East Bank Club’s founder, Daniel Levin, passed away on Saturday at the age of 95. He lived a full and exciting life. Our club was a source of true pride and joy. Many of you may have never had the opportunity to meet him in person, but many of us have had the opportunity to be charmed by his delight. Regardless, his existence has impacted the majority of people who entered EBC. (The minority that is unfazed, I can’t help you.) You have experienced the Daniel Levin effect if you ever looked around the club and thought, “Wow. I can’t believe how good it is, how many things we have, and /or how genuine and kind the people that work here are.”

If you read any of the media about his passing, every source mentions that he took a big risk when he envisioned East Bank Club on the shore of the Chicago River in what was a semi-abandoned industrial corridor of town. Many thought it was an insane idea, but it would become a major component in the majesty of River North.

If during your time there, anyone has believed in your talent and skill, Mr. Levin can also be attributed to birthing that spirit. He loved every employee and had the utmost faith in all of us to bring our best selves to the table to create something truly special, and he always believed in the “magic” that comes from truly caring about your work over anything else.

Tied to his faith in us, he was also so thankful for the part that everyone played in making this place wonderful. If you ever had the opportunity to hear him speak, the warmth in his voice and the sparkle of his humor clearly demonstrated a deep well of gratitude. 

It is a special thing to have a leader that believes in you and is truly grateful for you. Even on it’s most challenging days, being a part of the EBC machine has been nothing short of a gift.

When I was younger, I used to break my heart on New Year’s Eve. Hard. As a natural born dreamer, I was always so full of expectations that I would start the night full of hope and wishes, and by 1am, I’d be sad and disappointed with the outcome of the night. I can think of only about three NYE’s in my teens and 20’s that did not end in despair.

One involved driving around in a car all night with my high school friends Dawn and Drea. They were girls that just got me. They were always down for my shenanigans. The initial plan was to dress to the nines and just go out and see what could happen. We nixed the dressing up part and just went out in jeans and sweaters…and I don’t think we got in ANY trouble, but we laughed all night and listened to our favorite songs, and just generally had a good time with each other. It was a night when I realized that there are few things that beat the wholeness you feel being around people who get you.

Another was at one of Strawdog Theatre’s many New Year’s Eve parties. I think it may have been the first one that I went to in my first year in the city. A lot of my people from school were in the company or company adjacent like I was, and I danced my ass off like no one was watching, drank my fair share, and stumbled home to pass out, blissed out.

Another year, at that same party, I hooked up with a really delicious boy and tumbled through a funhouse of misadventures getting from the party to his place, including, but not limited to, our cab crashing into a limo, the limo driver and the cab driver throwing hands at each other and us running away from the scene hand in hand. It was wild and romantic, and good times were had. He never called me after that night, and even though that made me melancholy for about a month or more, in the grand scheme of things, he amounted to not much more than a footnote in my life story.

If we are talking about the years from 15-30, that is only 3 out of 15 NYE’s where I did not break my own heart. Those are not amazing stats. When I look back at that formative era, I wanted a boyfriend, a musical number, something spectacular. There was the year in college when I was home for break that I was going to write a godamned play goddammit. Stuck in my podunk parents house with no plans in my podunk town, I was going to sit down in 1994 and write my first masterpiece into the wee hours of 1995. Didn’t happen. I didn’t realize until I sat down to do it that I didn’t know how to write a play. I didn’t have enough life experience or much that was really worth saying at that age. It sure felt like I did, but when push came to shove……..crickets.

Around 30, I was just beginning to transition from the mindless day job into what would become the main course of my life’s work. My close friends (who were also usually my party friends) would soon scatter to the four corners of the earth…and I, having found more meaning in my daily work, would stop seeking inspiration in alcohol infused adventures and I would lean into the peace of being by myself. Man, the 30’s were really my salad days. I was comfortable in my own skin, loved being on my own, and could usually find company whenever I wanted it, but I didn’t need it as inspiration or fuel. I also cherished my time alone. By 40, my opportunities to be alone would evaporate…see my last post.

