Monday, January 28, 2008

Sunday Jan 27, Home Practice 5:30 P.M.

After a day of sitting at the computer I needed to move. This may seem sacreligious, but I put on The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill to energize me. Music has the nice effect of helping me stop thinking so much.

When I start a home practice session (I’m not saying how rare these sessions actually are), I start out trying to plan a nice sequence of poses that resembles something like what a studio class would be like. Something active, full of fast vinyasas, preferably even sweat.

What I actually end up doing however, is finding all these nooks and crannies during the warm-up and spending the whole time softly stretching those out in yin-like postures.

So what I did tonight (approximately) was:

Cat-cow
Balasana (Child’s)
Dog
1-legged dog on both sides
chatturanga dandasana
sphinx with neck stretches
locust
“rocket cat” (a kira invention)
Dog rolling to cobra
Windshield wiper
More cat-cow! (this pose seems to always lead to something unexpected)
Looong pigeon on my easy side. I stretched my torso out on the floor away from the front knee. Not sure if that’s still ‘yoga’ but it really dug into this perpetual tight spot in my outer thigh and stretched my side waist nicely. Mmm.
cow-face on the same side.
Badakanasana (butterfly)
Upavistha konasana (wide-angle forward bend on the floor)
Vinyasa
Medium-long pigeon on my tighter side with some of the same stretching away from the knee. At this point, lauryn hill was singing “When it hurts so bad, why does it feel so good??”
Cow-face on the same side (this time I straightened and shook the leg out first to break up the folded up position)
Full saddle pose
Child’s, but this wasn’t enough relief for the low back so
Malasana (squat) followed by
Paschimotanasana (forward fold)
Supine twist on both sides with Happy Baby in between
Savasana!

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