Hatha

Yesterday was a spectacularly BAD day with Murphy’s Law moments throughout. Since I was already grumpy, I decided to spend the evening doing tax preparation. Misery loves company and my taxes were lonely! At least I got something done!

Then I slept in and THAT was great!

I had just enough time to do a 45 minute Hatha practice this morning. I’ve tried all of the Hatha offerings from YogaDownload (there are not many) so I repeated one: Gentle Hatha Flow #2, 45 minutes with Jackie. I was curious to know why I had given this particular class a rating of ‘4’ and the 30 minute version of the same class a rating of ‘5’.

The answer: I didn’t like the additional postures that were added to make the longer recording. I gave the 60 minute version a ‘3’ so I guess it was all downhill with the added poses. I may stick with the shorter versions of this class.

I took a State-of-the-Backbend photo after practice on Thursday this week, just before my Lady’s hit. I was pleased to see some progress! I can definitely see an opening in the shoulders. The big change I made to my practice this week was to walk my hands in and push UP in my Urdhva Dhanurasana. It seems to be working!



It’s know hard to see the difference in my backbends from photo to photo so I did an experiment. Using my MacBook as a ‘lightbox’, I traced over the backbend photo from mid-January and compared it to this most recent one. The purple lines are January, the red lines are February:


I see a huge difference in the shoulders. It’s more difficult to see if there’s any change in the back - I’m not sure if I traced that part accurately. I feel like my backend is 'moving', though. I feel a deeper stretch in my upper torso.