Gyms, Head Stands, and Me
And Whatʻs Discipline Got To Do With It
Hello, aloha, greetings on this blustery March day. Yes even in Hawaiʻi March may come in like a lion (dance?) and exit like the lambs dotting the pastures along Kohala Mountain Road (one of which might find its way to me in June at the 4-H Livestock Show and Sale).
Readers new and seasoned, I appreciate you joining me today for another installment of They Keep Telling Me I Should Write My Memoir.
Last week I shared I had completely forgotten that “working out at a gym” was once a core piece of my identity. Indulge me on a trip back in memory, back even earlier than the transformative period in my 30s with which I started this memoir-in-installments-and-essays1. Back to the mid-1970s, the beginning of my 20s, when I was fresh out of college and about to begin work as an analyst for the Joint Budget Committee of the Colorado State Legislature.2
A friend of the family happened to work at the Stapleton Plaza Hotel near the airport. One of the first hotels to feature an on-site fitness facility, Stapleton Plaza Athletic Center was open to local members as well as hotel guests, and the evening aerobics classes led by a crazy Australian guy who managed the Center were legendary. Aunty-friend gave me a pass to the gym, which I joined for real as soon as I got my job at the legislature.
The locals who frequented the gym were mostly young professionals - a doctor, a lawyer, a restaurateur - along with a handful of Denver Broncos in the off season. Between the menʻs and womenʻs locker rooms was a co-ed steam room. After class weʻd shed our gym shorts and gather there wrapped in towels - but not for too long, because if we showered and changed quickly enough we could make it to the hotel lounge just before they removed the buffet of free hors dʻoeuvres. Once Coors Light debuted in 1978, our drink of choice was that almost-beer over ice with a twist of lime. Stapleton Plaza Athletic Center became the center of my social life.
Governor Dick Lamm also belonged to the gym. One day I was rushing from my office on the third floor of the Capitol to bring a document down to a legislative hearing on the second floor, and passed the Governor coming up the stairs with his retinue. In a moment that was fun and harmless in those innocent times and would be political suicide today, the Governor grinned and quipped, “Hi Beth, nice to see you with all your clothes on” - leaving his staffers gaping as I replied “You too, Governor” and continued running down the stairs. Oh that co-ed steam room…
The gym I joined after I started working on Wall Street in 1984 was also a hotel gym. Located on the top of the Vista International Hotel in lower Manhattan, it offered lockers where members could leave workout clothes in a mesh bag to be laundered by the hotel. I lost my workout clothes and shoes when the hotel was bombed in 1993.3 This too, was not just a way to stay fit. My social life in Brazil began with a connection made through a gym friend. Another of my friends from that gym (still a friend today) was my companion on many adventures - from workshops with Oh Shinnah to trips to the southwest.
Working out was just a given for at least the first couple of decades of my adult life. Why did it never occur to me to resume the habit? Was it just that I had other avenues to a social life? Is it just so much nicer to exercise outside in Hawaiʻi? Those answers could also be true. But the best answer is that it took having a goal for me to resume the habit.
Aha moment! Goal versus Habit is a key distinction. When I offered annual business plan workshops for Hawaiʻi Life agents, I used my yoga practice as an illustration of a a provocative proposition, a “Big Hairy Audacious Goal”. I got serious about a yoga practice at age 53, when I realized that many of the issues like bad back and poor balance that were haunting my mother in her 80s, were ones I could mitigate if not avoid altogether if I had a yoga practice for thirty years by the time I reached her age.
The goal I set for myself? Not being frail in my 80s would hardly motivate. Neither would “start taking yoga classes,” one of those New Years Resolution type “goals” that disappear before the arrival of March winds. The goal I set - at age 53 having never done this in my life - was to stand on my head in the middle of the room. Weekly yoga classes with at teacher who knew how to advance my skill level, and later daily home practice, were action steps - not goals.
Reaching that goal took six years. Along the way, daily yoga practice became self-rewarding and transformative. Now my devotion to yoga has nothing to do with Discipline in service to a goal. It is a simply a practice and a necessity of living. I flow into it automatically, allow thinking to fall away and awareness to settle into breath and form and noticing.
How often when we write our annual plans - or even create our vision boards - do we confuse actions, our To Do Lists, with a compelling purpose or inspiring goal? Discipline will drive me to find the steps I need to move towards a Goal that matters. Discipline will get me to the gym or the mat in the beginning.
Then Discipline naturally can step aside until I call for help again.
The word Discipline comes from the Greek word “disciple” which means learner. And I am indeed a learner. I have a passion for learning and achieving mastery in different “disciplines” that is almost the opposite of an attitude of competing or striving.
Words have different meanings in different contexts. Just as AI in the horse world involves stud farms not server farms, Discipline in the horse world means reining or eventing, the arena in which you compete. But for me Discipline is linked to curiosity and joy rather than achievement. This is fundamental to the way in which I approach most parts of my life: my habits of body, my habits of mind, my habits of spiritual practice, my habits of work, my habits of leisure. Discipline in yoga is not about making your asana better. It is a path to making your entire person better, with asana, breath, and meditation as tools. And “better” does not mean better than others. I mean better in the sense of more observant, more subtle, more capable of equanimity and kindness to myself and others.
Habits of a lifetime become unconscious patterns, both the unhealthy and the healthy ones. Discipline helps me form chosen actions into Habits that support consciously chosen Goals. Discipline is indeed a sibling of Integrity.
Those sequential memoir posts are gathered here.
I did mention that job in passing in this post about Annie Hall and Adrienne Rich.
It eventually reopened as a Marriott until it was destroyed for a second time on September 11, 2001.
When you do your headstand at 70 can I spot you?