See, I’m being nice and polite and not writing about it constantly, but I’m 21 days into the yoga now and it’s interesting. Others in better shape would be soaring along but I’ve got years of bad desk habits that the yoga is first dealing with.
At this point, Marty says I look secure, like I’m doing yoga instead of (as he puts it) attempting to do yoga, that I appear sure and steady, but I know that however I look on the outside to him, in all my postures I’m still a baby and learning about them and just a micrometer of a step away from where I was three weeks ago. I know that my postures too probably leave much to be desired.
It’s interesting because I’m experiencing shifts in alignment and balance with it, my entire body undergoing a process of rearrangement which carries into every day life with all that I do. As I move around doing the most basic things I feel my body and mind engaging, thinking about how I’m using my body. It is as if right now I always have two choices, to either enter or come out of a move in the old way or use what I’ve learned in yoga. The old way isn’t working for me any longer. The balance has shifted over to the new but I’m still in transition, the muscles causing the shift into the new alignments but also needing to catch up with the new alignments.
All my motions seem now to have three stages. I will think about how to go into a move, then in it I am mindful of what I’m doing and exactly where I should be, and then I have to make choices in alignment for coming out of the move. Which is a little strange and unsettling, that for the time being, with those muscles rearranging, I find myself having to think about virtually all of the smallest most ordinary moves, and I end up making the choice for the way I might move while doing my yoga less out out of mental selection than my body seeking that new engagement yet still transitioning. This has become fairly accentuated in the past couple of days and I expect it to continue for a while. Instead of rising up from a squat any old way, I have to think about what I’m doing…think about my feet, my ankles, my shins, my knees and thighs, my pelvis and spine and shoulders and head.
Yes, even my pelvis. I am constantly aware now of where my pelvis is as I move. These little shifts in alignment with the groin and pelvis that are made during the sessions, I was wondering what their importance was as I did them, but now I find myself adopting those shifts in my every day motions and thinking about where my tail bone is going.
My feet are gripping the floor differently.
I pulled a muscle in my upper back a while ago–nothing to do with yoga, this happened before I started it. The muscle will stop hurting for a couple of weeks and then I’ll tweek it and it’ll start hurting again, a cycle which has gone on for a while. However when I’m doing the yoga I never even feel it. I knew that my desk posture was possibly a real point of aggravation. Today it was hurting again and my body as if mindfully began assuming postures more suited with what I’m doing in the yoga, using those muscles and ways of handling and holding myself, the stress in that area alleviating greatly, the result being that I hold my upper back and shoulders differently. It is a push-pull. As if being pushed out of one way of holding myself, being pulled into a new way.
As I said, this is all a little unsettling right now because of the stage of transition I’m in. And I wonder how all this will play out, how I will be moving two, four, six months from now. It took me three weeks of yoga at an hour and a half a day to reach this point…y’know, a full grown toddler.
I know I don’t believe this would be happening if I had simply been doing postures and not really working on muscles and alignment in those postures. Instead I think I would have been carrying the old way of moving into those postures and this pull into using new alignments in every day life would likely not be occurring.
This feels to be an important point of transition and I’m hoping that the next couple of weeks of road trip doesn’t throw it off. I’m bringing along my mat and a number of yoga podcasts. If I find myself unable to do a full hour and a half in one session (which I like best) I have also a few 20 to 40 minute podcasts and I can split my practice up into morning and evening.
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