Renegade Yogi

Second Day of Yoga Retreat

I got to a late start today. I didn’t get to my yoga until after 3pm.

But that’s ok. It’s not about the time.

I wasn’t very congested so Jala Neti was simple and fast.

I did the same pranayama as yesterday. I felt nice and spacey afterwards.

Thirty minutes of meditation. My goodness do I feel like I’m going backwards. I don’t remember ever feeling this way about meditation. I’ve felt like it was hard before, but not like I’m getting worse. But, I’m going to stick to it. I know that it’s part of the process. On the bright side, I can feel a little bit of clarity returning off the cushion.

All of that took about one hour. I decided to keep the total time to two hours. Yesterday I went over, so I set a timer to make sure I wouldn’t. That left me one hour to do asanas.

That meant I had to cut out some postures. If I did everything at my normal pace, I think I would take over an hour and a half. So I only did three sun salutes of each type instead of the usual five. Not a big deal since they’re just for warmup. And when I got to the seated postures, I jumped through every other time. Still, at the end I had to stop short and begin the closing. It’s unfortunate because if I did that every day, I’d never practice any new stuff. So tomorrow I’m going to skip more at the beginning.

I felt good in the poses. I had a good lunch so I did not feel tired. I hadn’t noticed any soreness when I woke up, but once I started, my muscles felt sore at the extreme positions of stretches. I’ll take that as a good sign.

I surprise myself with my jumpbacks every time. Bhanda strength. That’s the secret. Jumpthroughs are still a little shaky. They’ll get there, though.

Ok, till tomorrow. Keep practicing.