahem, moving on. I think food has officially consumed too much of my blogging time.

Training?? Oh yes, that is exactly why I came out here in the first place. Ok, week 2 was...well...challenging.

Physically: My body was exhausted almost the entire time! I think I had one class (out of 11, which is so pitiful!) where I actually felt relatively OK. There were several classes where I found myself in tears just making myself sit-up from Savasana. Poor Jim -- his classes have always been my weakest (Friday evening being no exception)...I was literally in tears from half-tortoise till the end of class. I made it, but just barely.

Mentally: They are definitely working on breaking down our minds. I first thought it was an accident that the lecture room was so flippin hot during the afternoon lectures. Seriously, 300+ people in a tiny room in tiny chairs with no air circulation is enough to drive anybody mad...ha, which is exactly what they want! It is almost comical -- they have "Sleep Patrol" staff walking up an down the aisles during lecture. Let me tell you, the hot room and the tired body and the long lectures do not always encourage your best mental clarity!

Emotionally: The ups and downs are absolutely unbelievable! You guys are lucky that I'm only getting to blog on the weekends, because mid-week (ha, mid-day, mid-lecture, mid-class!) is definitely a key time to break down. Things start popping up left and right!
In class -- "Why am I crying right now? It's just half-moon pose!"
In lecture -- one moment you are taking furious notes and nodding in eager agreement, the next...furious thoughts running around your head wondering WHAT THE HECK they are talking about!!
In MOVIES -- oh wow, these are the best!! I almost always start off on this high thinking, "ok, tonight I'm going to love this movie!" I'll have my tea, my snacks -- life is good!...3 hours later, I want to curse 1)the people who hired these horrible actors, 2) the composer who wrote this terrible music, 3) the world for creating cameras to capture such awful moments that you have to sit and watch, 4) the chair company for making their chairs SO INSANELY uncomfortable, etc...

Phew, ok. All that being said, we only had one late-night movie this week (compared to our two from last week)...now I really feel puny, because I know that this is NOTHING compared to what is to come. Eesh. We officially started the Maha Bharat series...wait, strike that, EPIC MOVIE of the history of India on Thursday. I really want to pay attention and soak it all in, but the combination of the late nights and the over-dramatized, well, everything!, makes it quite difficult! I've never been one for soap-operas which, unfortunately, is exactly what this feels like. But, lots of time to grow and strengthen my mind into loving it, right?? :-)

And then the weekends come. And in our time of reflection and stillness we actually laugh about it. We laugh about the guy who had the guts to bring his entire comforter down to the movie this week. We laugh about how long Emmy took to let us actually sit down in Triangle pose (trust me, it was long!). We laugh about how we drip with sweat before our classes even begin. We laugh about how Minh was so tired that he said he was from Richardson (instead of Grapevine). We laugh at our CPR training (and how if anybody we know starts choking we are going to just pounce on them!). We laugh at all the little things that made us cry sporadically. We laugh at how every single time we were eating this week was "the happiest we have ever been!" (the same went for each time we crawled into bed, or got out of lecture early, or had time to lay down before class)... :-)

The biggest lesson I have learned this week? How helpful the "smiling, happy face" is going to be for the next 7 weeks...please, when I call you in tears, feel free to remind me of that fact! Lord, give me the clarity to keep that in my heart.

Peace, love, and yoga hugs!