My point to you tonight, my lovelies, is that I hope that on this New Year’s Eve and all that follow, you can know that great things don’t always align with some schedule that is dictated by popular culture. Hop out of the matrix and and enjoy what you have in this moment. For me, tonight, it will be sweet and sour meatballs, artichoke dip, video games, and trying to stay up until midnight. If you’re out…don’t go desperately looking for the kiss. Look for the good storyteller, or the great dancer, or just tell your own stories and dance your ass off. Hold the door for someone. Listen. Help. Connect. Maybe take some time like I just did, looking back to learn best ways to move forward. That is where the magic lies. I was always looking for the metaphorical magic, but now, I see that the things I was romanticizing were about as two dimensional as a stock photo. They weren’t real, they were made up. commonly agreed upon notions, getting more and more superficial with each time these ideas were passed on.

You deserve better than the empty promises we’ve been sold. We all do.

Happy new year, reader. Thanks for stopping by.

As a manager, some of my best work comes from the edit.

Did you know that you don’t have to say everything you are thinking, all of the time? There’s a reason why we are drawn to people who are mysterious, but even more than that, TMI is exhausting.

Earlier today, I was asked to recommend some instructors who would be best at dealing with a certain condition, a rare situation. In typing my response, I was provided a few names, and then I typed “but not X.”

Then, I deleted it….for several reasons. 1. It felt mean and judgmental. It was. 2. This instructor has an completely different focus in their work and this case would be a stretch. So, it goes without saying that they would not be recommended. 3. This instructor finds themselves in challenging situations that often give me more work, which means that I am really quick to judge because this person frustrates me. I have to temper my feelings so that I can treat them fairly.

I love email because I can do this all the time. When a member wants their money back on a late cancel, I can edit out my disdain. When someone asks me a stupid question, I can remove my judgement.

In person, I have learned to pause in difficult situations so that I have space to internally edit before I say or do something I regret. Never underestimate the power of the phrase, “Let me think about that.” When I am being my best self, I am able to calmly put that forth when I might normally feel compelled to disagree or shut down an idea or request.

When it comes down to it, everyone deserves to be considered and respected. Pausing, taking time to hear someone out, and taking time to make an impartial decision has really never failed me. Even when the decision is not in that person’s favor, being heard out pays out positive emotional dividends.

The number of times I get someone cancelling the morning of a class with the statement, “I just wanted to make sure that someone else could have my spot” makes me wonder if people really think about other people or just grab the most convenient idea that they could think of to excuse themselves.

In my experience, most people on our waiting lists are not standing by with baited breath waiting for someone to cancel 90 minutes before class. The waitlist has moved on by this point. It’s sweet that you want to do us the favor, but really, please know that odds are, you didn’t really help us fill the spot.

The other thing that I find wholly unfriendly is the person, sounding like they are on death’s door, calls the morning of their class and says, “I’m really, really sick, I’m wondering if you would excuses the charge, but if you are still going to charge me, I’ll come to class.” How is this anything but a threat? As grown, adult humans, we know how most diseases spread.

It puts me in a real catch 22. If I end up waiving the late cancel charge, it’s because I am thinking of your classmates. Your selfishness doesn’t really deserve the consideration to be honest. The people that perhaps deserve the consideration more are the ones that call an apologetically cancel and maybe even say, I know I’m being charged, I just want to make sure you knew I wouldn’t be there. Statistically, I’d say that one that threatens to spread their germs gets waived more often than the one who owns their lot.

It’s not fair. I try to keep this in mind with those who are taking ownership of their piece of the training relationship. I also try to be merciful with our cancellation policy within reason.

My dear student, perhaps you could approach us with the same care?

Thank you,

The Management

I wrote a poem. I’ll just put this here for now.

