Day Seven

I had a terrible case of Monday-yoga-itis this morning. Every muscle in my body felt sore and weak and I felt like I had been run over by the Bikram Yoga Bus. I had that R E M song in my head "EveryBODY hurts, sometimes". When I was telling someone about it this morning in the studio I almost burst into tears. I had to bend down and stretch so they wouldn't notice and I just knew I was feeling resistant, as well as being hard on myself. Andy said that the yoga brings stuff up for all of us, especially when you're practicing more often or doing a challenge, and that's part of the reason our studio doesn't do too many of the 30 day challenges, because people sometimes start to hate it and then drop out altogether. I did start to hate it this morning before class. I was definitely in a hating out on yoga place, which really means I was hating out on myself when I think about it.

Anyway, the room continued to fill up with people and Dave was teaching but Andy was practicing so she was in the room getting people to move around to fit others in and asked me to shuffle along so that she could place a pregnant woman next to me by the door to reception in case they needed to cool her off. (This actually worked out great for me because I was beside her, Dave pulled the door jam thing out from under the door in the floor series, and I managed to get a bit of that cool air - sweet). The place I got shuffled to was under one of the inlet vents (this is usually one of the warmest spots in the room) and it also meant that my gaze was directly into the join of the mirrors, which would have annoyed the hell out of me a year ago but this time I actually took it in my stride. I surprised myself how calm I was at the beginning of the class and I put it down to the fact that I was going to just take it easy in there and breathe and do my best to remain calm through the whole class, without too much additional exertion in terms of pushing my edge or getting an extra inch out of anything, which is what I would normally try and do. I decided I wasn't aiming for perfection, just a nice calm practice if I could do it.

And you wouldn't guess what happened? The class fell completely into place for me. There was a lovely quiet moment of stillness in Eagle where the whole class seemed to be like statues. It was amazing to have a good full room of people in stillness like that. Then the standing series wasn't too bad at all. I didn't kick out in standing head to knee until second set but my first set I had my knee locked for the whole time on both legs, which is something. I had some pretty good bows, one side one set I stayed in for the whole time. Bonus. This is pretty rare for me. In separate leg stretching I usually go too wide straight away and always get my head to the floor, this time I brought my feet in closer and just went for a really good stretch in my back without bothering whether or not I could get my head to the floor. (I almost did it second set but I still didn't care). The floor series continued well and I actually felt good for the whole class. Breathing settled, heartbeat got back to normal very quickly after postures, and I actually came out of class feeling relaxed and energised, and all that resistance and hating just floated off back to the nowhere place it came from. I was really hungry when I got back so I made myself some toasted ciabatta with avocado and smoked salmon, lots of pepper and some Himilayan natural salt cracked over the top. So good! Namaste, everyone.