No sweat

This is not me. But I relate. A lot. (Photo courtesy of shelleylyn's Flickr feed.)

You play in the sun, you’re gonna get burned.

At least, you will if you’re me and you experiment with the sun-shielding abilities of shea butter. True fact: Shea butter has natural sunscreen properties. Truer fact: Shea butter does not have enough natural sunscreen properties to adequately protect you on a hot summer day at the beach.

And thus I have been a painfully deep shade of red from head to toe for going on five days now. My condition has prompted many a sympathetic smile, despite the obvious: This is my fault. I know how to avoid skin damage, and yet I didn’t. And so, sympathy aside, I have been suffering the consequences.

It’s not the tender skin that I mind (though that’s no fun). It’s the fact that I’ve been unfit for asana. I was already in a pattern of lazy when it comes to asana practice, and was hoping to get back to the mat in full force this week. But when your skin is hot to the touch, generating internal heat doesn’t help the healing–particularly not when you want your burn to become a tan.

I came back from Colorado earlier this summer boasting an average burn that soon faded to an appealing brown–until I sweated off all the dead skin in the yoga room. It’s discomforting to feel your discarded skin slide away beneath your fingers, but if you’re not yet tan you can get in even more trouble. I know this because I took Bikram with a burn a couple of years ago, and let me just say, OW. Granted, it was an oven burn and not a sunburn, but I was nonetheless horrified as I watched the injury on my wrist go from red and flat to puffy and bubbly in the course of ninety minutes. It was like my skin was being cooked. Which it was.

SO, rather than consciously cook my already injured skin this time around–an inevitability in any studio, given the summer heat–I accepted that I would have to avoid yoga classes this week and instead focus on moisturizing my skin to the maximum possible level.

The plan has worked, and has also prompted me to find my yoga in other places. In pausing to do mountain pose with a tree (vrksatadasana, as I’ve coined it) as I walk around the city. In patiently helping my friend move into a new space, tolerating the heat and clutter with calm and controlled breaths. In teaching my coworker a few stress-relieving postures she can do at her desk–and then remembering to try them myself. In stretching my lower back as I hang in ragdoll/forward fold and rub more, more, more lotion into my legs.

But I miss taking class. And my skin has healed to the point where the top layer is more brown than red, which is to say, dead. Still, since I’m fair-skinned, a tan is a rare and exciting achievement, no matter how ill-gotten it may be, and I’m loathe to lose the golden brown color I’ve managed to acquire.

However, if I’m choosing between asana and a tan, what choice am I really making? Internal well-being versus external appearance, pretty much. And tonight, when yoga is being offered on a rooftop, accompanied by the words of a poet friend, it’s no choice at all.