What if all the rules we’ve written were wrong

Because they are

While not wholly inaccurate, every statement of how this all should work just isn’t quite right

The lines we draw are ephemeral, even when black and clear and sharp

She reached through and spoke to me

She is speaking to me now

As I lay in the bath scrolling her memory on my phone

The patter of the rain, increasing, and my literal mind wills her away

She killed herself? Or did she?

Is this why no one mentions cancer, or any other reason that her life may have ended by the drive of something else

She was a force of nature, and now, surely, she is nature, as the rain turns to thunder on December 26^th.

In the short times we’ve shared space, there was a knowing, which you could explain away by saying we loved the same man…at different times….but there is something else that I knew, that she knew, too.

The veil between this and that is more permeable than any of us on this side are willing to admit.

I don’t blame her.

I can see it.

Is it possible that she saw it, too?

And bravely crossed the line into space where we will out spread out eventually and make less sense and adhere to less meaning and unravel into many pieces, our elements dividing and colliding and melting into their source, did she choose to become….everything?

And is she now, from somewhere we will never understand from this spot, leaning into me, and helping me know?

Because I think I know.

I stop and listen for her pieces to tell me the invisible, elusive, ethereal truth.

And I stay here. Tethered to now. With this one and the other, attached to me, and I attached to them.

Life.

On this side.

Over a year ago, Tuesday nights in our studio were wild. Sure, there are times when the studio could get loud and exuberant, but Tuesday nights were unlike any other. There were 6 instructors crammed on the schedule, and they all embraced the vibe. Their clients embraced the energy. Everyone knew everyone. When someone was out, it was noticed. The Pilates workouts happened, but more memorable was the laughter and slightly risque humor.

Two of the instructors moved on prior to the pandemic. One of them didn’t return. Two of them no longer work on Tuesday night, and so now it’s me and another girl here, and she just left for the night.

Back then, I worried about that night. I worried about who might cross the line from risque to inappropriate. I worried that a new client might come in and be irate about the lack of concentration and control and wouldn’t want to be a part of their special party.

I was slightly the outsider to their fun. Sitting in my office and letting it veer perilously close to getting out of hand. Being the boss, I always have to be slightly on the outside, but I loved those nights. I loved those instructors.

Tuesday nights are quiet now.

And I’m turning out the lights at 5 sometimes.

I miss everything about those Tuesdays.

Over the years what I’ve learned to be true about myself is that I’m heavy.

I’m not talking about being fat. I can sometimes be called fat.

I’m talking energetically heavy.

This is a blessing and a curse. Until a couple of years ago, I almost always subconsciously felt it negatively. The turning point for me happened when a began a yoga instructor training at Tejas yoga in Chicago. I cannot speak highly enough about my experience at that studio and the many gifts that came into my life via Jim Bennett and James Tennant and my classmates in the program. (I’m aching to go back or at least take class with them virtually, but I’m either teaching or parenting at the class times currently available. Boo.) In the very beginning of the training program, we were given an Ayurvedic assessment by James. The results are derived from a health questionnaire, an in person consultation, and a pulse reading. What you receive is an explanation of your prakruti which is sanskrit for your “essential constitution.” You learn what qualities are present when you are in balance. You also learn how to systematically approach rebalancing these qualities through embracing opposites to decrease something and embracing similar qualities to increase something. It was a lens that I had never looked at myself through before, and what I learned was a detailed picture of my true self. My recipe is somewhat equal parts Vata and Kapha.

(Side note: I originally voice to texted this blog into my phone and it typed” half butter and half pasta” for “half Vata and half Kapha” …which post COvd-19 is also very accurate.)

There is an immense amount of self revelation I could unpack about my prakruti, but for the purpose of this blog, I’m going to focus on the aspects of Kapha and how that changed my perception of self. The qualities tied up with Kapha are many that I have spent time being ashamed of: heavy, dense, thick. However, when I view the personality traits associated with Kaphas: reliable, comfortable, trustworthy, grounded, stable; I begin to see the merit of being heavy. These are qualities that I have seen in myself and consider valuable, but I had never made the realization that these things were synonomous.

