Day 54

8:30 am with Lenette

We stayed up late last night watching the Olympics.  So I got just under 5 hours sleep.  But it didn't matter.  I felt strong throughout the class, and have had good energy all day.

I'm hitting a nice plateau on several of the poses.  For some reason, half moon pose feels much easier than it used to.  Attention to my breathing may be paying off.  Part of me thinks that I must be doing something wrong, but I can't figure out what.  And it is just possible that I'm finally doing something right.  

As a result, I have the very strange feeling these days of being warmed up by the end of the warm up.  That's a rather significant change from being almost wiped out by "party time." 

The poses do seem to change in ability as my body changes.  At the start, Half Tortoise seemed really easy, basically a resting pose.  Now it is one of the more technical poses, and it puts a really big stretch through my shoulders.  It's much tougher now than it was to begin with.  Similarly, Camel went from being easy (because I couldn't do it), to really hard, and it's becoming one of my easier poses again.

I imagine I'll be observing things like this for quite some time.  After all, I've devoted almost 50 years to ruining my body, and I was doing a pretty fine job of it.  I don't know how long exactly it will take to undo the damage I've done.  The remarkable thing is how much has repaired itself in under 5 months.  

I had pretty bad acid reflux for the last couple of years.  It would keep me up nights maybe three times a week, and there were several times where I forced myself to throw up for temporary relief.  I've been reading YOU: THE OWNERS MANUAL recently.  It says that acid reflux happens basically because the esophagus straightens out:  it loses the kink between it and the stomach that stops food from backing out of the stomach.  One of the reasons this happens, they think, is because of weakness in some interior muscles causing the organs to lose their proper relationship.  This makes me understand why Bikram has cured my acid reflux.  It has worked on muscles that I didn't even knew existed, and apparently has put the kink back into my esophagus.  To me this is really amazing, especially since the doctors told me that I needed to go on medicine for a long, long time to deal with only the symptoms of this problem (since the problem itself was incurable, according to them).