Sunday, October 24, 2010

Yo yo yo Yoga Training Weekend

It's a yoga training weekend this weekend! We're doing some forward bending, and it's pretty great. It's supposed to be great on ye olde organs and digestion etc, and I have to say I enjoyed some profound digestive functioning after three hours of all that organ massaging. Good stuff. I also had a vegan burrito (not in the "hey dude I had this rad vegan burrito" kind of way) that was pretty fibrous but whatever.

The magic in yoga for me is in things like that, like the digestion assistance of a pose - I love yoga for the exercise, but I'm frequently impressed by how emotional and cellular certain positions are. And of course the more consistently I do it the more tuned in I am to the feelings that come up (pardon my corniness). Like yesterday we rested on bolsters in child's pose and I just felt so cozy and happy in a way that the usual positions of daily life (chair, bed, car, table, couch, etc) don't prompt us to feel. It's magical.

Anyway I have been doing lots of yoga and meditating but I haven't really been hitting the books too hard, so that's on the horizon. I get to blame it a little bit on my transience lately. Haven't really had a settled home base in which to nestle myself with my trappings of comfort and focus. But come on, I can read a book anywhere.

But the studying part definitely isn't the hard part here, I am reminded again as another training weekend comes around. It's the talking! Talking people into poses is super hard! And I love to talk, talk talk talk that's my whole thing. Talkity talkity, on and on, about whatever. So I thought I would just flow right into it, especially since I've been hearing yoga classes for so long, but it's really difficult. The teacher said it's just a new language, which to me means it's learnable, but it seems so natural when teachers are really good, I'm afraid I'll never really be great at it. Anyway I've been trying to subject friends to my practice teaching and it hasn't really picked up yet. This will also get better once I'm better settled.

Anyway. I'm still hell of digging yoga's approach to life. What little I've read in the books has been mostly about yoga philosophy so far, and I love it. It makes even more sense than Buddhism. There's the eight limbs of yoga, describing the aspects of life that you need to get a grip on in order to merge with the Universal Consciousness, which are pretty cool, and then there are five bodies to a person, from outside to inside, from physical to spiritual, each layer of which needs to be integrated for us to reach the yoga state of being or something. As someone who really enjoys the physical world and experiencing athleticism I love that yoga asks your physical self to be an integral part of your spiritual self.

Well that short version of yoga philosophy is straight out of my subscription to Half-Assed Yoga Student Weekly. I'll get smarter about it eventually and then sound super boring all the time! Hooray!

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