I do not have a thesis tonight... just a couple of tidbits from my life. :-)
First of all, I keep on having a tiny heart attack every time I look at a calendar. It was October when I decided that I was definitely going to go to the teacher training session in April. At that time, training was SIX months away, which seemed like a nice, manageable chunk of time. Now it is January, and training is THREE months away. And the last three months went by really quickly, so I have every reason to believe that the next three months will do the same. Holy crap!! What's going on around here?! I gotta organize my life!!!
I love getting all these comment from teachers about how to get ready from training. Everyone tells me, "learn some of the dialogue before you go, if you can!" You guys are sooooo sweet. Also, you have never been stuck in a car with me. When Mei and I went on our little trip last month, she had to listen to my dialogue up through triangle - which I got almost verbatim, except for that stupid balancing stick - before we stopped for gas and got distracted. To be honest, that's about as far as I can get right now. But I'm pretty solid that far, and I plan on knowing the whole thing in my sleep by the end of February. This is pretty easy, because I come from awesome dialogue studios, and I also was born with a freakish memory. I don't know why. I've been accused of having a "photographic memory" many times in my life. That's not precisely how it works for me. It's more like a tape recorder. But I digress. If you want to help me study, which I absolutely love, start asking me tricky questions, like "how many times, and in which postures, does the dialogue tell you to look at the floor?" (I got that one from a friend yesterday and thought it was a great question. I got it right, too!!) I haven't fully studied all of it yet, but the whole dialogue is fair game. (One of my friends today just said, "Triangle... second side." What a jerk. I love her. "Quick, right arm stretch up, you're going to touch the ceiling pretty soon! .... that's all I got.")
Second of all, I did another back-to-back double tonight and enjoyed the heck out of it. Our studio was humid today, enough that after the 4:30pm class, my studio owner asked me, "Will you really be hydrated enough to do another class?" Happily, the answer was yes. (I had some Zico and some little tangerines in between.) The 6:30pm class was a trip, but I got it all done without missing any postures. Though in the interest of full disclosure, some of my postures were kinda short. Eighth set of standing bow for the evening, I did a nice 15 seconds or so and was like, "Ok thanks, I'm good."
I was just impressed, as ever, with the sheer quantity of sweat that my body can produce when I do more than one class! Every time I do two in a row, I find that my body is just primed to sweat in that second class and skips the warm-up period altogther. By the second or third breath of pranayama, I was literally watching the sweat drip down from my elbows onto the carpet during the inhales. Good grief. The whole class was like that. I really don't know where all that water comes from! But it felt good up until the very end, at which point I was telling myself, "Ok, two more postures... one and a half more postures... one more posture...."
I kept getting sweat stuck in my ear, which made the teacher's voice sound strange. Between the humidity, the sweat, and the impaired hearing, I felt like I was underwater for a while! Back when I practiced in the humid Boston summer classes every day, I remember having the crazy feeling that if I kept this practice up, my lungs would be able to operate underwater pretty soon. Tonight, my lungs were doing a pretty good job of that task. They also felt... huge. What a weird sensation, to feel that your lungs are bigger than they were three hours ago! It felt like breathing was a lot of work, not because I was out of breath, but because I had so much space in my body that I needed to take in more and more air to fill it up. After class, my teacher said that I'd had a really nice "yoga glow" going on the whole time. Must've been all that oxygen. And sweat. And prana, I suppose! I'm not an expert at the terminology, but I know a good yoga glow when I see one, and it's not just made of hydrogen and oxygen!
And that's all she wrote, folks! Hope you all have been enjoying your classes as much as I have. If not, cheer up! Last week I wasn't enjoying my classes at all, and now I'm starting to feel great. We just cycle around and around...
