Day One--Revised Expectations

Okay, in the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I want to lose eight to ten pounds. My secret hope was that I could do yoga every day for eight weeks and eat a little less and the pounds would drop away (despite the fact that none of my other weight-loss plans has dislodged these same eight to ten pounds for the last two years.)

I read (skimmed) the introductory pages of Rodney Yee's book yesterday, and at one point he says that you should figure out a way to do the eight weeks in tandem with whatever other yoga and exercise you do, and to think of this primarily as a spiritual practice. O...K. It's not that I'm not spiritual, or that I don't want to expand my spiritual capacity. I do. I'm just noticing a resistance in myself, and I don't quite know why. Partly it's "shit, how am I going to fit all this in? Lose eight pounds AND gain enlightenment? Who has the time?" And clearly, at least going into this, my focus was on the eight pounds.

So anyway, I overslept a little and got started around 6:30. The poses were all familiar to me--Mountain, Triangle, Warrior 1, Extended Angle. The toughest in this series was Half Moon. His instructions are good, providing a different focus for each time you do each variation of the pose.

Initially, I was comparing this home practice with my experience in class. No flow, it was weird doing Mountain Pose between each variation, blah blah. But I realized I was doing that, and was able to let go of the comparing brain and just experience this practice. I was glad I got the blocks yesterday, as there were a few poses that would have been very hard without them.

The trick to this is going to be getting up early enough to get the practice in before the day starts. Pretty much as soon as I got into meditation, I heard footsteps upstairs and Cam yelling "Good morning! I love you!" at Nora, and Nora responding, "Leave me alone." So a few extra minutes would be good.