YogaEMW2020

Today, I decided that I would like to try a more meditative style of yoga practice. So rather than doing that actual movements, I settled to putting myself in Full Lotus position and putting on my timer for 45 minutes. A lot of the yoga I've tried so far mostly focuses on the sequences and fitness, especially Bikram and Iyengar yoga. I haven't been having particularly the best mental health as of recently because of just life happening too fast, so I wanted to slow my mind down and focus completely on healing mentally today.  Yoga as a healing practice in the sense that Iyengar and Bikram talk about is focused so much on healing of the body. Which I think is definitely important because my body does need healing, and healing the body also helps heal the mind. Yet, the meditation I did today helped me clear my mind at the same time as being aware of the stretching pain in my legs from sitting in lotus position for so long. It's the good kind of pain though, and it helped me

 This week we practiced both the Iyengar Yoga Sequence and the Ashtanga primary series. Both instructors were really impressive, but I specifically enjoyed the Iyengar sequence. Just the smooth flow of movements in Iyengar, the way the teacher actually taught us the movements herself, and the specific poses really just made me want to push myself. My whole body was sore after the practice, and I could feel that she made me stretch muscles that I haven't stretched in a long time. I also really appreciated how she explained which muscles we were stretching and showed us progressions of some of the more simple poses we were doing. Ashtanga in comparison was still interesting! It feels more advanced just because it was such fast shifting from pose to pose, and there was much more strength involved. I had to stop when we started standing holding up one leg because I couldn't balance myself, so I had to move to use the wall. One thing I noticed about zoom yoga classes is that I feel

 This week, I did Bikram yoga as assigned with the rest of the class. The first thing that I noticed with the beginning of the Yoga practice was that I personally was not in the mindset to start doing Yoga in my living room. Although Professor Laurie was a fantastic example for the poses, I found it hard to make myself motivated when not in the studio setting. The months of Covid-19 have made me lazy, and I think the biggest part of this class is trying to find my motivation to start doing yoga, and to push myself past my boundaries that I've become so comfortable with. One of the things that we talked about this Yoga practice is that Bikram yoga is a healing yoga, one that strengthens muscles and may help with certain physical aliments. I really like the concept of this, like I said in one of my past journals, I have back problems. This is one of the reasons I took this yoga class, rather than just running or going to the gym I find that yoga has a certain calming quality to it. I