Finding Your Warrior: Our practice deepens

Please note this post is from last week and Thursday & Friday blogs were lost

Wednesday Feb 4

I woke up to my alarm today. That's a first since I've been in Thailand. Although I got a full 8/hrs of sleep I felt tired. With a banana and apple in me I headed up up to the Shala. Our main teacher Avi wasn't with us today so David and Marisca were leading the charge.

We dipped into more of the Nauli Kriya breathing technique attempting the mountain pose modification. I wasn't able to do this variation but on my last attempt I got my stomach to suck in and ribs to expand so I felt excited.

We tired a new meditation technique were you pace in super slow mo clearing your mind of nothing but the movements. I didn't find this to be effective for me but many people liked it. After more review of poses we dipped into Yin yoga practice. This was a nice change from Ashtanga Primary series. Yin holds poses between 3-5 minutes with 1-2 mins of savasana in-between. It was still difficult but nice to really stretch out our bodies. I kept singing along to the music (normally we don't listen to music during practice and thinking about friends and family back home). I think it was my way of blocking out the focused pain that came with the practice.

We broke for two hours and I was able to post my blog and check a few emails. It's a two hour break but it never seems long enough to get anything accomplished.

After lunch we heard more from our guest speaker Ram Vakkalanka. We discussed morality and righteousness through an ancient story that took place 6,000 years ago. It was a long story but helped to define Karma and how each life strives for divinity. It's actually very easy to believe the context based on certain truths in our current world. Energy is constant and just changes its vehicle as it moves through the cosmos. I'm obviously skimming very briefly on what we actually learned. It would take me all day to put it into this format.

After our lecture we broke for 30mins and I caught up on some reading. Back in class we taught each other more MPS series and I killed it. I nailed every position first time with proper pronunciations. Feeling much more confident and excited to learn more. The beginning of our MPS practice we did by ourselves and I felt very connected to my breath. The rest of the class was the rest of our practice and it wasn't as painful as the first three days. It's nice to finally start to feel more in shape and less physical strain. We broke and tonight was my turn to do yoga Karma, meaning myself and another were in charge of cleaning up the Shala. It was a beautiful sunset and the first time I've come back to my bungalow not exhausted.

Showered I wrote in this blog more and passed out for a nap face down. Guess I was tired. When I awoke I made my way to The Beam for dinner. After dinner our guest speaker Ram joined us for after dinner conversation. It was nice to talk philosophy and history with him. The rest of the group left to go to bed and Ram and I stayed talking about various subjects. The conversation was a mix of subjects and was filled with one of us talking about this and that. I wish I had recorded it because we went into some very facinating topics.

There is so much more to yoga I look forward to learning about. I am definitely a student and I have just begun. We departed ways later that evening and I had trouble sleeping. Guess that nap through me off.

So I lost my Thursday and Friday post because of loading issues between my iPad and iPhone. I did load some photos however. I honestly can't remember now what we did those days. It's all a blur. Sera sera.