Estatic Practice

How do I start:

Thursday: Did not do any yoga. Body felt lethargic, I was down with the flu and cough, and just needed a rest.

Friday: Felt reallly sluggish, but dragged myself to Intro class. I think I took it easy that class, did not really push myself in all the poses. I did practice though on the new jump back style the teacher taught us, some sort of hooking one leg on your upper arm and swivel your legs back thing. It feels easier than the traditional jump back though. I'm really excited about

backbends. The teacher focused mostly on backbends especially the variation where you sort of slide your body back into a bend against a wall. I'm slowly working on that so I could feel an improvement, even in milicm. I could do my UrdvhaDhanurasana longer - 5 breaths 3 times even though it's painfully long but I managed to hold. So I could see an improvement in my backbend.

The best part came in my second class - some sort of an advanced class with arms balancing and inversions. That class is crazy! We were required to do double and triple chaturanggas for each sun salutations. And each sun salutations have their own variations - we did Camatkarasana (Wild Thing) which is one f my favorites, probably because I came across a translation to its name: "the ecstatic unfolding of the enraptured heart." Isn't that wonderful? I fell in love with the pose immediately, nevermind if I knew how to do that. But I was adamant to nail it, or at least half of it. And I did. Didn't manage to drop to a Wheel, but needless to say I fully embraced the meaning of the pose: I was estatic! Oher cool poses: Birds of Paradise, and Reverse Birds of Paradise. They were cool. Challenging, but great nevertheless.

One thing that I learned on that day other than that advanced class wasn't to 'intimidating' was the alignment - or misalignment - of my palms on the mat. No wonder my palms were not flat... my index finger sometimes isn't pointintg straight forward, in fact I realized that due to my spreading my palms out wide the index fingers sort of point towards each other insteadof straight forward. I spent most of the class staring down to my mat in amazement.

Saturday: Refresher yoga with our favorite yoga teacher. We did Side Plank which I nailed and also some sort of a hip opener, which I failed. I'm going to work on these poses to open more of my hip and adductor.