1/08

108 Sun Salutations Completed!



We did several variations of Sun Salutations to keep us engaged the entire time. I mostly flowed through them doing what my body was feeling at the time. Sometimes adding an extra pose, sometimes skipping a pose. Here are my stats for yesterday's session:



216 Tadasana (Mountain)
216 Uttanasana (Forward Fold)
108 Planks and lunges moving from uttanasana to chaturanga or down dog



~150 Adho Mukha Svanasana (Down Dogs)
~80 Chaturanga Dandasana (4-limbed staff)
~90 Urdhva Mukha Svanasana (Up Dogs)
10 Virabhadrasana 1 (Warrior 1)
8 Virabhadrasana 2 (Warrior 2)



4 Virabhadrasana 3 (Warrior 3)
4 Utthita Trikonasana (Triangle)
2 Parvritta Trikonasana (Revolved Triangle)
6 Parsvottanasana (Intense Side Stretch)
8 Eka Pada Rajakapotasana (One legged King Pigeon Variations)



I set up my camera for interval shooting to capture us in different positions. The camera caught us from two different angles (I should have done more!) and was set to take 24 pictures at 10 second intervals. You have been viewing some of my favorites.



We are a perfect cross section of my current life. From left to right (and front to back) we are Gina (from my Advanced Studies Program), Tosca (a teacher at my school who I share the kids yoga class with), Robin (the birthday girl), and Inge (a dear friend from my church community).



As you might guess, I'm pretty sore today. But I'm still full of the excitement and thrill and joy of completing such a wonderful tradition. We stopped every twelve salutations to share visions of how we wanted our 2008 to be. It was a truly meaningful experience to share with three beautiful women. Thank you!

PS A special thank you to our excellent neighbors who graciously allowed us to take over their apartment for a few hours to do this.

On Vacation

Sorry for the lack of posts around here. We have been very lucky to have Grant's parents visiting us from Michigan for the holidays. We spent the last couple days in beautiful and wintry Yosemite National Park -- pictures to come soon. Today was spent so far enjoying a Kwanzaa worship service this morning and cleaning the apartment for my birthday party. Soon we'll be heading out to a play, dinner, and stopping by my church for Singing for Your Life - an amazing 12 hours continuous circle singing event.

For New Years and for my birthday, which is on Tuesday, I'm having a party and I am challenging myself and others to complete an old tradition of 108 Sun Salutations to welcome in the new year. For my distant friends who can not join me in person, you can still join in for the sun salutations. Do as many as you can or desire. Give up some thank-yous for another year ending and a new one beginning. Do it as a meditation and prayer, reflecting on who you were in 2007 and discovering the path you want to take into the new year. Do it as a celebration of your beautiful God-given body.

I'll be turning 27 on Tuesday, January 1, 2008. 27 is the natural number following 26 and preceding 28. Twenty-seven is the smallest positive number that requires four syllables to say in English though it can be defined in just two: "three cubed." (3x3x3) It is odd and has many odd friends like 1, 3, and 9. It is a perfect cube. It is the number of books in the New Testament. It is the 28th (and 29th) digit of pi. It is the number of moons of Uranus. 27x4=108, a significant number in many traditions, and therefore the number of salutations I will try to complete.

Believe it or not, there are actually several people who want to do this with me!

And then there are the others who will be just coming for dinner after... yummy fondue!!

Why Yoga?

One of my favorite regular readers recently asked a great question... why yoga? Of all activities that I've participated in, why would I choose this one to focus so much of my attention on?

This question will take a long time to answer so it will be something that I will have to come back to in future posts. Let's start with how I discovered it.

In Alma (winter 2002), I had this boyfriend who's dorm room with just across the way from mine and I would watch for his light to come on... he was home... and I would visit him and he had this wonderful book, Yoga: The Spirit and Practice of Moving Into Silence that he would read and then move his body. Sometimes he would let me join him.

In Berkeley (spring-fall 2004), walking down Shattuck Ave or Telegraph Ave, we would walk by several yoga studios/schools. They would have flyers outside their doors and occasionally I would pick one up and ponder attending a class. I never did.

In Berkeley (spring-summer 2005), we lived about 5 blocks away from an Elephant Pharmacy which had a video rental section. $1 DVD rentals for 1 night. Every time we went there I would notice the shelf with all of the workout videos. Pilates, Yoga, Kick Boxing, Step. I was already interested because the store had this huge display right by the entrance of all of their fancy workout equipment: mats, straps, blocks, balls, books, and dvds. Not wanting to buy anything without trying it out first, I opted for renting a couple dvds. I would watch them over and over... and eventually I would do the sequences without the dvds... and the cheesy background music.

