WEEK 12 - Ariana

I feel ready to resume. I have never had a physical shut down like that before. It was hard to listen to my body and take a real break, but I am glad I did.

I woke up this morning at 6AM and actually felt like practicing. This was shocking because I usually have to drag myself out of bed to get a cup of coffee. I guess I was looking forward to getting back to my LOY home practice. I missed it. I have come to love my personal practice. It feels very centering and grounding, like coming home. I still like to go to other classes, in fact the majority of my practice is with other teachers. But I do need to balance it with my personal practice with my own inner voice and guidance rather than relying on someone else to tell me what to do. This LOY experiment is helping me commit to that personal practice.

So I was happy to come back to it today. I thought I was clever. Being up so early, I thought I had plenty of time. My daughter woke up at 6:45 AM. Pleasure. As soon as she saw me she said, "woh." I think she was stunned that I was already awake and doing something other than drinking coffee. I was mid Parsvottanasana (Intense Side Stretch) on the right side. She wanted to practice with me, but I didn't want to today. My husband helped me relocate everything to another room where I could close the door. So I continued with Parsvottanasana on the left side.

A few minutes into it and the dog burst open the door with his nose. Got to get that fixed. He then sat on my mat. Don't know why he likes the mat. I leaned back on him for Navasana and he got the message. Then I heard my daughter crying that she wanted to watch me do yoga. Breakfast preoccupied her for a little while. The dog tired of me quickly and started scratching the door and whining to get out. He can only open the door from one side. So I let him out. What felt like 10 minutes later he pushed the door open again. Then my daughter came to the door and started crying again that she wanted to watch me. Luckily I was a few minutes into Savasana Pranayama at that point. Surprisingly none of this bothered me. Usually I would be annoyed by these interruptions and would see them as obstacles to my practice. Today I just went with it. Calm abiding I guess.

I feel replenished. But I am still having some chronic tightness in my left hamstring and arch of my left foot. I am trying to figure out how to undo that. I felt it intensely in Parsvottanasana. I touched the hamstring and it felt so taught and almost like it had little knots in it. So I massaged it a little while in the pose which seemed to release it a little.

Some of the poses felt stuck for me again (especially the revolved poses) either because it was the morning or because I had not done many of the poses in a while. Now I have to go be with my daughter.