it’s 9:00 pm. the house is dark and quiet. i have turned off the lights and shut my door. the girls are in bed. if i strain i can hear Jim Dale’s voice coming from their room reading them another in the series of Harry Potter on CD.
it’s spring (it feels like summer) but it’s spring and i’m ready to get moving again. the girls and i walked a mile tonight after dinner just before dusk, but it left me wanting a little more.
so i closed the door, put my Peter Davidson channel on Pandora and stuck my legs up the wall. i never know where my yoga practice is going to go in the evenings. i know there are certain series of poses i can do. i used to wake up everyday and do sun salutations and close the evening with a relaxation series. for awhile i followed this weekly schedule diligently. now, i find though i just want to listen to my body and this is the way i start. maybe it’s because my first yoga teacher always started us off with legs on the wall. after a long day of work, rushing to feed the kids and jumping in the car to class, this was the perfect way to start, and so i still do.
and then i just let my body tell me what it wants and i just enjoy the quiet time listening and moving. i’ve enjoyed good bouts of cardio many, many times. it helped me lose 25 pounds last year, but my favorite thing in the world is the slow movements of a good yoga practice that put you in tune with feeling the muscles of your body working.
right now i’m putting special focus on my shoulders. i had my first massage two weeks ago and the therapist was appalled at my upper back and shoulders. apparently i haven’t just been carrying my tension there, it’s moved in and tried to make a permanent home. in all the chaos that is my life, i was prepared to beg her to just let me take a nap on the warm table with the dim lights and the twinkly music, but alas, she knew there was work to be done.
now this past week i’ve been watching my shoulders like a hawk and i’ve found at ALL points through the day they rest somewhere right beside my ears. so i’ve been doing this little twitchy movement each day, all day, as i recognize my creeping shoulders and force shrug them back down.
so they’re getting a little special attention right now.
the last part of my practice is always the same too, savasana, oh sweet savasana. looks so easy. so not. but so worth it. in class we started by tightening every bit of our body and slowly letting it go. have you ever tried to relax your cheeks? let your eyes sink into the back of your head? but it works and anyone who is doing yoga practice, please enlighten me as to how many times you’ve actually fallen asleep in this pose. maybe it’s the fact i do it at night in the dark and i’m always tired, but it’s a common occurrence.
i wrote this whole post in my head as i worked tonight, but somehow sitting here now on the floor with the screen in front of me the beauty of the words i had then have left me. i’ve resolved to post the thoughts that are in my mind most evenings. some nights as with this night, perhaps it will just be a diatribe about yoga. oh well, some of you will get it.
it was a long winter this year. in a way i fell off my path during those long months.
but i feel it coming back and each time i wonder, why has it fallen away. this is such a wonderful part of my life.
i love my practice, but i’m missing yoga classes. there’s so much more i want to learn. no time to fit it into my schedule right now. so it sits with the tai chi classes and the mountain climbing classes that line up behind it on the wish list. let’s not talk either about the whole catalog of knowledge that could come from the kripalu or omega catalogs that have made their way to the mailbox the last couple weeks.
in the meantime i’ll just keep moving.