Hatha

I slept for 11 hours uninterrupted last night! This is so rare. I can’t remember the last time I slept for so long. During my extended slumber, I think my brain grew tired of being creative. My dreaming became too familiar. I thought: ‘This is like déjà vu!’ And it actually was! It was the *exact* same dream from earlier in the night. My brain was going into reruns!

I guess my brain only generates 7 hours of good material!

I woke up stiff and groggy, but I know this sleep was good for me. Clearly, I needed rest! I just hope I can sleep tonight. Too often, long sleeps leave me with insomnia the following night.

My baking adventures today were an Epic FAIL. I totally botched the Blueberry Crumble Squares. They’re terrible! I must have made a mistake when I doubled the recipe. It could have been the nutmeg too - last time I used pumpkin pie spice and they were fine. Anyway, they’re going in the garbage. Yeah, it’s *that* dire.Yuck. What a waste of blueberries!

It means I’ll be waking early to bake muffins in the morning. I’m baking blueberry walnut muffins, to stay with the theme. I’m confident in my Muffin Madskillz, so I’m sure they’ll turn out fine.

I didn’t do yoga this morning, but by 5 p.m., I was getting really twitchy! I did a short Hatha practice: Classic sun salutations, some standing poses (Iyengar style) and hip openers. I did lots of work with Supta Padangusthasana, first with a strap, then holding on to my big toe. I repeated the pose about 5 times in various configurations.

At least 3 repetitions were done Astanga-style. I’m exploring the limits of my newly-healed hamstring, trying to delinieate the ‘discomfort boundary’. It’s somewhere between the natural tightness in a muscle that hasn’t been stretched very much over the past month and the scar tissue of the injury itself. It’s tricky, but my flexibility and range of motion is returning the more I use it.

I played around with some inversions. Since stepping away from a more diverse Vinyasa practice over the past year, I haven’t done Pinchamayurasana or handstand very much. I was curious to see if these poses were still accessible to me. My Pincha isn’t bad, actually. I’m wobbly and I’ve lost all sense of where my body is in space, but I had more control than I did the last time I played around in the pose. In some respects, I’m much stronger! Hello, Bandhas!

Handstand is GONE. It was never my forte anyway. When I practised Anusara, it was my most-feared pose (way back before I met ‘Standing up from a Backbend’). I used the wall today because I didn’t want to flip and break furniture. It wasn’t scary at all, it just felt foreign to me.

I didn’t practice backbends, but I did hang over the blanket box for 7 minutes.

This week’s State-of-the-Backbend was shot yesterday. I also took a photo the day before. I’m posting both of them here, just to illustrate the day-to-day variation I find in my backbends.