Bring the FIRE! Reflections from Yoga Classes This Week: Oct.29

Classes this week were all about FIRE! We expanded upon our shoulder opening and heat building poses from last week to take us to our peak pose, handstand prep. 

Our focus for class centered on yoga as practice. Whether it be an inversion, an arm balance pose or just simply being seated on your mat, yoga is not about achieving something. It’s about being. Poses will come into your practice with time, dedication and most importantly, compassion for yourself. Nothing good can come from our practice if we constantly beat ourselves up or set expectations on what we should or should not do.

This is just like training for a marathon. It takes months, hundreds and hundreds of miles of training and love for yourself to even get to the starting line of the race. Once the race begins, you need to constantly check-in with yourself—what muscles are tight, how much water you should drink, what/when you should eat, etc.—to ensure you can get to that  finish line. Once you cross it, it is an amazing feeling. However, you quickly realize that the journey that took you to the starting line was the most important. It’s not about the achievement, it’s all about the journey.

I thought this passage from the book, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami, fit into this theme nicely.

“The most important task here as to let my body know in no uncertain terms that running this hard is just par for the course. When I say letting it know in no uncertain terms I’m speaking figuratively, of course. No matter how much you might command your body to perform, don’t count on it to immediately obey. The body is an extremely practical system. You have to let it experience over time, and then the body will get the point. As a result, it will willingly accept the increased amount of exercise it’s made to do. After this, you very gradually increase the upper limit of the amount of exercise you do. Doing it gradually is important so you don’t burn out.”

Click here to view the songs played in my classes this week.