I thought it might be useful (for me, at least, I don’t know about for you) to check in periodically and see how I’m keeping up with my teacher training workload, and how it’s balancing out with the rest of my life. TT began just over a week ago, so how did I do during my first week?
- I’ve read about half of The Royal Path. (It’s short and easy, I’m trying to stretch it out.)
- I’ve started on the yoga sutras and have considered the first two yamas carefully (and there’s one more post in the queue on ahimsa and satya, too). On schedule with this (especially since the next two are pretty easy – maybe I’ll make it through three this week).
- I blogged Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday (a total of seven posts), so I’m keeping up with my rough goal of doing this five days a week or so.
- I made it to yoga class at the studio twice, Monday and Thursday evenings.
- I practiced my Poses of the Month (forward bends) almost every day and started keeping a journal about it.
- My husband hasn’t throttled me yet.
I will start posting about classes and actual yoga at some point. This week I had the weekend sessions to post about, plus some introductory things like the books. Also, ahimsa is kind of a big topic. I do see myself posting about the actual yoga I’m doing and the people I’m now doing it with.
The forward bends are interesting so far. The idea here is to practice these poses every day, paying attention to how I feel in the pose, and see where it leads. Right now I’m feeling really scatter-brained and unable to focus – hopefully that will improve over the course of the TT. I will probably hold off on any big posts about the Poses of the Month until later on in the month when I’ve observed more.
I did, however, discover something interesting about my practice of paschimottanasana (seated forward bend). N & J teach this as a pose of surrender. They instruct their students to relax into the pose, let themselves go, just focus on the breath. I’ve been having a lot of trouble with this, and I figured out why: I learned this as a much more active pose! With my old teacher Gene, we focused on keeping a flat back, finding a strong grip/catch on the legs or feet, lengthening the spine on inhales and moving deeper into the pose on exhales. So, for the two years I practiced with Gene and ever since then, I’ve practiced this pose in a very active way. No wonder I’ve had issues with the way N & J teach it as a more passive pose. Neither method is “right” or “wrong”, just different. This month I’ll try to practice it N & J’s way and see what happens.
I haven’t been shirking my normal life, either, although there are definitely some bumps in the road to work out. F is really understanding of me needing to spend extra time on yoga practice and homework, and therefore sacrificing some of our time together, but we’re still working out how we’ll handle things that we usually split evenly, like cooking and dishes, when I’ll be out the door to yoga two nights a week and needing to spend time on homework on other nights. F also raised a concern about Facebook/computer time – if we’re sacrificing time together, then maybe we should be making some Facebook sacrifices too and not wasting time that we could be spending together. He definitely makes a good point. On the whole, though, I think we managed this week pretty well: got our taxes done, looked at some houses (we’re thinking about buying), had a nice dinner with my parents, vacuumed, cooked meals, even made it to church this morning. I hope we’re able to continue fitting the TT commitment into our lives in a healthy way.
Rox Does Yoga 