Finding a way

I am still finding away with the idea of being pregnant and the effect on practice, life and how it comes together.

It’s odd people mostly unless I say still fail to notice I am pregnant. Although in the last few days I have been feeling increasingly beached on the sofa or in bed as I can’t seem to engage my transverse abdominal muscles any more, although sitting up from lying is ok, turning over is complex and essentially means I have to sit up first.

Practice has become slower and more limited, but strangely I am enjoying it and finding that the chance to go slower and focus on the breath still feels like work, which is a real change from how I would have felt before.

I have been going to a pregnancy yoga class too but still feel that it is really mysore that is my thing.

Oddly I have also noticed that evening yoga classes seem to give me cramp, which never happens in the morning, but used to happen all the time before and now happens again, I have been trying to figure out why and the only thing i can think of is that I am not drinking enough and it is the dehydration.

All Change

Lots of changes around here, since I last posted.

My wedding:

My little one:

I’ve just been getting back in to practice again with the little one on board. I seem to be carrying remarkably small at the moment, so although I am 24 weeks people don’t really seem to notice unless I tell them.

Wisdom of crowds and weird goings on

I decided to go late to the shala today to beat the crowd, well, I did get to start quickly but as soon as I arrived a queue was building up again. I don’t know quite what it is but it sure is busy right now, I am not sure if it is the light I reckon it is always busier in the spring at the shala but then who knows.

I am trying to hold breathing as my focus at the moment in practice, bhanda seems a bit too hard so, I practicing equal and long breath and noticing it all the way through my practice, then expanding in to the rib cage and not in to the abdomen and just keeping on with that. Today seemed calmer for it and it made the practice more mediative for me. I also noticed that I could get further in some poses with that approach, although it might just have been the ridiculous heat with all the crowds, but in the prasarita padtonatanasana’s my head briefly touched in A, C and D, which has not happened for ages, maybe not for about 4 years actually, odd how practice takes circles.

Now the weirdness, As I was going out of the shala I noticed man opposite in a check shirt taking a photo of either me or the building, didn’t think too much of it, walked half way to the tube and noticed I had forgotten my mac so headed back, then saw him taking more photos of people leaving, weird, went in got my mac came back out, he was still there fiddling with his camera, when I noticed that he was the person who had been practicing to my right (not any one i Know, who I had seem pull himself so hard in to half lotus I winced), very weird. – either that or H is now getting so famous the paps are after him, might explain the crowds

Headaches and great heat

First ladies’ then the most horrible headache kept me off the mat this week, I was so pleased to wake at 6 this morning with a clear head, after two mornings of waking at 4.30 with an aching head and needing to get pain killers and go back to bed, before dragging my sorry butt in to work late late

I think this headache is all about the job applications stuff that is going down at the moment. I need a new job as mine ends next year and I am stressing about it as they are becoming increasingly difficult to come by what with all of the cuts, it does not make me happy, I am applying for a job that I want but the world and his dog are also applying and this just makes me anxious and tense as hell. – que the headache and general tension!

This morning was hot and the shala was busy, there were 6 people ahead when I arrived at 7.10 and I didnt start until 7.30, but then almost straight in to the main room and just a fuss free practice. I am trying to remember equal length breath all the way through and to draw down my lats all the time when needed too, both are works in progress, shall we say where I mostly remember except when it gets hard.

Musings on a Sunday

I’ve been busy this weekend, ladies meant a few days off yoga and I’ve been making hay while doing this.

I seem to be in spring clean mode at present, I have been clearing stuff out for weeks and can’t seem to stop, on friday I had a very quiet day at work so spent it culling my personal inbox, from 1800 to 30ish emails I actually need to act on and feel so much better about this, I have noticed that I do get a bit more anxious about acting on things though as they are no longer hidden in the rubbish so I can forget about them.

I am still chucking out at home too, clothes and books galore are about to go to the charity shop, I feel the need to be unencumbered by them all.

On that note if anyone wants these yoga/meditation books that I’m giving away let me know.
Loving kindness (I have two copies, odd)
Anatomy Trains
The Endless Web

I’m not sure what it’s all about, maybe it’s getting married, which is happening at the end of August and all that that will bring, kind of preparing by spring cleaning.

Not quite sure. – On that note I’m really thinking of going back to the healer I went to about 18 months ago as I felt that she was very helpful in a very difficult time in my life and that I could do with another clearout of other’s energys. I do think that my job means that I tend to pick up bad energy a bit.

I also have a friendship not going so well bad energy going on which is a little frustrating, she is pushing me away, I thought she was a really old friend but really feel at the moment it is all her and that I am just kept as a side issue for convienence, so when she wants me she will call but the rest of the time I am left hanging… difficult, how much do you let these things flow over you and just think their loss and how much do you try to put things right, where there was not really anything obvious wrong..

I am quite excited about being back to yoga tomorrow though, which is a place I haven’t been in for a long time.

Where have I been

Where have I been, well the answer is really that I’m not really sure, for a year somehow I lost the impulsion to practice, I’m not sure if it was the new relationship, work (which certainly made it hard geographically to visit the shala) but really it seemed it was something more weird.

