Tuesday, November 9, 2010, Check-In

[muck_a_luck]

Hey, EED community!

Here is your daily check-in post! Hope everyone is having a great day!

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40 Days of Yoga, Day 40

[just_ann_now]

I wanted to go out strong on the last day of this 40 day practice, and did I ever - Good Morning Extended set, Challenging level, from Barbara Benagh's Power Yoga for Every Body.

The set starts deceptively with gentle hip openers and warmers, but then moves quickly into a killer Sun Salutation set. The postures are familiar: forward bends, lunges, Warrior, up dogs, down dogs, but the difference between this and, say, the zippy pace of MTV Power Yoga, is that here it seems you're holding these poses forever. Thank goodness for the frequent, long, down dog opportunities to stretch and breathe. (And Benagh does invite you, often, to move into resting poses as needed. She seems much more personable in this set, as if you've proven your sincerity and committment by working your way through the Beginning and Intermediate series.)

After 30 or so minutes of Sun Salutations, the set continues with standing poses - most of them familiar, but taken to richer, deeper levels. I really like standing poses - my Dad died of Parkinson's, so I try to emphasize strength and particularly balance in my own practice as a way of warding off a possible future. This set made me more than happy with lots of wonderful stretching twisty postures. The 65-minute sequence closes with a (too-short, I felt) savasana.

What have I learned in the past 40 days? I think the most important lesson was confidence; the ability to trust my body to understand its own strength and skill even when my mind hadn't quite caught up with it yet.