Another bridge

Today’s practice was written by Claude Marechal. The principle posture was a held Bridge. I couldn’t help but reflect back on how Bridge has changed for me and changed me. When I started yoga, it was the one posture I hated but it didn’t take too many classes to figure out, this Bridge thing was going to be part of yoga for a long, long while, so I needed to get over myself.

Suck it up, princess… and I made my peace with Bridge. I slowly moved from “Good grief, this crap again” to “Oh well… take the good with the bad.” So today it was a nice observation to realize I was not just doing Bridge because it was called for but truly enjoying the experience.

I’ve been working with the posture for about 6 or 7 months now. I have an injured left shoulder that needs strengthening and flexibility along with some serious postural issues. Bridge was selected as a therapeutic option as I try to rebuild that joint. Somewhere over that period of time, my attitude towards it has changed and softened.

Abiding practice and the capacity for yoga to change us in subtle and fundamental ways — you’d think I’d be used to it by now but it still surprises me when I find it.

Now, it’s off for my final dayshift of this cycle — this would be number 4 — I will be grateful to see it over.

Have a peace-filled day and thanks for reading,

Namaste,

Kate

Mental note to self…

Do not play on the mat when you’re scheduled to work a night shift.

Yesterday’s little foray on the mat, which was largely free form and without any thought into design behind it turned out to be a bad idea. It’s not that I haven’t done stuff like this before, I’ve just always been free to sleep off the negative effects of an off-balanced session.

Yesterday, and I had hints of it on the mat as I was finishing up, introduced a lot of tension into my shoulders and there wasn’t any significant release of that area to counter it. Consequently, by 3 am, my neck was like steel and just holding my head up hurt like all get out. I spent about half the shift with a heated compress bag over my neck and shoulders in an attempt to get them to loosen up.

Today, I think I’ll sit down with pencil and paper and see if I can’t tweak yesterday’s mat experiment and circumvent the neck and shoulders bit. I think that it has potential to be a good session given enough play room.

Besides, I need as much practice as I can get with session construction. It was my weakest point during my teacher’s training and the one I feel the least confident about. So it’s time to start practicing those skills while letting go of my expectations that I’m going to be some kind of session construction wizard my first forays out. The problem with studying from massive quantities of Claude Maréchal’s practices is you get an idea of just how elegant a good session can be and just how awkward mine are in comparison. I’m going to assume his first practices weren’t quite the same caliber.

In any event, it’s time to get back to work. Thanks for reading and Namaste,

Kate