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Sunday, February 07, 2010

9 of 30

If I could tell the world one thing about yoga, it would be to challenge the belief that yoga is only for people who are flexible. It doesn't matter how flexible you are as long as your intent is right. If you are trying to do it the right way then you are getting just as much benefit as the person in the front who can turn themselves into a pretzel.

I was feeling tired today and had to fight not to give up at the end of a posture. Sometimes I won the fight, and sometimes my mind did and I left a posture early. I always have this sense of defeat when that happens; even when it's only a couple seconds, maybe I could've just taken one more breath and lasted for the full time, but instead I let myself come down. Yoga is just as much of a mental challenge as it is physical. One of the hardest poses to master mentally is Savasana or "Corpse" pose. You go into this pose for two minutes between the standing and floor series and for 20sec between each posture on the floor. The idea is to lie still and concentrate on nothing, or just one thing, your breath. Ideally the whole class is geared to be 90 minutes of awake meditation, and this is one of the core postures in which to practice that. But it's hard not to think about that piece of hair on your face, or the sweat sliding down somewhere, you want to wipe it away, but that would be the equivalent of falling out of the pose, so you try to breathe past it and just lie still, because it is in savasana that the healing happens and the blood is allowed to flow back freely through your body.

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