I’m not sure how to explain this but I got scared of it, yoga that is, and when I started back I was trembling on my way to the shala, and there still is an intense fear about it which I can’t explain and seems odd and weird. The fear is not there so much actually in practice, except in the upper back twists when I feel it (they have stiffened up a lot too), but on the way to the shala or in bed before getting up. It’s like normal resistance times ten at least.

I have this hunch (weird belief feeling) that it’s all as there is something stuck emotionally and I don’t want to unstick it, or am scared of un-sticking it, well that’s my theory anyway. Funnily I had a complete melt down about various other emotional things and since then, about the last three weeks suddenly I can practice again, and it seems easy for the moment. It was funny this melt down led to me thinking that somehow I had not released things, and I needed yoga to do this, and that I should just get over my fear and then spontaneously somehow it happened. I just got up one morning and went back to the shala. Wonder if I couldn’t bare the stripping bare of the practice?

Sadly after all that neglect and about a stone of extra weight I’ve lost some poses and flexibility, I’m back to a struggle with Mari C, but then the effect is good, joyful and feels in motion, I feel that I am gaining flexibility again, the Shala is a happy place for me again.

Baby steps

one thin and another has conspired against practice for some months to the extent I almost think that any credibility I had at calling myself a yoga student had left me.

Then in the last few weeks my mania for doing seems to have got out of hand and the anxiety has returned with avengence, and I have remembered that was why the yoga began the lack of sleep at night the waking each hour from 2.30am onwards.

So slowly I am trying to move back to a position of daily unquestioned practice that truely I can’t say i’ve been in for the last three years. Although given the events of my life over that time I can totally accept the reasons why.

This month I am trying to get a regular practice of both Ashtanga (minimum 5 A’s 3B’s and finishing, six days a week except moon and ladies) and a daily loving kindness practice of five minutes a day.

I am reading and re-reading Loving Kindness

I have this great sense of opportunity at the moment that I don’t know quite who I am but that my purpose is closer, I had this great discussion with my father about nodal points in life and how crisis in life can put you in them and suddenly things can look different and choices can be made. I feel at this point at the moment.

Funny how things are of import, I met a friend who meditates a lot a few weeks ago and realized that I had got so caught up in striving at work as I felt insecure that I was missing that path and I knew that I had to pass further along it. I bought a pendent from her an aum, and somehow it is my talisman of this at the moment.

I really feel that I need to escape the feelings of scarcity that I had been caught in as these are not helpful in the way of doing things and almost create the lack of abundance themselves, humm easier said than done i feel, but the commitment to the daily practices feels like a start.

Lotus

Funny those moments of realisation of progress, I’ve not practiced for about three weeks as first it was ladies, then I was ill then I was on an intense work course.

I’ve been back since Sunday, the usual sore hamstrings, even sore palms in fact, then today, I went in to half lotus and just had this thought maybe the other leg will go, and it did, not full yet but comfortably the whole foot over the knee!

One of the first yoga teachers I went to said it took her 7 years to do lotus, I can’t even remember her name but I remember that and funnily enough give or take a few months it’s 7 years since I went to my first yoga class, lots of water under the bridge since then… but 7 years somehow stuck and was right.

right now though even my ribs hurt, gah, I am regretting the three weeks off!

Puddle puddle

The weather today is something else, all winds and storms. I went for a walk this afternoon and was buffeted by the gales, which felt good and alive, with only a couple of drowned rat moments.

I had the viva yesterday which went fine and now have the Msc that has been haunting me for the last four years…. Which is quite something. Funny I started it before I had ever taken a Mysore class, which now seems so part of my life and back then I had never even done.

I’ve spent this afternoon since I got back pootling and starting to crochet some gloves for myself out of some wool I’ve had for ages which is a deep purple alpaca, they are fingerless, I am not that good.

I am now in a dilemma, I’m on call from work all weekend, so have to be available, but really want to go to the shala to practice tomorrow… I am actually rather unlikely to be called (haven’t been so far) So I am in a dilemma, is it totally obnoxious to take in a phone on silent? ….
sigh, I think that it probably is, so will have to practice at home for the second Sunday in a row.

Stress

I’m all stressed about the viva tomorrow, the final bit of the masters will be done, but all of the tension has moved to the middle of my back, all of a sudden Mari C has become stiff as anything again.

There is something that for me the stress and tension seems to sit in the thorasic spine somewhere I think between about T6 and T9 ish and just hovers there between the ribs there around the spine, perhaps erector spinae but I feel that it is more than that. I am sure that it is not without coincidence that that is also the area where my chakras feel blocked at times too. When I saw the healer all of the work was on the solar plexus chakra and the heart chakra, which seemed full of energy a lot of which was not mine. I do just feel to a certain extent that I still have stuff to clear there, I did know that at the time with the healer but was too scared to let it go in some way, I am hoping that the start of the shifting will enable me to go back with things in a different place so that I can let it go then. In fact I seem to have reasons every weekend until December that would prevent me seeing her so that time seems to be telling me that it is time to wait.

On a little of the same note, I have re-bought Creative visualisation (my father gave away the copy I lent him) as I feel that there is something in the idea of creating a vision of the life that you want and the idea that you create the abundance around you.

I will have complete relief tomorrow though after this viva and am going for cocktails with my friend in the evening to celebrate.