It’s Sunday, which is the day I prep for my weekly 24-hour fast. If you’re familiar with the blog, you’ll recall that I was in a mood and skipped my fast last week. In retrospect, my little ‘tude was mainly my PMS at play. I needed a week off and now I’m back. Just a gentle reminder to us all (especially ME!) that there is nothing wrong with giving your body a break from routine.
One routine I don’t skip on Sundays is hot yoga. My studio offers queer yoga every Sunday morning and allies are welcome to join in on the steamy Vinyasa flow fun. I thought I’d seen every flow pose known to woman but today, I got introduced to a new pose toward the end of class: the Dying Warrior. It has no official Sanskrit name, but it’s a variation of one of my favorite poses, Pigeon (Kapotasana). Hip opener poses like these are my favorite because they give the ultimate release. The hips are the part of our body where we tend to carry our trauma, emotions, and baggage. Whenever I come to the mat in a less-than-happy mood, beginner level poses like the ones below can bring me to tears as I let go of whatever feelings were holding me down. Try these hip opening poses or, if you’re up to it, try Dying Warrior by watching this quick instructional video.
Now, on to today’s practice:
The Instructor: Kassandra Reinhardt of Yoga With Kassandra
The Practice: Wheel Pose Workshop (40 minutes)
While I love me some hip opening poses, the Wheel (Chakrasana) scares the shit out of me. Like, for real. Every time I’m in class and the transition from Bridge (Setu Bandha Sarvangasana) to Wheel occurs, I chicken out. Part of it is that I fear I have is that I have too much body-ody-ody to lift my boobs, hips, and ass in the air for any inordinate amount of time. I think my wrists will give out and I’ll end up looking like an extra in a Jordan Peele flick. Intellectually, I know this is impossible because I’ve seen braver people with more body than me pull the pose off with effortless grace. Tonight, I’m going to try this sequence from my Yoga YouTube fave Kassandra to ease myself out of the confines of my fear. Methinks I’ll have to do it more than once before I can truly conquer my Wheel aversion so I’ll be sure to report back in a future blog post. I haaaaaate fearing stuff but I feel a little better now that I’ve bared my yogic soul on this page. Ahhhh…
See you on the mat tomorrow!
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