As I was contemplating my next post it occurred to me while I made my way to the floor of our living room to stretch out, that I should just write about being sore. I’m pretty sure most of you have experienced that feeling during class or practice where you are feeling great and think, “I can definitely do that again and do it better or with more control.” I had one of those practices tonight. I got out of work late because I had a last-minute phone call from a parent who needed reassuring. I stopped at my house to drop off my various work-related items, change, and headed to the studio for Mysore. Honestly I figured since I was running late already I would do a short practice. But something about the energy in the room made me keep going, I did my Sun Salutations, standing postures and moved onto the heart of Primary Series. Monday’s are typically my long practice days as I do all of Primary and up to where I am in Intermediate series. Tonight I did just that, after Primary I was dripping with sweat. After Setu Bandhasana, a pose I think is especially torturous and tricky I moved on to 2nd series. Here is a link to Kino MacGregor explaining Setu Bandhasana if you’re curious. In my 2nd series practice I go all the way up to Bakasana A & B & spent approximately 5 minutes working on jumping in to Bakasana, which I’ll need to learn to land before I can move on. After I finished attempting my jump to Bak I moved on to backbending.
Preparation for dropping back.
If you are unfamiliar with the Ashtanga series most of this won’t make sense and that’s ok, but if you ever as a child did wheel pose, possibly called bridge that’s what comes next, you do it 3 times and on the 3rd time you stand up and prepare for Dropbacks. At this point in my practice I do 3 wheels, 3 dropbacks, and then work on handstand dropovers to standing in addition to holding scorpion. Blah blah blah, right? For me, this part of my practice is especially tiring and challenging as backbending does not come easily for me and at this point I’ve been practicing for over an hour and a half. Tonight I even got to do my handstand dropovers twice! After closing I took rest and was feeling pretty good about my very intense practice and how I was able to stay focused on it for most of the 2 hours. However, once I got home I realized pretty quickly how hard I had worked and how sore I was feeling! But that’s part of the experience, the soreness, the feeling of being so tired and yet continuing on. The practice for me is about testing my limits and learning to let go as much as I can of the stress and the nerves and focus on my practice, my feet on the mat and my breath. I am also lucky to be part of such an amazing yoga family with two incredibly fantastic teachers!
