pretzel girl speaks

I keep saying, like for 5 years now, that I'm going to start doing yoga. But then every place I want to take a class doesn't have a beginners class at a time I can go, and it's too far, or it's too cold out, and it's expensive, and blah blah blah. So finally I broke down and bought a book with a CD and flashcards to try it at home. I actually looked at DVDs, but seriously? So many of them looked so cheesy just from the cover photos that I figured I'd just find them annoying.

The actual book/CD I finally chose was "yin" yoga, which is a very slow discipline. You hold each pose for 5 whole minutes, which works, supposedly, on your connective tissue. Which makes perfect sense to me, because that's the whole principle behind the myofascial work I learned in school: when you want to change the fascia, you're working very slowly and not forcing anything. You're hanging out and waiting for the tissue to change beneath your hands, as the fascia "melts" and loosens. A subset of my classmates hated that class, because they were too impatient/aggressive/inattentive/easily bored to just hang out and wait for the change. I loved it. So, temperamentally, I figured the yin yoga would work for me. I also know I have some fascial restriction in a spiral pattern from my left neck/shoulder down to my right hip, so I figured working on that couldn't hurt.

Well, basically, all the poses in the book/CD are focusing on your hips, low back, sacral, pelvic area, and particularly opening the psoas, so the fascia in my shoulder is shit out of luck. But I did it for the first time yesterday and, man, did I feel good afterward. If not necessarily during, when there were moments of "you want me to do what?" But even this morning, walking down the stairs, I could feel how open my hips and pelvic area were. It was like I'd gotten a massage yesterday. Cool stuff.

I have to tell you though, the instructor/writer is all about the Eastern medicine and the chakras, and in between the Western medicine explanations of what you're stretching, he says things like, "opening your first and second chakras will help you to better accept pleasure and pain." Alrighty then. Just another reason to plow on, huh?

xoxo