Hot Yoga.
The scene: You're dripping sweat as though you just walked towel-less out of the shower, beside other people dripping sweat in a room full of noisy nose breathers, led by a teacher who is trying to get you to balance on your hands with your knees up in your armpits.
best thing ever.
Not every class is necessarily enjoyable. Sometimes I leave wanting to snap twigs in half on my head but sometimes I leave there feeling......something different. Each class is a new class with a new intention or a new observation about my body or my thoughts or my emotions, but in learning to be open to listening..sometimes i leave there feeling like I am in the midst of personal and universal transformation.
no big deal though.
I've been reading
Living Your Yoga by Judith Lasater and It's about carrying the awareness we often embrace during yoga class, into the daily practice of living in the world. What has been the most surprising realization for me thus far, is that how I feel, how I act, what my thoughts are during a yoga class a perfect mirror of how I feel, how I act and what my thoughts are in my day to day.
One example is if we are doing a challenging or difficult pose during class. I tend to push through, stiffening and tightening myself, in order to appear (to others as well as myself) as though I can properly (and seemingly easily) hold the posture. My knee will be screaming at me, or my back will be telling me it's too far, but instead of listening, I'll go a little further into the posture anyway, thinking that If I go deeper, I'll come out the other side.
In life, if I'm in a particularly challenging or difficult situation, I tend to fight through it, knowing there is pain here, but tightening and fighting back, thinking that if I appear to be in control, it means I actually am in control.
We all secretly know there is very, very little we can truly control in this world. So we get it where we can, right?
