Yesterday, I said I would try to focus more on doing Triangle properly. Yeah, right. I had to skip the second set because it felt like there wasn't enough air in the entire world to get me through it. The strength building poses are starting to take their toll, and there is much more strength building in the Bikram series than I would have thought. The only pose I can think of that lends itself to just hanging out is Half Tortoise, and maybe the final forward seated head to knee pose.
When I went down in triangle, I couldn't even really hold myself in Japanese seated position, because my left knee was kind of sore. That's the only soreness I have right now that's troubling me. I haven't quite decided whether its a good soreness, or the beginning of something that might get worse. To protect it, I'm easing off of Fixed Firm for now. I've also thought about it, and I'm going to have to concentrate even more on "Lock the Knee," if that's possible. But I can't decide if this feeling comes from having hyperextended the knee without being aware of it, or if its just because the support muscles are tired from all the knee locking I've been doing.
Otherwise, I'm noticing something really odd. Typically, when you do relaxation at the end of yoga classes, the teacher invites you to call attention to body parts and to bring your focus into relaxing them. Right now, I can play a different game that stems from the same thing. When I decide to focus on just about any part of my body, I can pinpoint a soreness there that I may otherwise not have noticed. If I can get to the other half of the trick, and figure out how to breathe through that soreness and eliminate it, I will be absolutely perfect. Right now, it's more tempting not to think about any specific part.
Lynette talks about progress in Yoga as being like a spiral or a helix. People expect progress to be linear, and that leads to disappointment. She insists that practice always leads to progress, but because its more like a spiral, it sometimes feels like you are going down, backwards or in the wrong direction. The backward moving moments, I guess, are a small test of faith.
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