Overtime, I begin to embrace being heavy as I saw how much my friends valued my grounded authenticity.

Unfortunately, this groundedness is also the thing that slows me down. Translated into fitness, it can really feel like a heavy boulder. It feels murderous to start rolling it. I usually need a little help. Once it’s rolling, it takes less and less to keep up the momentum, but I can never completely stop without having to start all over again with the heavy push.

Lately, I have needed a lot of help. Coming back to work has taken away all of my workout time. Thanks to Covid-19, I no longer walk to the train. I drive. When I get home, I barely have the bandwidth for dinner, spending the quality time with my son, and getting him to bed. Couple that with the fact the the nutrition habits I had worked really hard to form went the way of the dodo when I had all the time in the world to bake and make homemade pasta. I became a busy, barely moving, glutton.

I was sinking into a heavy, moist, dense swamp of imbalanced Kapha.

A few weeks ago, I had a health scare. After my husband left for work, I had woken up with a challenging cramp that evolved into a debilitating pain. It inspired me to call him, have him come back, get our son take him to school and drop me at the ER. The pain was so bad they gave me morphine and Zofran and then sent me for a CT scan and an ultrasound. When the results came back, the doctor happily told me that everything looked really good. Nothing required emergency treatment. If I could digest food, I could go home so he gave me a pile of graham crackers. An hour later, I was heading back home. In my follow up visit with my primary care doctor, we went through things that he saw, and she told me that they were very minor and didn’t explain the pain. It felt humiliating. I had gone to the ER in the middle of a Covid surge with pain so bad they gave me Morphine and nothing was wrong with me? We were trying to come up with an explanation, but there really wasn’t a root cause that could be pinpointed. I was determined not to leave there with some sort of plan.

Sadly, it really wasn’t that hard to figure out what my plan needed to be , I needed to lose weight. I also needed her to look at my foot which I rolled and injured very badly in June and self treated it almost to recovery. It’s still swells a little from time to time. It’s been part of my excuse for exercising less. The conclusion that we both came to is that I’ve been lazy about exercising and rehabbing my foot. I was glad that she didn’t direct me towards some sort of medication or other medical and intervention. She validated what I’ve known all along. The stay at home order was very comfortable for me, and I sunk down deep in the muck and mire of my Kapha stillness. Luckily I am still healthy, save for the extra weight, but if I stay here, the needle on my health barometer is very likely to cross over into disease. I feel very fortunate to have caught this now.

Thankfully, I was able to be honest to myself, and I know what my constitution needs.

So here is how I found my own momentum.

1. I accepted the help offered to me. My boss and a colleague invited me to lift weights and box with them. I did a full body selectorized machine routine yesterday for the first time in probably 15 years and I feel like a million bucks. I’m also stronger than I thought.
2. I scheduled my workouts on my calendar like any other important meeting. I was skipping them more often than doing them because I kept saying that I would do them when I have time. You won’t have time until you make time, silly.
3. I started packing my lunch when I pack my son’s before I go to bed. I had been only packing his because the baby HAS to eat. I realized that I have to at least put my oxygen mask on at the same time.

Since the beginning of the week, these three simple shifts have resulted in more focus and productivity. I mean, look, you guys are getting more blogs. This means that I’m on top of my work day and can spend a little time writing each night instead of catching up on work after the kid goes to bed. Ironically, cutting into my workday has proven to be more fruitful. I’ve been thriving on the notion that I would get less done if I took time to work out. It’s a strange thing, productivity.

I know it’s hard. I just typed you several paragraphs telling you about how challenging it is for me. If you’re struggling to get started, you might be heavy like me. It’s okay. It’s actually a beautiful, noble thing to be. The good news is, once you get rolling, you will feel so much better. I promise.