Since my finals are eating up all my time for actually doing any Yoga (bohoo). I thought I'd start a mini series telling you a bit about the 26 fixed poses instead. The poses are divided into three groups. Standing series, balancing series and the floor series. Ill start off with the first five poses today. All poses except the 25th are repeated twice.
1. Pranayama Breathing series
You breathe, very deeply and slowly in and out while pressing your head back with your hands. This is supposed to get oxygen into your bloodstream for the rest of the practice. In all honesty I just think that it kinda hurts my shoulders. But I guess oxygen is good.
2. Half moon pose with hands to feet pose
This must be one of the worst poses for me, you keep your arms straight up, elbows locked (locked in Bikram language means completely straight and muscles activated) for minutes on end. And that is not enjoyable in any way. Anyway so with arms straight up palms of hands touching over head you bend as far as you can to the right, to the left, towards the back wall and finally towards the floor. When you get to the floor you grab under your heels and try to lock your legs straight while your forehead is touching your legs. All of these things hurt, which is why I'm sure it's extra important for me to do them correctly. On good days I keep my hands up during the whole posture. Most days I don't.
3. Awkward pose
This pose has three parts and they're all fun, but they do make you look slightly awkward. But then again a lot of yoga poses do that. So you hold your arms straight out in front of you, and then you pretend to sit down in an imaginary chair. After that you stand up straight, rise onto your tippy toes and again sit down. The third part starts off with you on your tippy toes, then you touch your knees together and then you sit all the way down. Because of my horseback riding days these are all quite easy for me to do, but when you have to rise up again from the third part with your knees touching, phu, that just hurts.
I don't even know how to explain this pose in words, you basically tie your whole body into a knot. It's supposed to cut off the blood flow to some of your major joints so that when you release the pose fresh blood comes rushing out into the muscles. The hardest part about this pose is to get yourself deep into the knot. I just realized last time I was there that I can now actually do the pose the way it's supposed to be done (ah well almost) quite the achievement for someone who's about as flexible as an average refrigerator.
5. Standing head to knee pose
In this pose you stand on one leg (leg locked), lift up the other one, grab the sole of the foot and then stretch it straight out infront of you and try to get it straight. While still holding on to the foot. When I first started at Funky Door I'd been taught to modify this pose into just holding my leg up with knee bent in a 90 degree angle without bending over to grab the foot. This Darius told me during my first class is "mental masturbation". Whatever that means. It's not the right way to do it, and by pushing myself little by little beyond the modification I can now proudly say that I can get my leg almost straight. Something I never thought I'd be able to do.
That concludes today ramblings, for tomorrow I'll try to get a hold of someone to take pictures of me actually doing the poses. Now off to class!
