Every Journey Begins with a Single Step, or Yoga Pose

So each week for this yoga and philosophy class we are supposed to reflect in different blog posts about different things from class and the reading for the week. Since I always like to be productive with my time and what I do, I’m going to add all them together into one massive entry once a week. Sorry for all yall who were hoping for daily insights into my life.

            Like every class we have assigned readings. Most of the readings have been from the book How Yoga Works which I still cant tell if its fiction or not, but so far the story has kept my interest more than I thought a book about yoga could.  The protagonist is a young girl traveling from her home in Tibet to study under a new yoga teacher in India and because of the quasi-corrupt nature of their police force is arrested and has spent the past months teaching the local captain yoga in hopes of it allowing her to go free.  The interactions between the girl and the captain are the most interesting because that is where the book is teaching the reader what yoga is through their relationship. The rest of the story I have not paid too much attention too so far because it is not as interesting to me as the yoga part. Ya her little dog is cool and the sergeant is a drunken perv, but that part of the story didn’t really get developed until the reading we had for today.  Even with that new development I still am more interested in the yoga philosophy because I would like to see how it affects me with the yoga we do in class and my feeble attempts to do yoga on my own. However, I have really enjoyed it because while I have done some yoga in the past when I am home with my mom, I never got too into the philosophy and history of it.  This makes me appreciate some things more, and embrace the suck of some of the poses because I am about as flexible as a concrete pillar.

             Speaking of my lack of flexibility, the class asana is a lot of fun.  Not as hard as I was expecting due to what I have done in the past, but still really helpful and it is awesome to have time in the day that I don’t have to worry about setting aside to calm down and relax and focus.  Some of the moves, like downward dog, I have done because I mean, who hasn’t done downward dog in yoga.  I have even had the pleasure, if you call it that, of knowing the warrior pose we did from “power yoga” this old Russian lady who grew up in the USSR learning how to be an Olympic gymnast would force my club swim team to do. Most of the other poses I have never done so its cool to learn other ones from what I have already experienced.  Most of the poses are also pretty easy, compared to what I had to do in my mom’s class I attended. Which makes sense because most of us in the class have little to no experience so we need to create a foundation and my mom has been doing yoga for around a year now so she can do more advanced things.  Some of my favorite, and least favorite, things we have done in class is down dog and walking the dog, along with some of the other leg poses because I have always had a problem with my hamstrings being really tight. So while I am trying to suffer my agony in silence during class, I can see and feel them slowly loosening up which is awesome and something I hope to continue all semester with.

            This slow work on my hamstrings, along with the chest and shoulder opening poses we did the first day are hard for me to do on my own so I have been a little slow in getting a set routine established outside of class. Mostly I use poses we have done in class to target different areas for a better stretch and to loosen up after PT or working out. Which while it isn’t a good practice or anything, it does feel awesome and a good start for me to slowly get into a more steady time of going through more poses and things.