Day 2

For some unknown reason, I drank green tea at 9pm last night and was up until midnight. The other side of that coin was Maple’s wake-up at 5:15 this morning. (I should really just do a whole post on mothering and yoga study- because that is really in many ways the hardest part of this training. Our sessions are supposed to be 3 hours but end up being more like 4, and for a little girl and mama who are used to spending most of their day together, this is a big adjustment. I may be worse of than her though. I got home tonight and she was singing and dancing to a new kids cd with Gramma).We spent about an hour and a half on the Spanda Karikas and then dove right in to the asana. The funny thing about the advanced intensive is that John really doesn’t have to teach the poses, he just calls out the names and people do them. He stops when it is necessary to show us something really wild that maybe we have never tried before, but that is about it. Throughout the practice today he emphasized taking rest between poses (efforts) to dive deeply inside. This in general really makes the rhythm of even a very challenging list of postures much more calm than usual. I love that. Good for the Vata girl who is doing her best to keep all neurosis in check. Which is pretty hard when the body gets stimulated, the mind really has to stay a few paces behind for everything to be OK. And it is OK. Actually, it is great. My body feels great, it is so fun to be with good friends doing something I love. The only challenge (other than the afore mentioned mothering bit) is that I am really not finding the time to enjoy all of the wonderful foods that I remember from living here. In fact, we have prepared all of our meals so far. Isn’t that funny coming from Viroqua? Oh well. I will have to work on that. Oh, if you read the previous post, you will be happy to know that we worked on chakrasana again this morning, and i actually think that if I focus on it a bit that I will be able to do it on my own soon. So that feels good. On to the photos. These are all pictures of Gandabherandasana. Except of course for the one of Pokapoke, Maple’s silly squirrel, wearing her shoes.