Astanga

When I woke this morning, I knew my Lady’s Holiday was imminent (and I was right) so I hit the mat with a special gusto. In the spirit of my WoYoPracMo goal, I do plan to keep practising the full Primary Series over the next few days - sans inversions, of course. But I’ll be taking it easy.

Today’s practice was really fantastic and I can only blame the blocks. I’ve been SO lazy about my transitions between poses in Primary, particularly the seated vinyasas. Now that I’ve regained some of my strength, I realised that it’s time to 'raise the bar' a bit. There’s no way I’m going to be jumping back/jumping through right away, but I can give it my best effort and my best effort requires blocks.

I use them to get enough height to do the ’take it up’ portion of the vinyasa properly. This is a valuable strength-builder. For now, that’s all I’m adding. I’m continuing to do my sloppy, lazy, close-but-no-cigar jump-through for the time being. If I can master the jump-back, then I’ll shift my focus.

As it was, that extra notch of effort heated me right up! I was sweating buckets in the seated poses and it felt great. As soon as I came into Bhujapindasana, I knew I would be binding in Supta K. Marichyasana C is binding more comfortably these days too!

My only half-hearted pose was Savasana. The dog wandered over and asked for attention in the middle of my ’take rest’ and I couldn’t resist - we went for a long walk.

I had nothing on my agenda for the afternoon and felt like resting, so I settled into my window seat to work on a small project: to teach myself Audacity (an audio editing programme) and use it to edit some of my yoga audio files.

Currently I practice the Primary Series with either the audio of Beryl Bender Birch’s ‘Power Yoga’ DVD or Sharath Rangaswamy’s CD. Because I practice at home, I find that I work a lot harder if I’m held accountable by a teacher, even if that teacher is only ‘digital.’

In both recordings, there are poses and entire sections that I tend to skip each time. This requires me to get up and ‘fast forward’ through those parts. I wanted to eliminate these sections in order to streamline my practice and keep it as compact and efficient as possible.

I experienced a few hiccups with Audacity, but overall, I found it very intuitive and easy to figure out. The Sharath recording is now 65 minutes (70 minutes with my 5 minute Savasana and even shorter if I opt to do the closing sequence on my own). Beryl comes in at just under 78 minutes.

I can’t wait to use these!

The 'Princess Fur Friday' Photo:
Lately, Princess Fur has been spending quality time in her bean bag chair. This is actually MY bean bag chair, but she co-opted it as soon as she realised that it wouldn’t attack her or swallow her up in its depths. When she gets really settled into it, you can barely spot a dog unless she pokes her little nose up: