Thursday, November 22, 2012

Bad yogi :-(

It's been 12 days since the start of my yoga teacher training.

I practiced my  3 versions of the sun salutation nearly every day.

Not Sunday after the first day of the training - my muscles were still in shock, especially my back and my bottom. The trick to getting more flexible and bendy is to make your muscles longer, so I was told. So it is not about stretching your back, it's about increasing the length of you muscles at the back of your legs and your bum. It's a bit the opposite of what power trainers and body builders do - they want to shorten their muscles so they look bigger. Coming to think of it, that is probably why they walk around with their arms wide - I thought they had something in their armpits, but it just all the muscles getting shorter (and too short to keep your arms down when you walk, so it seems).

So physically I'm doing OK. I'm happy with the amount of time I spend practicing and start to know  the exercises by heart. I hear you thinking - it's only 3 sun salutations, how difficult can that be?
I admit, A and B were pretty easy (and in line with what I had learned out of my pile of yoga books I used to practice), but the one with all the mini vanyasa (which are then repeated 3 times) still gets me puzzled from time to time. Knowing that there are still 32 postures to complete the entire flow, I'm convinced I will need to keep practicing on a daily basis.

Mentally, I monitoring myself to see change in my behaviour or my overall feeling.
At first I would say I feel more relaxed. Relaxed might not be the right word, I don't stress out that easily anymore - I get better at handling (last minute) change. And I'm not getting annoyed quickly either. Forget relaxed, I'm more in a state of acceptance - accept and deal with change. That sounds yogi like, doesn't it?

Until Tuesday evening - it had been a long day at work, and just after 11 PM I took off on a 1 hour drive home. In order not to fall asleep, I put on some music.... LOUD. Linkin Park and Jay-Z, Blink 182, Korn, Ozzy.... songs with a lot of rage in them. I started feeling the same "rage" I had when I was young, you know, the Grunge period in the early 90's - Pearl Jam, Nirvana, .... I started singing along. That kept me awake and it felt good, good to let it all out..... but then it struck me. This is not very yoga like, is it? Yogi always seem so calm, so in peace, .... as if they only know "rage" from wikipedia. I felt like a bad yogi...

So now I wonder, what will the effect of yoga be on this dormant "rage" I have inside of me? Or can that still be a part of me, even when I get my yoga teacher degree?

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