Rock the swellingsleeping!

So yesterday I spent most of the yoga practice sleeping — the pose to the left had a narcoleptic effect — and today, at least half of the practice with either my legs above my pelvis or hands above the heart to reduce swelling.

Rock it! The yoga of the third trimester in July in WDC!

i crave them like tastes

I’ve had to back away from my advanced yoga class, which is hard enough. And today, in the class I now take–still not a prenatal yoga class–I laid on the floor at the end of class, exhausted, and watched as my fellow classmates did pindasana and then its twist.

Ideally, the yoga practitioner, in my case a yogini, observes the fluctuations of the mind as they pass by the observing eye. In this particular case, I now observe and express the craving that came into my mind as I watched these practitioners do a pose that not too long ago, felt safe, comfortable, and challenging for me. I sought poses like this, in fact, because they quieted my mind and challenged the physical body simultaneously.

This experience led me to think: Surely we know now, as a yoga “culture,” what we know intuitively. Yoga is not about mashing the body into a shape for that goal alone, but rather, to stay in the pose and watch the reaction(s) of the mind. In my case, until the end of 2009, I will be watching my mind as I watch others’ poses. I post this reflection in honor of the attachment–ones that surprise me daily as my body swells and the lil’ lady grows–to what used to be “my practice.”

Yoga is indeed about letting go.