Yesterday I wanted silence. My first yoga session had no aural distractions. Today I yearned for some lovely music to collaborate with my movement. Nawang Khechog’s album “Music As Medicine” crooned from my iPod as I warmed up with three sun salutations and then did seventeen of the twenty-four poses in Sparrowe/Walden’s “Woman’s Energizing Sequence”. The whole practice took about an hour, during the course of which I noticed the following:
1) I am lopsided. My left shoulder is far more tense than my right while my right leg is far more tense than my left. Strangely, the tense right leg is also much stronger than my chill left leg.
2) My hips are tense like WOAH. They also seem to be holding some rage-filled emotional baggage. As a result, Child’s Pose was rather transformative. I remained folded over for longer than I typically would; my hips seemed to be letting go of something.
3) Plough Pose: Back of head on the mat, chest comes up to meet chin, buttocks reach toward the ceiling as straight legs fall toward the floor, forming an awkward-looking triangle. Once I finally got my body to get into this pose, I was struck by how intensely Plough Pose caused me to acknowledge my femininity. My nose next to my upside-down breasts and my eyes staring at my uterus and crotch, it was impossible not to feel confronted with my sex. Though I consider myself at peace with and proud of being female, I was forced to admit that intimacy with my womanhood at that level made me a bit uncomfortable. I plan to examine this further during my 100-day yoga immersion. Clearly there is something I need to face.
I left practice today with both increased calm and a sense of something being not quite right. Surely uncovering buried tensions in body and mind is the reason yoga has such a tremendous spiritual power – so I am excited to be experiencing these mixed emotions so early in my practice.
Namaste! More to come.
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