Exhale breathing and YOU GO DOWN

(I love that line!!)

Let the records show that I was down for the count in beginner's class this morning!  Down to my knees twice during standing series.  Perfect storm of low blood sugar, high humidity, and lack of pacing on my part.  I killed it during standing head to knee, got my head right onto my knee and held that for a good 15 or 20 seconds, and then in standing bow the room was legitimately spinning.  Good times!!  A friend of mine was teaching, and I quietly asked her to grab me a Vitamin water for sugar when we hit the first savasana.  Never done that in my life, but it made me feel better right away, even if it was just the placebo effect (which is highly possible).

The funny thing was how, as my body became less cooperative, my mood steadily improved.  I started off class feeling fine physically, but in a deep mental funk.  Once the postures started working and the blood started pumping and the heart started racing, well, I couldn't quite stand upright, but all my other worries were completely gone, and I finished class in a great mood.

After class I told my friend, "whoa, that was crazy, it's been a year since the last time that happened to me," and she said "oh yeah, I've never seen you do that, I knew that something was up!"  We had fun laughing about it.  My response to "going down" is "whoooooooaa"; hers is "hooooly SHIT."  She said, "Isn't it great how we can still be humbled by the beginner's class like that?  I mean, not great, but..." and I said, "Oh yeah, it is great."

Then we stayed for a while to do part of the advanced series.  (Note: We've both learned it separately, at different seminars, so we figure it's cool to practice the postures together, and the owner doesn't care if we use the space.)  And despite the train wreck of my beginner's class, advanced felt awesome!  It was the first time I'd done the postures since the seminar, and I couldn't believe how much some of them had improved since then!  I guess there's something to be said for doing the postures EVERY day for a week and then letting your body settle down again - which was exactly what I'd hoped for, so YAY.  As Emmy says: "Frequency, precision, and intensity."  I should write a post just about that sometime, but it's pretty logical and it works for anything.  Get those three things together, and you're golden.  Looks like turning the frequency up to 11 for a while did some good, after all!