In Oakland (may 2006), I asked around to a few friends for yoga studio recommendations. One friend talked about her Bikram experiences. But she said that a beginner shouldn't really attend. Another friend recommended Piedmont Yoga Studio to me and then took me to a couple classes with her favorite teacher. He quickly became my favorite teacher too and I have attended classes with him ever since. I even purchased my own yoga mat at a Long's Drug Store.

In Oakland (summer 2006 and after), I started to read yoga journal's website and started to practice on my own at home following sequences that I found in articles or some that I made up on my own. Eventually, I got my own subscription to yoga journal magazine. I made a commitment to myself to take one class a week (I allowed myself to spend money on myself... that's certainly a topic for another post) and I started purchasing a class "package" or "series" every two months.

In Oakland, (spring 2007) I applied for the program and we all know the story from here.

So, next before I write about why I chose yoga, I will start with why not other things.

Giving your 100%

At my PYS Advanced Studies Program this week, our instructor, Tony, asked us, "How many of you are giving 100% to your yoga practice?" and no one raised their hand.

Ya'll thought I was just kidding with that Yoga Mat Sectrez on Monday, but it is sort of true.

This question came after Tony spent 10 minutes lecturing us about our behavior so far in the program. Regular people may come to public yoga classes late or leave early, but you're "advanced studies people" you should be more serious than the public... come on time! pay attention! don't leave early! do your home practice!!

So last night, home alone, as my husband was on call at the hospital, I returned to "the bible of modern yoga," to help give me some comfort and encouragement.

It worked. This morning I read through the appendix of the book (thank God my Sanskrit has improved and I actually know the name of the poses!) where Iyengar gives you a work out schedule for the next 180 weeks. Using this as a rough draft, I am going to create a practice schedule for myself. I've picked some key poses that I want to work on and then I'll build in some creative time to do poses that I feel like doing but aren't on the list.

Ok! Here we go... ready... set... YOGA!

Yoga Mat Secretz

In the spirit of lolsecretz and postsecret, I bring you Yoga Mat Secretz, the next thing in community blogging. Here is your first secret from the life of a yoga mat...
Please send me pictures of what your yoga mat is saying and I will post them here for the world to see.

The Yoga Journey Continues

Saturday was our fourth 6-hour Saturday class for the advanced studies program at PYS. We were sooooo lucky to have an amazing teacher for the whole day. Someone who has had an amazing journey with yoga and meditation. You can see more about Mary here.

The first three hours were spent on meditation and asana. We started with a 15 minute guided seated meditation followed by a long supported supta baddha konasana. Then Mary had us stand in Tadasana while we continued to focus on our breath. We did a very slow sun salutation, mostly with our eyes closed. We were the most careful to watch our breath during the transitions from one pose to another. There were times when I felt disoriented with my eyes closed, especially when I transitioned from uttanasana to a lunge. Like always, I doubted myself in my movements. So there were times that I cheated and opened my eyes to check on my foot and hand placement. Then, we had lots of fun trying to find our lower abdominal muscles. I thought this exploration was wonderful and enjoyed every moment. There were many other poses that we explored, then we ended with another seated meditation.

After our dinner break, we came back to class and talked about Mary's favorite topic: joints, especially the hip joint and its happiness in our body while practicing poses such as trikonasana. She gave us permission to explore how we placed our feet and hips in our practice. She told us to break the rules... a refreshing instruction from a yoga teacher.

At the very end of the class, we talked about teaching and did a 5 minute practice with a partner where we talked someone through a pose. This wasn't so bad for me since I teach every Thursday. The pressure is different since the person I was talking to was an experienced practitioner and I wasn't sure what to say to help her in a pose that she had already worked hundreds of times. So this prompted me to ask Mary about her inspiration for teaching. I asked her, "When you teach your classes, do you focus more on what your students need or are your instructions coming from what you are learning in your practice?"

At first she told me that this was an excellent question and that I should ask every teacher the same question. Then she went further in her explanation saying that we teach for ourselves and we practice for our students. But she also went deeper to say, we teach for ourselves and we practice for the universe. If we bring our sincere intentions to our practice, then the fruits of our practice will transpire in our teaching and our students will feel the benefits. This explains how sometimes it feels like all of the yoga teachers I study from seem to have weekly meetings to game plan their teaching for the week. But it's really something greater than them... our connection to each other... is this purusa? I will have to think more on this, a great topic for another post.

More inspiration to get that consistent home practice going!

On a very positive note, I completed my first pranayama exercise this morning and wrote a journal entry, just as the pranayama book instructed. Yeah!